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plan 9---there's no real subtext to this. and i'm not terribly interested in "the man is evil" as a line of thinking. i haven't been since i was 19. that was a long time ago.
one problem with the definition of the gwot fiction is that it enabled rumsfeld et al to decide that the rules did not apply. so it was ok to, say, turn people over the the secular arm (inquisition-speak) and then "not investigate" the torture that in which they were entirely complicit. with plausible deniability dontcha know. because, well, they're just "reporting not investigating".... so it's not a surprise. and there's a sense in which i think people got kind of inured to reports of such business enabled by the bush administration somehow. acted like it was a bad tv show instead of what it was..war crimes, you know. the kind of shit that would've had the lot of them on trial had the united states committed to only real crime, which is to loose a war.
but i digress.
personally, like i said at the outset, i would hope these documents function to build some level of pressure for even something like the chilcot commission. a public accounting for what happened--even as i am pretty sure that the main reason chilcot happened was that everyone knew that beyond whatever actions blair took there was the united states to blame. it's much harder for a single party state with two right wings to undertake an investigation of a bogus war that was consented to by much of the political class in a context where there's no-one anywhere to blame but ourselves.
i'm also interested in this as an fight over information control. just to you know.
but it's quite nice that you are so quick to assume that this is a one-dimensional thread and that, in another way, you are the only person really qualified to make adequately complex judgments about iraq. it's a strange viewpoint, one that you seem to share with slims. i confess that i don't get it. fact is that in all of this, my personal interest is in the political and/or command conditions of possibility for things like torture, for overlooking the trigger-happy folk at checkpoints, for overlooking the mercenary psychopaths from blackwater....
that's different from going after the daily routines of the people who signed up and ended up there. and even from questioning their motives. i'm not entirely sure what made you think the situation was otherwise.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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