Jeanne d'Arc at This Modern World discusses officially sanctioned terrorism- by allied Peacekeepers on civilians.
That Geneva Convention thing. I guess you had to be there to understand it. That was then, this is the "f*ck you" age where the person in the way of Big Time Dick must be at fault.
The 70 farm-raised quail he shot before he bagged his lawyer must have hated America:
Monday's hunting trip to Pennsylvania by Vice President Dick Cheney in which he reportedly shot more than 70 stocked pheasants and an unknown number of mallard ducks at an exclusive private club places a spotlight on an increasingly popular and deplorable form of hunting, in which birds are pen-reared and released to be shot in large numbers by patrons. The ethics of these hunts are called into question by rank-and-file sportsmen, who hunt animals in their native habitat and do not shoot confined or pen-raised animals that cannot escape...
Speaking of torturing animals in pens, reading Jeanne reminds me of this tidbit I hadn't time to write about this week until now:
"The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired this week, by the way, for the crime of being anti-torture, and perhaps for not being sufficiently diligent about shutting people up."
More:
Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.
Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”
Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.
Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004 with a mission to “clean house”, has been angered by a series of leaks from CIA insiders, including revelations about “black sites” in Europe where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held...
But not angry about leaks about people who were actually doing their job and trying to tell us there was no reason for war in Iraq. Steve Clemmons posts this analysis about what Valerie Plame was doing when Cheney told Scooter to blow her cover:
As we now start down a path towards harder-edged threats against Iran, allies will naturally question the quality of our intelligence given our failures on Iraq WMDs.
If Cheney & Co. outed one of the key intelligence operations monitoring the inputs and outputs of Iran's nuclear program -- then Cheney & Co. did vast damage to our ability to know what is real and contrived inside Iran.
The Bu$hCo/ Cheneyburton syndicate is causing vast damage to our nation in more ways than you might imagine.
For example, remember when we had National Parks? No longer- they're reserves for oil companies.
New projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.
Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.
Administration officials say that the benefits are dictated by law...
They're only following orders. Amazing and versatile, the Colonel Klink defense is. The budget as a tool for policy, reform, and piracy.
It's an ownership society indeed... just don't let these butchers get a lien on you.
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