The Queens of Stalingrad - 8

Protesters as Blair, Bush II, & Brown (AP/Lefteris Pitarakis)

This series is about the madness that has infected the U.S. and other governments.

Another aspect of this series is the attempts to treat the illness of the U.S. government in the courts.

There are several Dredd Blog series that overlap some of the subject matter of this series new readers might also be interested in (e.g. A Tale of Coup Cities, Will The Military Become The Police?, Epigovernment: The New Model, The Germ Theory of Government, American Feudalism - 6).

For those who think Dredd Blog is a wee bit radical, check out some quotes from a journalist that gives this blog a run for its money:

The black-clad fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, sweeping a collapsing army and terrified Iraqis before them as they advance toward Baghdad, reflect back to us the ghoulish face of American empire. They are the specters of the hundreds of thousands of people we murdered in our deluded quest to remake the Middle East. They are ghosts from the innumerable roadsides and villages where U.S. soldiers and Marines, jolted by explosions of improvised explosive devices, responded with indiscriminate fire. They are the risen remains of the dismembered Iraqis left behind by blasts of Hellfire and cruise missiles, howitzers, grenade launchers and drone strikes. They are the avengers of the gruesome torture and the sexual debasement that often came with being detained by American troops. They are the final answer to the collective humiliation of an occupied country, the logical outcome of Shock and Awe, the Frankenstein monster stitched together from the body parts we left scattered on the ground. They are what we get for the $4 trillion we wasted on the Iraq War.

The language of violence engenders violence. The language of hate engenders hate. “I and the public know what all schoolchildren learn,” W.H. Auden wrote. “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.” It is as old as the Bible.
...
We are not, as we thought when we entered Iraq, the omnipotent superpower able in a swift and brutal stroke to bend a people to our will. We are something else. Fools and murderers. Blinded by hubris. Faded relics of the Cold War. And now, in the final act of the play, we are crawling away. Our empire is dying.

(Goulish Empire, by Chris Hedges, emphasis added). There is little if anything that can be done to change what the warmongers among us did to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya.

There might be something we could change about the fact that we are committing suicide slowly, just as the empires of the past have done, after they poisoned themselves with the toxins of power:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown." - A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee

"It is forbidden to kill therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." -Voltaire

"If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy." - James Madison

(Dredd Blog Quotes Page). Both tyranny and oppression have been brought to this land in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

This has clearly been shown by Dredd Blog in this series and others (see e.g. Dredd Blog Series Posts).

Court cases have not yet corrected the mad infection (see e.g. ACLU vs. Clapper, Alexander, Hagel, Holder, and Mueller).

But there is one ray of hope to share with readers today.

A federal district court judge has ruled that the "no-fly list" is applied in a manner that denies constitutional rights:

When prescreening passengers, Congress instructed the Executive to "establish a procedure to enable airline passengers, who are delayed or prohibited from boarding a flight because the advanced passenger prescreening system determined that they might pose a security threat, to appeal such determination and correct information contained in the system." ... As discussed herein at length, the DHS TRIP process does not provide a meaningful mechanism for travelers who have been denied boarding to correct erroneous information in the government's terrorism databases. A traveler who has not been given any indication of the information that may be in the record does not have any way to correct that information. As a result, the DHS TRIP process "entirely fail[s] to consider an important aspect" of Congress's instructions with respect to travelers denied boarding because they are on the No-Fly List.

(Latif v Holder, p. 63, PDF). Remember that a prominent member of the Senate, Ted Kennedy, was placed on the no-fly list (Sen. Kennedy Flagged by No-Fly List).

The craziness has spread far and wide, and will take years of effort just to get back to where we were just before the ill-conceived "war on terror" infected foreign and domestic policy, taking us deeper into American Feudalism.

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

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Interview of Senator Bob Graham (Real News):

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A House member discusses what Senator Graham mentioned (the "28 pages of truth") which the government hides from the American people:

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