Antiwar.com regular and Foreign Follies author Doug Bandow dismisses our government’s ridiculous narrative about why the Terrorists™ are at war with the United States.

 

 Antiwar Radio: Doug Bandow [39:07m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Hey shiney people. Ideas for various bloggerooneys have been bouncing around my cranium walls. (On a clear day, you can hear the clanging for miles around.) Unfortunately, any semblance of ANY SEMBLANCE OF coherence, if manifest here, would merely resemble verbal flatulence. Serious writing is not ready to be hatched.

So, boys and girls, here’s one or two ideas to tide you over to ameliorate those pre-summertime blues:

I propose a tag team for libertarian discussion boarders. Most libertarians or an-caps are a “live and let live” kind of people, and don’t really have a whole lot of stamina to browbeat others, i.e., force them to similarly live and let live.

We’d rather be doing things like getting rich, tending to our familes, inventing things, or quietly writing manifestos in remote-but-well-stocked locations.

But also, we tend to be loners, our piss and vinegar individualism getting us into trouble, vastly outnumbered (on average 50:1) by die-hard statists. We may be right, but we might need a bit of rest. For example, Joe Schmoe on board X announces that the Federal Reserve is really a raw deal, and promotes disorder rather than order. Then he gets slack and has the nerve to go to bed, wake up, and work at a full-time job–and the fact that he has a life being productive beyond the internet does not matter to die-hard collectivists, who then believe that they have torn his rationale to shreds when in reality they did not “hear” a word he said.

What I said is that let here be the place where one person can tag the other to carry on the fight for a bit one of these political discussion boards.

Okay, next idea.

For fans of the TV series Firefly, you can hear a really really good story about what happened to Mal after he got back from the Unification War. It’s great on headphones. Give it a listen y’all. It’s outstanding, or in Firefly parlance, “shiney”:

That brings it to 3,351.

But always remember, you who want to bring the troops home are the ones betraying them.

Hey Mace, Ken, Oscar, Mud, Cous, VyS, Sol (whatever happened to Sol?),

It is obvious that I have no time to write a damn thing these days, and this blog is quickly becoming simply a maroon, comment-having version of ScottHortonShow.com - that is, just radio archives. It really does suck to know that all the crazy news breaking out right now is not being catalogued here as in the past.

At the risk of having no commenters left, I am inviting you guys to be bloggers on Stress.

Then you’ll have your say and maybe there’ll be things for other people to comment on too.

Update: Shit! I forgot Steve C and Phil.! You too dudes!

Steve? Cous? Don’t make me beg you bastards!

Yeah, and what happened to Phil and to Redrum?

for today:

It’s just you me and the news for the first hour, Doug Bandow the second.

Call in for crying out loud.

512-646-6446

KAOS Radio 95.9/92.7 in Austin, Texas 11am-1pm.

Stream it live at KAOS959.com.

Rest of the show.

Remember how Bush the Lesser claimed that Hezbollah had suffered a defeat in the war last summer?

Now the Israeli website Debka (which has close ties to Israeli intelligence sources) reports that the White House told the Turkish authorities that Israel had suffered a ’strategic defeat’ at the hands of Hezbollah:

DEBKAfile Exclusive: White House now holds that Israel suffered a “strategic defeat” in the 2006 Lebanon War

April 30, 2007, 2:39 PM (GMT+02:00)

This view was leaked hours before the Israeli Winograd panel published its harsh criticisms of the Olmert government’s conduct of the war Monday, April 30, in Jerusalem. It represents another of the grave setbacks Israel has suffered in the wake of its failed management of the Lebanon war. President George W. Bush’s original judgment directly after the hostilities ended was quite different: “Hizballah attacked Israel; Hizballah started the crisis and Hizballah suffered a defeat in this crisis,” he said.

The revised view was not conveyed to the Israeli government; it was part of a warning Washington delivered to the Turkish prime minister Tayyep Erdogan, Sunday, April 24, to call off his planned offensive against PKK rebel bases in northern Iraq’s Kurdistan. The US message to Ankara reportedly cautioned the Turkish army to beware of landing itself in a situation similar to Israel’s predicament in the Hizballah war, i.e. Israel was confident of a swift victory and instead suffered “a strategic defeat.”

DEBKAfile’s Washington sources report:

The White House’s redefinition of the Lebanon War’s outcome is not just a factor in the foreign policy fallout dogging the Olmert government ever since, but a diplomatic olive branch for Iran, recognition that in the showdown between its surrogate and a key US ally, Tehran came off best. It is meant to pave the way for a US-Iranian understanding on Iraq and even perhaps on Tehran’s nuclear program. The Bush administration’s willingness to accept that the strategic advantage Hizballah gained in the 2006 conflict procured Iran a role in Lebanon implies its recognition of Iran’s important strategic role in Iraq. Positive ground rules are thus laid ahead of the interview projected between Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Iran’s foreign minister Manouchehr Mottaki at the second Iraqi security conference taking place in Sharm el-Sheik this week (May 3-4).

Should an opening for a breakthrough with Iran present itself at those talks, Washington will obviously not think twice about putting Israel’s strategic interests to one side, as the party which suffered its first “strategic defeat” in war. Any US-Iran deal on Iraq will in any case probably be a package that includes Lebanon and Hizballah’s standing there..

Still, DEBKAfile’s Washington sources point out, these steps have not gone beyond diplomatic openers whose outcome is far from clear, especially as Tehran has still to respond. At the first Iraq security conference in Baghdad last month, Iranian representatives showed no inclination to jump into dialogue with America. Higher expectations this time were fueled by the sudden visit to Baghdad which the powerful Ali Larijani, who is head of Iran’s national security council and its chief nuclear negotiator, paid Sunday. It is rumored in Baghdad’s Green Zone that Larijani talked not only to Iraqi leaders but also met the new US ambassador Ryan Crocker to talk about a deal for the agenda and content of the Sharm el-Sheik conference.

 Of course, the part about “Washington will obviously not think twice about putting Israel’s strategic interests to one side” is nonsense (in particular in light  the eager genuflexing of the Democrats to the Neocon’s propaganda about Iran being an ‘existantial threat to Israel), but it does reveal a possible insecurity in the minds of the Neocons about whether they will be able to make their agenda prevail over US national security interests.  Might the ‘Old Anglos’ be re-gaining the upper hand over the Neocons?

 –VS

Lies, torture, evasions and deceptions.  Sounds like the powers that be still have us running in circles and arguing over the details but few, if any, are looking at the big picture.  I suggest that a re-read of the Paul Craig Roberts article: Gullible Americans is in order.  Especially the parts about the collapse of the Trade Center buildings.  Why indeed did the three buildings collapse into nice neat little piles within their own footprints? If the fires in the floors where the planes impacted were indeed hot enough to melt the steel support structure then it is a stretch to think that the superstructure in these areas would have collapsed symmetrically so as to allow the buildings to collapse on a perfectly vertical plane. It would have been more likely that if the steel began to melt and collapse then the structures above this point would have toppled over and fell into the areas surrounding the buildings.

From No Comment, ‘the other’ Scott Horton has this little blurb of info:

A Swiss court has acquitted three Swiss journalists on charges of violating state secrecy requirements for publishing an intelligence intercept of the Swiss intelligence service that confirmed the existence of a CIA “blacksite” detention facility at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Base near the Black Sea city of Constanza in Romania. Swiss intelligence put 23 Iraqi and Afghan citizens at the base and in the custody of the CIA. It states that Romania had made false official statements to European Parliamentary investigators in which the base was denied. It notes the existence of similar “blacksites” at the Szymany Air Base in Poland, in Ukraine, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria.

The transportation of Iraqi civilians captured in connection with U.S. military operations in Iraq to a location outside of that country would be a criminal act under article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Reports circulated earlier that such a program existed and that it had been approved by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, headed by Jack Goldsmith, now a professor at Harvard University. A copy of a memo purporting to authorize the transportation of Iraqis out of the country by the CIA, dated March 19, 2004, was obtained and published by the Washington Post on October 24, 2004. The memo has been uniformly condemned by legal scholars, some of whom have suggested that the author might be subject to criminal prosecution.

umm… what was that about torture, Mr. Tenet? yeah, and I’m sure you know nothing about Africa’s own little Gitmo‘ either, huh? Lucky for you the 911 Whitewash Commission didn’t want to talk to Michael Ross. I bet he has plenty of interesting stories on the run-up to 911 having to do with the conduct your agency. Oh well, more filler for the memory hole…