Now that assassination is official American foreign policy I did not find it hard to imagine, five minutes ago, that Simon Sheikh had been poisoned and there would be more men and women of the Left so dealt with in the future.
Untune that string, and hark what discord follows, as Shakespeare’s Ulysses noted.
Diane Feinstein yesterday asked that Assange be charged with spying, an echo of Sarah Palin who wanted him shot like a moose and John McCain who wanted him lethally injected for treason. A film will open soon acclaiming the murder in a foreign city of Osama Bin Laden and his son and his friend and his friend’s wife for crimes unspecified and in a court unproven. And every month or so a drone takes out a foreign politician, and sometimes his young family. And every week or so an Arab is killed by an Israeli for his politics. And it’s not too much to imagine Simon, a very effective political organiser and publicist, might have been so treated tonight.
Perish the thought. There are no conspiracies. Yasr Arafat was not poisoned; no way. A lone madman took out Bin Laden, another took out Indira Ghandhi, another Anwar Sadat, another Olof Palme. James Ashby was deeply affronted to receive his two thousandth saucy text message, one different from all the others and from the thousands of saucy text messages he himself sent out to friends and lovers. John Edwards and John Della Bosca and John Brogden and Mike Rann were not set up. No-one tried to kill Castro, never. Both Kennedy and Oswald were killed by lone madmen, in the same city, within two days. Some cities are big on lone madmen. There is no evil intent. None. Not ever. The CIA never plots to do people harm. They earn their billions by doing cryptic crosswords and playing Monopoly in Langley, and writing scenarios they never enact.
If Simon has a history of epilepsy, fine. If he ate a dodgy oyster tonight, okay.
But you wonder, you really do.
And Assange is right to be scared. Really scared.
Discuss.
Name:
Why on earth would you conflate the Julian Assange case with Osama Bin Laden ? I mean, seriously ? Are we giving self-professed jihadists and remorseless terrorists who rejoice in the murder of thousands the benefit of the doubt nowadays ?
What do you mean ‘the benefit of the doubt’? What are you saying?
That it’s okay to kill on suspicion anyone in the house of a foreign figure you dislike? That Mushareff, say, had every right to kill George Bush and his daughters in a surprise midnight raid because of Shock and Awe?
Like that sort of thing, do you.
I prefer trial by jury.
That’s not how the world works (or has ever worked, nor will it ever) and you know it. Please do not suggest Osama Bin Laden was the victim of an injustice.
No, but his wives and children and business associate and his wife were.
Or do you disagree?
Please answer this.
Yes and no. Life’s messy.
I am just suprised that no jihadist, saw through the whole charade and doing a quick calculation on the cost, didn’t cut of Osama’s head, present it on a pike to the Americans and said ” Here, this is what you were after, have it and now fuck off!”
Where does reason and conscience go during times of war, on what tropical isle do they take their rest?
The same tropical isle they habitat most of the time.
Well of course George and Tony could have done the calculationand have shown up and said “take us two and we will call it square and we just let the rest of the folks get on with their lives, waddya say huh, waddya say?”
You’re right to be concerned that people are dying; a society bereft of concerns would be heartless.
I would nevertheless point out another view. Assange, for example, oversaw the leaks that brought down the Moroccan government, and the contagion spread in an “Arab Spring” over which clouds are already gathering. Bin Laden’s 9/11 adventure provoked an initial response that was looking at returning like for like, ie weapons of mass destruction for WMD. Drones target people who agitate for the oppression of women and children worldwide, not to mention the prosecution of ideological warfare; and such warfare causes Israeli children to spend their summer holidays in bomb shelters.
And so it spirals downwards. I would note that the bloke in charge of the assissinations is the one who wanted to talk to anybody who came to the table. I give him his due: he tried it, and found it didn’t work.
Gee Bob, what’s wrong with your password system?
I follow the instructions to copy the password and it still screams “error” when I post- the computer lies..
If I’m banned for some reason, let me know and I’ll offend no more.
Paul, you are not banned, this is happening to me all the time, someone here told me to save my post and send it again, I’m a bit miffed about it,but it always goes…
I believe that the same password is generated to all those in the comments section. When the first person copies the password and submits, then those still left using the comments section, have lost that password.
I think this is what is happening. If you find yourself in thos situation, select and copy what you have written, go out of that screen, then go back in, paste, use the new password and submit.
Of course, I may not know what I am talking about but find that this has worked for me.
When the ‘error’ message comes up and you get back in, you will always notice a new post has been submitted. Possibly the password being used is the specific cause and this is why they say ‘error’ but whilever the (any?) blog is updating they are usually not accepting new data at that time.
Copying the post at the time and pasting when the screen comes up again is the way to go. Recopy the password and you are okay. Recommend pasting it to blank page in meantime so that recopying password for a fresh go doesn’t fail when that, too, is interrupted by yet another post.
I agree with dawsonb.
This time it works. Am not rewriting previous posts, but Spleenblatt should consider himself shredded, by my thinking.
Shred me properly.
After WW2 there were millions of displaced persons all over Europe. Some countries were able to put out their hands of welcome to these people and allowed them to settle in to their new country. Europe, just coming out of a war was unable to feed those millions, and staying there was not a great option for a lot of people. What message are the PM and the LOTO sending out to the citizens regarding asylum seekers? It is not OK to have these people placed behind razor wire and be guarded by armed guards. My husband escaped by Yugoslavia, it was his third attempt at escape. He was picked up at the Italian border and placed into a refugee camp at Trieste. He was allowed to go out and find employment but had to be in camp at night, unless he was able to find a job at night, washing dishes or working as a cleaner. After a couple of weeks, his identity had been established he then was given a country to emigrate to, US, Canada, Argentina and Australia. It seems a much better alternative to what we do here. For the opposition to claim the Pacific Solution worked, it did not, it was a disgrace, nor did the TPVs work, they were the reason for women and children getting on boats in an effort to rejoin their father, and husband here. The majority of people drowned were women and children. We are being lied to and led by a pair of politicians of the lowest order, whose identical mantra has become ‘stop the boats’, as if it is the end to their means.
I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the layout of your website?
Its very well written; I love what youve
got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people
could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having 1
or two images. Maybe you could space it out better?