The Washington Post is reporting that US military drones have crashed more than 400 times. Yes, such a great, precise, carefully targeted technology. I’m so proud to be an American taxpayer paying to kill civilians willy-nilly with these things.
First Review of “After We Kill You”
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Kirkus Reviews has issued the first official review of “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan“:
AFTER WE KILL YOU, WE WILL WELCOME YOU BACK AS HONORED GUESTS
Unembedded in Afghanistan
Author: Ted RallReview Issue Date: July 1, 2014
Online Publish Date: June 19, 2014
Publisher:Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Pages: 240
Price ( Hardcover ): $26.00
ISBN ( Hardcover ): 978-0-8090-2340-0
Category: NonfictionA political agenda can’t undermine the author’s credibility as an observer who gets close to the Afghan people and sees what otherwise goes unreported.
As a cartoonist, alternative-weekly correspondent, and author of previous books on American imperialism and international intervention (Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia is the Next Middle East, 2014, etc.), Rall lays his cards on the table at the beginning. His subject is “the war against Afghanistan” rather than “the war in Afghanistan”—“Like all choices of language, this is a political choice.” The author is not one of the reporters with big rolls of bills and accommodations at the best hotels, subsidized by major news organizations, nor is he embedded with the soldiers, a position he finds hopelessly compromised: “The Taliban are right: American journalism has been reduced to rank propaganda.” Through cartoons, dispatches and contextual analysis, Rall shares what he has learned through two trips to an Afghanistan that Americans rarely see and comes to conclusions that invite readers to share his outrage: “We have spent $229 billion here. Meals cost less than a dollar. No Afghan should be starving—yet millions are.” He argues that America’s longest war is unwinnable, since “Afghan resistance forces live there. We don’t. Sooner or later, U.S. troops will depart. All the Afghan resistance has to do is wear us down and wait us out….All occupations ultimately fail.” Talking with Afghans and staying in their villages has allowed the author to understand their puzzlement and resentment at an occupying force with so many resources but so little expenditure in terms of infrastructure support in comparison with military spending. There’s a particularly telling photograph of a “children crossing” sign in which the caricatures are practically stick figures: “In Afghanistan, even abstract symbols are emaciated.”
Even readers who do not share Rall’s politics will find his reporting powerful and convincing.
One nit: Who doesn’t have a political agenda, especially when it comes to Afghanistan? I simply believe in wearing my agenda on my sleeve. Obviously, this is a very positive review. I’m happy and relieved.
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: Why So Depressed?
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After a court-appointed monitor for California’s state prisons told a panel of judges that about three dozen inmates on death row are so mentally ill that they require 24-hour care, state prison officials have announced that they will build a 40-bed hospital at San Quentin prison to house them.
“This is the only place on Earth where you’d be talking about building a psychiatric hospital for condemned prisoners,” U.C. Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring told Times reporter Paige St. John. “It is a measure of American greatness and American silliness at the same time…We are curing them to make them executable.”
Until recently, states that frequently execute prisoners, like Texas and Florida, did not carry out executions on inmates with IQs under 70. The idea was that the punishment loses its meaning if victims of capital punishment are too mentally disabled to understand to them.
Take, for example, the case of Andre Thomas, a Texas schizophrenic who gouged out his right eye and then, several weeks later, stabbed his estranged wife and two young children to death, dropped their organs in his pocket and went to the police station to confess — and used his phone call to call the dead wife. (He gouged out his left eye in prison, and ate it.) He was sentenced to death — but to what end?
Recognizing the absurdity of the live-or-die cutoff, on May 26th the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the practice. “Florida seeks to execute a man because he scored a 71 instead of 70 on an IQ test,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the majority.
States have gone to extreme lengths to make their prisoners sane enough to kill.
In 2012 Texas obtained permission from a judge to force Steven Staley, a murderer and armed robber, to be force-fed antipsychotic medications because “the State has an essential interest in ensuring that the sentence of this Court [execution] is carried out.”
Emily Bazelon described Staley’s mental state in Slate: “Doctors who have examined Staley on death row have said that he talks in a robot-like monotone yet has ‘grandiose and paranoid’ delusions, including the beliefs that he invented the first car and marketed a character from Star Trek. He has given himself black eyes and self-inflicted lacerations and has been found spreading feces and covered with urine. Medicated with the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, Staley complained of paralysis and sometimes appeared to be in a catatonic state. He has worn a bald spot on the back of his head from lying on the floor of his cell.”
An appeals court stayed the forcefeeding order in 2013.
If you think about it, this can make your brain hurt:
A guy commits a terrible crime, probably because he is mentally ill.
The state cures his mental illness, or mitigates it enough so that he qualifies for execution.
The saner man is executed for a crime he wouldn’t commit now — because he’s sane now.
Or conversely:
A guy commits a terrible crime, probably because he is mentally ill.
The state fails to cure his mental illness, or mitigate it enough so that he would qualify for execution.
The insane man, who would remain a threat to society were he to escape somehow, lives out his life — not that he’s much aware of it.
It’s not just the prisoners who are nuts.
Pando Daily: My Week in Review
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Here, in reverse chronological order, is a summary of art and writing I’ve produced for Pando Daily over the last couple of weeks.
Essay: In print or on dead trees, there’s money in long-form journalism
Essay: Going after Bergdahl: Why don’t more soldiers walk away?
America’s “moderates” are wild, crazy — and more extreme than any “extremist”
This one made noise on social media: Essay: Iraq is the ultimate startup everyone knew was doomed
Sketches: Meet today’s Southland startup competitors (in cartoons)
Sketches: Bonobos CEO and co-founder Andy Dunn now on stage at Southland
Essay: The $90,000 question: Uber’s salary lie harder to kill than a garlic-immune vampire
Sketches: Ted Rall’s Southland Startup Contest Highlights
Essay: Yes, Jimmy Wales, There Is a Right To Be Forgotten’
Essay: As sinister dealers in mass death, the CIA could at least spare us its snarky tweets
Blog: Melt is a social media app I don’t hate yet
Blog: Tech companies still awful on diversity, but AirBnB and AOL less awful than Quantcast and Box
Essay: Jeff Bezos has apparently taught this old newspaper how to write Internet headlines
Blog: Disrupting Darwinism: AT&T offers $50,000 to stop cellphone users getting hit by cars
LOS ANGELES TIMES CARTOON: 300,000 Californians Vote for Accused Gun-Runner. What’s Up?
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“In this week’s largely sleepy California election, there was one startling result: more than 300,000 ballots cast for Leland Yee for secretary of state, good enough for third place, even though he dropped out after being accused of conspiracy to run guns and political corruption,” Mark Z. Barabak writes in The Times. “Yee’s tally, which is likely to grow as hundreds of thousands of uncounted ballots are processed, pushed him past a pair of good-government candidates also vying to be the state’s chief election officer — a bit of irony adding to a widely held notion, especially outside the state, that Californians are a bit nuts.”
Electorally, the turnout for Lee echoes the L.A. sheriff who drew 39% of the vote despite being dead.
Barabak attributes the startling results for Lee to several factors:
- “The size and sprawl of the state”
- “The lack of attention, by voters and the media alike, paid to so-called down-ballot offices like secretary of state”
- “Coincidence“: “Candidate Betty Yee was on the same ballot running for state controller, also a relatively obscure office. She received a number of endorsements, including the support of several newspapers and labor unions, and some voters may have simply confused the two.”
- “The ephemeral nature of news — even events that are widely covered or hugely hyped — in this age of perpetual information.
“People can’t even remember who won the Super Bowl,” Richie Ross, who managed Yee’s campaign before he dropped out, told Barabak. “And people are surprised that ordinary voters — not the political insiders and smarty-pants who follow this stuff — can’t remember who was indicted three months ago?”
Barabak is careful not to blame the “supposed shallowness and stupidity of the California electorate.”
He’s nicer than I am.
This is worse than the dead sheriff. You’d have to spectacularly ignorant not to have heard of the charges faced by Leland Yee. Not to mention, crazy cynical and mad blasé to have already forgotten them.
Even by the low standards of American political corruption, which has seen Congressmen caught taking cash bribes from fake Arab sheiks, and dipping into campaign funds to buy stuffed animals, elk heads and fur capes, it’s not every day that an anti-gun crusader with character actor looks gets is accused of offering to set up an undercover agent with arms traffickers who deal in rocket-propelled grenade launchers. Yes, yes, we’re all busy people — I myself have binge-watching of “Orange is the New Black” to do — but really. This was a big national story. How could anyone forget a State Senator charged with gun-running and hanging out with alleged “tong” (Chinese mafia) gangsters with colorful monikers like Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow (official title: dragonhead)?
Once you hear that story, you’re not going to forget it.
Which means that there are, in the state of California, 300,000 people who do not watch, listen to, read, or hear about the news. At all.
My first impulse was to say that no one that stupid or ignorant should be allowed to vote. But I’ve thought about it: with two political parties so close together on the ideological scale, and candidates whose perfidy varies merely by degrees, what difference does it make?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: America’s “Moderates” Are Wild, Crazy — and More Extreme Than Any “Extremist”
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Every damn second of every stupid day in this brain-dead nation, the insipid overlords of America’s inane corporate news media put out the same message: extremism is extremely bad.
9/11? Carried out by Muslim extremists. The couple who murdered two police officers in Las Vegas this week? Right-wing, anti-government extremists. Washington gridlock? A Republican Party taken over by intransigent extremists (the Tea Party).
In this official narrative, unquestioned by left and right alike, moderation and centrism are equated with reasonableness. So Hillary Rodham Clinton describes herself as a middle-way realist who values compromise — i.e., a moderate and therefore a Very Serious Person, and thus qualified to be president.
To be feared and marginalized, by contrast, are those the system defines as “extremists.” (Some might call them men and women of principle. But that would be on funny little blogs no one reads.)
If you criticize the mainstream (the current government, the biggest corporations, the most well-connected journalistic elites) in a sustained way — especially if you call those in charge out for breaking their own rules and laws — you will be categorized as one of these horrible “extremists.”
A recent example: Michael Kinsley, lately of Slate and The New Republic (the most centrist of moderate magazines), comparing Glenn Greenwald to Robespierre (within the context of the pretty extreme French revolution, extreme) in the New York Times (down to the tone of any given sentence, the most centrist of moderate newspapers), for the sin of complaining about NSA spying, drone assassinations, Guantánamo and other (when you think about it, extreme) U.S. government activities that violate — U.S. government laws.
Though, actually, “violate” doesn’t quite go far enough. Bombing countries without bothering to declare war against them pees all over the Constitution, numerous federal laws — the whole spirit of the American endeavor. Extreme, no?
This is some bass-ackward shit.
For asking that political elites obey their own laws on domestic spying and not assassinating American citizens on American soil — even being willing to mount an actual filibuster over it — Rand Paul gets portrayed as a wacky fringe loony-toons extremist. For listening to our calls and reading our email and dropping Hellfire missiles on American citizens — and children! — without a warrant, Barack Obama is a moderate.
What the “moderates” call “mainstream” is, in truth, about as extreme as it gets.
Ex-Obama Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, formerly of Goldman Sachs and thus the embodiment of reasonable centristness, is pushing a book in which he claims a tough-call-but-had-to-do-it middle ground for an action that was in reality about as extreme as can be: his reaction to the 2008-09 economic collapse. Geithner gave $7.77 trillion in taxpayer money to the banks and their top executives, no questions asked, and $0.00 to the homeowners and unemployed people whom the banks screwed. (Also, there’s this: he failed. The economy is still tens of millions of unemployed behind; consumer confidence is still shit. NPR still asks his opinion.)
Speaking of books, Hillary’s latest brief, called “Hard Choices” — a phrase meant to conjure Solomonic wisdom — kinda sorta admits she “got it wrong” by voting for the U.S. war against Iraq.
Democrats voting for Republican-led wars — that’s the “crossing the aisle” “bipartisan” “seriousness” Manhattan and Beltway pundits like Thomas Friedman and David Ignatius, both of whom did the same, approve of.
Moderate.
The war, of course, was an extreme affair. Between $2 trillion and $6 trillion down the shitter. 4,500 dead American troops. Hundreds of thousands whose brains will never be right again. At least a million — more like two million — dead Iraqis. Who can count them all? A Second World oil state, secular socialist and authoritarian, reduced by ten years of American occupation to civil war and total societal, political and economic disintegration, Third World going on Fourth.
And what about the way it began? Ginned up out of whole cloth. Even by U.S. standards, it takes some big stones to justify attacking a nation that never attacked, or threatened to attack, you. Pretending that you know about WMDs, and then getting caught lying, and then not only not apologizing and immediately withdrawing, but doubling down (c.f., the “surge”)?
Pretty damn extreme, if you ask me. (No one does. Cuz, like, my saying so makes me extreme.)
Hillary’s “hard choice”? In 2003, Bush was popular, so was invading Iraq. She assumed that, when she ran for reelection to the Senate in 2006, Bush and his war would still be the bee’s knees.
Sorry, Iraq.
Hard choice, you see.
With “moderates” like this…
Yet the Moderate Class is so loud about the evils of extremism. Writing in the very moderate Washington Post opinion pages, a forum that promoted the Iraq War and publishes the full range of editorial opinion from center-right Democrat to center-right Republican, Paul Waldman asked “How much does right-wing rhetoric contribute to right-wing terrorism?” after the Vegas cop shooting.
Here’s a taste: “When you broadcast every day that the government of the world’s oldest democracy is a totalitarian beast bent on turning America into a prison of oppression and fear, when you glorify lawbreakers like Cliven Bundy, when you say that your opponents would literally destroy the country if they could, you can’t profess surprise when some people decide that violence is the only means of forestalling the disaster you have warned them about.”
Mmmaybe. But how about a little context? Assuming that “the fetishization of firearms and the constant warnings that government will soon be coming to take your guns” inspired the Vegas shooters, shooting cops isn’t good. But: (only) four people died, including the killers, in Vegas. Four dead due to right-wing extremism.
Millions died in the Iraq War. This slaughter wasn’t inspired by, but directly carried out by a bipartisan Congress coming together to support an attack editorial writers on both the Right and what passes for the Left agreed upon.
Why doesn’t anyone at the Post ask “How much does mainstream Democratic-Republican rhetoric contribute to U.S. state terrorism?” Here is how Waldman would write if he or his editors were sane:
“When you broadcast every day that an isolated Middle Eastern dictatorship is a totalitarian beast bent on reducing America to ashes and irradiated rubble, when you appease lawbreakers like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and John Yoo, when you say that antiwar activists would literally destroy the country if they could, to score cheap political points, you can’t profess surprise when some people decide that war is the only means of forestalling the disaster you have warned them about.”
When you run an extremist government that markets itself as realistically moderate, your smartest move is distraction.
See Huge Crazy Extremist Kettle point at tiny extremist pot.
Like, even when a politician considered extremist within the bounds of the two-party “mainstream” gets defeated by an even more extreme extremist, mourn the loss of the slightly less extreme extremist as “A Bad Omen for Moderates.”
And ask things like this:
Why on earth would a 22-year-old from Florida with a “passion for Islam and teaching children about the Quran turn into something more disturbing”?
The New York Times approvingly quotes Veronica Monroy, a friend of a man who carried out a suicide bombing against Assad government forces in Syria: “He deplored any kind of negativity, and was always the first to lend a hand if you needed one. He was religious, but definitely not an extremist,” Monroy said. “He was loving and caring, and I know he came from a strong, loving, supportive home.”
Get the message? Jihad is extreme. Fundamentalists are severe and cold, not loving or caring — and they’re usually the damaged products of dysfunctional families. Extremism is “negative.” Follow a religion. Just don’t really follow all its tenets.
Like that stuff about giving up all your stuff and joining the poor: that would be extreme.
If you step back from the media maelstrom, it isn’t all that hard to frame another narrative: here was a young man, his father from Israeli-occupied Palestine, politicized by the global onslaught against and oppression of Islam, led by the U.S. Done with “doing typical adolescent things, such as playing video games,” he put his ass on the line and made the supreme sacrifice for his coreligionists.
Moner Mohammad Abusalha’s wasn’t my brand of “extremism.” Nevertheless, unlike Hillary’s vote to destroy Iraq, carefully calibrated to maximize her centrist warmongering cred as a “realist” “moderate,” it’s one I can respect.
(Ted Rall, Staff Cartoonist and Writer for Pando Daily, is the author of the upcoming “After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.” Subscribe to Ted Rall at Beacon.)
COPYRIGHT 2014 TED RALL, DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM
iRaq was the ultimate startup everyone knew was doomed
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Eleven years ago, the U.S. military installed a Shiite-majority puppet government in Baghdad. The cost of regime change in Iraq has been estimated at between $2 trillion and $6 trillion. Nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers were killed. Tens of thousands were wounded. At least one million Iraqis died.
You could think of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq as the most expensive startup of all time, a high-risk experiment, but with real human lives at stake.
More here.
Hillary on NPR
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“The most important thing I did was to help restore America’s leadership in the world. And I think that was a very important accomplishment. We were flat on our back when I walked in there the first time.
“We were viewed as being untrustworthy, as violating our moral rules and values, as being economically hobbled. And we had to get out there and once again promote American values and pursue our interests and protect national security. Because of the eight years that preceded us — it was the economic collapse, it was two wars, it was the war on terror that led to some very unfortunate, un-American actions being taken. That was my biggest challenge. It was why the president asked me to be secretary of state.”
Oddly, the rest of the world still doesn’t trust us. It’s almost as though Gitmo were still open, we were still torturing, droning, warring…
Here is why you shouldn’t vote for Hillary
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From The Washington Post’s summary of Clinton’s new book:
Clinton describes U.S. reaction to the unfolding protests that became the Arab Spring, starting with the first stirrings of protest in Tunisia. She defends traditional U.S. alliances with autocratic regimes as part of balancing various U.S. interests against one another, defining a pragmatic approach that would have the United States push regimes toward democratic reform while also forming alliances with those willing to advance U.S. security interests. She describes herself as being consistently more cautious about siding with protesters who promise an uncertain future over longtime, if autocratic, U.S. allies — particularly in Egypt. She suggests her position aligned her with Biden and Gates in opposition to others in the White House, who she suggests were swept away by idealism and wanted to move more quickly to help usher Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak from power.
A vote for Hillary is a “pragmatic” vote for reliable dictators over people yearning to be free.
