Thy gory locks at me."
Tom Englehardt catches on to the cognitive dissonance:
Consider the following statement offered by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at a news conference last week. He was discussing Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks as well as the person who has taken responsibility for the vast, still ongoing Afghan War document dump at that site. "Mr. Assange,” Mullen commented, “can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.”
...The British Guardian was one of three publications given early access to the leaked archive, and it began its main article this way: “A huge cache of secret U.S. military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents. They range from the shootings of individual innocents to the often massive loss of life from air strikes...” Or as the paper added in a piece headlined “Secret CIA paramilitaries’ role in civilian deaths”: “Behind the military jargon, the war logs are littered with accounts of civilian tragedies. The 144 entries in the logs recording some of these so-called ‘blue on white’ events, cover a wide spectrum of day-by-day assaults on Afghans, with hundreds of casualties.” Or as it also reported, when exploring documents related to Task Force 373, an “undisclosed ‘black’ unit” of U.S. special operations forces focused on assassinating Taliban and al-Qaeda “senior officials”: “The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women, and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.”
Methinks Birnam wood begins to rustle as the nicely settled begin to lose all to the real cost of the Endless War:
This has been the greatest spell and illusion the Company has cast on the American people: that there is no cost for perpetual war.
...Does anyone doubt that once a society ceases to be able to afford schools, public transit, paved roads, libraries and street lights -- or once it chooses not to be able to afford those things in pursuit of imperial priorities and the maintenance of a vast Surveillance and National Security State -- that a very serious problem has arisen, that things have gone seriously awry, that imperial collapse, by definition, is an imminent inevitability?
Mr. Greenwald, there are doubtless many scions of MacBeth in Company boardrooms who would argue the Endless War can be maintained forever.
One might be tempted to argue these are the same kinds of people who ten years ago argued that history is over and stocks and real estate values can only rise. One might be tempted to say the shortsightedness of those who would rule us has been shown again and again. One would be tempted to lump these assertions together.
Until you realize that these same people made a lot of money on said bubble collapse. That increasing unemployment only makes our cowed populace work more feverishly to hold on to what few toys remain to them. That we have always been at war with Eastasia/ Eurasia and this all represents an increase in choco-rations for everyone, as far as anyone will allow themselves to remember.
Still, Birnam wood is now rustling, and in the right moonlight, you can see it creeping towards the castle wall.
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