Hypothetical Olympian dilemma

People all over the country are parking in front of their TV's for many hours every night to watch sports that they couldn't care less about most of the year. The Olympics are extremely compelling for many of us. People are talking about the Olympics all across America, mostly sharing observations about the sports where Americans are competitive. It all seems very important, and you can tell this by the way earnest look on the faces of people who discuss the Olympics. But what if a magic being appeared before you tonight and offered you the following option: [More . . . ]

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Another day, another BS U.S. drone strike story

Yesterday I spotted another one the many U.S. drone strike stories--the story I read was published by MSNBC. These stories are incredibly predictable: U.S. drones launched an attack that killed a group of people from the Middle East who are presumed to be bad people despite the fact that we have no idea who these victims were. The witnesses and the victims are unnamed. The source of the entire story could well be the U.S. military, which has no idea who the dead people are and, in fact, has been repeatedly caught claiming that the dead people were threats to America (through the use of the word "militant") when many, if not all of them turned out to be innocent people, including children. And, of course, there is no information about how the local people acted. They should be outraged, because, according to the story, unknown people were killed from the sky by the U.S., which has repeatedly outraged the government of Pakistan for such conduct in the past. For all we know, this attack, like so many other attacks, has angered the people, causing them to swear revenge against the United States. But you'd have no idea of whether this attack advanced the interests of the U.S. or hurt U.S. interests. This is a prototypical sterile story about the U.S. using its high tech weaponry to preserve freedom, or so this immensely obeisant and gappy story suggests. The U.S. doesn't know who was killed, even long after the fact, because the U.S. doesn't care. If they cared, they would quickly announce who the dead people were and tell U.S. citizens the "bad" things these people did to deserve to die such a fiery death, often in the presence of their children. I'd like to give a lot of credit for what follows to Glenn Greenwald, who has repeatedly pointed out that these drone strikes are usually nothing but propaganda, and that the word "militant" is used as follows: Any person killed by a U.S. weapon. With Greenwald's guidance, I decided to mark up the opening lines of the MSNBC story as if I were an editor reacting to the reporter's first draft:  

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The mind of a neocon

Glenn Greenwald acknowledges that Thomas Friedman has value: If we listen to Friedman we will understand the way neocons think. We will understand their rage and we will understand how their rage tempts them to lash out indiscriminately. Here are Greenwald's words:

If I had to pick just a single fact that most powerfully reflects the nature of America’s political and media class in order to explain the cause of the nation’s imperial decline, it would be that, in those classes, Tom Friedman is the country’s most influential and most decorated “foreign policy expert.”
Here is the mind of a neocon in action (from a 2003 interview with Charlie Rose):

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Abe Lincoln’s warning about allowing a President alone to declare war

For at least the past ten years American Presidents, including Barack Obama, have been not-declaring their wars, including their secret wars. What's wrong with this situation? Glenn Greenwald quotes none other than Abe Lincoln:

There are few things more dangerous in a democracy than allowing a President to wage secret wars without the knowledge of the country. I’ll permit Abraham Lincoln — not exactly a pacifistic worshipper of legalisms and restraints on Executive power — to explain why this is so, in an 1848 letter to a proponent of unrestrained presidential warmaking powers:
Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, I see no probability of the British invading us but he will say to you be silent; I see it, if you dont. The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.

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Eisenhower must be turning in his grave

At Truthdig, Bill Boyarsky reminds of of the words of Dwight Eisenhower, a man who both experienced war and understood the urge to go to war. Boyarsky offers this Eisenhower quote:

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberty or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

We've been warned, but we have not heeded the warning, according to Boyarsky:

Even in the face of this warning, we have become complacent. A small, insular group of security advisers and State and Defense Department officials, working out of public view and supervised by President Obama, are waging cyberwar in Iran and drone war in other countries. Behind them is a huge commercial apparatus of arms manufacturers, private security and logistics contractors and others who have an economic interest in war. Oversight is impossible; stiff penalties await leakers or whistle-blowers.

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