The Humanitarian?

 

One of the morally revolting things about war (one of thousands) is that we define loss of life by how many people are killed on "our" side, while ignoring the reality that all of America's war in the last 100 years have resulted in far, far, far more "enemy" civilians being killed than American soldiers.

In addition to American soldiers and local civilians, enemy soldiers are also killed.  Enemy soldiers can be seen as terrorists, as people who get what's coming to them, or as people who are defending their homes from an invader.  For the purpose of this argument, I will put this issue aside and focus on civilians rather than tackle the more complicated issue of whether resisting invasion makes one a "terrorist".

Another revolting truth is that our "leaders" who set these bloodbaths in motion almost never make any reference to the death sown by their actions.  Each individual American who dies in war is lionized as having made the "ultimate sacrifice", as having died for us, while the far larger number of innocent civilians killed are either ignored entirely or chalked up to "collateral damage".

So how utterly twisted is it that the only major American political figure to speak empathetically about these faceless dead, indeed to speak about them at all, is.......Donald Trump.

 "Look, the war is a disaster.  The war should not have been entered into.  To lose all of those thousands and thousands of people, on our side and their side.  I mean, you have Iraqi kids, not only our soldiers, walking around with no legs, no arms, no faces.  All for no reason"
7-13-04

Aside from the unfortunate phrasing of people "walking around with no legs", this is an example of a fleetingly rare moral clarity.  The man largely understood to be a self-absorbed blowhard, a heartless industrialist, a racist, sexist Islamophobe is the only person with the moral clarity and bravery to even mention the "Iraqi kids".

"Hundreds and hundreds of young people killed.  And what about the people coming back with no arms and legs? Not to mentions the other side.  All those Iraqi kids who've been blown to pieces.  And it turned out that all of the reasons for the war were blatantly wrong.  All this for nothing."

8-13-14

These two quotes were uttered 10 years apart.  Remember this when Hillary Clinton insists that Trump wasn't "really" against the war.  And keep in mind that Hillary's change of heart about the war had nothing to do with heart or humanity.  It was pure politics, as was her vote to unleash the dogs of hell in the first place.

It is exceedingly difficult to find virtue in Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton, but Trump's unique willingness to acknowledge the humanity of the tens upon tens of thousands of young people who have been physically or psychologically destroyed by our actions stands out prominently amid the moral desert that nearly all of our politicians inhabit.  

I am actually moved by this glimmer of humanity, but I am just as distraught that it is so rare.  In terms of the most basic humanity, nearly all of our "leaders" are blind.  How bizarre that Donald Trump, of all people, may in fact be the one-eyed man.

Has It Been That Long?

Of all the images, moving and still, from 9/11 that have been employed to captivate the horror of that day, this picture of Mohammad Atta is, for me, more evocative than any other.  This man was the lead hijacker of the first plane to strike the first building on 9/11, and the leader, in fact, of the entire network of 19 nihilists that struck that day.

His very face has all the ingredient of that day: steel, ash, a total lack of pity.  Death.  He posed for this picture while getting a driver's license in Florida, and it is clear, as so many things are in retrospect, that he was already ready.  Perhaps he was hoping that the DMV clerk would somehow end up on one of the planes. 

There are so many aspects about what those people did on that day that could be written about that writers have a hard time picking just one.  This was a massive conspiracy, spanning continents, with multiple rabbit holes of logistics, planning, funding, and operational support.  There were so many targets, so many thousands of tons of steel and glass, so many thousands of innocent people sucked into the whirlwind of it.

9/11 is, to the writer, like an elephant to an ant; it can only be explored an inch at a time.  Here are a few inches that have been on my mind since the 15th anniversary of the attacks.

Big picture:  the War on Terrorism is an even bigger failure than the war on drugs.  Terrorism has increased by 6000% (not a typo. six thousand percent) since 9/11.  But most of that violence has occurred outside of the U.S., so we don't focus on it.  But we have set the Middle East on fire.  They had the gas; we brought the matches.

Other Thoughts:

Why is there no footage or photograph of the plane crashing into the Pentagon?  The Pentagon has released a handful of individual frames from a surveillance camera, none of which clearly show a plane.  We know there were several other surveillance cameras on nearby buildings, but those are all classified.

Why?  If a plane crashed into the Pentagon, and there is video of it, how could it possibly threaten national security to show something that the government says already occurred?  Mark my words, if video of the World Trade Center plane crashes could have been kept secret by the government, they would have.

Think about the psychology of an organization that will not release images of an event that that very same organization wants us to believe happened.  The government creates conspiracy theories by its obsession on keeping things secret even if it insists that we accept the obvious truth of those things.

I assume a plane hit the Pentagon, but I know these two things:  Firstly, the government claims to have, and refuses to release, objective evidence of that event in the form of video footage.  Secondly, there is no independent video or photograph of an airplane approaching or impacting the Pentagon.

Washington DC, as opposed to New York, does not have modern skyscrapers.  It is less dense and lower-lying than New York.  Because of this, any aggressive, low-flying aircraft would be far more visible from much further away in DC than it would be in lower Manhattan.

And, like New York, Washington DC is full of people with money,  people in media, and tourists.  In other words, people with CAMERAS.  And yet, there is no photograph or film, from any source, of an airliner flying fast and low along the Potomac River even though everyone in DC would have already known that hijacked airplanes were being flown into buildings representing American power.

The only footage that does exist is in the hands of the government, but they won't release it because it needs to be secret even though everyone "knows" what it shows, but we only know that because of an unshowable tape.  It's exhausting.

Another thought:  I think the most likely cover-up being orchestrated by the government is that some of the hijackers were working for our government and were, in fact, double agents sent by bin Laden to infiltrate our intelligence services.

Consider: the CIA would have been desperate from 1998 to 2001 to recruit agents that could infiltrate al Qaeda and pass us information on the next attack.  These recruits would ideally be young Arab men.  What it the CIA unwittingly recruited al Qaeda members to spy on al Qaeda?

What if some of those terrorists came to the US under CIA protection, claiming to be tracking the "real" terrorists while, in really, they were the real terrorists?  And what if you were a CIA agent who, on that awful day, saw pictures of the hijackers, knowing that some of them were being supported and paid by your very own agency?

What would you do?  You would bury that information.  And you would tell yourself, not without reason, that if the truth ever came out....

9/11 will never end.  I'm confident that most of the government's account of what happened is true, but I am equally as confident that some of it is not.  We are all left to live in the chasm between those two truths.

Where's the Outrage?

Hillary Clinton got her start in Washington D.C. 40 years ago as a very junior member of the apparatus that drove Richard Nixon from the presidency for committing the worst of all political crimes:  getting caught doing what your predecessors did without getting caught. 

Hillary, on the other hand, did not get caught committing old and common political crimes; she got caught inventing her own, brand new political crimes.  And not only will she not be driven from the presidency for her crimes; odds are that she will in fact be driven to the presidency in spite of them.

Hillary's email scandal is difficult to deconstruct for a few reasons; one is that the mainstream media is covering it, but not really explaining it.  Another is that it involves computers which, even for people who have lived in a computerized world for years, can quickly descend into incomprehesible techno-babble.

Yet another reason is that this scandal doesn't involve sex.  It is thanks in part to Hillary's husband the scandal and sex are often so synonymous that a scandal involving people with all their clothes on seems somehow not very scandalous at all, even if it is far more relevant to one's fitness to be president than one's private sexual behavior.

If Hillary had been sending pornography from her phone, she would have to drop out.  But she was only sending national security secrets, so......whatever.

I will attempt here to explain this issue in a more comprehensible way, while acknowledging that I myself still do not, and never will, fully grasp all of its dimensions and implications.  I will attempt to focus on a couple of big-picture concepts rather than to dissect all the technological and stautory minutiae.

When someone works at the level of Hillary Clinton in the federal government, their communications are public property.  Almost none of these communications can be made public in the here and now and much of it never will due to national security concerns, but it is, in theory if not in practice, the public's information.

A brief aside: some things must be classified.  The names of individuals in other nations who are risking their lives in the enterprise of passing us information should obviously not be made public.  But in the national secuirty state we now inhabit, the government has a motive and a habit of classifying nearly everything it does.

That is a huge problem.  We are paying for these actions, they are being done in our name, and we will reap the results, whether positive or negative.  Much more of what our "leaders" do should be made public in a much more timely manner.

That very important caveat aside, all of Hillary Clinton's communications as Secretary of State were the property of the government and, eventually, hopefully, of the public at large.  What they most decidedly were not was the personal property of Hillary Clinton.

When Clinton was sworn in, she was advised that personal email accounts cannot be linked to government devices.  In other words, if Hillary had a gmail account, she was forbidden from accessing that acount from a government-issued phone or laptop.

This is because government-issued devices are used to conduct government business, much of which is secret.  These devices, therefore, have all sorts of high-tech and high-cost protections against hacking.  Allowing personal emails to flow into a government-issued computer would expose that computer to possible hacking via spam mail, viruses, etc.

So, Hillary was forbidden from getting her personal email on her government devices.  So what did she do?  She got her own devices, without all the protective bells and whistles, and used those personal devices for both personal and government communications.

Imagine if Hillary Clinton were the principal of an elementary school.  She is informed by the powers-that-be that peanuts must never be allowed in the kitchens or cafeteria of her school because several of her students have life-threatening peanut allergies and the possibility of a mistake or a cross-contamination could literally be a life or death issue.

What would Hillary do in that situation?  She would not bring peanuts into the school; she would bring the entire student body on a field trip to a peanut farm and then tell the mayor and the school board that she didn't break any rules.

Another way to look at this issue is to go old-school.  Forget emails and servers and encryption software.  Think about paper.  Everyone understands paper.  Think of the emails as paper documents.

The State Department is full of top-secret documents.  The State Department is a very secure building and there is a rule, indeed a law, against any person taking any document out of the building for any reason.

Hillary decides, in this analogy (and maybe in real life, who knows?), to take top-secret paper documents home with her every night.  When the State Department finds out and asks her to return those documents, Hillary says, "Sure, but I've mixed them all in with my bills, personal letters, poetry, and doodles.  Give me a few weeks take out the personal, irrelevant stuff and then I'll give you all the government stuff back."

What does she do in those few weeks?  She goes through all the government stuff, our property, and decides which of those stolen documents she will return.  Whatever stolen documents make her look bad, she will destroy.

We know now that Hillary's staff took her personal devices, which were full of stolen government property, and literally smashed them with hammers.  Presumably the vibe was something like this:

So, in summation:  Hillary stole government property, decided which of that property to return, decided which of that property to destroy, and we have no way of knowing what property was either destroyed or pilfered by hostile foreign governments or terrorist organizations or drug cartels.

There's so much more to this, but what's been outlined here is enough to disqualify this woman from office.  She will, in all likelihood, still win, and if she does I have no intellectual option other than to wish her well.  But in either case, just like her husband, we know exactly what we will be getting.