Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Fire, Meet Gasoline

Just when you think they couldn't make a bad situation worse, they did. How many atrocities have been committed in Iraq and nobody has been held accountable? Unless they were E-5s and below. With torture, rape, and murder committed by some of the troops, what's a little indiscriminate killing of Iraqi citizens by, let's call them by their real name, mercenaries? Because they certainly aren't the Foreign Legion.
"It is possible that some contractors may remain outside the jurisdiction of U.S. courts, civil or military, for improper conduct in Iraq," the report said.
Why is it that the crew without a clue like to babble incessantly about personal responsibility but nobody ever seems to take it? It's never their fault. There are always extenuating circumstances or nobody could havn anticipated. Anything except somebody standing up and saying they made a mistake. They're like babies playing their first game of hide and seek. They hide behind their fingers thinking that since they can't see you, you can't see them.

Meanwhile back in the real world, all travel has been restricted for those not wearing a military uniform outside of the Green Zone for fear of reprisals. So much for the everything is going well over there story the administration has been trying to stuff down our throats.

Not that it means anything, but the temperature is currently 51 degrees at 5:30 am in San Jose. This year we only had about four weeks where the nighttime temperature was above 60 and it never went above 65. We didn't have any really unbearable heat for any extended length of time. A few weeks just doesn't count. The weather patterns are definitely changing.

Last year, special detection teams required 40,000 people to undergo extra screening for one reason or another. Almost 300 people were found to have done something wrong. That is less than one percent. People with four days of classroom training and three days of on the job training, are going to have another class. This one will enable them to detect "micro-facial expressions". They last approximately 1/15th of a second and are supposed to reveal if someone is lying or hiding something, but it is still going to be subject to individual preferences. Football has instant replay for a reason.

A meteorite slams into the earth and 600 people from the surrounding area are sick from noxious fumes. From all the sci-fi horror stories you would think that this would be a big story, but it happened in the Peruvian Andes. If it had been the Ozarks or the Appalachians, we would be hearing about it 24/7.

First you call them names, then you blockade, invade, and bomb. From "axis of evil" to "enemy entity" it's all about demonization and dehumanification. Word games played at the expense of people's lives.

Aargh! Happy talk like a pirate day!

3 comments:

  1. On Talk Like a Pirate Day, I think we should all praise the modern day pirates (mercenaries if we must).

    All Hail BLACKWATER!!!
    All Hail BLACKWATER!!!

    Argh, 'tis a sad day indeed.

    ReplyDelete
  2. CIA Shut Down in Iraq:

    One quote: "the CIA station is all but motionless - as meetings with informants and Iraqi government officials have been hastily cancelled.
    "What caused the shut down? Following a firefight between Iraqi insurgents and a Blackwater USA protection detail on Sunday (12:08 PM Baghdad time), Iraqi officials suspended the operating license of the North Carolina-based government contractor. While the Iraqi government is yet to hold a formal hearing on the matter, Blackwater and all it protects remain frozen.
    "By jamming up Blackwater, they shut down the movements of the embassy and the [CIA] station..."

    ReplyDelete
  3. At least the foreign legion had some oversight and the French government got a much better force at the fraction of the price of Blackwater.

    Geez, will they never learn?

    ReplyDelete