COMMERCIAL AIRPORTS take great care to exclude weapons and explosives from their passengers’ bags and accessories. Why bother when authoritarians can bypass security regulations and restricted airspace with armed drones? US officials brag that they killed the world’s Number One Bad Guy, an Iranian major general named Qassem Soleimani, who they claim was responsible for American casualties. Naturally the precision airstrike killed Soleimani’s entourage as well, including Brigadier General Hussein Jafari Nia, Major-General Hadi Taremi, Colonel of the Guards Shahroud Mozaffari Nia, Captain Waheed Zamanian, Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, deputy-commander of the Iraq’s People’s Mobilization Forces, and Mohammad al-Shibani, Muhandis’s son-in-law. No word yet on what their crimes are alleged to have been, had charges been brought and the group been summoned to a court of law, as would be done in any self respecting international law abiding society. Anyhow NBD, the U.S. of Assholes has traded its nocturn Seal Team raid Death Squads for MQ-9 Reaper drones guided by War Room extrajudicial assassins. And Yanks no longer shy away from Death’s Head nomenclature. We’ve gone from Predator drones to Reaper. Ha ha “Grim Reaper” get it? America Fuck Yeah! No, you dumbfuck blimpnecks, that drone is actually a sower. Of a grim harvest.
Tag Archives: Extrajudicial Assassination
Modern Nat Turner insures Dallas cops cannot assail Black lives with impunity
Was ANYBODY going to stop the unfettered lynching of people of color in America? Did President Obama ever deliver anything more than a eulogy? Few police officers are being convicted or even indicted. Videotaped killings of black men by lawmen have become so common, those disseminating the videos are being accused of harboring fetishes. People expressing offense online are being shamed for being clicktivists, though clearly the only fuels firing public outrage are the videos. Meanwhile Black Lives Matter spokespeople have become so jaded they ridicule the efficacy of street protests. And now everyone is condemning the lone direct action taker.
The killing of any human being is terrible, but the retaliatory killings of police in Dallas could have been prevented. Not by expecting minority communities to stomach further and unending extrajudicial assassinations, but by having police curb their racism and use of lethal force. Or of course by disbanding militarized police departments. Public officials can’t even broach that conversation. Do we expect the police state to dismantle itself?
Self-styled black revolutionary Micah Xavier Johnson, a typical PTSD-hardened Afghan vet, put “suicide by cop” to the service of his embattled community and avenged the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. He didn’t shoot their actual killers, but he didn’t hit innocents either. Johnson targeted America’s systemic enforcers of inequity, hitting twelve police officers, five of whom have now died.
Let’s note those cops weren’t “protecting the first amendment rights” of a spontaneous protest of the Sterling and Castile murders, but were harassing and detering demonstrations. The officers could have chosen not to, and hopefully, their comrades in other cities, molesting other legal assemblies, may now choose to stand down, because now authoritarian bullying has come in the line of fire.
There is poetic justice for those who would decry “Blue Lives Matter”. If they’re going to pretend it, let them feel the oppressive threat of violence which black lives bear. For one evening, in a small corner of Dallas, Texas, police brutality faced a comeuppance.
For now Johnson’s act is being condemned as an atrocity, as a massacre even, though obviously his victims 1) met every standard of belligerent adversary, 2) were armed, and 3) outnumbered him. Let’s concede that Johnson is a credit to his military training. He confirms how our soldiers could so murderously rapage through our war zones against lesser equipped combatants. Johnson’s motive echoes that which provoked US atrocities overseas, seeking revenge against civilians, exacting collective punishment for deadly IEDs.
If we acknowledge the violence with which African Americans are oppressed, and the mendacity of its apologists and enablers, can we condemn violent resistance? International law accords oppressed peoples the human right to resist.
Slave rebellion leader Nat Turner is recognized today as a hero, but was exhaustively vilified in his day because he killed slave owners, indescriminate of old or young. Whites retaliated and killed many more blacks. More violence follwed from abolitionsists and Jayhawkers, all of it lamentable. But slavery didn’t end because we willed it.
Because this era’s history is written with erasers, our victors’ primary tool, Micah Johnson will probably never be praised for heroism.
Johnson will join fellow effaced cop-killer Christopher Dorner. A previous African American reservist vet who was immolated alive, killed instead of being apprehended, lest an investigation benefit from his testimony about why he could no longer bear LAPD corruption in 2013.
From Dorner’s “manifesto”, before Michael Brown, Ferguson and Baltimore:
“Those Caucasian officers who join South Bureau divisions (77th,SW,SE, an Harbor) with the sole intent to victimize minorities who are uneducated, and unaware of criminal law, civil law, and civil rights. You prefer the South bureau because a use of force/deadly force is likely and the individual you use UOF on will likely not report it. You are a high value target.
“Those Black officers in supervisory ranks and pay grades who stay in south bureau (even though you live in the valley or OC) for the sole intent of getting retribution toward subordinate caucasian officers for the pain and hostile work environment their elders inflicted on you as probationers (P-1?s) and novice P-2’s. You are a high value target.
You perpetuated the cycle of racism in the department as well. You breed a new generation of bigoted caucasian officer when you belittle them and treat them unfairly.
Mikah Johnson’s last words we only know through the spin of Dallas police, the same people who decided not to wait him out, nor to smoke him or gas him out from hiding in a public parking garage, but instead to send a robot with a bomb and M.O.V.E. his ass like every other black nationalist revolutionary.
No, you murdurous assholes, Johnson didn’t “want to kill all white people.” He wanted to kill white cops. Just like Dorner, he wasn’t a threat to the public, he was a threat to the police state. You cops ensured Mikah Johnson didn’t live to dictate “confessions” and you even obliterated his body like Osama bin Laden. Drawn and quartered essentially, to preclude memorializers being able to center on an idol to build a resistance.
You and I may grapple with what to think of Johnson’s personal rampage, but the state knew immediately his was the selfless heroism they fear most. As with bin Laden, they knew his apprehension must be terminal.
Lest I be misunderstood, I do not promote armed insurrection, sedition or murder. I cannot. But I will not condemn Micah Johnson.
I need not agrandize him either. Taken without his revolutionary ideology, Johnson was an ordinary mentally wounded veteran like many others. Homicidal vets with PTSD are at the core of our epidemic of police brutality. Our law enforcement teams are full of OIF and OEF soldiers who got their start shooting up cars at checkpoints and acting out racist genocide to their heart’s content.
It’s not a new problem, the US has always had active warzones feeding veterans into homelessness for those who couldn’t cope and filling government jobs for those who thrived. Beside policemanship, a very common job for discharged soldiers has always been the post office. Rembember the rampaging gunman problem we used to call “going postal?”
America’s racism problem may be transcended by a succession of church services, but class struggle is not a hearts and minds operation. Fascist rule and its army of the rich are not going to be wished away by militant nonviolence. That’s as likely as counting on the tooth fairy.
Worrying that acts like Johnson’s will provoke increased authoritarian repression is an expression of privilege provided by someone aclimated to a tolerable status quo, clearly a white perspective for whom black lives matter not enough.
Until all of us share the plight of the average Syrian refugee, trapped in our capitalist frontier war zones, none of us are shouldering an equitable burden of the police state.
That’s why it is more than black lives that matter. The middle class greivances of Occupy Wall Street are only a class removed from Black America’s suffering. We’re still talking about privileged Americans who support a grander racism that drives our global exploitation of all peoples.
I don’t have any faith that an arc of history bends toward justice in this corporate dark age. For my own sense of what’s right, it’s important to recognize Micah Johnson and Christopher Dorner for who they were, flawed, maybe very minor, aspiring Nat Turners, who wanted to strike against today’s slave masters and their brutal blue foremen.
Human rights for even Anders Breivik
In retrospect, awarding the newly elected Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize was about as smartly ambitious as it gets. Everyone knows humanitarians don’t do it for the reward. A Nobel Prize is wasted if there’s not some eligible sociopath who might be influenced with the pressure to behave themselves. President Obama’s Nobel medal was an experiment in paying it forward. Who knows how much more bloodthirsty Obama might have gotten with his drones had not the Nobel committee tried to extort him with its higher expectations? The Nobel award givers took a lot of ribbing for their foolishness from those of us who weren’t idealist enough. AND SO IT COMES AS NO SURPRISE when Norway’s mass murdering overachiever Anders Breivik sued his jailers for abusing his human rights because he wasn’t getting sufficient visitors in his cushy prison suite, that the Norwegian supreme court would rule Breivik was right.
Of course they did. If you’re not going to give a death sentence to a crazed bigot who guns down 76 children, if you’re not going to throw him in a hole but instead give him a spacious accommodation, if instead of a life sentence you let him pursue university studies and limit his incarceration to twenty some years, then you don’t want to isolate your prisoner from human contact if it might appear even as a semblance of solitary confinement. Because lesser cultures do that.
Lesser capitalist flagship states isolate, execute and torture. I so appreciate that Norway wants to set a high bar, but I despair that the land of Guantanamo and waterboarding and indefinite detention and ILLEGAL detention and rendition and extrajudicial assassination and no habeus corpus can’t even see this bar to reach it.
Ask the candidates: who, as president, vows to jail Obama, Clinton and Bush?
If Americans really want to differentiate which presidential candidate represents change, a good question would be, which will prosecute America’s celebrity war criminals? Who, among them, will jail past leaders guilty of crimes against humanity?
Obama 2008 didn’t do it. President Obama didn’t even close Guantanamo, end torture, or disarm drones. By failing to curb Pax America’s wars of aggression, Obama too should now stand in the docket. Wasn’t it hoped, as Bush and Cheney helivac’d from the White House, that Obama’s “change” meant calling that chopper back for a return to accountability? At minimum, superficially? Justice didn’t happen, Obama didn’t want to look back, and the villains remain to foul the political discourse as foils to perpetuate high crimes and to normalize the forgiving of greater trespasses.
Is American exceptionalism fathomless? ISIS hasn’t grown out of the terrible twos yet already John Kerry wants to charge it with genocide; not to haul ISIS perps before the Hague –extrajudicial assassination by drone circumvents that– but because genocide law holds that those who do not condemn it are its accessories.
How far does culpability reach among our active enablers of war crimes? It extends into our pool of candidates certainly, but how far? Does Senator Bernie Sanders, at one edge, consider himself an accessory to the crimes of past and current administrations? It’s possible Sanders voted against the wars, interventions and regime changes, but will he prosecute those who did not?
Donald Trump stands on the periphery as well, avaritic criminality is not alas a purview of the International Criminal Court, but he does seem an unlikely candidate for honoring the rule of law let alone conscience.
Still, would it hurt to ask? An independent party candidate might have the only acceptable answer. Who, as president, will honor humanity’s highest laws? Who will hold state terrorists accountable?
NE Patriots are serial cheaters, so are their namesakes. The unfair advantage is an essential of Capitalism.
First the New England Patriots got caught spying on their adversaries, now they’ve been tweaking the air-pressure of their game balls to sneak a ballistic handling advantage. Rules be damned, Patriot quarterback Tom Brady prefers his ordnance two pounds psi shy, hollow-points –if you will– which are also against regulation. For how long have the Patriots been manipulating advantages? And how else? They weren’t satisfied with the home field advantage on Sunday. Maybe officials should bring protractors to investigate the Boston gridiron. A level playing field doesn’t likely suit the Patriots either.
OF COURSE it doesn’t. Who expects sportsmanship from “patriots?!” Patriotism is the antisocial insistance on your own cultural superiority. American exceptionalism is an endorsement of tactical superiority, covert war, disproportionate force, drones, extrajudicial assassination, death squads, snipers, collateral damage, and torture. Formal US policy is to FLAUNT international law. American materialism profits from insider trading, extortion, usury, and corporate hegemony uber alles! Why would our surrogate Sunday warriors pretend there is honor among thieves?
Of course America underinflates footballs to best our opponents. We also diligently deploy inspectors to ensure our intended defeatees can’t recallibrate theirs. Meanwhile our leaders dissemble when plausible deniability stretches thin.
Of course NFL officials are not discussing a Super Bowl disqualification for the recidivist Patriots. Instead they’re weighing minor penalties, no doubt manageable, if not tax deductible. If America’s best cheaters don’t advance to the Super Bowl, the outcome would be hypocritical. Go Team! America Fuck Yeah!
I’m kidding of course. Sack the quarterback, disqualify the Patriots, send whoever else to the Super Bowl, then march the entire US defense and offense departments to the Hague.
UPDATE 1/23:
While fans and media try to belittle the scandal (ie. “Deflate-gate” and “Ballghazi”), statisticians have noted a damning anomaly relating to the advantage gained from underinflated footballs. After the rules were changed to allow offensive teams to use their own footballs –Brady was among the quarterbacks lobbying for the change– New England’s ball handling superiority grew beyond the realm of probability.
Probably all teams know that well-inflated footballs fly further but underinflated balls are easier to grab. Maybe the purpose of making a personalized array of game balls available is so offensive teams can exploit alternate characteristics as needed. Maybe the NFL understood this when they granted the rule change. Maybe the Patriots just couldn’t pass up every opportunity to cheat, until the statistics made plain their greed. Whether by hubris or head-injury numbskulledness, Tom Brady and his receivers thought they coud break PT Barnum’s rule too.
The American Dream hinges on equality of opportunity and fair play, but of course Capitalism idealizes the unfair advantage.
Btw I abhor the theatre of corporate sports, but when it exposes the reek of America’s national character, I like to make sure to smell it.
Charlie Hebdo cartoonists didn’t merit death, like adversaries of West do.
Even the nuanced critiques of the CHARLIE HEBDO COMEUPPANCE in Paris begin by disclaiming “of course the cartoonists didn’t deserve to die.” But I wonder, have none among us yet earned our adversaries’ judgment? We western imperialists are quick to decide which of our opponents deserve to die, even as mere collateral in our preemptive justice-dealing. How uncharitable of our exceptionalism to think that only we can direct extrajudicial assassinations. Paris is a front line like any other noncombatant zone marauded by US drones. Our intelligence agencies aren’t bothered to explain who they target and why. Contrast our existential rationalizations with the concrete evidence, much of it rubble, with which anti-imperial defenders can condemn us.
“Jaber was sleeping near his car when the missile arrived. 3 people killed.”
DELIVERY CONFIRMATION for drones! You can get it for free with the Metadata iPhone app. The following notice arrived this morning, March 3, postmarked Yemen: “Jaber was sleeping near his car when the missile arrived. 3 people killed.” The blurb is as much as the USG knows, based on preliminary reports from the ground, and highlights what little they know of their intended victim. It’s also based on the POV of the targeting pilot whose job it is to study the slow-mo video of the warhead’s GoPro camera. Extreme Extrajudicial Assassination –Radically illegal too!
UPDATE: Mar 3, Yemen
“The second drone strike of the day killed 1 person in Abyan.”
Should the London Olympics remember the 1972 Munich Holocaust? Do you?
America can’t memorialize the 1972 Munich hostage killings, because that act of terrorism was not unlike our own airstrikes or special ops raids, against purported enemy combatants, off the field of combat, except we don’t even try to kidnap them alive.
Of course the Israeli Olympic wrestlers and weightlifters killed in Munich in 1972 should be memorialized. But to call the deaths a massacre pretends the German police meant their ambush to kill everyone.* What happened at the 1972 Olympics is being recalled as the “Munich Massacre” but even the propagandists tweaking the Wikipedia entry don’t have the temerity to doff the disclaimer that “massacre” is the informal name. Shall we recall what happened? On September 5, 1972, PLO terrorists infiltrated the Olympic village and tried to kidnap Israeli hostages to exchange for 234 Palestinians held by Israel. Two Israelis fought back and were killed. Next the eight gunman and their nine captives were led into an ambush at a military airfield. After a 1 & 1/2 hour gun battle on the tarmac, trapped under the helicopters by police snipers, the PLO killed four of their captives. A police investigation revealed the remaining five captives may have died in sniper crossfire. This detail is disputed, but a secret financial settlement was sought and reached with German authorities. So, was Munich a massacre or a botched hostage rescue? Do words matter? The Mossad’s retaliatory murder of an innocent Moroccan waiter in Norway, mistaken for the Munich mastermind, is trivialized as the Lillehammer Affair.
Proponents want an Olympic tribute to the Munich Massacre “so that it never happens again.” Boy does that ever have a familiar ring to it. Look out for an Elie Wieselish re-tailoring of the original narrative, Steven Spielberg’s Munich being only a recent example of a myth-makeover remembrance.
To begin with, the PLO kidnappers were a faction of the PLO called the Black September Brigade, named after the Black September purge of the PLO from Jordan. This ouster, aided by the US and fought by Syria, was initiated by Israel’s attack on the village of Karameh, in which the PLO suffered 200 killed, to the IDF’s 28. Not a massacre because 150 PLO fighters were taken captive. Wikistorians taking liberties with translation are calling the PLO group “Black September”, with the effect of obfuscating the event which preceded the Munich operation.
The Munich raid to seize hostages was actually named “Operation Iqrit and Kafr Bir’im” after the Christian villages of Kafr Bir’im and Iqrit, ethnically cleansed by Israel in 1948. Villagers were granted right of return by Israel’s supreme court, but overruled by the military. An attempt to return had been repulsed by police as recently as August 1972, as the Olympics began.
Next, the identity of the Israeli athletes is always left incomplete. With the exception of the 18 year old Russian immigrant, all the Israeli hostages were IDF soldiers who’d participated in military acts against Palestine, Egypt, lebanon, Jordan, or Syria, and so are not exactly the innocent civilians of current retellings.
Who killed the Israeli captives during the gun battle with German police? An immediate investigation found that sniper fire may have hit the captives, as it had also severely wounded a fellow policeman. A cover-up long obscured the official reports. While this could be pretended to protect the German participants, it also kept the blame on the PLO gunmen, which would have been critical to justify Israel’s “eye for an eye” revenge killings.
Did the gunman strafe their hostages with bullets upon seeing the arrival of the police armored reinforcements? The only witness accounts come from the German authorities. We might accept that the lead PLO gunman lobbed a grenade into the first helicopter with the intention of killing the four hostages it contained, if they were still alive. An autopsy revealing that one of the Israelis died from the flames is used the emphasize that the grenade, and thus a PLO terrorist, certainly killed him.
Though the German police admitted potential culpability for the deaths of the five hostages in the second helicopter, a later analysis put convenient blame on a particular gunman, one of them ones captured and who eventually escaped justice by being released. Certainly this narrative would be critical if Israel hoped for popular support for their effort to hunt the gunman down.
Many of Israel’s revenge killings involved car bombs which risked collateral deaths and injuries. Assassinating the “mastermind” killed eight others, including a nun, and injured 18 more.
Whether the PLO gunmen killed the Israelis or not, even the operation’s planners can’t be said to have intended it. No one masterminded a massacre.
Of the PLO participants in Munich, five gunman were killed, and three were captured. Those three were released weeks later to meet the demands of a subsequent hijacking. Israel’s Mossad boasted of having tracked them down and assassinated them shortly thereafter. But accounts vary, and one of them was interviewed decades later for a documentary. What’s known is that Israel implemented an “eye for an eye” operation that over 20 years hunted and killed 20-35 Palestinian targets. They weren’t sought out to take hostage but to murder, and most of them were unconnected to the Black September Brigade. The Mossad long-arm-of-the-law theme was less about revenge than deterrence, because anyone who might have masterminded or abetted the Munich plot was planning a kidnapping not a murder.
If a massacre is measured by an imbalance of casualties, let’s look at the numbers. After 11 Israelis were murdered, Israel retaliatory airstrikes killed 200 in Syria and Lebanon, an IDF raid killed up to 100 in Lebanon, and the Mossad targeted up to 35 in subsequent assassinations. Here’s an accounting:
Sept 5-6, 1972
11 Israeli athletes, coaches former IDF
(2 killed by BSB in initial break-in, 9 killed during the ambush rescue attempt, possibly by crossfire)
1 German police
5 PLO gunmen
Sept 8, 1972
IAF retaliatory airstrikes on PLO bases in Syria and Lebanon.
200 Palestinians killed, including women and children
IDF Operation “SPRING OF YOUTH” raid on Lebanon, April 1973
3 PLO suspected planners
12-100 PLO members
1 PLO wife
1 Italian woman
2 Lebanese policemen
Unknown number of Lebanese civilians
Mossad Operation “WRATH OF GOD”, (20-35 targets over 20 years)
PLO translator of disputed BSB involvement, Oct 1972
PLO senior official, December 1972
Palestinian activist “expertly” pushed under bus, London, 1972
Jordanian Fatah rep, January 1973
Law professor at Am Univ of Beirut, April, 1973
Replacement for Fatah rep, Athens, April 1973
(2 BSB minor members injured, Rome, April 1973)
PLO director of operations for BSB, June 1973
Moroccan waiter, mistaken identity, Norway, July 1973
3 Arab-looking men, Switzerland, January 1974
Arab security guard, Spain, August 1974
PLO rep, blamed on the Abu Nidal Org, London, January 1978
2 PLO reps, Paris, August 1978 (3 injured)
PLO suspected “mastermind”, car-bomb, January 1979, also killed:
4 Bodyguards
1 British student
1 German nun
2 Lebanese passersby (also 18 injured)
PLO military head, Cannes, July 1979
2 Palestinians, December, 1979
PLO rep, Brussels, June 1981
2 PLO senior figures, car bomb, Rome, June 1982
PLO senior official, car bomb, Paris, July 1982
PLO senior official, drive-by, Athens, August 1983
PLO Secretary-General, drive-by, Athens, June 1986
PLO official, car bomb, Athens, October 1986
2 Palestinians, car bomb, Cyprus, February 1988 (1 other wounded)
PLO suspected head of intelligence, June 1992
What’s that? The ratio is 11 to 335 and the Israelis want to call it a massacre? If you count the Palestinians killed in the initial Black September attack on the PLO in Jordan, the comparison becomes irrelevant.
But the Munich ratio is nothing compared to the 1,500 Gazans killed in Operation Cast Lead. Now there’s a massacre.
*ON THE OTHER HAND. The botched hostage rescue in Munich might very well have been a massacre. Do we really want to go there? The German snipers who initiated the gun battle at Furstenfeldbruck Airbase may really have behaved with a total disregard to the fate of the Israeli hostages. With the antisemitism that prevailed in Europe, and still prevails there among the working classes, it’s very likely the policemen looked at the gunmen and their captives with equal scorn. If the bound Israelis weren’t hit in the crossfire, it could certainly be held that the sniper attack provoked their killing. The coverup and subsequent private financial settlement reached between Germany and the Israeli survivors suggests a culpability of the like. In that respect, if European Jews look back at Munich 1972 and say it was a massacre, I believe them.
President Obama tells Aurora survivers he has no power to address gun control
Barack Obama explained that his role as president is limited to the authority to offer the nation’s condolences and voice the common desire to see the accused feel the “full force of American justice.” Aurora police were to blame, apparently, because if James Holmes had not been apprehended, and did not now have to face trial, Obama could dispatch the gunman, suspected accomplices, and whoever else might be in their company at the time, with a swift drone strike.
No America, justice has not been done
This didn’t always need explaining– lynching and body snatching are INJUSTICES. There used to be an understanding of what “taking the law into your own hands” meant. Killing someone outright doesn’t bring them to justice, and I’m not alone to assert that killing someone -even after a trial- is premeditated murder. We’re not hearing any such voices on the media unfortunately. Even in the days of mob lynching, the crowd once drained of its blood-lust would sober to the crime it committed, often masked. That said, the press has always responded with statements of pitiable glee. In Colorado, even the most gruesome lynchings, race-related and otherwise, prompted congratulatory editorials from the Colorado Springs Gazette, the Rocky Mountain News and the rest. However, political leaders were usually more careful not to be celebrating extra-judicial revenge killing.
Today even world leaders seem to be piling on with attaboys. Dispiriting really.
The facts emerging from bin Laden’s killing just get worse and worse. If Osama was indeed in a military-secured compound, a whole secured zone apparently, what reason could possibly be given for why every usual method would not be used to bring him into custody? Where was he going to go? Did we need to kill his entourage like we did Saddam Hussein’s sons? The fact that this raid is purported to have been planned for months makes the assassination all the more purposeful.
And then we learn his body was buried at sea, which the media uncritically recite is “in accordance to Islamic tradition” even as Muslims refute it. Besides of course suggesting that today’s raid was only Kabuki theater for disposing of OBL’s ten-year-dead corpse, conveniently making the body disappear makes dark humor of mocking Habeas Corpus. Where already America disregards the fundamental right of a trial of your peers.
Bin Laden’s colleagues are denied the jury of peers and instead judged through kangaroo military tribunals, patently illegal by international law. Lynching of course dispenses of even that formality.
But lynching victims of the earlier times were not deprived of their bodies. How dare the US declare itself judge, executioner AND God over Osama bin Laden’s remains?!
The pretext is that they don’t want a shrine made of wherever his family would have chosen to bury him. But of course, that will not be ours to decide. At the very least the site of bin Laden’s murder will already be a shrine for those in Islamabad. It will certainly be ironic if the WTC in New York City will be the most significant memory of Osama bin Laden’s deeds and become ground zero for his enormous fame worldwide.
Palin signed off on Giffords shooting, grizzly lipstick plot to direct gunmen
AZ representative Gabrielle Giffords was one of twenty crosshairs on Sarah Palin’s checklist directing political assassinations.
Whether Jared Lee Loughner was a lone gunman, or in a TP or al-Qaeda cell, shouldn’t the DOJ investigate the grizzly mastermind who is inciting these acts? While they’re at it, Vice President Biden for illegally targeting Wikileaks’ Julian Assange, and Boss Obama who commands extrajudicial assassinations via military/CIA drones. If this was a GPS map of Pakistan the “unhinged shooters” would be Predator Drone operators.
Michael Moore tweeted these interesting links:
Dem Rep Giffords shot in head in Az. Sarah Palin had put CROSSHAIRS/ BULLSEYE on Giffords on her website! OUTRAGE!
When Rep Giffords voted in favor of health care bill, her office in Tucson was attacked & vandalized.
Palin “set gun sights on 20 Dems (including Giffords).” Palin site now seems 2 b 2 taking down crosshairs map!
In 2009, another gun nut showed up where Rep Giffords was speaking (at another Safeway) & dropped his gun
Giffords opponent held June event 2 “Shoot a Fully Automatic M16” to “Get on Target” & “Remove Gabrielle Giffords”
When Palin put crosshairs on a map w/ Rep. Giffords & 19 other Dem congressmen/women, she urged followers to “reload” & “aim” for Democrats.
Stunning admission by Tucson sheriff: Arizona “a mecca” of hate & bigotry which unhinges the unbalanced Wow.
Christina Green was the 9yr old killed. She was born on 9/11. Was on student council & only girl on baseball team.
If a Detroit Muslim put a map on the web w/crosshairs on 20 pols, then 1 of them got shot, where would he b sitting right now? Just asking.
Is the US chain of command fair game to al-Qaeda drones? But what is it?
The jokes always fly when US drone attacks claim to dispatch an al-Qaedan of supposed rank. “How many 3rd in command does al-Qaeda have?” -asks the too-clever saw. As Mohammad approaches infinity, I believe, is the inconvenient answer. When a sports competitor disqualifies from the rankings, another moves up. The military intelligence which charts our adversary’s chain of command has me thinking about our own. Our grunts overseas fight under exasperating tiers of pay grades, but we know our number one in command is President Obama. Do you suppose Americans expect that al-Qaeda or the Taliban have every license to hunt and execute our number one and his aids, through number 99, including their families?
The latest number three, Sheikh Sa’id al-Masri, also known as Mustafa al-Yazid, was killed along with his wife, three daughters, a grandchild and other men, women and children.
If one could indeed rank a command structure in a single line, I bet not many could guess what it really is. Americans know there’s an official chain of authority which Al Haig violated so famously, but the political hierarchy is a facade. I would be most interested to hear what foreign intelligence determines to be the chain of command in the west.
Drones vulnerable to P2P filesharing?
The WSJ headline screams “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones … Iranian Backing Suspected.” Hmm. Why Iran — because insurgents can’t afford $25.99 SkyGrabber software? Captured Iraqi laptops have evidence of intercepted video feeds, not code. The hacking term is no misnomer. Instead of calling the footage “hijacked” or “received,” the data is described as “stolen” and “pirated,” which would seem to betray an inviting vulnerability to SkySoftware’s reach. Are they saying there’s a UAV feed that can be harvested by a distributed file-sharing exploit? Imagine a drone-watch network for nabbing unwarranted military surveillance: DroneWire. By going after too many birds with this story, the DoD confirms its armed unmanned vehicles are patrolling not just Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but Yemen and Somalia, where our distributed representative Democracy has no legal authority to conduct extrajudicial assassinations.