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Originally Posted by loquitur
A coincidence of views does not imply prior coordination. You need a lot more than that. Otherwise I'm a member of more conspiracies than I can count.
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You're your predictably dismissive self. I posted that "I suspect", and that it is "reasonable", to do so.
There are waaaayyyyy too many "coincidences". Food for thought, condensed beyond my meager abilities to convey observations I think are becoming more valid, in the fullness of time:
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http://letters.salon.com/opinion/gre...9932ee76c.html
Almost, but not quite Glenn
<i>This is plainly part of the ever-increasing politicization of the U.S. military in Iraq and the attempt to control the flow of information from the war zone.</i>
It's part of the (excuse my lack of vocabulary to express this) warification of all aspects of life in an attempt to politically control the flow of information.
I have to run, I want to elaborate on this, but more and more and more of all things in life are being made to seem part of the whole war effort, indeed war is almost being proposed as a holism for everything in American life, as the only way to control all information. The very bedrock of all of this is the belief that things that should have happened in the past (winning the Vietnam war, for instance) did not because democracy didn't function properly because the information that flowed was not correct. So now everything, from the disks of photos from Abu Ghraib, to Bilal Hussein's pictures, to the coffins arriving, to how newscasters phrase their stories, to memos in the Justice department, to torture and rendition, to testimony in trials, even to whether or not there are trials or whether or not they can proceed, is judged by it's effects or purposes in an existential war, and all are part of the war effort. It isn't the military that invented this all encompassing view in which information is the basis and the purpose of all war, it was created in the halls of power, and the military is carrying it out. The new answer to politics stops at the water's edge is that in the information world, the water has no edge.
Badly expressed, but you've covered a lot of it before, Glenn, I just think its a very, very big assault, and uncharged prisoners are only one tip of an iceberg called controlling democracy by controlling the information that controls all minds.
-- ondelette
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Aren't the following reactions to the US military's treatment of Pulitzer prize winning AP photographer and Fallujah, Iraq native, Bilal Hussein, "just about the size of it"?
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http://letters.salon.com/opinion/gre...d7fbca1b1.html
Incorrect Narrative
There are so many ironies, hypocrisies and contradictions at work in the Great Millennial War on A Tactic, but here is one that I have not seen much discussed:
The Neocons continually trip over each other in their mad rush to give up their (read our) freedoms <h3>in order to preserve order and protect us from random violence, yet insist it is all made worthwhile by our efforts to give the blessings of those same freedoms (at gunpoint, to be sure) to the Iraqis who arguably had just the sort of ordered, freedom-free society they covet -- before we took it away from them.</h3>
Bilal Hussein would never have been jailed in my America. If Iraq has "secured the blessings of liberty" he won't be convicted in Iraq. But in Saddam's Iraq, and George Bush's America, "Incorrect Narrative" is a capital offense.
-- Blue Meme
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/gre...9e15e4779.html
Outlaw State
The relentless wingnut blogger campaign against independent journalism in Iraq generally, and Mr Hussein in particular, is perfectly understandable in the context of our current domestic politics. <h3>Most of one major party's candidates for President are campaigning for more detentions without charges, more torture, more unprovoked attacks on other countries.</h3> From that distorted perspective, a kangaroo court conviction of Mr Hussein is to be applauded, the more arbitrary the better, "pour encourager les autres" and "validating" more unchecked assertions of American state power.
How little our hardy band of 24 percenters understand that their bloody-minded drive to make America a law unto itself has been systematically undermining American power and influence throughout the world. How much every despot the world over must be enjoying the spectacle of America trashing its own noble governing principles with both hands, secure in the knowledge that it will be years, or even decades, before America can painfully regain the moral high ground it has so contemptuously disdained these past 7 years. How pathetic as well, as new technologies make obsolete the techniques of press control through jailing accredited journalists. How grimly ironic, for all those people who lived under Communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, <h3>to watch America, so often a beacon of hope, so eagerly adopt the failed methods of Party apparatchiks to force the people to ignore reality and accept the Party line as truth.</h3>
-- HenryFTP
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loquitur, if you think that my posts are "over done" reactions to what top officials at AP say has happened to their accredited photo journalist reporting from war torn Iraq, and to what the US military itself has announced about his detention, it's duration, and the "pace" of it's "justice" in his "case", <h3>at what point would you be concerned enough to</h3> post about it, to attempt to discuss it, to protest against it, to post suspicion, in view of Malkin's statements/accusations of the last 2-1/2 years concerning Hussein's work, and her claim of an "anonymous tip" from the US military, immediately after his detention in April, 2006, that she was a catalyst, if not in his arrest, but in his long, so far unjustified, detention, <h3>if not at this point in time?</h3>
US citizen, Jose Padilla's similar detention without trial or a hearing of evidence, right here in the US, has obviously not fazed you, either. What would have to happen to raise your level of alarm? What display of callous disregard for justice and due process of an accused, by US authority would you have to observe, to raise your hackles?
I'm long past my limit, Padilla's "trial", three years late in coming, and without the criminal accusations that were described at the time of his arrest, by the US Atty. Gen. in a hastily convened "presser" from Moscow, as being so offensive to the sensibilities of "freedum lovin Muricans", that it was necessary to turn his sorry ass over to the military and to abridge all of his rights to "justice" in civilian criminal court, or to his "right to an attorney".
How do you do it? How do you exempt yourself from this "process"? When I see the treatment of Padilla, I wonder how I am any less exposed to what happened to him, at the hands of authority, than he was.
Then, when I observe the treatment of Bilal Hussein, a man with the AP, the largest news gathering and distribution organ in the entire world, squarely behind him as he is put through 19 months of injustice, and I see how little benefit his AP credentials and support, and exposure of his predicament have been for him, while in US military detention, I feel very vulnerable.
My vulnerable feeling is magnified by my suspicion that there may be "no bounds" to my embarkation of a campaign of intense, relentless, non-violent protest and civil disobedience of undetermined duration, because of what my government has already done to others, in an effort to communicate to authority that they've "crossed that line" and that I'm one who won't effing <h3>stand for it anymore</h3>.
Do you ever feel that way?