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Words
A word is dead
when it is said,
Some say.
I say it just Begins to live.
-- Emily Dickinson, c. 1872
BuzzFlash,
One of my favorites by Dickinson, because I agree, especially if the word or words come from political leaders around the world. Obama just this week brought alive two common words that were never really dead: nuclear and assassination.
Not the first time our leaders have mentioned these two words. There is something about power in leaders that seems to always lead to debt, death, and destruction. This week I understand that we, as a nation, under the Obama administration have signed a treaty:
The treaty substantially cuts the nuclear weapons that the United States and Russia will deploy and will significantly reduce missiles and launchers, Obama said. It follows a 1991 treaty that expired in December and about which the United States and Russia have been negotiating.
This is all really great, the attempt in the taming of nuclear power. However, the fact that we will still bump off our enemies using assassination attempts by the CIA per instructions from Obama, just doesn't fit well, in my mind, with a nation trying to avoid violence.
I still remember the horrible sixties and the great losses that this nation had, and I firmly believe that we, as a nation, suffered greatly for the next 30 years due to those leaders that we lost. That said, we constantly are subjecting people to dangers and violence in Iraq and Afghanistan and we still maintain over 800 bases around the world, which spreads fear and paranoia in countries that just might look to the U.S. as an invading and occupying country today, especially after what Bush did to Iraq. How can they trust the US government, when it's very hard for American citizens to do so?
These orders for assassinations, to me, are so Bush GOP. I was hoping that with the Clinton administration, and now the Obama administration, that once and for all, we could rid our government of the Bush crime family's influence and their thuggish ways of doing business. But I guess not. It always strikes me that these people in D.C. are so far away from the deadly decisions that they make for our military and for other innocent people around the world, that we Americans don't have to wonder how in the hell they sleep at night.
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Feb 5 2010, 4:34 PM ET
Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told to Congress Wednesday that the U.S. can target Americans to be killed if it believes they are involved in terrorism. This supports an earlier report that the CIA and JSOC maintain White House-approved "kill lists" of three to four Americans. Blair articulated the policy as requiring high-level approval but did not mention Congressional oversight or judicial review. He described the criteria as "whether that American is involved in a group that is trying to attack us, whether that American is a threat to other Americans." So far, the only confirmed American target is Anwar al-Awlaki. The vagueness of Blair's criteria, as well as the assertion that Awlaki meets those criteria, raises the question: What gets an American citizen on the kill lists?
A 1981 executive order signed by President Reagan explicitly bans assassination by the U.S. government. However, in 2002, the Bush administration issued a secret finding allowing the CIA to target Americans directly involved in terrorism. American citizen Kamal Derwish was killed in 2002 under this authority, struck by an unmanned drone while traveling in a car with the al-Qaeda organizer of the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. The 2002 policy, which did not extend to JSOC, claimed that "enemy combatants" can be killed, a phrase that the Obama administration does not use.
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The arrogance of such threats to kill, not only American citizens, but to kill others around the world, and we Americans have seen this type of killing already. Drones killing people in Pakistan, and we are told (paraphrasing) they were nobodies, they were dangerous "terrorists," (the idiot word of the century made popular by one of its own, idiot, of course). Or oops! They were actually innocent families and were killed as if they were just nothing more than ashes to ashes or dust to dirt or U.S. collateral damage.
I still remember the carelessness and the atrocities reported in Iraq. By the way, with the deaths of two reporters in the news as well as people targeted with cameras and not guns, how many Americans remember that at least 70 journalists and photographers were killed in Iraq, and most of them by the Bush U.S. military. Eh? Bush did not want anyone photographing or reporting, who was not connected to the U.S. military.
Also, probably not reported here in the U.S., there were families killed at check points, trying to get the hell out of Iraq. Families being killed by weapons that were being tested for use. Gory descriptions of what those weapons did. Our own military and leaders appointing themselves as judge and jury? Not in a functioning democracy, but in a dysfunctional democracy, yes, we would see this and we are constantly seeing this. I wouldn't want any of them on my jury. Do those types of mistakes sound as if those weapons were in the hands of professionals?
I thought that after Bush, who had several months of warnings before 9/11, and then used that to advance his own bloody and deadly agenda, that this would have taught U.S. government serious lessons about keeping a tight rein on U.S. leadership in power... only after one million people dead and two to three million people uprooted, homeless, and over 5,000, Americans dead, all due to lies, did most of the killing finally stop, but we Americans are still there.
And, let's think for a minute, say Saddam did have WMD. Are we, the U.S., the police of the world, when our own country has the largest stash of WMD? No. It's not our job to invade and occupy another country, killing innocent people and there was no way for this leader to ever get those WMD, which Saddam did not have, to the U.S. All lies. And, branded into my brain is the picture of Bush making fun and laughing as he played at searching for those WMD.
And, yet, today, all of those murders and lies, go unaccountable. Abuse of such power demands accountability for the dead. It's called taking responsibility. If we don't demand that, why should anyone in power think twice about what they do, even when it concerns taking lives, and it almost always concerns taking the lives of innocent people. This nation has not had accountability from our leaders since Nixon.
What happens? Over and over again, we have this type of scenario, killing people on the word of our leaders, even one such as Bush, who was never elected, and don't forget the killing Clinton did in Bosnia and the bombing for years of Iraq to please Bush number one. Killing by proxy. They may not pull the trigger, but they are responsible.
What do we have to do to get a government that respects life and is willing to be a role model for a real democracy? I'd like to know. We had to fight to save any lives with a minimal type of healthcare. Vets have to fight for healthcare after being wounded. Women have to fight to be in charge of their own bodies. I still remember years ago, as I've said before, when "rape" was questioned in U.S. courts with lawyers using coke bottles. In other words a woman being raped was not accepted. She had to "do" something to deserve it. How backward was that? Just as backward as hearing that even in today's world, women serving in our own US military were being raped by U.S. military, and not too much was being done about it.
Back to our leaders dishing out assassination jobs or invasions, when none of these people have ever known the violence of war and its lasting affects on the human heart and soul, or have even served in U.S. military. War involves such trauma that it lasts the lifetime of those involved. That is why they hate us.
Tormented from a lifetime of memories of horror. Just review the figures of so many of our own in U.S. military, suffering with PTSD and a lack of good healthcare, who took their lives after returning to this country.
Bush number two went AWOL without punishment. It's too easy for any leader of the U.S. today to kill people. I was always under the impression that Congress should be the watchdog of this type of misuse of power. But, we don't even have that type of Congress today. How many members of Congress have served in a war or in U.S. military, I wonder, and how many tried to stop Bush?
Below, more proof that Obama is just another continuation -- sorta, kinda like Clinton, and Bush number two -- of U.S. government's use of violence and using Bush's joke of the century:
"War on terrorism." We Americans are not that stupid, and our leaders are too far away from the American populace to realize that, unless they are out campaigning, that is. War is terrorism. Assassinations without trial, evidence, or a jury are not and never will be the leadership signs of a working democracy. Where is the passion that goes along with such beliefs. I don't see it in U.S. government, and it hasn't been there for years.
And, we Americans thought we voted for change.
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This article originally appeared in the October 2009 edition of Freedom Daily. Subscribe to the print or email version of Freedom Daily.
Bush’s war-on-terrorism paradigm obviously provides another way to treat suspected terrorists — simply by killing them. No arrests, no Miranda warnings, no presumption of innocence, no attorneys, no trials, and no other messy procedures associated with the criminal-justice system. Not even incarceration in a military dungeon, torture, or trial before a kangaroo tribunal.
Instead, just have the CIA assassinate them.
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Actually, it (the Bush GOP's war on terrorism) started years ago. How many Americans know the history behind this true family of crime?
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With CIA headquarters now officially named the George Bush Center for Intelligence and with veterans of the Reagan-Bush years still dominating the CIA's hierarchy, the spy agency might be hoping that the election of Texas Gov. George W. Bush will free it from demands to open up records to the American people.
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Of course, Bush was never elected and the Supreme was never punished for putting their guy into the White House. The fake five should have been impeached. Even the Supreme Court should not be above U.S. law. But, hell, U.S. law doesn't seem to be in any of the three branches of U.S. government in today's world.
For anyone interested, the below link is a long article that brings us up to 9/11:
Where does it say in our Constitution that any President or illegal resident, such as Bush, of the White House has the power to use the CIA to carry out assassinations or even invasions and occupations for that matter? It's always been my belief that since George H. W. Bush was in charge of the CIA, that half of that organization are good people for the country and yet, another half is still under the influence of Bush Sr., and are thugs. A word that has a history and a direct connection to the word that became 'assassination.'
"Thug was first used as a term for a member of an organization of professional robbers and assassins in India who strangled their victims."
-- Oxford Dictionary of Word Histories.
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The threat of an Al Qaeda "Attack on America" is being used profusely by the Bush administration and its indefectible British ally to galvanize public opinion in support of a global military agenda.
Known and documented, the "Islamic terror network" is a creation of the US intelligence apparatus. There is firm evidence that several of the terrorist "mass casualty events" which have resulted in civilian casualties were triggered by the military and/or intelligence services. Similarly, corroborated by evidence, several of the terror alerts were based on fake intelligence as revealed in the London 2006 foiled "liquid bomb attack", where the alleged hijackers had not purchased airline tickets and several did not have passports to board the aircraft.
The "war on terrorism" is bogus. The 911 narrative as conveyed by the 911 Commission report is fabricated. The Bush administration is involved in acts of cover-up and complicity at the highest levels of government.
Revealing the lies behind 911 would serve to undermine the legitimacy of the "war on terrorism".
Revealing the lies behind 911 should be part of a consistent antiwar movement.
Without 911, the war criminals in high office do not have a leg to stand on. The entire national security construct collapses like a deck of cards
-- Michel Chossudovsky is the author of the international bestseller America’s "War on Terrorism" Global Research, 2005. He is Professor of Economics at the University of Ottawa and Director of the Center for Research on Globalization.
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I'm only bringing this up again because it's still going on even with Obama. This fake, so-called "war on terror." We, the U.S. and our leaders, such as both of the Bushes, have been the largest terrorists around the world, along with members of the CIA doing the bidding of these leaders and killing people when they don't even know for sure, "they just think they might be terrorists, which is what happened in Iraq and Pakistan" and this has been a proven fact. This makes the U.S. no different from any other outlaw country that goes around killing innocent citizens, such as our own innocent citizens were killed on 911. And what did Bush do to please those Americans wanting blood, anybody's blood? He bombed Afghanistan and killed up to 5,000 innocent citizens and never did get bin Laden, whose family just happened to be Bush family friends.
More facts that happened back then: At least 100 members of the bin Laden family were allowed to leave this country by Bush, without being questioned by the FBI, during the U.S. ordered fly down.
Also in the news this week is a report of a guy on a U.S. flight smoking a cigarette in the bathroom and when he is discovered, it's as if the professionals or upper class were left at home and the incident was being handled by the freshman. Whenever I hear of such idiocy, I have to think of the poor and very ignorant woman who made the mistake of believing some talking Bush GOP sap who was telling Americans that duct tape would protect them from an attack, and she wrapped her two children and herself into a small compartment and they smothered to death.
When we have people in government being paid large salaries, they should be expected to know what the hell they are doing and what they are talking about. I personally am sick and tired of the slick phrases and parroted themes dished out to the populace by U.S. government. The same themes that were used constantly for the full eights years of the Bush GOP regime. That was the kind of leadership that we in the U.S. did not need.
However, we do still need accountability. But what does Bush get for his continuing eight years of debt, death, and destruction all on his so-called quest of "fighting a war on terror?" A library and speaking engagements. More proof that these leaders represent only the top 1 to 5 percent of the U.S. population, and that is the real change that we must achieve in this nation.
Which brings us to today, and since the Obama administration, just as the Clinton administration, refuses to demand accountability for the lives taken so frivolously by the Bush GOP regimes, and forge on ahead as if they meant nothing, nothing will change. Absolutely nothing. Just as it was during the eight years of the Clinton administration, and today, during the Obama administration, we have constant threats of violence from the Right Wing of the Republican Party, and the leaders of that party do nothing. We have violence inside and outside this country without responsibility. Bush would have arrested the teabaggers if they were Democrats, because he arrested and had cops at every protest, and these protests were against violence, his violence.
Power without responsibility will continue. Instead of a U.S. government of law and order, we have a government of power among the privileged and elitists. If there is a war going on, regardless of where, it is, in reality, a war against the poor.
Thanks BuzzFlash,
Shirley Smith
MS. SMITH GOES TO WASHINGTON
Let The Sun Shine In......
