Saturday, July 15, 2006

Guantanamo Bay - Geneva

"The Bush administration has agreed to apply the Geneva Conventions to all terrorism suspects in U.S. custody, bowing to the Supreme Court's recent rejection of policies that have imprisoned hundreds for years without trials.
The Pentagon announced yesterday that it has called on military officials to adhere to the conventions in dealing with al-Qaeda detainees. The administration also has decided that even prisoners held by the CIA in secret prisons abroad must be treated in accordance with international standards, an interpretation that would prohibit prisoners from being subjected to harsh treatment in interrogations, several U.S. officials said."

This is definitely good news. The holding of prisoners without trial should have never happened in the first place, but better late than never I guess. Finally maybe this ridiculous bantering between the White House and the supreme court will stop...scratch that, they'll find something else to argue over.

source

Do We Trust Bush?

Everyone needs to take a look at this. If there is one post you read on this entire blog let it be this one. I found this article very informative and frightening.
This article found on tribe concerns the possibility of WWIII with sufficient evidence to support it. History has repeated itself and will continue to until people learn from it. Over and over again we have been “deceived” into wars we should not be involved in. This article predicts the next cycle of history repeating itself.

“In his work, "The Art of War", Sun Tzu observed that all wars are based on deception.

Simply put, this means that those leaders who wish to start a war must lie to convince their people that war is necessary, as the vast majority of people do not want war, do not wish to risk their life and limb in war, and in general avoid the unpleasantness that war is. Throughout history, wars have usually been started by a ruler playing a dirty trick on his people; a dirty trick that fools them into thinking that they themselves have been, or are about to be attacked.

As an example, Hitler played this trick on the people of Germany by having his soldiers dress up in Polish uniforms and attack a German radio station near the border of Poland. To aid in the illusion, prisoners were dressed in Polish uniforms and shot dead on the scene for the benefit of the radio station's on-air reporting, and later for the German newspapers. World War Two resulted. Germany lost.

Vietnam was transformed from "Advising" to all out war based on the report that North Vietnam had fired torpedoes at the USS Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin. Armed with that report, President Lyndon Johnson obtained a war declaration from Congress. Later, it was revealed that Johnson knew the report of the attack was a fake. The US lost that war.

The US Government clearly lied about Iraq's 'nookular' weapons to create a public fear of imminent attack. Tony Blair told the British subjects attack was potentially only 45 minutes away. And it looks like the US will lose that war as well, inasmuch as the stated political goals can never be met.”

I understand the points that this article is trying to make, but I hope that they are wrong for humanities sake. If these predictions are correct, we will be seeing war for the next decade. There will be massive turmoil throughout the world. If Russia turns against the U.S. we will see another “cold war like” era.
The U.S. tries to play it off like Israel is not their puppet, but how could people possibly oversee this. We give them billions in aid every year. Militarily we back them, not questions asked. Israel is the U.S.’s foothold and they will do whatever it takes to keep it.
I will not be surprised to see things start to get really messy in the next year with Israel attacking Syria and maybe Iran. This will then cause the U.S. to move in and try to dominate the situation and in turn unsettle Russia. And then the fun begins with every other super power joining in, hence WWIII.

source

Friday, July 14, 2006

Steven Colbert Correspondent's Dinner clip

This is fairly old, (from May I think) but I thought it was hilarious. I just found it today and thought it was worth a post. Colbert really tears the White House a new one. You can tell his performance made a lot of the guests fairly uneasy by the sound of their laughter.

part 1
part 2

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Interesting...

Work has been long and grueling as of late, so the posts have become shorter and less often. This blog is still in its construction phase, with me changing different things. but hopefully all that will end soon...
I discovered this online comic today. I thought it was interesting and pretty well done. So if you get a chance check it out.

Real posts soon, I promise!