Zees queez fhrom Jhoovaynal, eet ees ab-seurd! Aye aym newt a hway-teur!
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Category Archives: War
Rav Jousting: Knights on cars vid o’ the day
There are no words for this…it makes insanity look like accountancy.
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the faces of terror
According to the Americans, this is what a terrorist looks like:
and like this
and like this
Well, you may say, better safe than sorry. After all, we don’t know what the kid had in her diaper, and the first two are kinda swarthy-lookin’.
And yes, fair enough, they do look kinda tan for, respectively, a Canadian and a Swede, but since Maher Arar was cleared of terrorism charges and released after spending two years of torture in a Syrian prison(Syria being the US’s favorite offshore torture facility), and since Prince Carl Philip of Sweden is in line for the throne of a major European monarchy, besides being a total hottie, to keep Arar on the no-fly list and to arrest and detain HRH CP in jail overnight for using his diplomatic passport and looking insufficiently regal seems a tad…well, overzealous.
Whereas we have no sympathy whatsoever for the three year old girl who threw a screaming tantrum while her flight was boarding, and who was thrown off the plane and banned along with her parents for “attacking a woman” (who happened to be her mother). If empowered to do so, I myself would unhesitatingly throw off a plane anyone I felt looked like they could at some point in the flight become flatulent, hog the armrest, throw a screaming fit, attack someone, discuss real estate or smokers’ rights, or chew with their mouths open. And I wouldn’t wait for the bloody plane to land, either. Softies!
So, with passport requirements stiffening, even for US citizens trying to re-enter their own country — don’t misplace yours. If it can happen to Swedish royalty, it can happen to anyone.
Well, OK, there is one difference between royalty and us little guys in this situation…
“I got the impression that he thought it was quite exciting,” said documentary film maker Folke Rydén, who was traveling with the Prince as part of the filming project.
Special bonus British terrorist:
Jay Cowper, the tiny terrorist, the huggable hoodie.
The shop, which serves the well-to-do Huntington area of York, is only a five-minute walk from the family home but it was a cold and windy night so Jay was wrapped up in a brown Next jacket with a furry hood.
Mrs Cowper said: “No sooner had they got inside than the shopkeeper said to my husband, ‘Could you ask the little boy to remove his hood?’
“My husband said, ‘He’s only two and a half, I don’t think he’s going to rob you!’“
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petard-hoisting in our time: the Yard arrests top gov’t official
and, apparently, using the post-paranoid age’s patented warrant-less taps and hacking provisions, which Blair‘s own government shoved down the throats of a complacent nation. Whoops, won’t do that again soon, will ya?
The Guardian has a report on the panic at #10:
Yates was the man who authorised the arrest of Ruth Turner, the rather earnest daughter of a theology professor and, more importantly, head of government relations at Number 10, on suspicion of perverting the course of justice. The move has set the government and the Metropolitan Police at war. What began with four police officers banging on the door of Turner‘s flat in Waterloo at dawn now threatens to end in a constitutional standoff, raising fundamental questions about the relationship between politicians and the law.
And more of the same, with bonus “senior government officials interfering with an investigation” here.
Downing street was plunged into a full-scale war with the police yesterday after senior officers hit back at criticism of the way the cash-for-peerages investigation is being handled.
They responded after Cabinet Minister Tessa Jowell expressed bewilderment at the manner in which Ruth Turner, Number 10’s director of devolvement relations, was arrested at home at dawn – while former Home Secretary David Blunkett accused police of ‘theatrics’. Yesterday Scotland Yard made clear its anger at what it sees as undue political pressure. Sir Chris Fox, the former president of the Association of Chief Police Officers who remains close to Scotland Yard, accused political critics of ‘scheming to discredit a very important inquiry’. Chief constables feared a potential threat to police independence, he added.
and, best of all, Iain Dale has the story about how it was the coppers hacking into the computer system at #10 which provided the smoking gun. This would, of course, have been illegal but for the shiny new surveillance measures that have been enacted since The War Against Terror began.
…An independent IT expert was then sent in by detectives, with the permission of Downing Street, to look through communications records, it claimed. But the Sunday Telegraph suggested that detectives had obtained high-level permission to “hack” into the IT system remotely…
Captain KJ on freedom of the press, Iraq, and the value of human life
Here’s one of my patented I-don’t-agree-with-everything-in-this-post-but-it’s-too-damn-good-to-ignore posts. Captain KJ is an American serving in Iraq, and this is her post about the way the American MSM reports on American deaths, doesn’t report on Iraqi deaths, and gives a bad impression of America to Iraqis in multiple ways.
But where she says that exercising their freedom of speech is one of those ways, that is where she and I diverge. This is an excerpt, of course, but I encourage you to read the whole post, because she makes several complex points.
…What does it say to the Iraqis that we yell and scream (or our visible press does) about 20 American deaths when, in this ongoing conflict, a “light casualty day” for civilians in Baghdad is a day when there are less than 50 deaths? What are we saying about our relative valuing of American and Iraqi lives? Perhaps we should consider the messages that we’re carrying around the world when we have hysterics in the press the way we do. Granted, no nation or people can escape a certain amount of ethnocentrism, but it looks really bad to the people here when we obsess continually about American lives lost (which are, after all, lives lost who had volunteered to put themselves in the path of danger), and remain dismissively mute about the Iraqi lives lost, except as an underscore to continually harping about American deaths…
and my comment:
A good post. Respect for American lives does not require the negation of the personhood of any other nationalities, and I haven’t seen it put as well as it is here. But do you think that anyone Stateside gives a moment’s thought to how the US appears to Iraqis? I don’t: your post is the single most humanistic thing I’ve read about the Iraqis since…yes, since the last time I read Al Jazeera.
I have to strongly disagree, however, that parroting the party line strengthens the country. The Iraqis already know the US is divided: the US really is divided. Opposition and debate are inherent in the democratic process and certainly the Founding Fathers of the United States knew and valued this. It’s messy. It’s complicated. But it is the mark of an advanced nation that it tolerates ambiguity and difference, and venerates freedom of speech. There is no point in your being there, trying to bring democracy to Iraq, if they don’t know that this is how it works; they already know how totalitarianism and government censorship work. They know it all too well.
raincoaster 