Aside from the ridiculous proposition that it is currently against the law for someone in the United States to send non-military aid to one side in a civil conflict in another country, this piece in the New York Times reveals the extent to which the media is in bed with the US government.
Check out these quotes below:
“Two New York City men have been arrested on charges that they sought to supply the Taliban and other terrorist fighters with warm clothes and equipment for use in wintertime battle with United States forces in Afghanistan, the authorities said on Thursday.”
The sentence explicitly states that the Taliban are terrorists. This is, at best, in opinion. In truth, the Taliban are indigenous resistance fighters against foreign occupation forces, and during the 1980s we called the same exact people freedom fighters.
More to the point, no journalist or quasi-independent newspaper should characterize the Taliban as terrorists. Just call them the Taliban and leave it at that. Everyone knows who they are.
“But in a statement, Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said the arrests “demonstrate the spectrum of terrorism threats” that the police must guard against. He said the equipment that the men sought to provide “could have endangered the safety of Americans as much as supplies of guns and ammunition.””
The implication, obviously, is that the Americans referred to here are living in the United States. But of course, when you think about it, that’s not the case at all. The Americans who would be in danger of being attacked by the Taliban are US occupation troops engaged in an illegal war of imperialist expansion.
“Sean A. McNicholas, a lawyer for Mr. Alsarabbi, said that his client had “no idea” that the outerwear was heading for terrorists in Afghanistan, and that Mr. Alsarabbi was swept up in an investigation reliant on the work of an informant with questionable motives.”
Again with the terrorists! Again: calling them terrorists is ridiculous. This is just one of zillions of examples of why people like me say that this media is not free, and is merely a puppet of the regime.
4 Comments.
‘Charges?’ What sort of charges? Yes, indeed. The police must guard against quite a ‘spectrum of terrorism threats.’ Yeah, just another reminder of the ever-present dire threat of terror! How about our own state terrorism finally? The media absolutely accepts the paradigm of the pols.
They’re terrorists if they’re Muslims and fighting us. Or more to the point: they are terrorists if we say so. Most people used to call terrorists the guys who murdered unarmed civilians. Now the label is for guys who attack soldiers. Aren’t Palestinians who attack Israeli soldiers already termed terrorists?
Keep in mind, under NY “law,” once you are accused of terrorism, you are stripped of essential rights as a citizen.
I didn’t say “convicted.” I said “accused.”
And, no, I’m not drawing a conclusion from de facto circumstances. This is what the Courts of New York believe.
About a year ago, maybe less, a group of defendants in NY won an appeal when they claimed that accusing them of terrorism was overbroad — they were Latino gangbangers. The court agreed, noting that terrorism charges came along with, in effect, the negation of due process.
And no one even blinked at that.
Effectively, terrosim is explicitly racist. It has absolutely nothing to do with your behavior. You’re a terrorist because Fuck You, That’s Why.
Which is bad enough, but when you combine it with the destruction of due process, you have a pogrom.
I see Sekhmet wants to give people accused of terrorism due process. The New York Times has had some columnists who said, ‘While everyone killed or imprisoned by Obama was a heinous terrorist who deserved everything that our brave forces did to them, and Obama was always careful to review solid (but classified) proof of their guilt, what if we have another president who accuses, kills, and tortures the innocent?’
All the responses are, ‘You’re a terrorist lover, and the New York Times should fire you. The US president cannot make a mistake. The US electoral process guarantees that. So if ANY US president declares anyone a terrorist, that person must be a heinous terrorist who just wants to kill innocent Americans and who deserves everything the president orders done. They don’t deserve a trial. They deserve nothing but enhanced interrogation and a painful death immediately if not sooner.’
Start about 2,000 years ago with a Roman chef, known for the salad they named after him. He deeply regretted some civilians killed when trapped between two armies.
Jump forward to WWI. Mostly, the armed forces–army, navy, and air force–attacked military targets. But, in the last year of the war, Germany, desperate, bombed an undefended village in eastern England, trying to terrify the English into withdrawing from the war. The British responded by classifying the attack Secret until after the war so few Brits heard about it to be terrorised into demanding withdrawal.
After WWI, the British bombed their rebellious colonials with poison gas. Much cheaper and more effective than sending in Army units. And that was different: those colonials weren’t English. They weren’t even European.
WWII. Germany was bombing British military targets. Chamberlain, fearful of massive German attacks with nerve gas, made no response. Then the Tories replaced Chamberlain with Churchill, who ordered bombers to strike an undefended city in Western Germany. Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to stop bombing military targets and retaliate by bombing English cities. Which was one of the things that caused the Nazis to lose the war.
Once the US entered the war, there was massive bombing of German cities. After it was clear that Germany had lost, there was the fire bombing of Dresden, an undefended city with no military value. More than 100,000 civilians were killed. This was fully justified, since it helped the Allies win the war. German bombing could not be so justified, so those who ordered it, and some of those who carried it out, were executed after Germany surrendered unconditionally. (I’ll skip Japan, where most agree those nukes saved a lot of lives. Those who say that don’t have any convincing evidence, but the history books all say they’re right.)
So the overwhelming majority of Americans say, ‘This is War. We have to kill the terrorists, and armies don’t give members of the opposing forces trials, they just kill them. They also kill civilians to weaken the enemy war effort. That’s just war.’
By this logic, the US has the inalienable right to kill anyone and everyone whose death MIGHT advance American interests. And the US is exercising this right with the approval of the overwhelming majority of the American voters. Only the loony left and one or two loony libertarians on the right have any objections.
If the US wants to nuke all those it thinks might be its enemy, that’s perfectly all right, (as long as this doesn’t annoy anyone who could possibly retaliate in kind).
(Some disapprove of this. But the US is a democracy and the majority has spoken, so they’re just anti-government insurrectionists who should be arrested, subjected to ‘enhanced interrogation,’ and sent to Guantánamo or just disappeared.)