Diagnosing The Dogs of War - 3

Me like, me take ...

In this series we have been looking at pop-science as well as looking at serious science concerning the subject of the wars of society and what causes them.

The pop-science says that war is part of our genetic makeup, but serious science says it is learned behavior, taught via massive propaganda engines of society.

Today, the liberal city of Boston, a city of about a million people, the capital of the  Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is under complete police lock down.

People have been ordered to stay in their homes, not to go to work, not to send kids to school, and to stay off the streets, meanwhile, storm trooper looking groups go from house to house, forcing inhabitants outside, as heavily armed squads go through citizens homes to "secure" the home and the city by way of armed searches.

Two people are said to be responsible for this, a 19 year old male and a 26 year old male.

In the first post of this series I referred to the book "The Dogs of War", by author Frederick Forsyth, as a source for some interesting but peculiar quotes.

In the second post of this series I referred to the book "The Party Is Over", by author Mike Lofgren, as another source for some additional interesting but peculiar quotes.

Today, I want to look at some interesting but peculiar quotes from the website "InfoWars" in order to show that there is no consensus as to what is happening behind the scenes, and that such a lack of consensus is perpetuated by both "right" and "left" leaning citizens of America:

"False flag terrorism – attacks manufactured or provocateured by governments and then blamed on other groups – is a tactic that stretches back almost 2,000 years.

Nero and the Great Fire of Rome ... The Spanish American War: Remember the Maine ... Wilson’s Pretext for War: The Sinking of the Lusitania ... Hitler’s Fascist Dictatorship: The Reichstag Fire ...

Prelude to World War: The Gleiwitz Incident ... Israeli False Flag Terror: The Lavon Affair ... Operation Northwoods: Targeting American Citizens ... Gulf of Tonkin: Phantom Attack on the U.S. Military ... Operation Gladio: State Sponsored Terror Blamed on the Left ... Terror in the modern age ... (As the New York Times reported last year, the vast majority of domestic terror plots in recent years were “facilitated by the F.B.I.”) ... Underwear Bomber ...

This is by no means an exhaustive length of cases involving false flag attacks steered or provocateured by governments ..."

(Why Government Should Be The First Suspect In Any Terror Attack). I can't tell if that website is correct or not, but in the interest of unifying citizens in the country, I do think all sides of the issue should be at least listened to.

One reason for quoting that site is that they do not blame any one nation, any one political party, or any one ideology, rather they point out that very crazy government actions are done by "all of the above."

I do disagree with that site about their belief that The Global Climate System (currently dangerously dysfunctional) has not been damaged by human civilization.

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The Common Good - 5

"We did it for the common good"

In this series I have been infusing other Dredd Blog series into this current ongoing series so as to broaden the subject matter reach without increasing the verbiage too much.

That way readers can click on and link to similar series or not at their own discretion and interest.

One suggested series for infusion into this "The Common Good" series is: Life After People - The Movie, including Life After People - The Movie - 2.

The "Life After People" television series on The History Channel was a very clever series.

That series pointed out among other things, in a very nuanced manner, how "things" without people around to maintain them are slowly broken down by powerful processes in the environment of the Earth, a very ancient and persistent process which continues until "things" rust, rot, and otherwise decompose down into component parts, eventually becoming little more than dust in the wind.

The various series mentioned help inform us that "The Common Good" is that which benefits people in the long run, not the short run.

An example is depicted by the fire within and explosion of a fertilizer plant in the small community of West, Texas, which killed the common good producing some of the worst forms of the common bad., because they used lax safety regulations and very bad zoning regulations:

The devastation from the explosion in West, especially given the known destructive power from the Oklahoma City bombing, should have been foreseeable. The rapid and overwhelming response from emergency crews from around north-central Texas has been nothing short of astounding. Clearly, disasters like this are exactly what the first responders prepare for. They knew where to go to establish triage centers. They even had backup triage centers in case they had to evacuate the primary site, which happened in this case. That kind of forethought, as I say, is nothing short of astounding.

Apt. Bldg. Was Too Close - (LM Otero/AP Photo)

So why didn’t local planners demonstrate an equal level of forethought and imagine what kind of problems could arise when you place a middle school, a retirement complex, apartments and houses next to a fertilizer plant with a 12,000-gallon tank containing highly volatile chemical compounds? Someone needs to be called to account for the scores of deaths and injuries caused by this explosion.

(The Dallas Morning News, emphasis added). That writer hit the nail on the head, because he shows that the focus is backwards, upside down, and out of whack in terms of the public good.

Bowing down the the false god of "free enterprise" by letting dangerous mechanizations whirl, hum, and spin without adequate safety regulations is a recipe for disaster, a recipe for the public bad.

This backwards approach, which impairs attempts to increase the reality of the common good, goes hog wild when it comes to disaster preparation and response, but does little to regulate what causes those disasters.

It treats the effect, not the cause, insuring repetitive problems (e.g. Groundhog Day & The Climate of Fear).

In the case of the Texas explosion, there had been no inspections for a long time, and when such inspections do take place they are impotent, for-show-only, play pretend operations that cow-tow to greedy business interests.

A similar escapade has been explored in the recent Dredd Blog post in the current series where we discussed the devastation heaped upon Americans by the big banks (The Common Good - 4).

In that post I criticized the Attorney General, Eric Holder, for saying that those banks are too big to prosecute, even as the civil courts, in a sense, are beginning to say otherwise (Wouldn't It Be Loverly: Big Bank Justice, and see this).

This is the exact state of affairs that Dredd Blog envisioned in The W Direction = The Perilous Path, complaining that the government's primary focus had the nature of reactionary triage rather than visionary prevention (New Climate Catastrophe Policy: Triage - 10).

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Oil-Qaeda gets a tax break for doing "good" public charity:

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On The Recent Condemnation of Torture

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog for years has continually condemned acts of torture by the U.S. government.

While psychopaths in the government have repeatedly stated in public how effective and good torture is, Dredd Blog has consistently condemned their public bragging about having ordered and facilitated war crimes.

Their conspiracy to do this then cover it up has always been obvious to Dredd Blog, notwithstanding the mumbo jumbo legal memos that fooled no one who has the American Spirit of 1776.

The propaganda of OIl-Qaeda has fooled a lot of people who don't understand international treaties against torture, Civics 101, U.S. criminal laws against torture, American Traditions, or the sanity of Americans who have nothing but disdain for the evil concepts that promote torture.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog also fully condemns those who would cover up those crimes, including the Obama Administration members who have glossed over heinous wrongs with cheap, bumper sticker pabulum such as "lean forward", refusing to do their American duty to prosecute the evil perpetrators among us.

Now hear this, Dredd Blog will never compromise with the ideals that made America great, which is the historical pursuit of human dignity and human decency, which in short is "The Common Good."

So, today we begin a series based upon the report of The Constitution Project’s Task Force on detainee treatment.

But before we jump into that, let me remind regular readers, as well as new readers, of the Dredd Blog coverage of this subject over the years with posts such as:

The Torturing Of America, Tortured Record of Bush II Torture Policy, The Penalty For Torture Can Be Death, Noonan's Grace of Torture Murder, GOP Strategy - To Prove Torture Works, Voodoo Interrogations - Torture, Brain Damage of the Torture Lovers, President Reagan Puts Cheney In Jail, Oldest Bush II Job - Torture Meister, and The Penalty For Torture Can Be Death - 2 ...

(to name a few). These Dredd Blog posts consistently pointed out the ongoing dementia that sanctioned torture which McTell News was consistently trying to infect the nation with.

To begin the series, following that background, we will introduce the members of the committee who helped produce the report:

Asa Hutchinson (Co-Chair): He served in the administration of President George W. Bush as Under Secretary for Border and Transportation Security at the Department of Homeland Security from 2003 to 2005, where he was responsible for more than 110,000 federal employees housed in such agencies as the Transportation Security Administration, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. He was Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration from 2001 to 2003. Prior to joining the Bush Administration, Hutchinson represented the 3rd District of Arkansas as a Republican Congressman, first winning election in 1996. Hutchinson served on the House Judiciary Committee along with the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

James R. Jones (Co-Chair): As a Democratic member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Oklahoma (1973-1987), he was Chairman of the House Budget Committee for four years and a ranking Member of the House Ways and Means Committee, where he was active in tax, international trade, Social Security and health care policy. Jones was only 28 when President Lyndon Johnson selected him as Appointments Secretary, a position equivalent to White House Chief of Staff, the youngest person in history to hold such a position.

Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte: A former President of the American Bar Association (1991-92), Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte was appointed President of Florida State University in 1993, serving in that capacity through January 2003. Prior to that, from 1984 to 1989, he served as Dean of Florida State University College of Law. A member of the American Law Institute, D’Alemberte also served as President of the American Judicature Society (1982-84).

Richard A. Epstein is the inaugural Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law at New York University School of Law. He has served as the Peter and Kirstin Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution since 2000. Epstein is also the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law Emeritus and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1972. Prior to joining the University of Chicago Law School faculty, he taught law at the University of Southern California from 1968 to 1972. He has published numerous books and articles on a wide range of legal and interdisciplinary subjects, and has taught courses in administrative law, civil procedure, constitutional law, and criminal law, among many others. He served as editor of the Journal of Legal Studies from 1981 to 1991, and of the Journal of Law and Economics from 1991 to 2001. From 2001 to 2010 he was a director of the John M. Olin Program in Law and Economics at the University of Chicago.

Dr. David P. Gushee is the Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics and Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life at Mercer University. Gushee teaches at McAfee School of Theology and throughout Mercer University in his specialty, Christian ethics. As Director of the Center for Theology and Public Life, he organizes events and courses to advance quality conversations about major issues arising at the intersection of theology, ethics, and public policy. Gushee came to Mercer in 2007 from Union University, where he served for 11 years, ultimately as Graves Professor of Moral Philosophy. Dr. Gushee has published fifteen books, with four more in development, and many hundreds of essays, book chapters, articles, reviews, and opinion pieces.

Dr. Azizah Y. al-Hibri is a professor emerita at the T. C. Williams School of Law, University of Richmond, having served on the faculty from 1992 until her retirement in 2012. She is also a founding editor of “Hypatia: a Journal of Feminist Philosophy,” and the founder and chair [president] of KARAMAH: Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights. In 2011, al-Hibri was appointed by President Obama to serve as a commissioner on the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

David Irvine is a Salt Lake City attorney in private practice, a former Republican state legislator, and a retired Army brigadier general.
Irvine enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1962, and received a direct commission in 1967 as a strategic intelligence officer. He maintained a faculty assignment for 18 years with the Sixth U.S. Army Intelligence School, teaching prisoner of war interrogation and military law. He was the Deputy Commander for the 96th Regional Readiness Command. He served four terms in the Utah House of Representatives.

Claudia J. Kennedy is the first woman to achieve the rank of three-star general in the United States Army, taking her from the Women’s Army Corps in the late 1960’s to the position of Deputy Chief of Staff for Army Intelligence in 1997-2000. She oversaw policies and operations affecting 45,000 people stationed worldwide with a budget of nearly $1 billion.

Thomas R. Pickering: From 1997 to 2001, Pickering served as U.S. Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. From 1989 to 1992, he was Ambassador and Representative to the United Nations. In a diplomatic career spanning five decades, he has served as U.S. ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria, and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Pickering also served on assignments in Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. He also served as Executive Secretary of the Department of State and Special Assistant to Secretaries William P. Rogers and Henry A. Kissinger from 1973 to 1974. Between 1959 and 1961, he served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research of the State Department, in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and from 1962 to 1964 in Geneva as political adviser to the U.S. delegation to the 18-Nation Disarmament Conference. He earned the personal rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the U.S. Foreign Service.

William S. Sessions served three United States presidents as the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, earning a reputation for modernizing the FBI by initiating and developing the forensic use of DNA, the development and automation of digital fingerprinting capabilities with the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, as well as recruiting of women and minorities for service in the FBI. Prior to joining the FBI, Sessions was the chief judge for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, where he had previously served as United States Attorney.

Dr. Gerald E. Thomson is the Lambert and Sonneborn Professor of Medicine Emeritus at Columbia University. Following his post graduate training at the State University of New York-Kings County Hospital Center, Thomson remained on the faculty there and directed one of the nation’s first artificial kidney units for the maintenance of patients with end stage renal failure. He joined the Columbia faculty in 1970, serving as Director of Medicine at the affiliated Harlem Hospital Center from 1970-1985. He was Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff of the Columbia University Medical Center from 1985-1990 and Senior Associate Dean from 1990-2003. Thomson has served on and headed numerous National Institutes of Health and other agency advisory committees on hypertension, end stage renal disease, cardiovascular disease, public hospitals, minorities in medicine, human rights, and access to health care. Thomson is a 2002 recipient of the Columbia University President’s Award for Outstanding Teaching.

(The Constitution Project's Detainee Report). That is a distinguished committee which has determined that torture was practiced and sanctioned by the U.S. Government, and that Obama is wrong to simply ignore it:

The events examined in this report are unprecedented in U.S. history. In the course of the nation’s many previous conflicts, there is little doubt that some U.S. personnel committed brutal acts against captives, as have armies and governments throughout history.

But there is no evidence there had ever before been the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after September 11, directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.

Despite this extraordinary aspect, the Obama administration declined, as a matter of policy, to undertake or commission an official study of what happened, saying it was unproductive to “look backwards” rather than forward.
...
Moving on without such a reckoning weakens our ability to claim our place as an exemplary practitioner of the rule of law.

In the absence of government action or initiative, The Constitution Project, a nonpartisan public-interest organization devoted to the rule of law principle, set out to address this situation. It gathered a Task Force of experienced former officials who had worked at the highest levels of the judiciary, Congress, the diplomatic service, law enforcement, the military, and parts of the executive branch.

Recognized experts in law, medicine and ethical behavior were added to the group to help ensure a serious and fair examination of how detention policies came to be made and implemented.
...
Perhaps the most important or notable finding of this panel is that it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.
...
The second notable conclusion of the Task Force is that the nation’s highest officials bear some responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of torture.
...
Lawyers in the Justice Department provided legal guidance, in the aftermath of the attacks, that seemed to go to great lengths to allow treatment that amounted to torture. To deal with the regime of laws and treaties designed to prohibit and prevent torture, the lawyers provided novel, if not acrobatic interpretations to allow the mistreatment of prisoners.

Those early memoranda that defined torture narrowly would engender widespread and withering criticism once they became public. The successors of those government lawyers would eventually move to overturn those legal memoranda. Even though the initial memoranda were disowned, the memorable language — limiting the definition of torture to those acts that might implicate organ failure — remain a stain on the image of the United States, and the memos are a potential aid to repressive regimes elsewhere when they seek approval or justification for their own acts.

(ibid, bold in original). This post is long, so I will stop for today.

The next post in this series is here.

The Boston Massacres

The Boston Massacre, 1770

Our hearts go out to those who suffered yesterday at the bombing site, and who may still be suffering today, in the great city of Boston.

Some 243 years ago an event called The Boston Massacre took place, another episode of violence where British soldiers fired on an unarmed crowd, killing 5 and injuring six.

Interestingly, regular readers know that Dredd Blog had been doing a series last week concerning the origin and meaning of "conspiracy theory."

Today, it may be helpful to ask "was yesterday's bombing at The Boston Marathon, a criminal conspiracy between two or more persons, or was it a lone bomber crime?"

The federal and state officials who investigate and later prosecute the case will either develop a "conspiracy theory" to present in the courts against several defendants, or they will prosecute an individual defendant:

The concept of criminal conspiracy has its earliest roots in fourteenth century English common law. At that time, it saw limited use as a legal theory. It became more broadly applied in the United States in the nineteenth century, though still the scope of prosecutions was not wide. Today, however, conspiracy is a far-reaching legal principle, embracing antitrust actions, an enormous number of more traditional criminal cases, and even tort lawsuits. It is the basis of prosecutions dealing with, among other crimes, drug violations, securities fraud, murder for hire, bank robbery, and extortion.

... Conspiracy is an agreement by two or more people to commit a crime.

(On The Origin of "Conspiracy Theory" - 2). Meanwhile, the McTell News will be sensationalizing with their fantasy ploys by using their comic book stories about "conspiracy theory" being the most horrid thing envisioned only by kooks on the fringe of society.

I took a gander at the usual suspects and targets of McTell News (unofficial "conspiracy theorists"), some of whom were not in the mood to swallow anything whole, instead, choosing to chew the facts slowly.

Others had already concluded that it was a false flag operation.

One thing in common both types had was that they were pointing out the fact that about half of the information being reported on McTell News had been in error already.

How would you like a four cylinder engine that only had two working cylinders, that is, getting it right half the time?

Anyway, there doesn't yet seem to be any clues that make the case clearly one of criminal conspiracy or clearly a case of a single bomber:

Police were seen carrying several large bags from a suburban Boston apartment that authorities say was searched in connection to the Boston Marathon bombing.

Boston area television stations reported that the bags were removed from the apartment on Ocean Avenue in Revere just north of Boston at about 2 a.m. Tuesday.
...
Massachusetts State Police confirmed that a search warrant was served Monday night but provided no further details.

The Revere Fire Department wrote on its Facebook page that firefighters responded to the scene for a search for ‘‘a person of interest.’’

(Boston Online). That is not conclusive as to whether one individual or multiple conspirators are the perpetrators of yesterday's senseless carnage borne of inordinate hatred.

The use of the plural instead of the singular in official statements may or may not indicate that authorities suspect they are dealing with a conspiracy theory:

"We will find out who did this. We'll find out why they did this," the president said. "Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups, will feel the full weight of justice."
...
As many as two unexploded bombs were found near the end of the 26.2-mile course as part of what appeared to be a well-coordinated attack, but they were safely disarmed, according to a senior U.S. intelligence official, who also spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

[UPDATE: at news conference Governor Deval Patrick says NO unexploded bombs were found; there were only two and they both exploded]

(Boston Herald, emphasis added). The number of bombs and the use of plural words probably triggered conclusions in some minds that it was a conspiracy of multiple conspirators.

The proper thing to do at this point is gather as much evidence as possible, then let that evidence tell the story.

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The Common Good - 4

Are you in good hands with Oil State?

In this series we have been discussing how "the public good" is a concept that means one thing to the 1% plutocrats, but another thing to the 99% middle class and poor.

"The public good" originally was the purpose for the founding of the nation, and the reason for the U.S. Constitution and laws.

We have become so subverted and our national priorities turned upside down to the point that some writers have hypothesized that this downward trend, this morph of the concept of "the public good" into the new meaning "the public bad", may be here to stay:

If you're worried about where America is heading, look no further than Tennessee. It's lush mountains and verdant rolling countryside belie a mean-spirited public policy that only makes sense if you deeply believe in the anti-collectivist, anti-altruist philosophy of Ayn Rand. It's what you get when you combine hatred for government with disgust for poor people.

(Fundamental Tennessee, emphasis added). Included in this mean-spirited and hate-filled selfish decline of the human spirit is defining "middle class and poor people" as "anyone that can be victimized" it would seem:

Nearly a third of all foreclosed borrowers who faced proceedings brought by the biggest U.S. mortgage companies during the height of the housing crisis came to the brink of losing their homes due to potential bank errors or under now-banned practices, regulators have revealed.

Close to 1.2 million borrowers, or about 30 percent of the more than 3.9 million households whose properties were foreclosed on by 11 leading financial institutions in 2009 and 2010, had to battle potentially wrongful efforts to seize their homes despite not having defaulted on their loans, being protected under a host of federal laws, or having been in good standing under bank-approved plans to either restructure their mortgages or temporarily delay required payments.

More than 244,000 of those borrowers eventually lost their homes, government data show.

(Home Plunder). Taking homes from people when they haven't even defaulted is the new concept of "the public good" by criminal plunder barons.

Regular readers know that Dredd Blog saw this coming after looking into one tool of the plunder barons:

Now we focus on one of the many aftermaths of that debacle, the Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems, Inc. (MERS) potential catastrophe:

The growing furor in the United States over improper foreclosure documents is focusing intense attention on MERS, a mortgage-record service company that tracks more than 60 million mortgages.

Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems has filed thousands of foreclosure actions around the country on behalf of lenders. Its right to do that is under challenge. Several courts around the country recently have ruled that MERS lacks the right to file such cases. Federal regulators say they are investigating its role. On Tuesday JPMorgan disclosed that it had stopped using MERS.

(Reuters, emphasis added). I read some depositions of MERS officials to come out with the impression that it borders on sham, has a fundamental flaw in its concepts, and should be avoided until massive repair is done.

(Banker Jekyll Will Hyde Your Money - 6). The mean-spirited anti-public-good people are spreading like a disease.

The next post in this series is here, the previous post in this series is here.

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Oil-Qaeda gets a tax break for doing "good" public charity:

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