Monday, May 2, 2011

Excuse Me If I Don't Salute...

It's not quite 24 hours since "the announcement". We got him, he's dead. Our special forces and intelligence community after almost 10 years finally tracked him down and killed him. The guy who took credit for masterminding the 9/11 attacks was shot dead and there are reports that he may have used one of his wives as a human shield before being shot through the eye by one of our skilled soldiers. Excuse me if I don't salute...

Now, don't get me wrong, I support our troops and anybody who would bring such horror on foreign soil must obviously understand the old saw, "Live by the sword..." but as I watched the coast to coast celebration of the death of a figurehead, a chilling but familiar thought crossed my mind. Whenever we have these world figures with overt ties to this government, our government's sideways dealings in other countries, there's a disturbing trend that sees these individuals rubbed out before they can reveal the extent of those ties. Look up Ngo Dinh Diem, Park Chung Hee, Idi Amin, Anastasio Somoza, Rafael Trujillo, Anwar Sadat, and Sadaam Hussein. By the way, has anybody seen Manuel Noriega? Excuse me if I don't salute...

Somehow the stories of what's being done by our government on behalf of mega-corporate interests go largely unreported and untold. Would there have been an Al Quaeda without the Reagan-Bush training and manipulation of Bin Laden and the Saudis to do their bidding. They were funded and deployed by the US to fight the war in Afghanistan that the Reagan administration knew they could never get support for in Congress. So after the Soviet Union collapsed under the weight of fighting an un-winnable conflict against Bin Laden's forces in the same barren wasteland that is the Afghani border today, what did we do? Did we reward them with funding, equipment, and materials to build an infrastructure? Did we send them nation-building consultants and engineers? Did we retrain them to embrace the democracy we so dearly love to export? Did we at least say thank you? The answers: nothing, no, no, no, and no! We left them high and dry with weapons and festering anger in that same barren wasteland that we're caught up in today. Did you ever wonder why we had a war-front there in addition to Iraq? "They hate us for our freedom." Right! Excuse me if I don't salute...

What's the point? I'm glad you asked. A reporter at today's White House press briefing asked the Press Secretary, "Under what legal authority did you go into Pakistan?" After the cursory response about believing that there was credible evidence to support the apprehension or killing of a HVT (High Value Target), the follow-up question was, "So would you have gone into any country to kill someone you considered a HVT?" The answer, "Since, we were able to get him there, there's no need to engage in that sort of speculation." So, here's my question: If Bin Laden was responsible for thousands of deaths and destruction here which made him number 1 on our Most Wanted List, then what would happen if the Iraqis decided that Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Blair-Rice whose deceptions are responsible for millions of deaths and untold destruction in their country decided to exact the same type of "justice"? So, while I'm trying to figure it out, please excuse me if I don't salute...

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