Tag Archives: war

Ballpoint Adventures for January 21, 2006: Billy Doesn’t Like Apologists

Posted on 2012/02/16 12:01 am by thepete

Yeah, apologists for the Iraq War are only slightly better than people who believe in “honest” rape. >_<  (#ronpaul2012)

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Posted on 2011/08/23 10:39 am by thepete



amodernmanifesto:

cognitivedissonance:

Cost of one Tomahawk cruise missile: Approximately $756,000-$2,000,000 per missile

Congress appropriated $6,734,000,000 for WIC in fiscal year 2011.

Let’s compare these numbers for perspective:

When Operation Iraqi Freedom began, more than 725 Tomahawk cruise missiles had been fired into Iraq by early 2003. That’s an approximate cost of $548,100,000 to $1,450,000,000 – nearly 20% of WIC’s 2011 budget in a matter of weeks.

War is expensive, but for some reason, it’s easier to to write those costs off than the costs of helping families in need. War is also profitable, whereas assisting the impoverished, well, not so much.

This quote is truth.

This quote makes me so angry.

….but then, so does the truth.

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Keep It Classy, USA! (very graphic, messed up pic of USGI and victim)

Posted on 2011/03/23 05:58 pm by thepete

newyorker:

Seymour Hersh on the Der Spiegel “Kill Team” photos:

“Why photograph atrocities? And why pass them around to buddies back home or fellow soldiers in other units? How could the soldiers’ sense of what is unacceptable be so lost? No outsider can have a complete answer to such a question. As someone who has been writing about war crimes since My Lai, though, I have come to have a personal belief: these soldiers had come to accept the killing of civilians—recklessly, as payback, or just at random—as a facet of modern unconventional warfare. In other words, killing itself, whether in a firefight with the Taliban or in sport with innocent bystanders in a strange land with a strange language and strange customs, has become ordinary.”

It think it’s time for a war movie marathon of “Das Boot” and “Saving Private Ryan” for all Americans (ESPECIALLY OUR POLITICIANS!!).  Seriously, kids.  This is fucked up beyond all measure. 

If you’re capable of doing this, someone needs to tell you to STOP.

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Wikileaks Adventures Comics: US Admiral Accuses Internet Superheroes of Bloody Hands; Mrs. Irony

Posted on 2010/08/03 03:22 pm by thepete

Today on Democracy Now, they played the following quote from Admiral Mike Mullen who spoke out against Wikileaks and their huge document-release:

ADM. MIKE MULLEN: Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we’ve been given, but don’t put those who willingly go into harm’s way even further in harm’s way just to satisfy your need to make a point.

via democracynow.org

The huge irony here is the part I italicized. I’m sure, if there’s one thing Admiral Mike Mullen (or any other military mucky-muck) knows about, it’s what it’s like to have blood on your hands. What a child to think that sort of argument would work against someone like Assange.

And check it out—if Assange ends up being to blame for the deaths of anyone, doesn’t it follow that it’s really the military that should be blamed since they put those soldiers and those Afghan families in harm’s way in the first place? Let’s take that one better—let’s blame the guy who put the military in a place where it could then put those soldiers and Afghan families in harm’s way. It’s the Commander-in-Chief. So really, it’s George W. Bush who may have the blood of “some young soldier or that of an Afghan family” not Jim Henson’s Wikileaks Babies.

Give me a break, Mullen.

Everyone knows people die in war!! The news media and the military has done a great job of cynically reminding us of how there’s nothing new in the docs that were Wikileaked. So, why the hell would Assange and his supporters hesitate to release docs that could result in deaths when so many on both sides have died already?

Oh really? “Some young soldier” might die? Well, maybe if he hadn’t been ordered to invade a country, he wouldn’t have died.

Stupid, useless argument.

And how can the military and it’s propaganda wing have the gall to ignore the rich, choco-flavored irony of accusing Assange and Pals of having blood on their hands???

Seriously—is there not a sane brain in the American government today?

This war is unjust, it’s costing too much, people continue to die for nothing and we all know it—WHAT IS THE DEBATE HERE?

US Military: you’re following orders, we get that, but this war (and the one in Iraq) is a dead dead dead end. We can’t fix it and are only responsible for the latest round of messed-up-edness there. That “country” has been messed-up for thousands of years. Let it go.

And let our soldiers come home.

Yes people will die because we left, but they’ll die if we stay. And we shouldn’t have gone in the first place. If we had sent in an elite, light-weight task force to track down ObL, I think we’d have gotten a lot closer to our goal there. But that’s an alternate reality now… or is *this* the alternate reality? >_<

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Are the Lies the Lying Government Officials tell actually lies? Or…?

Posted on 2010/07/26 03:52 pm by thepete

newsweek:

“What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai’s government and regards him as a legitimate leader—or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents—from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans—is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so.”

—

The New Yorker: Wikileaks and the War

  (via southpol)

So, they are lying?

Like it even matters.

Who freaked out in 2000 when it was obvious to anyone paying attention that there was no clear winner in the election?  Or that it’s Congress’ job to settle ties, not the Supreme Court’s?

What public rose up to demand impeachment when it became obvious the Bush Administration’s USG had violated international law several times over, least of all by invading countries unprovoked?

Every single one of us wander the streets of our cities and towns knowing full well that the cash in our pockets isn’t worth anything tangible, yet we just keep pretending that’s not true.

We, The People, are used to dealing with lies—all the time.  Whether it’s God, Santa, our money, our government or the fact that Diet Coke is really no better for you than regular Coke.  We lie to each other and ourselves all the time and this shock that the USG is lying to us about war is, you guessed it: a lie.  This one, like many of them is to make us feel better.

No one in the USG should worry.  Both endless wars can continue. We have no ability to stop them from doing so and even if we did we wouldn’t use that ability.

And that is no lie.

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