Last week, former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Reagan and Rios: Committed to Democracy
Here is what Ronald Reagan, president of the U.S. A., said of the man at the time:
“A man of great personal integrity”
“He is totally dedicated to Democracy”
Geeee, why do those people overseas hate us so much?
ekwaysan
I mean, if you want to worry about the rule of law, look out your window. Why do you have to go all the way down to China?
Today, under “In China, no rule of law” the editorial board of the Washington Post is lamenting the rule of law …… in China, that is!
I mean we went to war over a lie in Iraq. We illegally spied on our own citizens, we introduced indefinite detention, tortured people and invented a euphemism for it “enhanced interrogation technique”. Remember Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram etc… and other “naked” transgressions? How many were prosecuted, let alone convicted of a crime? A grand total of zero.
The banking shenanigans and Wall street theft that led to the near collapse of the world economy are still going on under one guise or another. How many of those knaves that consciencely caused all of that were brought to trial? Zero.
Our constitution has been shred to pieces. But Obama famously declared (in a stark reversal of a campaign promise) “we should look forward not backward” to justify not prosecuting the Bush-era war crimes.
And on and on and on, and the Washington Post did not a raise a hoot about the rule of law. In fact, in the case of the ongoing wars, they cheered them on.
In China, at least they fired Bo Xilai and they are bringing charges against him and his wife. Heck even Iran sent the daughter of ex-president and strong man “Rafsanjani” to prison on corruption charges last week.
To the Wash Po, the rule of law is, literally, a “foreign concept”.
The notion that our main stream media takes the rule of the law seriously is ….. well, a joke.
ekwaysan
Men of the cloth.
They know things. They can always tell us what is good and what is evil.
Go to church, pray, love your neighbor, have faith even when you can’t understand, and accept what you can not change.
They tell us to pray so God can guide us to make the decisions He’d like us to make no matter how difficult they may be.
Well, until they themselves really have to take a stand that would make a difference, that is.
A few days ago, men of the cloth representing the Presbyterian church failed to divest from companies such as Caterpillar, Motorola, etc… that make equipments that aid occupation (form of apartheid, really) of the WEST Bank and Gaza?
Granted, the vote was close (333-331). But why even was it so close? How could 333 men of the cloth, who supposedly fight for social justice and preach against abetting evil, vote for investing in companies that raze innocent people’s homes?
If these pillars of virtues can’t even bring themselves to stand against occupations (a term the U.N. uses, by the way, not just me) and speak truth to power, then why are they relevant at all?
Every thing they have been telling us (well, at least about things that really matter) seems like a lie.
The men of the cloth have no clothes.
ekwaysan
Our latest product is a “Kill List”.
Unless you have been aboard Venus transiting across the sun the past week, you probably have heard of the “kill list”. This is a list of people our Nobel Peace Prize winner president approves to be killed weekly via drones. He is the jury, the judge, and the executioner.
After bombing a certain target, the president does not stop there. Rather he authorizes the bombings of the rescuers whom ever they happened to be. He even authorizes the bombings of funerals!
Unless these drones are firing M & M’s, a significant number of civilians must have been killed. Independent sources have borne this obvious conclusion out.
However, since he cares about innocent people being killed, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and self-proclaimed devoted Christian has come up with an ingenious way to prevent killing civilians. He redefines what a civilian means: Any male of combatant age near a strike zone; never mind rescuers or funerals!
The news outlets have been overwhelmingly praising Obama’s effort since a New York times article exposed it last week.
I am not offering here a political critique of the drones attacks on civilians. I am just wondering whether we have our eyes open wide enough to look within. Are we any better than those we are killing in this manner? Bin Laden and his network of terror did not graduate from Al-Azhar, Al-Najaf, or Qom, the elite Islamic theological schools. He graduated from Madrasas in caves and remote camps. He and his organization are not main stream. Far from it, they are theological pariahs.
By contrast, our Nobel Peace Prize winner president, went to Harvard; Bush went to Yale (and they’re both devoted Christians!). Our elites that have been waging this war are the products of our elite institutions, secular and otherwise. And we, the people, have been complicit and silent at best, if not flat-out cheering them on.
What does approving of killing civilian rescuers and bombing funerals say about our own values and principles? Our soul and identity? Our faith? Our culture and set of beliefs?
If you are one of those individuals who nurtures a conscience, I wish you luck wrestling with your morality before you cast a vote this coming november.
Our conscience really needs to be shaken to the core.
ekwaysan
A handful of billionaires are keeping major presidential candidates alive in the arena. And in the case of Newt Gingrich, one billionaire and his wife alone are doing the job.
This clash of the Titans is not to save Argos or princess Andromeda. Simply put, it is a bazaar to wash your brain with money and buy your votes and use it against your own interest.
Mitt Romney, for example, spent $15 million to soak the networks with relentless attacks on Newt to stop his momentum after winning South Carolina (a feat accomplished with the aid of another Titan) and beat him in Florida!
Under these current conditions of limitless money contributions, participatory democracy is really a joke. Election is becoming like a ritual that allows us to cheer on our “savior” and feel good every four years; just like the World Cup does!
Real change, however, comes from the pockets of the billionaires. Their billions can write bills and influence policy any time; election year or not.
Do you seriously believe whoever ultimately wins the election is representing you? Or he is representing these billionaires behind his win? Does your interest and the interest of these billionaires have anything in common?
Yep! The corporate state is in.
ekwaysan
It never ceases to amaze me how inflated Man’s ego can be.
In the very entertaining movie ” The War of the Roses”, we’re treated to a feuding couple going through divorce. The two parties become consumed with hate and vengeance. Each spouse wants to teach the other a lesson. It all ends in self-destruction.
This comes to mind every time I recall the real reason Dick Cheney and George Bush took this nation to war with Iraq; a country they knew had nothing to do with Al Qaeda and had no WMD . “We have to hit the heart of the Muslim World to teach them a lesson”, Cheney convinced a clueless Bush.
Listen to one of the most influential foreign policy “experts” on the Middle East justifying the worthiness of that war too.
Was it really worth it? Or was it a self-destructive big ego war? Over 4500 soldiers dead and 30,000 injured; over trillion dollars spent and counting; over 500,000 dead Iraqis; millions more displaced. And the economy is teetering thanks, in no small measure, to that war.
I have no problem making the perpetrators pay for their crimes. But that was not it.
Over what exactly? To teach “Them” a lesson?
Is that lesson even worth the life of one soldier not coming back to his family on Christmas? Let alone all the economic suffering the nation has endured the last 4 years.
Just like the Roses, we have become so consumed with hate and vengeance that we have been willing to self-destruct in the process .
I marvel at how we have become so numb that we don’t even see this “bullies mentality” for what it is.
ekwaysan
Remind me again, please. Is it the Arab League or the American League of Arabia?
The American puppet regimes in the Middle-East, heeding a call from Hillary Clinton, suspended Syria’s membership in the League. But that is not the punch line. They suspended it because of the brutal crackdown on the democracy movement in Syria!
Now that must be the joke of the century. Think about this surreal farce. Here we have a collection of kings, sultans (not particularly enlightened and benevolent bunch), and your garden variety brutal dictators calling for democratic dialogue between the government and the opposition in Syria.
The blood of the innocent protesters in the bastion of democracy, Bahrain, has not dried out yet. It has been straight out of the stone ages what “our democratic allies” in Bahrain have been doing to its own peaceful protesters. The Jeffersonian democracy advocate king in the home of the American fifth fleet, Bahrain, sentenced even doctors who helped near-death peaceful protesters to 20 years in prison. They have killed women, children, and elderly like the true barbarians they are.
Obama and his “Arab League of lackeys” have not heard of that one.
ekwaysan
Does David Brooks know something we don’t about an impending war with Iran? Is he just suggesting one?
It certainly feels that way.
In his weekly analysis for PBS this Friday, David Brooks, the ideologue who argued vehemently for the urgent invasion of Iraq, laid out in sketchy prints the grounds for an attack on Iran ever so subtly. The fact that all of his arguments for the war in Iraq were discredited did not deter the self-proclaimed pure moralist in the least. Nor did it deter PBS, or the NYT for that matter, from continuously providing him with the pulpit to propagate lies necessary for his ideological agenda.
In his signature sneaky way, he suggested Iran is a rogue state that not only the neocons view as very dangerous, but also the whole Western world.
Now combine this with his claim, in that same PBS segment, of the relevancy of foreign policy in deciding presidential elections, a view he himself used not to believe in. Add to that his assertion that “somehow the middle east is going to come back in September or October next year”. Now consider the fact that Obama’s reelection prospects are looking dimmer and dimmer, and a picture starts to emerge.
I hope I am wrong but it feels like a “wag-the-dog” scenario is being promoted here.
ekwaysan
Question: What do you call a country whose government pleads with a foreign leader for help in order to pass a bill through the house of representatives of its people?
Answer: The land of the free and the home of the braves.
” When the Obama administration wanted to be certain that Congress would not block $50 million in new aid to the Palestinian Authority last month, it turned to a singularly influential lobbyist: Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. At the request of the American Embassy and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Netanyahu urged dozens of members of Congress visiting Israel last month not to object to the aid…”
Look how these “free” congress memebers are stampeding to touch his hands and get his blessings:
Pope Netanyahu awards his blessings to US Congress members
And for good measures, you may want to watch the farcical scene at the Congress of the United States of America. “His excellency” Master Netanyahu (Boehner’s words) got 29 standing ovations. It is straight out of satirical theater.
The land of the free and the home of the braves indeed!
ekwaysan
A New Line 