Source

Wikileaks
Who's Hiding What and Why

July 30, 2010

Two ways exist of looking at Wikileaks, the site that publicizes secret military documents and videos. The first is held self-interestedly by the Pentagon and by Fox News, the voice of an angry lower-middle class without too much education. These believe that Wikileakers are traitors, haters of America, who give aid and comfort to the enemy and endanger the lives of Our Boys.

Implicit in the Foxian view is a vague idea that the leaks give away important�well, stuff. You know, maybe frequencies of something or other, or locations of ambushes or, well, things. Important things. The Taliban will use this information to kill American soldiers. The notion is vague, as are those who hold it, but emotionally potent.

The other view, held usually by people who have some experience of Washington, is that the Pentagon is worried not about the divulging of tactical secrets, but about public relations. Wikileaks doesn�t endanger soldiers, insists this way of looking at things, but the war itself, and all the juiceful contracts and promotions and so on entailed by wars.

Which is obvious if you look at what the military (the president, remember, is commander-in-chief) actually does. Remember the military�s frantic efforts to suppress the photos of torture at Abu Ghraib, photos of prisoners lying in pools of blood while grinning girl soldiers play with them? These had zero tactical importance. They did however threaten to arouse the Pentagon�s worst enemy.

The American public.

In recent decades the military has almost achieved its wettest dream, the separation of wars from the American population. The fielding of a small volunteer army prevents the riots on campus that helped to end the adventure in Asia long ago. �Embedding� reporters with combat units pretty much prevents coverage that might upset people. The media for whatever reasons are now complicit, declining to air what really happens on the ground. All of this allows ghastly behavior, which is what wars always produce, to go forward with little opposition.

Ah, but leaks, YouTube, holes in the wall of silence�these pose real threats to the flow of contracts.

If you don�t think that contracts�money�have a great deal to do with wars, reflect that all those hundreds of billions of dollars end up in pockets, and those pockets do not belong to soldiers. Makers of body armor, boots, ammunition, helicopters, on and on, are rolling in gravy. All this half-watched loot flows in cataracts at the price of at most sixty dead American kids a month (and lots of brain-damaged droolers, but what the hey). A bargain. Afghans don�t count.

Note that the Pentagon�s orchestrated screaming has not been about technical data that might in fact get GIs killed, but about revelation of the ugly things the US is doing to people. Consider the footage of an American helicopter gunship killing pedestrians in a city street, and apparently having just a swell time doing it. This didn�t reveal military secrets. But it showed the gusnip crew as the butchers they are. Bad juju for the military. PR is all.

The pattern holds. Remember when the White House furiously suppressed video of torture? The Taliban would have garnered no tactically devastating details. But men screaming, choking, crying, bleeding, begging�even the patriotic might gag.

Why are the fun and games at Guantanamo kept secret? Watching a man die under torture does not make it easier for the Taliban to ambush Marines. In no way would it endanger American forces. But it would endanger the war. The golden goose.

Then there was the photo of the hideously wounded and dying GI that was (miraculously) published in the New York Times. SAD Robert Gates (Secretary of Alleged Defense) said that the publication was �irresponsible.� Oh? How so? The Taliban could have gotten no militarily useful pointers from seeing an expanse of red gushing meat (the leg looked to have been nearly severed). But people in Kansas might look and think twice about the war.

The whole profitable circus rides on keeping things abstract. The war isn�t children looking at their entrails in brief puzzlement as they bleed to death. (Just what do you think happens when you bomb a village?) No. It is about Islamo-fascism, the Gates of Vienna, national security, the War on Terror, and it is done with precision weapons that kill only the evil ones.

Remember when Bush II forbade the photographing of coffins coming back into Dover AFB (I think it was)? That lamentable president said the prohibition was to �protect the privacy� of the dead. (The inside of an anonymous coffin isn�t private?) Those photos contained no military information�but they could have made the public think. Bad. Very bad.

The Taliban can keep the war going, which is fine for the military, but they can�t end it. The American public could. No more contracts.

Can you think of a single instance in which the information to be revealed was of military value? The detailed workings of an IED detector? The name of a Talibani secretly working with the US? The date and place of an attack by a team of Special Forces? Or is the suppression always aimed at keeping Americans in the dark?

There is of course a great deal to hide in any war, but particularly in one such as that in Afghanistan. In any guerrilla war, the soldiers quickly come to hate the locals. In Afghanistan, as in Viet Nam, virtually no American speaks the language, the �intelligence� outfits are clueless, the troops don�t really care who they kill, and pilots bomb according to their own or some intel weenie�s guess as to who they see on the ground. Atrocities, intended or not, occur daily. All of this has to be lied about, concealed, papered over. Concealed from the American public, I mean. The Afghans already know about it.

It works. A decade into the war, Fox cheerleads onward, interviewing former CIA thisses and military thats, generating a warm glow of togetherness aimed perhaps more at liberals than at the Islamo-whatevers. The Wickileakers are putting Our Boys in danger as they risk their lives for Freedom and Democracy.

Next to sex, the strongest human instinct seems to be to form groups and hate other groups. I have long suspected that the bulk of humanity has more glands than neurons. It never changes. I need a drink.

I wonder why Fred stays in the US when he obviously hates its Government and national institutions so much?

Perhaps he should try moving to one somewhere like Iran or Syria and see how he fairs there..

Troll

He doesn't: he's expatriated to Mexico, where he likes it a lot better. Take a look at some of his articles about it. He makes it sound tempting.

Fred is beginning to sound like a reincarnation of Daniel Schorr. Of course war is gruesome and the providers of armor and items related to war make a profit but they did not provoke the muslims into attacking us. At what point would he agree that we should resist?

Well good for him...living in a defacto nacro-state with out of control drug cartels waging war against all an sudary must be *so* much nicer than living in Smalltown, USA.....

Edited to add he sounds like an American Lord Haw-Haw

Oh--and speaking of Syria, a good friend of mine is Syrian and regularly goes back to Syria to visit his family. He says that there are significant areas in which life in Syria is considerably more free than life in the US--for example, health care. Of course, there can be repercussions for speaking against the national government, but the government is so comparatively tiny and poor that if you don't live near Damascus, it doesn't really figure in your business for good or ill.

The US is still coasting on its past laurels, but it's no longer a free country, and the characterization of the President as "the leader of the free world" is laughable.

I'm sure it sounds tempting, to some.

The Muslims in Iraq didn't attack us.

(Neither did the Muslims in Afghanistan, for that matter: the attackers were almost all Saudi.)

Regardless, nothing Iraq or Afghanistan is any longer about 9/11: it's now just another quagmire more Vietnam-like than Vietnam.

Seriously: read some of his articles about it.

Most of what you know about Mexico--just of like most of what we know about anything else we learned about from the Old Media--is probably wrong.

I can't see that it makes any difference where they muslims are from. I agree that it's turning into a quagmire similar to Vietnam and for the same reasons. Lack of a will to get the job done.

It's hard to conduct a war when you are afraid of hurting everyones feelings.

What ever the "justification" needed, Saddam was simply on borrowed time from GW1. He did nothing to mend his ways or try to stabalise the situation but quite the contrary, he called the US/UK's bluff and lost...Had he followed the exanple of Gaddafi, GW2 would probably have been avoided and SH would have been alive today.



The Taliban givernment refused to give up the A-Q elements in their country and instead openly and publically sided with A-Q against the US.

Again if they had followed the example of others in the region ie Pakistan and Saudi, the war probably would not have taken place, not in such an overtly militay manner anyway.



I tend to agree, but incidents like WikiLeaks simply adds to the quagmire and so aids the enemy. Anything that aids the enemy in wartime should be classed as traitorous....

There's a few someone's here on the board that should consider the same thing. I generally find the folks that have traveled the least, particularly to places like the Middle East, Africa or Central America, have some odd opinions about how bad life is in the west.

Earth to Barak....Syria is a police state, with no freedom, no right to private property, no rule of law, rampant torture...it is in fact what the Fred Reed whackjobs pretend the US is. You sound like communists who excuse Castro's police state because the people have "health care".



I hope Reed stay in Mexico.

That's the truth.

I couldn't read it. I'm too lower middle class and uneducated.

Didn't the footage referenced make an appearance here at the fire? The scene where those poor, poor "good Samaritans" tried coming to the rescue of their fallen fellow combatant and got a bit chewed up by flying lead?

"Enemy combatants" accompanied by a newscrew as I remember...I am thinking the newscrew got hosed with the rest of them???

Forgive me for, as 280 says, being too stupid and uneducated to figure this out, but how does allowing a reporter to be imbedded prevent coverage of 'ghastly behavior'? You think a reporter (whom we all know has about a 95% chance of being a Bush-hating lefty) is gonna pass an opportunity to slam the results of 'Bush's Wars'?

Oh, and interesting that none of the leaked material had anything on The Messiah's decisions and policies.

+1 Mickey==Lack of will is an epidemic in this country ,concerning more than just our war effort and involves more than just the politicans.

I will never figure out why the campfire gives such a silly troll like Barak so much air time.

Heard an interesting thing. In all 90000 pages, not one was after Obama took office. Now I can't verify that it's true, but if it is, could it just be dismissed as coincidence?

Well that probably explians the Messiah's comments the other day that the Wikileaks weren't really a big deal. Maybe we have Messiah Gate in the making here.

Jerry Pournelle offers an excellent analysis.

Fred needs to get off his high horse and notice that the Taliban now has names of people who are supporting the US. Treason is still treason...jim


Wikileaks and the Afghan War

No one has had time to do any detailed analysis of the 91,000 documents leaked by Julian Assange and his Wikileaks organization, but from what we can see now I have two conclusions, one tentative, and one in which I have great confidence.

The tentative conclusion is that the documents told the public nothing that informed citizens, including me, didn't already know and were not in discussion. The war was not going well, there were a number of incidents of less than optimum tactics and command and control, brute force tactics were not going to secure the Afghan provinces, the "President" of Afghanistan was a politician, corruption is rampant in Afghan politics, the "President" of Afghanistan is in realty no more than the Mayor of Kabul (not even Grand Duke; he has to rely on a number of rent-seeking allies even to have his writ run in the suburbs and immediate vicinity), etc., etc. For two thousand years the only thing that unites Afghans is the presence of armed foreigners on Afghan territory. That unites them -- against the foreigners, even if the foreign army -- possibly especially if -- the armed foreigners are in the service of the Khan in Kabul. News flash from my reading of the leaked documents: that's all still true.

My firm conclusion is that the Wikileaks are an act of treason. They release the names of Afghan allies: villagers who have been converted to the notion of liberal democracy, and clan leaders who decided that the Allies are in Afghanistan to stay, and can eventually win, and that it is better for their clansmen to cooperate with the Allies than with the Taliban. Those names are now released, and those identified are doomed, as are their families. The Taliban and al Qaeda have long memories, and there is much to be gained by making examples of those those who collaborate with the West.

A corollary conclusion is that the current US goals in Afghanistan cannot now be achieved. This is a direct consequence of the Wikileaks. I hasten to add that I have always had grave reservations about those goals, largely because I was pretty sure that something like Wikileaks would happen: the names of collaborators is such an enormously attractive target that it would attract a lot of effort, not only by the Taliban and al Qaeda, but also by the intelligence services of countries who do not want the US to succeed in the Great Game in Afghanistan, and also by free lance secret sellers. The Taliban and al Qaeda would have paid enormous sums for the information now available on Wikileaks; only now they don't have to, and they can apply those resources to other objectives including making hideous examples of the collaborators and their families. It may take weeks, it may take longer, but the atrocity stories are already in the making.

There are several conclusions.

First (and of lesser importance), this was an act of treason. The US cannot of course try the Australian editor of Wikileaks for treason, but I do wonder if Australia doesn't have a case. The Aussies have lost troops in Afghanistan and if they stay around they will lose more. In the US treason consists of levying war against the United States or giving aid and comfort to its enemies. I put it to you that when the Legions are committed and the costs are billions, this is war; and little that anyone could do would give more aid and comfort to our enemies than giving out the names of our friends, converts, and informants in Afghanistan. Of course, as a matter of honor we are obliged to offer aid and sanctuary to our friends and allies and their families .

Second and more importantly, the war is now unwinnable under our present definition of win. Therefore, we need a new set of goals and a strategy for Afghanistan, and we need to start adopting it now. Whether or not establishment of a liberal democracy centered in Kabul was ever possible, it is not possible now. The Wikileaks have made it clear that Afghans who cooperate with the US must do so openly and be prepared for the consequences: you will not do so covertly. We also know from Wikileaks -- of course we knew it all the time -- that the presence of armed US soldiers in Afghanistan are great causes for resentment. We need to get them out of there. Up to now we have been able to generate some cooperation by means of raining benefits on those who cooperate. After the coming atrocities that's going to be a lot tougher.

As a first cut at our new strategy for Afghanistan, see "The CIA Solution for Afghanistan" by Jack Devine. Devine was the CIA official in charge of "Charlie Wilson's War" against the Russian occupation of Afghanistan, and has more experience in this kind of war than any of our generals. The Afghan War was never a war for the Legions, whose very presence in Afghanistan tended to unite the Afghans against us.

"The U.S. military will not achieve anything resembling victory in Afghanistan, no matter how noble the objective and heroic the effort.

"It's time to face this reality. We should start by developing a new covert action plan to be implemented by the Central Intelligence Agency. The strategy should focus on forging the kinds of relationships necessary to keep Afghanistan from re-emerging as al Qaeda's staging ground once our forces depart, and also on continuing the hunt for Osama bin Laden."

As I have said before, there's little in Afghanistan that America wants. Assuming the newly discovered mineral resources are as valuable as some estimate, the US isn't going to get them. China, and Pakistan, have greater interests and are closer. Factor Russia with its long history of interest in the area. Add India to complicate the matter. The people of the United States aren't going to profit from expenditure of US blood and treasure in the land that has resisted every foreign occupation since the time of Alexander the Great.

What we do need is to deny Afghanistan as a sanctuary for our enemies. That is achievable. Devine's article is an overview of how.

"If there is any lasting lesson from the recent demise of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, it's that the large and visible occupying army he commanded in Afghanistan is simply the wrong force to wage the battles being fought there. The British and the Russians know this too well.

"Having run the CIA's Afghan Task Force�which covertly channeled U.S. support to the Afghans fighting to drive the Soviets out of their country�I recognize the playbook our policy makers are using today. It didn't work for the Soviets then, and it won't work for us now. However different our current objective, our efforts are alarmingly similar to those of the Russians. Instead of ignoring the lessons of that history, what we need to do is to be more like ourselves in the 1980s and in the months immediately following the attacks of 9/11."

The Wikileaks told the public nothing it needed to know; but they have made the Afghan War unwinnable under the previous definition of win. It is time and past time to reconsider what our objectives are.

=================
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/2010/Q3/view633.html#Wikitreason

"Most of what you know about Mexico--just of like most of what we know about anything else we learned about from the Old Media--is probably wrong."

Of one thing we can rest assured,....

You are an Anti American idiot, who spends a great deal of his "life" in the company of felons.

At one point your chit was kinda' fun,....these days it's just pure fuggin' SICK.

GTC

You sure got THAT right !

I wish Barak WOULD go to someplace like Culliacan, or Las Mochis, and STAY there.
....after all, he LIKES "anarchy",....right ?

GTC

Fred should realize that what a foreigner living in a narco terrorist state thinks or writes is just so much bs.

However to me it looks like Obama and Fred are out of the same cloth. For instance, "Foxian" view is knuckle dragging uneducated equal to Obama's bitter angry gun clingers who believe in a God.

Fred needs to face east on his prayer rug, smoke a little dope and commune with his belly button while thinking about how America is the Great Satan.

X2- Having worked and lived in a number of Third World countries America haters have no clue how good we have it here in the US. No clue whatsoever.

GW1 was another completely unnecessary waste of American time, dollars, and lives. First, it's none of our business whether Iraq wants to invade Kuwait; secondly, April Glasspie was pretty much dispatched to tell Saddam he had carte blanche to invade as far as we were concerned.


Suppose a bunch of Syrian civilians get murdered, and the Syrian government blames it on a group of Brits in the UK and demands that they be handed over for prosecution, and the British government refuses to extradite them.

Does that mean Syria is justified in invading England?

Or does it only work that way when it's brown people?


At this point, I'm in favor of whatever it takes to bring these two stupid and pointless wars to a conclusion. I don't care about which side gets helped and which side gets harmed in the process, because no matter how it ends--when it finally ends--both sides are going to declare victory anyway, and then the Muslims are going to go straight back to the way they've been living for thousands of years.

The whole thing is a tremendous waste.

I can put you in touch with a Syrian who disagrees with you.

Its government would like to have that much power, of course, just as every government would; but the government isn't nearly as powerful or rich as the US government is, so it can't oppress its subjects as thoroughly as the US government can--except for the ones that happen to live right under its thumb.

An embedded reporter doesn't get to say whatever he wants to say: he's censored by the group he's embedded with. And he doesn't object to the censorship either, or else he gets un-embedded right quick and is kept just as far from the action as you and I are.

It's hardly a free ride. If you're embedded you get to see more stuff, but you tell the story the US military gives you to tell.


Don't worry, they'll get around to it. Check out some of the other stuff on the site. They're not partisan: they're just interested in making secret stuff public.

Which is to say, they're interested in fulfilling the job that real journalists have abdicated in favor of re-masticating government press releases in exchange for "access."

But who are you to say that the people should be interested in the silly Bush/Obama wars? Maybe the people are right in thinking the wars are stupid and the politicians should bring the soldiers home.

Isn't that kind of the whole idea of a representative democracy?

More and more people are coming to the point where they understand the difference between the American people and the US government. In almost every case, the epithet "anti-American" actually means "anti-US government."

Some people (not many, you understand, just a few) are also coming to understand that the objectives of the US military and the interests of the American people are not anywhere close to being aligned with one another.

But if you haven't gotten clear to that rung on the ladder yet, be of good cheer: you'll get there. The US government is doing everything it can to get you there, and it can be pretty effective in that area when it puts its mind to it.

Really, you ought to read some of Fred's other stuff. It's available right there at the link above. You're embarrassing yourself. Not only is he very far from being any kind of liberal, he's a retired Marine.

You probably mean, "Having worked and lived in a number of Third World countries, I can testify that America haters have no clue..." or something like it.

Normally I wouldn't play Grammar Nazi; I have restrained myself on a number of occasions when that grammar pattern was used with the subject of the sentence misplaced. But this time, the subject wasn't even present in the sentence, and I had to say something.

I'd like to see proof of that. Curious like.

You know jack chit about Mexico, keep on reading sport.

Maybe so: I've only been there once. On the other hand, I do read what folks living there--Fred and others--have to say, and one of my coworkers on the current project is a software developer from Mexico City, and my wife has been there a number of times. I'm not entirely uninformed. There's more to Mexico than you'll get from either side of the immigration issue.

LMAO!

Look her up for yourself. (Incidentally, I typoed her name: it has only one S. Glaspie, not Glasspie. Sorry.) If you're looking for an even-handed treatment, you might start with the Wikipedia article on her. I'm not going to give you links, because you'll accuse me of cherrypicking.

Well aware of that. Guess where I was born and raised. Keep on reading that drivel, they don't have an agenda now do they? Amazing how "learned" ones know so much about things they have never experienced. You ever seen heads rolling down a street? You ever seen military or "federales" running roughshod through neighborhoods looking for guns? Ever had you car torn apart and left in that condition on a highway in the middle of nowhere? Didn't think so.

you won't....it's moonbat legend bullshit.....Barak becomes Cindi Sheehan on full moon nights

But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts,


, means go ahead and kill some folks?
In diplo-speak mebby.

That's a fact, Jack...there was no OK given to Damsad to hit Kuwait. Comparing Cindy with our little troll isn't fair though....Cindy isn't that F'd up.

Cindy Sheehan is not nearly so [bleep] up.
She's leastwise got a legitimate excuse...

Afghanistan is the perfect place for a government to wage a war.

It has no *real* government so there's nobody who can surrender,..even if they wanted to,..and there's no measurable criteria for success,...so there's no way the government can ever acknowledge that it's been either won,...or lost,...

,...consequently, it can go on indefinitely and the people who profit from it can make money indefinitely.

"There's more to Mexico than you'll get from either side of the immigration issue."

Juarez 2010 death toll reaches 1,700
by Diana Washington Valdez / El Paso Times
Posted: 08/01/2010 11:16:39 AM MDT

Fifteen people were killed in the Ju�rez region on Saturday, bringing the year's total to date to 1,700.

This means an average of 242 people were murdered in the border city each month since January.

Mexican authorities reported 290 slayings in July, including 25 girls and women.

Diana Washington Valdez may be reached at [email protected]; 546-6140.


Yeah,....really, you're quite the "Pundit"......aren't you ?

GTC

Then what are we disagreeing about?


Not in Jocotepec, Jalisco, no. Have you?

Not everywhere in the US is Harlem NY, and not everywhere in Mexico is Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua.

No. He served one tour in the USMC in the late sixties according to his bio. A far cry from "a retired Marine" and all the experience that encompasses.

http://www.fredoneverything.net/biography.shtml

Well if "all the experience that encompassess" interests you, maybe you'll like Smedley Butler. Hard to get more encompassing than that....

http://www.amazon.com/War-Racket-An...mp;ie=UTF8&qid=1280752530&sr=1-1

+1

Beat me to it.

Quite familiar with him and while I respect his opinion and experience it was a different time and I do not believe that there are relevent gross parallels today.

Barak hates all governments of all sorts and thinks that he can exist as an island so his opinion on anything moving beyond his yard is suspect. He and Fred are ammusing in their niavity.

It's funny as hell to me that all of you " know it alls " choose to dismiss Barack's comments about ANYTHING with some allusion to his anarchist views .

That's a tactic usually employed by the ultra-left liberal press .

Barack is right about a lot of stuff and so is Fred .

NOBODY is right about EVERYTHING .

Anyone that reads this:





And comes up with "carte blanche to invade" is either intellectually dishonest, never bothered to question and investigate what some other intellectually dishonest individual claimed, or just plain suffers from reading comprehension issues.

Obama is a threat to national security.

I'm all for above board open government until such time as it jeopardizes the welfare of our armed forces. The judgment that these documents should be released to public and by extension the people we are fighting, without consideration of unintended consequences is ignorant. Simple argument really and I rather imagine those who put our troops at risk should be willing to face trial for treason, sedition, subversion or some such. They are guilty or not, let the jury decide.

We generally chose to not prosecute similar crap during Vietnam and as a result the war dragged on many extra years. A lot of GIs died as a result and millions of Vietnamese as well. War is not a theoretical board game without consequences.

If anyone is intrested, Julian Assange (WikiLeaks) was on Freedom Watch with the Judge last week.

http://freedomwatchonfox.com/2010/0...ustin-raimondo-lew-rockwell-more/101714/

His is the first interview on the show.

Obama jeopardizes the welfare of our armed forces.

Who? Bashar Assad? Your "Syrian friend" is either a friend of the regime or just really really ignorant of his own country. Fire up that google you love to use to attack your own country and have a look at what people besides your friend say about human rights and the rule of law in Syria.

Sun Tsu and Confuscious were having tea, when Sun snorted some herbal out his nose.

"You think I should add a chapter to account for your enemy developing its own 5th Column in the media.?"

Confuscious says, "Ridiculous. But, after all, life is bitch."

Sun drinks more tea and shakes his head.....

Reading this thread makes one wonder how incompetent the White House clown has to be before warmongers stop supporting his wars.

Even the hand picked General that Obama selected to lead the war has bailed on him,..yet the armchair warmongers are pushing for Obama to escalate it even more!,...keep it going!

That warmongering mentality is a sickness,..no chit.

Knowing Barak, it was my assumption that his reference to health care was a reference to free markets in health care, not centrally planned health care.

All excellent points, Barak. Been saying the same for years.

The transcripts have been available since day one.

Once again, The Southern Avenger (of the American Conservative Magazine) gets it right.

+1

Thank goodness your posting. For a second there I was very concerned you were teaching kids or out maneuvering the real world without adult supervision.

Not sure I agree with your perception on that. IMO, "warmongers" (Hawks?) want it over as much as anybody. They just look for a decisive conclusion from the very beginning. There are a goodly number of people in the US who have first hand experience with combat and appreciate the nuance of warfare better than 99.9% of the bureaucrats that wage war. Some call them warmongers, but...probably they're not. FWIW, I did not support Bush II in the way the opening of the war in A'stan was prosecuted, nor for that matter, Iraq. Was looking for a quick and decisive resolution to A'stan myself and the Iraq thing...future will tell on that, but it is not what I would have promoted.

The list of people I've met that love war for the sake of war is short and filled with blank pages. Is that what you mean by "warmongers"?

Had a college English professor call me a "Warmonging baby killer" during class (I later dropped because I figured the chance of getting a passing grade was slim).

He had trouble defining the term for me also, and he supposedly could speak the language....

I posted the applicable excerpts from the transcripts above. Let me know when you find that "carte blanche" to invade....hell, I'd settle for an inferred wink and a nod....

"But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait ... We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi (Chedli Klibi, Secretary General of the Arab League) or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly."

amazing the extremes to which the Baghdad Bob Amen Corner here at the fire will go to try to get Saddam off the hook, isn't it? Why do you guys have so much trouble just blaming the genocidal maniac dictator who actually, like, you know....invaded Kuwait, instead of trying to find some way to blame America for it?

I'm sure they still weep every day over their little Saddam shrines.....it was just sooooo unfair for that mean old W to take away his palaces, kill his sons, and let the Iraqis hang his sorry ass.

I, for one, am glad Saddam is deceased.
I have a friend that served in GWI as a USMC tanker and told me some stories about his experiences in Kuwait City and what the Iraqis did to the Kuwaiti people-Saddam was a monster that needed his ticket punched years ago.
I can only imagine what he would be doing to his people were he alive and in power today.

Blame America?? What an odd distortion! Did those Germans who opposed the transformation of Germany into Nazi tyranny blame Germany for it? Rather, I imagine they blamed those seeking to transform Germany into a Nazi tyranny.

But Barak is wrong about just about everything outside his yard. May be a heck of a coder but my experience in this big world make his anarchist views on par with the RP's isolationist views for relevance in the real world.

Reminds me of idealist young folks arguing in college with no experience to back it up.

My point was that Barak's views regarding anarcho-capitalism [ or whatever he calls it ] have nothing to do with Fred's comments about Wikileaks but both are dismissed out of hand .

And Fred obviously has some experience in the " real world " .I'm guessing that Barak has some life experiences as well .I could be wrong about that , I guess , and maybe he is just a psuedo cyberspace person invented by that evil Ms Penny !

I don't see much difference between Fred'd point - and Barak's - and Ike's warning about the industrial , military complex .

Yes, correct. I also dismiss O's comments and beliefs...

Nice cut and paste job to take it out of context. No intelligent AND honest man can read this and infer any type of permission to invade.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg disagree with you.

They are both dead - I win THAT argument .

Barak, and Fred like to put out that the sole reason for a military and the associated required industry is wrong. Ike, on the other hand understood that a strong military was needed but that one must guard against undo influence, sought or unsought. He also understood that our national interests often lay far from our shores and are worth defending with said military so don't tell me that the three agree. They don't. I would strongly recommend reading the the first section of the book Rescuing Prometheus before you argue otherwise.

So, I regard Fred as an RP'er and Barak as anarachist (of whichever ilk he chooses to describe himself) as isolationist that have no place in the real world. Espouse ideas they have and you run the risk of having all your ideas dismissed. They know that and have taken said risks openly.

Penny? She's a smart logical, caring woman, a whole different feather! I wish she posted more.

And why are they dead?

Because Ike did not buy into Reed or Barack's theory's that security leaks are a healthy part of free speech.

wait...even for you this is descending into double talk. You blame the US for purportedly giving Saddam permission to invade Kuwait...i.e. you blame the US for causing the invasions. Putting aside that that is utter bullshit, as shown in the posts by Foxbat, what in the hell are you attempting to analogize to with your Nazi reference?

Since you'd never criticize Saddam, it appears you are saying the US is some sort of proto-Nazi regime because we supposedly gave Saddam permission to invade his neighbor?

Is that what you mean? Because it makes even less sense than the other stuff you've been posting lately. Have they changed the glue at school or something?

Ok , Pugs , we agree on IKE and Penny , dis-agree on Fred , and Barak is a draw .

That's a good place to leave it - that passes for complete harmony around here .

Have a good day .

Two others that got their just desserts.

Unfortunately, for your argument, the reality is that isolationists exist exclusively in the propaganda of leftist internationalists, and in the credulous minds contaminated by same.

Funny. There's a crop of them right here.

Hawk,
If you don't mind my asking, how do *you* define an isolationist?
Not trying to be a smart ass, but I am curious as I am trying to understand your argument?

There are indeed a handful of leftist internationalist right here at the Fire. Not to mention their many credulous followers who believe in the bogymen they call isolationists.

Sure. I know you're sincere. An isolationist is a straw man conjured up by American leftist internationalists of the early Twentieth Century. It's purpose was, and remains, to marginalize those who believe in following the sage advice of the Founding Fathers regarding the avoidance of entangling and permanent foreign alliances, and foreign adventurism. These voices needed marginalization in order to persuade a large enough percentage of Americans that entangling and permanent foreign alliances and foreign adventurism are vital to national security, thus permitting the dominance over national policy of the military industrial complex, as Eisenhower warned in his farewell address.

According to the leftist internationalists, an isolationist is someone who wishes to figuratively wall in the United States such that she and her people have relations and dealings with no other people or nation, i.e., isolates herself from the wider world. This, they disingenuously argued, was a proper reduction of the position of those who wished to follow the sage advice of the Founders on such matters. In short, it was and remains a piece of clever propaganda, and no more.

leftists fly the flag upside down....

A total and complete crock of horsehit. Youve' been handed your ass so many times on this subject yet you keep repeating the same garbage. I guess you take a page out of Lenin's playbook in that if one repeats a LIE often enough people will eventually accept it as the truth. You insult the "Founders" with this nonsense. If the founders had been true isolationists, we would still be a nation of thirteen colonies. One simple concept there Ace; MANIFEST DESTINY, now there was an isolationist concept! jeez

What is a "true isolationist?"

PS I reject your laughable assertion that my argument has in any manner been damaged by anything you've ever argued in reference to it.

And yet Jefferson forgoes any congressional blessing and gets the Barbary Pirate war ramped up. Foreign adventurism didn't take long did it?

Somehow I doubt the Founders were referring to naval missions in defense (against piracy) of open sea lanes when they referred to foreign adventurism and permanent entangling foreign alliances. A clue lies in the fact that maintaining a permanent national navy is a constitutional obligation of our national government, while other branches of military are not.

It really is funny. TRH should come with a warning like those home gambling machines, "For amusement purposes only"

The founding fathers are the same people that funded our first blue water Navy, that proceeded to chase pirates to Africa with it, established treaties with France, Prussia, Morocco, Spain, Algeria, Tripoli and Tunis all before 1797. Our country has been involved in international "entanglements" as you call them for it's entire history.

My definition of isolationist?

1) People who believe that the US should never send it's military overseas for any reason other than a direct attack on the United States (although they conveniently forget the haven that was Afghanistan for the Taliban the people that funded and directed the 9/11 attacks) and they like to forget the many actions the US fought all over the world in the first part of our country. Heck we built a fort in east Polynesia in 1813!

2) People that believe the United States can exist solely by itself without trade and their associated agreements and (gee, here it is again) "entanglements" with foreign governments because of some weird view that the founding fathers disagreed with these mechanisms that are (a) Specific powers in the Constitution and (2) Something that we had 36 of before the country was 100 years old.

No TRH, you can bluster your theories here but facts will bear out that the reality is we have always been a country leading the world forward and active with them and will continue to be so, even if it means our folks going in harms way for the benefit of others.

The origin of the term, and it's intended function, are not in dispute by legitimate scholars.

Laffin....

Hey now... not so fast...

And the Stars and Stripes flew over conquered territory on April 27, 1804. In 1813 we are engaged in tribal warfare in the Marquesas. And so on and so fourth. Nothing new.
Just wondering why folks are surprised.

Why? Anarchists, leftists, illegals here in America all fly the flag upside down, usually just before burning it....so, where do you fit in? Don't tell me you are a follower of TRH!

you notice he has no response other than a funny picture to my question about what the hell he was talking about with his nazi reference.


see, in the Hawkeye parallel universe...you've got a guy who is a fascist, jew hater, loves uniforms, surrounds himself with thugs and perverts who also like fancy uniforms, gases ethnic groups he considers inferior, and commits torture and mass murder on an industrial scale. But the Americans who deposed him are apparently the proto-nazis.

figure that one out

Hawkeye really doesn't want to talk about Jefferson's secret and borderline treasonous foreign entanglements with the French revolutionaries' ambassador, while he was vice president of the United States.

I just re-read Fred's take on the wikileaks . Then I re-read Hunter Jim's excellent post .

This business of " nation building wars " has never worked and will never work . The leaks apparently are just going to hasten the inevitable end of the effort .

The real culprits in this affair are the Pentagon genius's who created a system where a PFC could deliver ALL this classified info to a media outlet which is beyond the reach of US law .

Of course the PFC is guilty of diseminating classified info and that may, or may not , be treason . But the idiots who created a system that allowed ALL of it to be disclosed before ANY of it was discovered are the ones who put our troops at risk just as much as the PFC .

You would never get draftees to fight in a " nation building " war .And THAT is a good argument for the draft .

If the real casualties of the leaks - as Jim's source thinks - will be the afghans we bribed/converted to our "side" they are probably climbing up on the embassy roof already .

If nuthin' changes ; nuthin' changes .

Not sure I follow you on this? Throughout history we've had traitors that occasionally show up and do stuff like this. Sometimes to the media and sometimes to enemies while other times to "friends".

This PFC was obviously cleared and had access through his job. You could never prevent a determined traitor unless we start conducting recurring lie detector tests which would not end well either.

How would you propose preventing such disclosures by a determined individual?

The Taliban are busily analyzing and correlating the raw intel releases to determine who the snitches and agents among them are. Wikipedia condemned dozens of brave men and women to torture and death.

They should be real proud.

The idea that some PFC knows what information should be released and not the classifying authority, is beyond naive and dangerous.

Reed seems to think information is classified to protect politicians and companies, when in reality, that couldn't be further from the truth.

Even the President often receives sanitized information, as the most important factor in classified information is often not the subject information, but who, what and how that information was acquired. Something a user or recipient down the information chain may have no clue of when he/she takes it upon themselves to disseminate it.

I'm not a security expert and know very little about computers . What prompted my remarks is the idea that the Vegas casinos have a guy that watches the guy that watches the guy who watches the guys who move and count the money .

I don't know the level of classification assigned to these reports . If - as they are now claiming - its' disclosure could put the whole war effort in jeopardy it should have been classified at a level that precluded ANY PFC from having access to it .

In the early sixties when I did my hitch , getting a " classified " security clearance was done at Company level .A "Secret " clearance required Battalion level scrutiny and NCO's were the lowest ranks to hold that as a rule .I never ran across anybody with a " Top Secret " clearance but I'm guessing they would have been Staff NCO's and Officers .

The names should have been redacted at the issuing source , I would think .

Your guess is wrong. In the late '50s when I served I held a Top Secret clearance as an 18 y/o E-3. It is not so much a matter of rank as need to know. Of course in those days we understood the meaning of an oath and a sacred trust. None of us would have betrayed our country.

The perpetrator of this outrage should be shot. Since that is unlikely, he should at least given a long prison sentence.

Paul

It all depends on your MOS/AFSC and need to know. There is no rank to security clearance ratio to my knowledge, even in the Army. There may be need to know that escalates with rank of course, but hell, I was sanitizing SCI as an E-4 before I gave my own Majcom 2 star his briefing.

The Russians did stuff like you mention, security guys watching the guys watching the guys... We don't really do that, other than your chain of command and of course some information security IT types that watch for individuals trying to access shyt they aren't cleared or have a need to know.

As far as info that could damage us or the war effort. The amount of information out there that can damage us worldwide is so vast, you simply can't set a rank as a cutoff. Hell, the worst traitors we've had in the past couple decades weren't young guys, they were seasoned veterans in their positions. Hanssen, Ames, Walker, Whitworth, Pollard weren't young guys.

In fact the media age of U.S. Military arrested as spies over the past century is 25 years old and civilian employees is 39 years old. It's not the young bucks doing it.

the executions have already started:


The Taliban has already begun to retaliate against Afghan collaborators named in more than 90,000 secret U.S. files released by a whistleblower website, Newsweek reported Monday.

The documents released by WikiLeaks -- the biggest leak in U.S. military history -- contained the names and villages of Afghans who have been secretly cooperating with American troops.

According to Newsweek, following the publication of the files, a Taliban spokesman threatened to "punish" any Afghan listed as having "collaborated" with the U.S.

One tribal elder suspected by the Taliban of liaising with American officials was taken from his home in a Kandahar village and executed by gunmen at the weekend.

Death threats have also begun arriving at the homes of a number of other tribal leaders.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange acknowledged that Afghan deaths may be "unavoidable" after his website released the files, but he said he felt in was in the public interest.

Questioned by Australian news program "Dateline" as to whether their release may lead to Afghan informants named in the documents being killed, Assange said it was possible.

"It's absolutely not something I want, but ... the possibility of that is unavoidable," the Australian said.

"In the end we are forced to make hard choices."

He explained WikiLeaks removed the names of Afghan informants prior to releasing the documents to The New York Times, The Guardian and German weekly Der Spiegel, but admitted "there may be a stray report here or stray report there."

"We do best effort to minimize harm, which we have done with the understanding that this is an extraordinary body of material capable of producing extraordinary reforms," he told the SBS show.

"It belongs in the hands of the Afghan people. Give it to them."

The Times newspaper in London last week revealed Afghan informants' names and details had been left in the documents.

The reports contain previously untold details of the Afghan war through Pentagon files and field reports spanning from 2004 to 2010.

The files from Wikileaks, a secretive web organization that often publishes classified material, showed coalition forces had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, detailing 144 such occasions.

The papers also showed attacks by the Taliban have soared -- it is estimated the group has killed more than 2,000 civilians -- and NATO commanders told of their fears that "neighboring Pakistan and Iran are fueling the insurgency" in Afghanistan in the leaked reports.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said WikiLeaks was at least morally, if not legally, culpable for leaking the documents, by putting U.S. and Afghan troops as well as Afghan civilians at risk.

The U.S. Justice Department is considering whether to bring legal charges against the website.


Did you catch that.....the commie bastard who runs the site knew that releasing these documents would cause the people named to be tortured and killed, along with their families. His response...well, yes that will happen and its unfortunate but "we are forced to make hard choices"....WTF? Hard choices....not hard choices for you, you smug bastard sitting safe in Europe while you cause the deaths of better men.

I sincerely hope one of the survivors pops a cap on this worthless douchebag....this is just the last in a long line of releases that have damaged the west and gotten people killed. Time he got a real "hard choice" to deal with.

That's right.

My friend Abdul's young son fell and broke his arm while he was in Syria. Abdul and his wife took him to a local hospital, where he was treated immediately. He was given an MRI and a cast and sent home the same evening, and the total bill--no mandatory insurance, no HMO, no universal health care, just competitive free-market health-care service--was just under the equivalent of $200.

Yep. Nothing delivers goods and services more efficiently and cost-effectively than free markets. Most other technology-based services drop in cost over time, while the cost of medical care has increased far beyond the inflation rate.

yup, that right there convinced me--Im packing my bags and moving to Syria, forthwith.

How about, instead, stay here and join us in the fight to restore the United States to free markets and general liberty under the rule of law?

yeah, I think I'll start by flying the flag upside down.

Damned right. More of us should. When Obama Care passed, a bunch of us here did it, but just two of us are left now. Mine's staying till it's reversed.

I have no particular edge over the next guy when it comes to explaining myself clearly, but I hadn't thought I was that bad.

Wow, that IS impressive. Does Obama know about this?

Developer, not coder.

And Ron Paul is hardly an isolationist.

because the doctor is making ten thousand dollars US a year....Syria's "health care system" suffers from chronic shortages of personnel, medicines and equipment. It is slightly above third world, but not on the same planet with the US or Europe. Tell ya what, Barak, you just move right on over there and get your "free market" health care....cause if it is it is the only free thing in Syria.

your and Hawkeye's gullibility is embarrassing, for such a couple of would-be cynics about governments

Hey, we all do our little part, right? You can help turn that flag right side up by helping the conservative cause in any way you're able.

It's called intentionally misconstruing. It's Steve's special talent.

if he's not, he'll do till a better one comes along

what, he's too much of an internationalist for you, Barak?

or just not enough of a surrenderista?

I'm gettin' on the horn tonight, to tell Obama about your avatar, I'll wager he changes his mind.

+1

Excellent! Now you're thinking.

You-uns-is need to get behind Obammer own this war against them Africanstans. I seen a movie about how the English damn near got run out here while back and them Africanstans was rough as a cob,...hollerin' out ZOOLOO ZOOLOO, stompin they feet and a carryin' own. And they women didn't wear no brazeers either. In fact they didn't wear mucha nuthin. They'd do summa that ZOOLOO hollerin' too,..be jumpin' here and there,...big ole hooters just a floppin.

Well, it ain't classified to protect the general population, that's fer damn sure.

LMAO!

I got it! You sound like Will Smith in Men In Black....

TRH must have an ass-manufacturing machine set to "ripple fire" he loses his with laughable regularity, refuses to answer and just slinks away with hyperbole and no facts. If Manifest Destiny wasn't anything but pure expansionism and the antithesis of isolationism, no wonder out kids in school dont' learn anything these days with this kind of tripe being taught.

jorge, what you don't seem capable of comprehending is that I deny the Founders were isolationists, i.e., it is my contention that it amounts to propaganda for your side to characterize their foreign policy as such. It is therefore your burden to argue that they were, if you wish to contend against my position.

Right;

They weren't isolationists, they involved the U.S. in "entanglements", and your disproven your own position, TRH.

Well done.

As to Barak's malfunctions, it's easy to fathom why he's so twistedly anti-American.

When you're the addle brained sort, turned down by the military because of it, then run afoul of the IRS for years whilst trying to cheat the system, get caught and hammered, then spend your free time alternately between sucking up to felons, idolizing Lew Rockwell loons, and visualizing a perverse "anarcho-state" named for your screen name....

Well, try that on for size, and tell me you don't end up nuttier than squirrel schit....

Why should the US send its military overseas because of a direct attack on the US? Wouldn't the military be better employed defending against that attack?


Well, then The Real Hawkeye is right. He and I and Ron Paul and the folks who think like we do aren't isolationists by your definition, and you're wrong to call us such.

Squirrel [bleep] ain't near as nutty.

Where'd you get that?

Turned down by the military? Quite the contrary: when I graduated from college, the Navy wanted me to be a nuclear physicist on one of its submarines. I was the one who decided I'd rather go into commercial IT than military physics.

And I've never run afoul of the IRS--any more than anybody else, anyway--except once when they sent me a refund and then two years later decided I wasn't entitled to it and emptied my checking account without notice.

I don't mind when you exaggerate the truth to ridiculous proportions and use your exaggerations to make ludicrous accusations. I understand that you can't help it, and I wouldn't dream of trying to take it away from you because it sometimes seems that it comes close to being all you have. I'm not completely devoid of sympathy.

But please do try to start with a kernel of truth.

hey, I invented "Barakistan"......don't be giving Barak credit for that

uh, yeah.....if this was, like 150 BC and they had to wade ashore here to harm us.

otherwise, no.

1.) I enjoy Fred from time to time, but he missed the boat on this one. Episodes such as Wikileaks and the Pentagon Papers for those of you old enough to remember Daniel Elsberg, are more destructive than construct.

2.) I enjoy reading Barak from time to time, and even find myself agreeing with him in spirit, occasionally. I could stand a world with more personal freedom and less Big Brother.

At the very least, Barak is consistent.

I'll never understand how so many of you get on here and absolutely damn the government and everyone in it to hell but yet, give a free pass, nay, defend to the point of idiocy, government's chief arms of enforcement, law enforcement and the military. It would seem that if someone believes the government is corrupt, inefficient, violent, and stupid, he would believe that it is across the board. Instead, it seems as if most of you would rather give the government a free pass if it meant considering for a moment, that the power and authority of the military and law enforcement should be limited or questioned in the slightest.

Exactly! Odd, isn't it?

Well! There is a sane one in this bunch after all. I was beginning to doubt it .

Barak is much easier to understand if you start from the point : " This guy is a damn sight smarter than anybody else on here " - like I have .

Being smart don't always make him right , but it means his reasons for believing as he does are worth more consideration than those of your average curdog .

But ----- I'd still rather have my distress call answered by a random bunch of you guys than a SWAT team . I expect Barak would , also .

Laffin...you start wherever you think best for you,curdog. At least you seem to have a little more self esteem than hawkie!! You certainly know your limitations better than he!!

Could be Hawkeye ain't bumped up against his limitations as much as I have . He's a schoolteacher , you know .

We like guns? Of course, it helps not seeing boogie men everywhere and in case y'all haven't heard, Mexico and Syria doesn't have any!

Yep. He's only once surprised me. His opinion on intellectual property rights. But that was another thread.

Aw, you guys are so nice to me!

You're right, it's another thread, but to sum up, the reasoning is that asserting that intellectual property rights exist implies eventually a right to control the ideas in somebody else's head; a consistent libertarian can't countenance that. (Yes, pro-IP folks will say such laws attempt only to control behaviors, not ideas, but that doesn't hold up under detailed analysis.)

Incidentally, it means that a consistent libertarian can't advocate laws against libel or slander either. Your reputation doesn't belong to you: it consists of thousands of individual opinions that each belong to the individuals who hold them. Thus, when somebody adjusts those opinions, he can't be said to have committed any offense against you.

(However, depending on circumstances, he may have committed fraud--against the folks whose opinions he adjusted, not against you--which is actionable.)

Horseshit....find one example. And no, defending the military against the proven lies and moonbat troofer theories of America haters doesn't count. Find one post where anybody suggested that the military and law enforcement shouldn't be questioned in the slightest. Dare you.

Every now and then I feel a peculiar need to try and fit in.

I think my above post makes about as much sense as any of the those from the good "conservatives" on here who are jabbering in circles while trying to manufacture some reasonable justification for Obama's war.

It's one of the more ridiculous things I've seen on this forum (and that's saying something),..but the same people who believe that Obama is a foreign born, Marxist, Muslim subversive,.support his war initiatives in the middle east!

Like I said,..the warmongering mentality is a sickness,...it's serious bent noodle shiit when it reaches the level witnessed on here.

I wouldn't turn Obama loose with a pellet gun,...much less the U.S. military.

The day that idiot got elected it was time to lock the military away from him and not tell him where the key was.

Here's y'all's mentality boiled down.

"Obama is a Muslim!"

"Obama must be allowed to wage war against the Muslims!"

I ain't sure,...but I suspect they make a pill for that kind of mental problem.

Y'all need to find it.

Nice to be identified as sane for once.

I will also throw Barak a bone for thinking situations out. I'm not always on board with the conclusions, but the effort is recognized.When he is off the mark, he can be Barack!

Interesting. Never thought of it that way.

Never thought of it that way.

Hm.

Thanks, although mostly it's not really me thinking them out: just reading stuff written by other people who were smart enough to think them out.

Another view of the WikiLeaks scandal, from Ron Paul:

Goob, O ain't on the ground leading the troops, he's not leading anything/anyone except dims over a cliff.

I hear tell Mexico/Syria are the places to be, heads up for someone that never outgrew the 60's.....drop acid, not bombs!

A strict libertarian, perhaps not. But what of the Christian?
The good Lord calls it bearing false witness. It can in fact leave a victim if his reputation among his peers is falsely shot full of holes.
And, that the unwise listener believes a rumor is as much his own fault, if not more, than the guy doing the telling. The good Lord speaks of that as well, that one is called rumor mongering. The wise liistener doesn't necessarily believe but remembers and watches just in case.

Don't confuse morality with law. The two are mortal enemies: morality turns law into injustice, and law corrodes morality into nonexistence.

You would agree with me, I suspect, that laws against the use of marijuana are unjust and should be repealed. Does that mean, then, that we should all go out and smoke marijuana? No, that would be silly.

Similarly, the assertion that laws against slander are unjust doesn't imply that slander should be compulsory.

Don't confuse morality with law. The two are mortal enemies
============

Laffin'...you see things through a most peculiar kaleidoscope,Barak!!

He's right, Bob.

Look how much legalized theft goes on. All with rubber stamp and nodded approval of legislators, courts and enforcers.

ps
And that's just this country.
Some others are far, far worse.

You make some good posts sometimes, but all I can say about that one is "F.U."

War is a terrible thing requiring terrible acts. The American people can barely stick hamburgers in their mouths without feeling guilty about it.

This leak was meant not only to expose intelligence, but to put Americans on another guilt trip and thereby derail the war effort. If Americans were strong, we'd just brush it off and call for more. But America is a pussified state without any resolve or stomach for reality.

Semantical word games coupled with bizarre thoughts and concepts don't make anyone right or wrong, just bizarre!

Remember,stealing from the government isn't wrong in Barak's world!! So, he's either a hypocrite or attempting to validate his thought processes with sophomoric,child-like concepts and opinions. You know, stuff you hear in the psych hospitals.

To some folks protecting one's self from theft is a theft from the one intent on doing the taking.

Particularly when it's been scribbled on a piece of paper by someone that one perceives to be his ruler.

Very convoluted world we live in...



My initial post on this little side track from the thread topic was in reference to God's judgments. They are just. And it behooves us all to align our lives with them.

Very true and very well said!

Paul

Some Congressional leaders are now speaking of the PFC's execution, if convicted.

Your lack of comprehension amazes me sometimes. The FFs were the complete OPPOSITE of isolationists as Pugs pointed out, they enjoined a multitude of treaties and alliances to PROFFER an aggressive foreign policy, and without such policies, Manifest Destiny (and the Monroe Doctrine) maybe would have never happened. You on the other hand, want to stick your head in the sand behind some imaginary wall and forgo any sort of foreign policy that is in the National Interest.

As usual, Ron Paul has it right.

Then I've convinced you? Excellent! Who are the isolationists, then?

Your lack of comprehension amazes me sometimes.
==============

Sometimes?? There are times he understands, I'm sure, but wallowing in ignorance and fighting untenable positions long after he's been thrashed still continues to suit him.

He's just one of those guys who has determined it's best not to admit the awkwardness of the illogical positions he asserts as it would be too time consuming a effort.

That was good. I'm going to try and remember that when this subject comes up with my left leaning friends.

Think about it, my friend.

In a moral society, what need is there of laws? People in a moral society will interact morally with one another without reference to law. What happens if a law is broken in a moral society? Obviously, any law that prohibits moral behavior or mandates immoral behavior is unjust; but that's the only kind of law that could possibly be broken in a moral society. That's what I mean when I say that in the presence of morality the only effect law can have is to introduce injustice.

Similarly, in a society of laws, morality is minimized. Wherever morality and law address the same behavior, the motivation for committing or avoiding that behavior will corrode from the sort of self-sacrificing pursuit of a higher abstract standard that comes from morality to the sort of self-centered avoidance of a penalty that comes from law. A man who does the morally right thing merely for reasons of self-preservation is not acting in a moral manner; therefore, law destroys morality.

This isn't my peculiar kaleidoscope: this is something men have understood for at least hundreds of years, possibly thousands.

That's certainly the spin that is disseminated by the ruling class. You're to be commended for swallowing it so effortlessly and regurgitating it so accurately.

Another view is that Americans by and large hate the Bush/Obama wars and think they're stupid, immoral, wasteful, dangerous, and counterproductive; and that this outrage--rather than fear or pusillanimity--is where their lack of support comes from. In this view, publishing additional evidence of atrocities and other criminal behavior committed by the US government and its henchmen, then, would serve to reinforce the existing popular contempt for the ruling class's war drums.

+1

Hmm. What do you mean when you say "stealing from the government?" I tried to come up with an example and couldn't.

Unfortunate and outrageous, of course, but on the other hand, he should have known what happens to people who climb into bed with a government.

What do you mean when you say "stealing from the government?" I tried to come up with an example and couldn't.
=====================


Exactly what I meant and you know that....but, you still have that edgy style with semantical game-playing, I'll grant you that.

GOD you are dense. Since day one I've been saying the FFs were not isolationists and had they been, Manifest Destiny would have never happened and you kept saying the opposite that Jefferson was against foreign treaties etc., but as to your question, Ron Paul and you for starters.

Me too. So where is our disagreement?

aw, the two Cindis agree.....that's sweet. Y'all got your matching Code Pink shirts on while you type this stuff?

Don't forget the "I'm With Stupid" quotes on the front of them;Barak's being believable.

That's right, Steve. You're not a real he-man unless you favor perpetual war. War is peace, after all. Keep repeating it.

problem with you girls is....you think surrender is peace.

it ain't.

It is too late for you to argue about whether or not we should be entangled in these wars.

We are at war, you can't go back. Now the task is to win them. Criminal or not, you are now just as accountable as all other Americans.

We need to get back to the Old School of waging war - you kill the enemy and everybody who remotely supports them, and you break all their stuff. Plain and simple.

For one here in your totally wrong definition of an isolationist, which BTW, fits you to a tee:


And an even better description and destruction of your posit by Pugs:


I RP and those who thik like him EVER pull their heads out of their collective gluteal clefts and follow the above, then they might garner a vote or two. Then again he has to work on his goofy look...jorge

But that's just it. By your definition (which was the one I summarized in the post you quote), I am certainly not an isolationist. Not even close. In fact I doubt there is any real school of thought or political movement that fits that term. In other words, it parallels "Johnny Reb."

The North, in an effort to nip in the bud the potential for Northern sympathy with the Southern position leading up to and during the war, manufactured and popularized the label "Johnny Reb" to identify those who stood with the South and/or who agreed with the arguments of the South. No Confederate, however, proposed rebellion against the United States, but only secession from it, which was a power retained by the states from the beginning. "Johnny Reb" was intended to marginalize those who opposed the folks who manufactured the term. Same with "isolationist." In truth there never were any Johnny Rebs, and there never were any isolationists. Those terms are just propaganda intended to marginalize viewpoints in opposition to their creators.

problem is, the United States has never played by those rules. Closest we got was bombing civilian centers in WWII, but even that was accompanied by much hand wringing and waffling, and self-delusion about military benefits.

The US isn't Rome or Carthage and we don't fight like they did.

We can't surrender: we're not at war, because there's been no declaration of war.

More practically, though, it's silly for you to talk about surrender. Whenever this thing ends, not only is nobody going to surrender, nobody's even going to lose! Both sides will declare victory; and then both sides will go back to their accustomed pastime: killing brown people.

More semantics!!

the first sentence was going to be my nominee for dumbest thing posted this year, until I read the second.



a)you surrender by giving your opponent what he wants....no paper needed.

b)the brownest people in Afghanistan are US GI's.

Again, an excellent restatement of the standard spin of the ruling class. Congratulations.

It is, of course, totally false. It's never too late to condemn immorality.


Of course we can go back. Load 'em all on planes and fly 'em home. If they're unwilling, then cut off their funding until they're no longer unwilling. It's not only possible, it's even simple.

And nobody has ever come up with a credible suggestion for what "win them" means. Kill all the Muslims? Not credible. Make the Taliban and al Qaeda promise to behave and be good? Not credible. Successfully install puppet democracies? Theoretically possible, but of course the puppets will be overthrown the instant they're no longer propped up with US arms.

They were stupid wars to start, they were stupid wars to fight, and they're stupid wars to continue.


Hardly.

It's not Americans who are accountable for these wars, it's Americans who are victims of these wars. (Along with a whole bunch of other people.) It's the US government and its henchmen who are responsible (I didn't use the word accountable, because holding the government or its minions actually accountable for something is nearly impossible) for these wars.


Not with my money.

If that's what you want, you buy a plane ticket with your own money and pack your own guns and ammunition and go over there and kill all the Muslims you want on your own.

By that definition, Ronald Reagan surrendered to Libya when he ordered the cessation of air strikes against Muammar Qaddafi.

So what happens if you and your opponent want the same thing?

The Taliban and al Qaeda would obviously like it if the US just up and left; and the longer these stupid Bush/Obama wars go on, the larger becomes the segment of the American people who would like that too.


Where did you get the idea Afghans were white people? I know Afghans, and they're not. They're all different shades of brown--like Indians. (Computer Indians, not casino Indians.) And when they come to the US to compete in IT, they're damn smart, also like Indians.

Sure we did. And should again.

I asked dear old Dad "What if the Germans were in a school? Did you shoot at them?" Answer: "Yes, we shot at them wherever they were, schools, hospitals, churches, didn't matter. Then we called in artillery to level the places. If there was a soldier or someone carrying water for a German soldier, we killed them. They either surrendered or we killed them."

Oh, and Barak, don't even try to blow that [bleep] about "war is immoral". Not going to fly. War is terrible, but often necessary.

Terrible <> Immoral

shooting at German soldiers or auxiliaries where ever they can be found with whatever ordnance is available is not the same as your prior statement, as I read it. and of course, the problem in the Stan is that everybody dresses the same...hard to tell what team somebody is playing for, but you can't waste him on suspicion. at least, we don't.....are you suggesting we should?

other than via strategic bombing, the US has never countenanced warfare intentionally directed against civilians. nor have the other civilized nations. collateral damage is inevitable, but not the intentional slaughter that you apparently endorse.

I didn't say that war is immoral.

But the Bush/Obama wars are certainly immoral, at least on the US side.

As a matter of fact, the last American war that wasn't immoral, in my opinion, was the Revolutionary War.

a new contender for dumbest post of the year.....three in one thread.....he's on a roll.

Ah, not since Japan......and that was to save American lives.

that was strategic bombing....and the debate about that was a long one. the use of incendiaries against cities was resisted by many in the government, both in and out of the Air Corps. Even Churchill initially recoiled from it, but he got over it.


happen to be in the middle of Max Hastings' book Retribution about the war against Japan...1944-45. Particularly like his rebuttal of the old saw...still parroted by maroons like Barak...that the US war against Japan was different from the war with Germany because of racism. Obviously wrong for two reasons.....one, the brutality of the Pacific war was a result of Japanese conduct, both toward allied troops and, even more brutally, toward the Asians they conquered, and, two, the US had a love affair with the Chinese and Philipinos, and spent a great deal of blood and treasure in their interest, despite their being Asians. Great book, as is his Armageddon about the end game against Germany.

"..not since Japan."
I may be splitting hairs here, Stan; but didn't many of Japan's cities by 1944 have a multitude of shops used for military production spread far and wide in residential districts?

Gives somewhat of a justification for LeMay's bombing campaign against Japan, at least to my mind.

Well, we can call it whatever we want, the bottom line is that Japan was brought to her knees to prevent hundreds of thousands of Ameirican combat troops dying and in so doing we targeted Japanese civilians....I don't disagree with the decision.

We did give the Japanese notice...like we did Damsad. They were warned and didn't heed the warning.

What a colossal level of dumbphuckitude on display. Of all the hyperbole about the War of Northern Aggression being "morally right" because of slavery, of WWII being... well, if you can't see being morally right when combatting Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, I can't fathom what planet you're on....

Then again, perhaps with all those Nazis and Japanese war criminal convicted at Nuremberg, Barak has an unnatural affinity for those felonious monsters. Go figure...

Partially true; to prevent the deaths of hundreds of thousands of American service personnel, and MILLIONS of Japanese, we targeted a couple Japanese cities and brought Japan to it's knees.

An invasion of Japan would have turned the entire island nation into a combat zone, and leveled every village and nearly every living Japanese citizen.

You tell me which was the most moral and humane decision....

Actually, we fire bombed nearly every city in Japan larger than a village. It was far more than a "couple". In LeMay's own words we "...burned everything worth burning..." in the entire country.

Millions of Japanese were killed that way. In the fire bombing of Toyko, there may have been as many as 180,000 Japanese killed.

True.
In fact, the folks that decided which cities to atomic bomb had a pretty limited list of suitable targets due to most of the country being in cinders.

The bombs saved thousands of Japanese from jumping off cliffs. But, we did target civilians and we then regained their trust and today we have a great ally in Japan. The lesson was 'don't start no chit and there won't be no chit'.....we don't teach that anymore.

Yep, their military industry was largely a "cottage industry." Decentralized in order to prevent it being shut down by narrowly targeted bombing raids.

And then there was Dresden.

minimizing of Japanese civilian deaths was an explicit consideration in US planning.....the deaths of an estimated 150,000 civilians in the Okinawa operation were a small sample of what would have happened if the home islands had to be invaded.


brutal as it was, the atomic bombs were perhaps the only thing that could have sufficiently shocked the rulers of Japan into a surrender short of invasion and occupation of the home islands......the incineration of Japanese cities had not affected the Army's willingness to fight it out.

Of course, the Japanese Army had millions of troops living in relative comfort in China who were never engaged against the US forces moving up through the Pacific islands, and some fanatics thought they could carry on the war in China even if Japan fell.

Joe;

As usual, you miss the point. As pointed out beforehand, MOST of, if not nearly ALL of, those villages and cities had military installations and production facilities: just like we did here. So, you hit everything that was a target, with the capabilities at hand.

We targeted 67 cities in the last six or seven months, all of which had significant military production capacity and installations (Tokyo, included). Hiroshima was a primary military and production location. Nagasaki lacked the military production and installations of the other parts of the nation, and was targeted because it was left, and because in order to bring about the end of the war prior to an absolutely hellish invasion (on all sides), it was hit.

Given that I have relatives from Dresden, you might want to reconsider going that route.

Dresden was a central rail hub, and a source of considerable production capacity for the Third Reich, as well as home to more than a few Nazi units. Death tolls by lie-berals and defeatists have been sorely exaggerated for years (as I am sure your going to try to do), as has the military and industrial importance understated by the same.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II

Suffice to say, from folks THAT WERE THERE, Dresden was FAR from non-military.

I don't want to fight the whole war over again, I merely wished to point out that you were wrong in saying that we bombed a "couple" of cities. Regardless of the justification or rectitude of the cause or lack thereof, Japan was subjected to the most intense bombardment in the history of mankind. Millions of Japanese were killed in these cities.

The atom bomb was superfluous. Not necessarily because it was unnecessary to use it, but rather because it was actually not as destructive as an incendiary raid.

I reckon, but most of the population was starving, pilots were down to one mission flights, Kamakazees....their Navy was history so they were prepared for women and children to commit hari kari with a garden hoe when troops hit their beaches and fight to the death. Japan's industrial complex capability in Nagasaki and Hiroshima wasn't the determining factor for those hits.....

the bulk of the Second Army and its HQ was at Hiroshima, including more than 40,000 troops, and was obliterated by the atom bomb.

Hiroshima was also home to the massive Kure naval shipyard, home of the Imperial Japanese Fleet.

Not to mention the Nazi's were pounding London.....payback is hail!

physical destruction wasn't the objective.....forcing the Imperial General Staff to accept surrender was the objective, and it worked. they could muddle through the fire bombings, but the atom bomb finally focused their attention.

Wrong, dead wrong, on Hiroshima, as pointed out by Steve_NO.

dated a girl who's father lived through hiroshima.

Prolonged suffering via repeated bombings promoted anger and a will to fight. The fact that the "bomb' caused so much destruction in one fell swoop initiated the move to surrender.

He had no bones about telling me this, and how he hated the military for it. And resented my presence in his daughter's life....

If you engage a war like Japan did, against an enemy that has to hit you back and damned hard to make you surrender, and you diffuse your military and industrial capacity throughout your nation in almost all cities and neighborhoods, you have to expect to take huge casualties when your homeland is hit.

And, frankly, that's what happened. Japan attacked, they were being beaten, they would not surrender without taking a pounding on their homeland, their facilities were in and around and surrounded by civilian areas that would be and were hit by attacks, and that's what happened.

War is hell, and if you get in one, you have to anticipate casualties.

Whining and crying over casualties after a war is ridiculous; it was necessary to effect the defeat of Japan. If you want to blame someone for those civilian casualties, blame the Japanese high command, and that blame would be more accurate though still as ridiculous as blaming us for fighting back.

The nukes dropped were a HUMANE end to the war, compared to the alternative.

Oh? Which part, that the industrial capability wasn't the determining factor for the bomb, or the Japanese Navy was still formidable? Or there weren't women/children/old people with hoes prepared to committ suicide? The only one that didn't know Japan was defeated was the Emporer and he needed convincing.

Careful: I've never called the War of Northern Aggression "morally right"--except possibly on the Confederate side.


What's your position, then? Is it morally compulsory for you to fight every existing bad guy?

Yes?

How, then, would you define "bad guy?" How about somebody who commits large-scale extortion and murder? Would such a person be a "bad guy" under the proper definition?

Yes?

So...you're saying that if such a guy existed, it would be morally imperative to extort hundreds of billions of dollars from hundreds of millions of people to finance the murder of hundreds of thousands of people in the pursuit of him?

As usual, you miss the point. I've made no moral judgment whatsoever in my posts. You WERE in fact, trying to minimize the impact of the casualties by saying it was merely a "couple" of cities and you are the one who continues to make excuses for the casualties by saying that they were justified and the like.

I'm merely pointing out that whatever the justification or lack thereof, the experience of the Japanese was pretty much unprecedented in the history of the warfare.

The determining factor for the hit on Hiroshima was the production and military capacity.

As for Nagasaki; those were not the factor, and I've never said that they were. In fact, I've said the opposite.

Comprehensible blather would be appreciated.

I said, frankly, that we targeted a couple of cities for non-military/industrial capacity reasons; Nagasaki being primary.

As for minimization of the casualties; nope, just realization that given the situation you either kill a few thousand, or a few million. Draconian choice, and the right one was made.

It's all moot.

Obama is going to apologize for it at the upcoming ceremony....

The Kure shipyard near Hiroshima was destroyed and virtually every vessel destroyed/wrecked before the bomb.....we mostly agree here, I think. But, to believe the Japanese had any military industrial might left is a stretch. I agree with dropping the bomb.

the problem was that the Japanese had no concept of honorable surrender. it had been part of the western military code for centuries that when resistance becomes futile, and honor has been satisfied, there is no shame in a surrender to overwhelming force. the victors often pemitted the surrendered troops the honor of marching out with honors of war...including keeping their colors and sometimes even their arms.

while Hitler was committed to dying in a bunker, his generals were not, and hundreds of thousands of German soldiers were surrendered by their officers. that never happened in the Pacific, and Okinawa and Iwo Jima had made it plain that the same could be expected of civilians,

the idea of surrender was dishonorable.....in a society where honor counted for a lot. no rational calculation was ever going to get the Imperial General Staff to go to the Emperor and say "the jig is up, we need to cut a deal". It took a weapon from hell.

Historical revisionism smells whether our former enemies do it or we attempt it.

Dresden was payback for London, pure and simple. Our own people were uncomfortable with Dresden after the fact. This was Bomber Harris and Churchill's vendetta.

War is hell, but don't try to justify Dresden as a strategic raid, it was payback for the same reasons we used incendiaries on Tokyo...psychological effect on the civilian populace.

I don't personally have a major issue with Tokyo, Dresden, Hamburg, Nagasaki or Hiroshima, you're at war and you do whatever it takes to win AND Nagasaki and Hiroshima saved countless American lives. However, I do have a problem with convicting people like Donitz and Raeder for war crimes then trying to justify Tokyo and Dresden.... wreaks of intellectual dishonesty.

Yep, totally concur. Dresden was Vendetta-driven warfare. jorge

Sherman was the first general to break the modern Western tradition in warfare when he resorted to a total war strategy.

not quite....Sherman practiced scorched earth/confiscation on a geographical scale not seen since the Wars of Religion in Europe. But it took the Spanish Civil War, and the Wehrmacht's invasions of Poland and Russia to perfect the art.

Bad as Sherman was, he wasn't shooting civilians out of hand.

Correct...the Japanese citizen would have fought and died for the Emperor.