Take a Toke of Some Homegrown...Terrorists

Today:

Revelations about spying on bank records.

Mueller gives a speech on "homegrown terrorists."

Gonzales faces Senate questioning on domestic spying.

The Indian Affairs report released, detailing how Abramoff worked with Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist to launder money from tribes through various organizations. Norquist writes much of Bush's corporate crony-ass policies, Reed is God's boy and Christian frontman and key broker of the Bush's Christianity illusion.

The debate about Iraq still in the air.

Iraqi gov't proposes an amnesty for insurgents who've killed our soldiers.

AND:

And FBI informant poses as an Al Qaeda rep, goes to this feeble little group of malcontents and gets them on board with a "plan" to attack the Sears Tower and FBI offices. No bombs found. No weapons found. No money found. Only the "aspiration" to join in with the faux Al Qaeda operative. But, last night...and early enough to change the lead on every paper in America, they arrest this group of "homegrowners."

The news cycle is now sucked into this story, the rationale for spying on phone calls and bank records is clear...we have homegrown terrorists. We need homegrown spying. Now who on the Senate panel is going to argue against the tools to stop these homegrown terrorists? And they've got Alberto's boy, sycophant and shill who has slowed down Abramoff investigations—Alex Acosta--in Miami's US Atty's office to lord over this "sting." Timing is everything, and it's good to have a timekeeper in place.

This is taking the Indian Affairs report out of the news cycle.

This is taking the bank record story out of the news cycle.

This is proving that Al Qaeda exists.

This is showing we need to be afraid of homegrowners, people living in your neighborhood. And they are Black men, too! Double fear!

This is proving that the War on Terror is "real."

This is better than an elevated color alert.

This is showing the Bushies as vigilant, protectors of our safety

This is going to prep us for the GOP to hold the Congress and hold onto subpoena power (they just need the polls to be close enough, should they need their Diebold machines to pump out papertrail-less victories in key races...you know, plausible deniability)

Watch Bush's poll ratings climb.

Watch the timing.

Dead Again...The Zarqawi Effect

Al-Zarqawi is dead.

Again.

That's right. This is the second time he's been reported dead. This time we have a Polaroid of his peaceful-looking face after an airstike apparently killed the visage of Al-Qaeda’s franchise in our imperial outpost. This time we have officials pushing the story.

This time.

Last time, it was just news reports and low-level official claims. This time, there is no news reporting getting in the way of the carefully displayed military announcement. No independent verification to muddy the water.

The timing couldn't be better. For Bush. For the new Iraqi "government," and for those Congressional sycophants who can't quite run away from their support for the war come November.

In fact, the Iraqis announced and swore in a Defense and Interior Minister at the same time Zarqawi was being bumped off...taking care of two persistent problems for our puppeteers in Baghdad. Those Ministry vacancies were a huge source of criticism.

In fact, the news of Zarqawi's re-death came during a meeting with Congressionalzoids...giving them what they needed. Some sort of victory in Iraq that also makes the bogus case for Al-Qaeda's "International Terrorist Network" in our occupied "terror-tory." It makes the case for referring to insurgents as terrorists.

And for Bush? Well, it takes Haditha and the mess of Iraq out of the news cycle. Perhaps for a day, perhaps for a week. And it makes our presence seem like a positive force in Iraq. We are trying to stop "the killers," as Georgie likes to call them. It's bullshit, of course...because Haditha and the thousands upon thousands of civilians we've killed did not benefit from our presence. But this is a perfect counterpoint to the boiling blood here and there about Haditha and the growing image of US occupation as torturous, murderous and self-serving.

And it's a perfect closing of the circle...between Zarqawi and Haditha. Because both are predicated on military sources. All of our info on Zarqawi...his rise from the dead, the regeneration of his leg, the beheading of Nick Berg, the various "video" of him, the website postings...all have come without independent verification. Without any verification, in fact. No one in the media asked questions...about Zarqawi being reported dead, losing a leg in Afghanistan, about Nick Berg's strange path to Zarqawi which had him sharing his computer and internet account with two 9/11 hijackers...and had him working on a radio transmitter at Abu Ghraib when he was beheaded by Zarqawi. No questions asked, no real verification of what we are told. Excuse me if I think Zarqawi has been a PsyOp from day one, particularly since we've seen Pentagon documents that say he was/is. He was. And is.

Which is the story of Haditha, right? We were told a totally bogus story. We are told what the military needs to tell us. And it took a long time to get the truth. A truth that came out because people asked questions. Because the verification was sought independently. And now we have the Zarqawi story, which has not been verified at all over the last couple years and which is...as I sit here writing this...being used to push Haditha out of the news cycle in favor of a new, shiny image of an effective military presence out to protect the Iraqi people from "terrorist killers." A shiny image of a War on Terror. A bogus image...but shiny.

So, Zarqawi is dead again. And so is a catch-all evildoer for most anything and everything that happened in Iraq. The link between Al-Qaeda, whether real or not, is now going to be harder to make. This is the downside from this stage PsyOp... that Team Bush is not going to have Zarqawi to kick around anymore. A cynic might think this is a sign of desperation...that they really needed a victory. Really needed to counter the Haditha story of a brutal military presence with no real benefit for Iraqis. That they needed to stop the bleeding in the polls.

Okay, so I'm a cynic.

Haditha

This just in...we might actually care about Iraqi deaths.

Might.

It's been some time since Lancet, the British medical journal, determined that over 100,000 Iraqis were killed in the invasion and immediate aftermath of our pre-emptive strike against the non-threat known as Iraq.

It's been some time since the massacre at Fallujah, where we employed white phosphorus on the population...killing everything in that besieged town. Men, women, children, animals and insurgents. Dead.

It's been well over a decade since we began raining depleted uranium on Iraq, irradiating the land and the air...causing a massive spike in cancer rates and birth defects among the Iraq people. This is particularly so in southern Iraq.

And it's been two years of returning soldiers telling stories of Iraqis being killed at checkpoints, being run over by tanks and other imposing, high-priced military vehicles. Since we heard about torture. Since we heard British military commanders criticizing us for treating the Iraqis as subhuman.

Now we have Haditha. And yet another "civilian massacre" emerging in Ishaqi. And maybe we do have a conscience.

It's taken some time and tens of thousands of Iraqis being "liberated," as in liberated from their corporeal bodies and ushered into the freedom of death. Until now, we've spent countless hours mourning our dead and consoling our wounded. Close of 3,000 dead, close to 18,000 wounded. Soldiers. People sent into "battle," if that what it's been. But we've ignored the lives of human beings who saw their homes, their livelihoods and their families bombed into oblivion, shot apart in a mail of bullets....destroyed.

Warfare requires a level of dehumanization....that's a cliché of military history. Dehumanize the enemy to engender bloodlust. To soothe the humanity within that may, during the drive of destroy, short-circuit the command to kill. Haditha has finally broken the stranglehold on dehumanization...a stranglehold that kept its grip even throughout Abu Ghraib and countless bombing raids. We've soothed ourselves with the idea that Iraqis are terrorists, that they were connected to 9/11, that they would come here if we didn't kill them there...that we were liberating them.

Now we see what we are. What we are doing. What dehumanization spawns.

And we are beginning to see what dehumanization is doing to us. To the soldiers who buy into the mission, out of a desperate need to justify the unjustifiable and to make sense of the senseless of the killing they see...the killing the do.

Because dehumanizing the enemy ends up dehumanizing ourselves. Life becomes cheaper than usual. Everyone is an enemy. And our soldiers return home and fight the battle within themselves between their wounded humanity and lingering anxiety about day to day survival. They end up dehumanized. Alive...but not fully human.

Now it is time for us...the American people upon whom this war is justified...to wake up to our collective dehumanization. We are all responsible. It is easy to blame Team Bush. It's fruitless, because they don't care. Lives and humanity are not on their agenda. They care only about geopolitics, oil and war profiteering. They care about controlling us. And like other historical powers, they use war and dehumanization...the blood thirst for an enemy...to keep us in line. To preserve their agenda. Yes, they have lost support. In polls. But no one is camping out in the National Mall. Few are speaking out. Few are demanding justice and an end to the rape and murder of Iraq.

Coming out of the 20th Century, we find that there is little excuse for succumbing to the dehumanization. From the Nazis in WWII to our dehumanization of Vietnam and the various wars we were involved with around the globe, we saw over and over the result of dehumanization. We have no excuses.

Perhaps it is not too late. Haditha may finally humanize the plight of Iraqis, the death and destruction we've wrought. We, my friends. All of us. Because this is, at least nominally, a democracy and we bought into the big lie. It may not be too late for us to stop the dehumanization. It's too late for the thousands of dead Iraqis. But it may not be too late for us to stop ourselves.