Propaganda and deceit about the Patriot Act

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Thursday December 15, 2005 · 1:51 PM PST

2005/12/15 · 13:51

Worshipers of the Patriot Act have launched their full-scale propaganda campaign to intimidate anyone who does not -- once again -- meekly swallow all of its invasive provisions. John at Powerline, for instance, has a post up about the Patriot Act which can only be described as being full of falsehoods, and it plainly foreshadows the outright deceit which is soon to be spewing forth from all pro-Patriot Act precincts. The Patriot Act is one of those issues which, due to its complexity and legalistic nature, is susceptible to highly being propagandized, and partisan Republican deceivers like John have long been doing exactly that.

The Patriot Act was borne of this sort of propaganda, beginning with its creepy, Orwellian name, followed by the virtual unanimity with which it was enacted by a Senate which did not even have time to read it. Read More

Iran is the only winner in the Iraq War

GlennGreenwald

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Tuesday December 13, 2005 · 1:44 PM PST

2005/12/13 · 13:44

Two new stories out today underscore the malignant and growing influence of Iran over the dominant Shiite political forces in Iraq, and the quite likely prospect that an elected Iraqi Shiite government will be a close ally of the Iranian ruling mullahs. This is a profound danger which has serious implications for whether the U.S. can avert even greater disaster with this war.

The mullah-ruled Iran is, thanks to our invasion, on the verge of solidifying full-scale control over Iraq's internal affairs, and there appears to be nothing that we can do -- or are trying to do -- to stop that. The militias controlled by Iran are using death squads and the types of authoritarian secret police tactics which Saddam perfected to solidify control, and they are doing so in close cooperation with Iran, America's most despised enemy. These are the results of this war that we are told is liberating Iraq and making America safer. Read More

Eugene McCarthy & the Smearing of Howard Dean

GlennGreenwald

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Sunday December 11, 2005 · 3:20 AM PST

2005/12/11 · 03:20

Nice things are being said today about Eugene McCarthy in the unlikeliest corners because he died yesterday. Here's Paul at Powerline, in full-on disingenuous eulogy mode:

McCarthy's most ardent supporters were college students. Most of my anti-war friends preferred him to Kennedy, as I did (and still do). First, McCarthy had shown more guts than Kennedy by challenging Johnson before it was clear how weak the president's position was. Second, McCarthy came across as cool; Kennedy as anything but. . . . .

In many respects, some of them superficial, Robert Kennedy's position in 1967 can be compared to Hillary Clinton's position today. It's more difficult identify the new Gene McCarthy (it's certainly not Howard Dean). He was one of a kind.

Despite the concerted effort to distinguish (with no reasons given) McCarthy from Howard Dean, everything which was said here (and elsewhere) in praise of Eugene McCarthy's anti-war candidacy applies at least as much to Howard Dean's presidential campaign. But Dean is still very much alive and McCarthy isn't, so it's safe to praise McCarthy but not Dean.
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Our Iraqi Dogs - Neocons doom their own war

GlennGreenwald

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Saturday December 10, 2005 · 4:11 AM PST

2005/12/10 · 04:11

Pro-war fanatics are clearly laying the groundwork to blame the loss of the Iraq war which they wanted so badly on those who opposed the war in the first place, just as this same crowd tries to do, to this day, with regard to Vietnam. Leading Neocon war-monger Norman Podhoretz is already doing exactly that in his new Commentary essay released today, where he warns that it is anti-war critics (and not, of course, those followers of his who have been running this war) who are "pulling off the proverbial feat of snatching an American defeat from the jaws of victory." Just as they do for Vietnam, they are actually claiming that their war would have worked perfectly if only the people who noticed that the war was misguided and was failing had kept their mouths shut.

But with each day that passes, it is these very pro-war zealots who are dooming their own war in Iraq by demanding that the U.S. cast aside and violate the very American values which the Iraq War is supposedly intended to import to the Middle East. Read More

Identical Government claims on Vietnam & Iraq

GlennGreenwald

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Thursday December 08, 2005 · 8:24 AM PST

2005/12/08 · 08:24

Howard Dean's comment the other day contesting the idea that the U.S. will "win" in Iraq provoked some astounding hysteria, but another, more substantive comment which he made in the same interview was essentially ignored:

"I've seen this before in my life. This is the same situation we had in Vietnam. Everybody then kept saying, 'just another year, just stay the course, we'll have a victory.' Well, we didn't have a victory, and this policy cost the lives of an additional 25,000 troops because we were too stubborn to recognize what was happening."

Whatever one's views are on the propriety of analogizing the conflict in Iraq with Vietnam, a review of the pro-war statements by the Government and others during Vietnam conclusively proves that Dean's equating of the Bush Administration's statements about the Iraq war to the statements which Americans heard from their Government throughout the duration of the Vietnam War was absolutely, indisputably accurate as a matter of historical fact. Read More

Ramsey Clark - Heroism Being Smeared

GlennGreenwald

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Tuesday December 06, 2005 · 3:29 AM PST

2005/12/06 · 03:29

Ramsey Clark was Attorney General in the Lyndon Johnson Administration and, as a New York Times profile this morning details, he has spent the last 35 years serving as legal counsel for some of the most reviled and despicable figures on the planet, including Muammar el-Qaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh, and Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was convicted of participating in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

Clark, at the age of 77, is currently risking his life in order to represent Saddam Hussein for free in Hussein's criminal trial in Iraq. Clark's rationale for doing so is clear and noble:

All men, he said, deserved a fair trial, even history's worst criminals. "Suppose Hitler had survived," he said. "It seems to me that it would have been absolutely critical to give him a fair trial, to let him call witnesses and cross-examine the hell out of them." He added, "If you don't do that, historical truth will be distorted."

GlennGreenwald

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Monday December 05, 2005 · 3:35 AM PST

2005/12/05 · 03:35

It always seemed to be an incredibly close and hard-fought competition between Iran and Syria as to which country would get to be the neocon's next target. Now that we're being told that we are oh-so-gloriously triumphing in Iraq, it looks like a winner has finally been selected. From The Jerusalem Post:

IAEA chairman Muhammad ElBaradei on Monday confirmed Israel's assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.

If Teheran indeed resumed its uranium enrichment in other plants, as threatened, it will take it only "a few months" to produce a nuclear bomb, El-Baradei told The Independent.

It's unclear from this report whether ElBaradei is actually agreeing with the Israeli warning -- namely, that Iran is now months away from production of a nuclear bomb -- or whether he is agreeing with that assessment only hypothetically, i.e., that Iran would be months away if it engaged in full-on enrichment efforts. But no matter. The article, at the very least, signals that the Israelis (and their neocon supporters in the U.S.) are no longer willing to wait around with regard to Iran. Read More

Bush admits we are NOT fighting terrorists in Iraq

GlennGreenwald

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Thursday December 01, 2005 · 8:08 AM PST

2005/12/01 · 08:08

George Bush admitted yesterday that the vast, vast majority of people whom we are fighting in Iraq are not "terrorists" at all, but merely Sunni "rejectionists" who favor a system of government which preserves long-standing Sunni privileges in Iraq. Here is what he said:

A clear strategy begins with a clear understanding of the enemy we face. The enemy in Iraq is a combination of rejectionists, Saddamists and terrorists. The rejectionists are by far the largest group. These are ordinary Iraqis, mostly Sunni Arabs, who miss the privileged status they had under the regime of Saddam Hussein -- and they reject an Iraq in which they are no longer the dominant group.

After 2 1/2 years of being stridently lectured that the war we are fighting in Iraq is a war against "terrorists," for Bush to now acknowledge that the targets of our war in Iraq are not "terrorists" at all is a rather remarkable admission. Read More

Gay Groups Should Actively Support a Ban on Divorce and Re-Marriage

GlennGreenwald

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Wednesday November 30, 2005 · 4:50 AM PST

2005/11/30 · 04:50

The ostensibly Christian assault on gay people took a huge step forward yesterday when the Catholic Church released a vile little document warning that homosexuality risked "destabilizing people and society," and further proclaimed that homosexuality "does not represent a social value and even less so a moral virtue that could add to the civilization of sexuality." All of this is in an adjunct to the Church's ban on even celibate gay men from entering the priesthood.

The Pope, of course, is not the only, but merely the latest, self-proclaimed Christian who claims that Christian doctrine compels the secular inequality of homosexuality. Texas earlier this month became the latest state to incorporate into its State Constitution a ban on same-sex marriages, and its Governor, Rick Perry, signed the bill to create the referendum at a Christian evangelical school alongside what he called his pro-family "Christian friends." When asked earlier this month why he supports the ban, he replied, simply enough: "I am a Christian and this is about values." Read More

Padilla Tyranny now includes Torture

GlennGreenwald

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Thursday November 24, 2005 · 4:16 AM PST

2005/11/24 · 04:16

Q. What is worse than having the U.S. Government imprison one of its citizens indefinitely -- without any charges being brought, without any due process of any kind, and solely on the unilateral decree of the President -- while the Government has its top officials simultaneously accuse that citizen in press conferences of trying to detonate a radiological bomb inside the country?

A. Having that indefinite, lawless imprisonment and those public accusations be based upon information which was highly suspect all along, because it was obtained by the U.S. Government through the torture of the "witnesses" who provided it. Read More

True Tyranny Defined: Bush Admin. v. Jose Padilla

GlennGreenwald

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Wednesday November 23, 2005 · 3:49 AM PST

2005/11/23 · 03:49

Of the many abuses of power by the Bush Administration, the most disturbing, dangerous, and under-publicized one is the fact that the Administration has arrogated unto itself the power to single out U.S. citizens and unilaterally imprison them indefinitely and without a trial of any kind. The Administration has brought to life and is now defending what is literally the worst totalitarian nightmare: being locked away by your own Government indefinitely -- without being charged with a crime, without a trial, and without any recourse to challenge your imprisonment.

The Administration's decision yesterday to finally bring charges against U.S. citizen Jose Padilla -- who has been kept incarcerated in a military prison for three years solely on George Bush's order, in solitary confinement and indefinitely -- along with multiple other factors, discussed below, makes this the perfect (and likely last) chance to use these severe Bush Administration abuses to bring to light just how dangerous this Administration has become. Read More

The new Pro-Iraq-War Justification is Unveiled

GlennGreenwald

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Monday November 21, 2005 · 4:10 AM PST

2005/11/21 · 04:10

We have seen in the past couple of weeks a brand new excuse unveiled for why we must prolong our occupation of Iraq. The most zealous of the pro-Iraq-war fanatics in this country have always had as their express goal in invading Iraq the establishment of a compliant, pro-U.S. (and pro-Israel) Iraqi government which would serve as the anchor for American domination of the Middle East. They have waited a long time to get their hands on Iraq, and no matter how disastrous our occupation becomes, they have no intention of allowing the U.S. to leave Iraq until that dream is fulfilled.

But with virtually all of their pre-war justifications for the invasion now wholly discredited -- there were no WMDs, we are not more popular or less hated among Middle Eastern Muslims, democracy has not spread like wildfire throughout the region, the region is not more stable -- they are in desperate search for some good reason to continue to pursue and even intensify what has been a relentlessly self-destructive enterprise. As new pro-war statements over the last several weeks reveal, they think they have now found one. Read More

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