Sick Bastards Watch: I knew it wouldn’t be long before Charles Krauthammer would enter my list of sick bastards. Notice one of Kraphammer’s arguments about Israeli benevolence:
The flourishing greenhouses that Israel left behind for the Palestinians were destroyed and abandoned.
So, Israel is responding to the destruction of its… greenhouses?
Add David Frum and Barry Rubin to the list of sick bastards:
And the casualties are disproportionate: Hamas has arranged it that way. If necessary, sympathetic photographers take pictures of children who pretend to be injured, and once they are published in Western newspapers these claims become fact.
Yoel Marcus is a sick bastard:
British pro-war fantasists (which includes most of Parliament) are still lying about Iraq.
Political leaders and their religious beliefs: Tony Bliar talks about his conversion to Roman Catholicism. Apparently, he was worried people may have thought he was a “nutter” if he had talked about his beliefs. Shame he wasn’t so concerned about being called a warmongering bastard for lying over invading another country with no justification whatsoever.
Shrubya, meanwhile, says he is not a literalist and has no problem with evolution. That’s good. But too bad he also has no problems with indefinite detention, torture, and letting corporations run amock in a country he invaded for ficitious reasons.
Corporate manslaughter: Five Blackwater employees (mercenaries) were charged with manslaughter this past week, accused of killing unarmed Iraqis. The families of the Iraqis want the death penalty, although lawyers for the families think the case will be thrown out.
Sadly, this case will probably be another whitewash — the policymakers, politicians and corporate executives behind the decisions to privatise the Iraq war and enact laws which granted the likes of Blackwater immunity, will be untouched.
(Via Jurist.)
Colonial intelligence agencies*: James Scott reviews Empires of Intelligence: Security Services and Colonial Disorder after 1914. Scott seems unimpressed by Martin Thomas’ well-researched, but ultimately narrow focus in the study.
I also second Scott’s recommendation of Sven Lindqvist, especially A History of Bombing, which is one of the most unconventional histories you will ever read. Scott notes this about Lindqvist’s work:
Beginning with an Italian aviator dropping a hand grenade from a light plane over Tripoli, [Sven] Lindqvist shows that almost all the torments Europeans inflicted on one another were first tested and refined in the colonies and on people whose rights and sufferings were not considered to have risen to the level of white Europeans.
*Thanks to gess for this title. I thought the same when reading the review in my copy of LRB, but since he put it down into 1s and 0s first the credit need to go the right person.
Phoney Bliar’s smug grin returns to the television screen.
So, what you’re saying is the problem wasn’t Iraq?
The lies told in the run up to the Iraq invasion are the best arguments against 9/11 (and 7/7) conspiracy theories.
The government has been told by the Information Commissioner that it must release information on the September 2002 dossier. This document contained the infamous claim that Saddam Hussein was capable of launching WMDs within “45 minutes”.
Joe Biden once ripped off Neil Kinnock.
It seems John McCain wanted to show the world his skill in using The Internets by ripping off Wikipedia.
Still at least American politicians don’t rip off dissertations by postgraduate students in order to justify war. (Though that is largely due to American politicians not caring too much about justifying wars they are about to launch.)
Ron Suskind claims the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.
As noted by Booman Tribune, this was then leaked to the Daily Telegraph’s Con Coughlin (an appropriate name given his dubious record in tub-thumping for war on Iraq and Iran).
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