Thank God there are bloggers that read them; I'm distressed enough as it is, and I rarely -- if ever -- visit their website.
"The New York Times Covers up Bush's Crimes again
From the New York Times Nov 9th..
"WASHINGTON — The United States military since 2004 has used broad, secret authority to carry out nearly a dozen previously undisclosed attacks against Al Qaeda and other militants in Syria, Pakistan and elsewhere, according to senior American officials."
Since when has the US President had the right to circumvent International Law ? Well, actually ever since he came in to office. The illegal invasion of Iraq in 2003 was the the seminal event which took the world in to a new dark night where laws and humane behaviour were to be circumvented and justified via an increasingly bizarre discourse coming from Fox News and it's partners in crime. People actually found themselves asking questions that, beforehand, would have been dismissed out of hand instinctively.
Even as the evidence was pouring in and the lies revealed, the invasion of a sovereign country was just another day's business in the American Empire. The public had been duped, dumbed down and seem to have lost their sense of perspective along with the TV remote.
So here we have the same newspaper who lauded the election of Barack Obama and is now revealing the extent to which the Bush Administration has been abrogating International Law, without even a single reference to the latter.
The recent invasion of Syria to kill "Al Qaeda" operatives resulted in the deaths of innocent civilians but they didn't even deserve a mention.
"Some of the military missions have been conducted in close coordination with the C.I.A., according to senior American officials, who said that in others, like the Special Operations raid in Syria on Oct. 26 of this year, the military commandos acted in support of C.I.A.-directed operations."
The really distressing events detailed in the article comprise of..
"But as many as a dozen additional operations have been canceled in the past four years, often to the dismay of military commanders, senior military officials said. They said senior administration officials had decided in these cases that the missions were too risky, were too diplomatically explosive or relied on insufficient evidence."
Play was cancelled because some countries might even complain about the US murdering their citizens. What kind of warped statement is this ? Has the Grey Lady completely lost her mind, though some would argue this happened a very long time ago, and is still trying to justify War Crimes ? The special prosecutor in the Hague has recently alluded to the possible indictment, on War Crimes charges, of George W Bush and Tony Blair. Is this a pre-emptive Public relations strike to start the moral equivalancy discourse again ?
Further down in the Article, we hit on a slightly thorny subject..
"The 2004 order was a step in the evolution of how the American government sought to kill or capture Qaeda terrorists around the world. It was issued after the Bush administration had already granted America’s intelligence agencies sweeping power to secretly detain and interrogate terrorism suspects in overseas prisons and to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on telephone and electronic communications."
We are talking about Guantanamo Bay, where the Geneva convention and International Law gets left at the entrance, and the illegal, unconstitutional surveillance program conducted by the Bush Administration on it's own people and abroad. Bush was caught lying about the existence about the program and promptly passed a law to retroactively make himself and his buddies immune from prosecution. There doesn't seem to be any mention of this in the article either.
Further Down..
"Occasionally, the officials said, Special Operations troops would land in Somalia to assess the strikes’ results. On Jan. 7, 2007, an AC-130 struck an isolated fishing village near the Kenyan border, and within hours, American commandos and Ethiopian troops were examining the rubble to determine whether any Qaeda operatives had been killed."
So what we can assume here is that AC130 Gunships blow isolated fishing villages to smithereens and then examine "the rubble" to see if they can piece body parts together of Men Women and Children to assemble an "Al Qaeda" Frankenstein to exhibit to the bloodthirsty crowd over coffee and doughnuts.
If the article quoted above is indicative of the reporting we will be seeing during the Obama presidency then the truth will remain concealed and it's readers cajoled in to going along with whatever is shoved down their throats via "All the news that's fit to print"
--MORE--"
That's the New York Times all right!