Woo!

Isn’t it a great feeling to finally know that some completely irrelevant guy is now dead, and he won’t be escaping from his maximum security prison and going after your family?

Finally we can all relax and know that the Allied Forces have done a great job, and that its finally over because “it is an important milestone on Iraq’s course to becoming a democracy
that can govern, sustain, and defend itself, and be an ally in the war
on terror”*.

Because, obviously, killing off an old hack who has been in US custody for some time, and who is unable to so much as move, yet is obviously capable of using his imaginary WMDs to blow up things, is such a great achievement in this war on terror.

The war in Iraq is going swell, so this could not have been some clever ploy to draw our attention away from the bloodshed, and towards the way we joyfully kill bad people.

And how many people actually feel this way?

Between his sentencing and the execution yesterday, too many people have been hailing it as a great conquest, hailing “good riddance” to the brutal dictator. Completely irrelevant was the fact that he had been “rid” back in 2003, where he became a fugitive, with absolutely no influence, and no possible way to commit more crimes. He was then again “rid”, when they captured him in late 2003. And yesterday, as if he were still some incredibly dangerous man, he was executed, ridding him for the third and final time, all three instances timed impeccably well. So well, even, that had George Bush not stated otherwise, it would seem that this was the workings of a President who could offer the people nothing – not peace, not victory – but the killing of a frivolous, downtrodden man.

Yet no less troubling is the fervour with which people, including most Western governments are celebrating the execution of Mr. Hussein. It is deeply disturbing, yet not in the least surprising, that the Commonwealth Government of Australia has itself fully supported the hanging, even praising America and Iraq, with Prime Minister Howard saying: “I believe there is something quite heroic about a country that is going through the pain and the suffering that Iraq is going through, yet still extends due process to somebody who was a tyrant and brutal suppressor and murderer of his people”.

The irony being, that Australia seemingly is quite opposed to Capital Punishment, except, of course, in the case of murderous dictators. And while several members of the EU have mentioned that they did not support the execution, Australia has not so much as made a peep about condemning the hanging.

And this hypocritical nature and “moral flexibility” is making Australia look futile in efforts to fight for human right around the globe.

Supposedly justice has been done here, because, admittedly he was tried, and sentenced according to the law in Iraq. However, relativism would also suggest, that if we cannot criticise the Iraqi law, then who are we to condemn the absurdity of Sharia law, and of stoning women because they allowed themselves to get raped? Or for that matter, who were we to remove Saddam from power in the first place?

Nevertheless, the issue at stake here is not doing “justice”, if it is indeed that, and not a revenge killing: Saddam has been influentially incapacitated for quite some time now.
The issue is about not compromising one’s moral stance because before them comes a “global villain”, an undoubtedly “bad” person, infamous worldwide. It does not matter that it is Saddam Hussein. What matters is that he is a person, captured by the supposedly “ethical” Western world. And if and when, one such person is found guilty, after a FAIR trial, he should rot in jail, not be barbarically executed.

* All quotes provided by Mr. G. W. Bush, unless otherwise specified

Article from Junaman

This one about the fear-mongering (read terrorising) of the Republicans about the terrorist threat.

Transcript below

And lastly, tonight, a Special Comment on the advertising of terrorism.

The commercial, you have already seen, it is a distillation of everything this administration and the party in power have tried to do these last five years and six weeks.

It is from the Republican National Committee, it shows images of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. It offers quotes from them, all as a clock ticks ominously in the background. It concludes with what Zawahiri may or may not have said to a Pakistani journalist as long ago as 2001, his dubious claim that he had purchased suitcase bombs. The quotation is followed by sheer coincidence, no doubt, by an image of a massive explosion. “These are the stakes” appears on the screen, quoting exactly from Lyndon Johnson’s infamous nuclear scare commercial from 1964, “Vote November 7^th“.

There is a cheap Texas Chainsaw Massacre quality to the whole thing. It also serves to immediately call to mind the occasions when President Bush dismissed Osama bin Laden as somebody he didn’t think about, except, obviously, when elections were near. Frankly, a lot of people seeing that commercial for the first time have laughed out loud, but not everyone. And therein lies the true threat to this country.

The dictionary definition of the word ‘terrorize’ is simple and not open to misinterpretation: “To fill or overpower with terror; terrify; coerce by intimidation or fear.” Note please that the words ‘violence’ and ‘death’ are missing from that definition. For the key to terrorism is not the act-but the fear of the act. That is why bin Laden and his deputies and his imitators are forever putting together videotape statements and releasing virtual infomercials with dire threats and heart-stopping warnings.

But why is the Republican Party imitating them? Bin Laden puts out what amounts to a commercial of fear; the Republicans put out what is unmistakable as a commercial of fear.

The Republicans are paying to have the messages of bin Laden and the others broadcast into your home! Only the Republicans have a bigger bankroll.

When last week, the CNN network ran video of an insurgent in Iraq evidently stalking and killing an American soldier, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Mr. Hunter, Republican of California, branded that channel quote “the publicist for an enemy propaganda film,” and added that CNN used it to sell commercials. Another California Republican, Representative Brian Bilbray, called the video quote “nothing short of a terrorist snuff film.”

If so, Mr. Bilbray, then what in the hell is your party’s new advertisement? And Mr. Hunter? CNN using the film to sell commercials? Commercials? You have adopted bin Laden and Zawahiri as spokesmen for the Republican National Committee.

‘To fill or overpower with terror; terrify. To coerce by intimidation or fear’

By this definition, the people who put these videos together: first, the terrorists and then, the administration, whose shared goal is to scare you into panicking instead of thinking, they are the ones terrorizing you.

By this definition, the leading terrorist group in this world right now is al Qaeda, but the leading terrorist group in this country right now is the Republican Party.

Eleven presidents ago, the chief executive reassured us that ‘we have nothing to fear, but fear itself.’ His distant successor has wasted his administration, insisting there is nothing we can have but fear itself.

The Vice President, as recently as this month, was caught campaigning again with the phrase “mass death in the United States”. Four years ago, it was the now Secretary of State, Dr. Rice, rationalizing Iraq with quote, “we don’t want to be…the smoking gun to be the mushroom cloud.” Days later, Mr. Bush himself told an audience that quote “we cannot wait the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”

And now we have this cheesy commercial, complete with images of a faked mushroom cloud and implications of mass death in America.

This administration has derived benefit and power from terrorizing the very people it claims to be protecting from terror. It may be the oldest trick in the political book: scare people into believing they are in danger and only you can save them. Lyndon Johnson used it to bury Barry Goldwater. Joe McCarthy leaped from obscurity on its back. And now the legacy has come to President George W. Bush.

Of course, the gruel of fear is getting thinner and thinner, is it not, Mr. President? And thus, more and more of it needs to be made out of less and less actual terror. After last week’s embarrassing internet hoax about dirty bombs in footballs stadiums, the one your Department of Homeland Security immediately disseminated to the public, a self-described former CIA operative named Wayne Simmons cited the fiasco as quote “The, and I mean, the perfect example of the President’s Military Commissions Act of 2006 and the NSA Terrorist Eavesdropping Program-how vital they are.”

Frank Gaffney, once a respected Assistant Secretary of Defense and now the president of something called The Center for Security Policy added “one of the things that I hope Americans take away from this is not only that they’re gunning for us. Not just in a place like Iraq, but truly worldwide.”

Of course, the “they” to which Mr. Gaffney referred, turned out to be a lone 20-year-old grocery bagger from Wisconsin named Jake. A kid trying to one-up some loser in an internet game of ‘chicken.’ His threat referenced seven football stadiums, at which dirty bombs were to be exploded yesterday. It began with the one in New York City, even though there isn’t one in New York City and though the attacks were supposed to be simultaneous, four of the games were scheduled to start at 1:00 pm Eastern time and the others at 4:00 pm Eastern time. Moreover, the kid said that he had posted the identical message on forty websites since September. We caught him in merely about six weeks, even though the only way he could be less subtle, less stealthy and less of a threat was if he bought an advertisement on the Superbowl telecast.

Mr. Bush, this is the what–100^th plot your people have revealed that turned out to be some nonsensical misunderstanding or the fabrications of somebody hoping to talk his way off a waterboard in Eastern Europe? If, Mr. President, this is the kind of crack work your new ad implies that only you, and not the Democrats, can do, you, sir, need to pull over and ask for directions. The real question, of course, Mr. Bush, is why did your Department of Homeland Security even release that information in the first place? It was never a serious threat. Even the first news accounts quoted a Homeland spokesman as admitting strong skepticism. The kind of strong skepticism which most government agencies address before telling the public, not afterwards.

So that leaves two options, Mr. President: the first option, you and your Department of Homeland Security don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing here. Thus, contrary to your flip-flopping between saying, “we’re safe” and saying, “but we’re not safe enough”, and contrary to the Vice President’s swaggering pronouncements about the lack of another attack since 9/11, the last five years HAS been just an accident.

Or there’s the second option: your political operatives leaked this nonsense for the same reason your political operatives put out that commercial. To scare the gullible.

Obviously, the correct answer, Mr. Bush, is: all of the above.

There are some of us who could forgive you, for trying to run your candidates on the coattails of the Grim Reaper, for reducing your party’s existence to “Death and the Tax Us.” It’s cynical and barbaric, but after all, it may be merely the extension of the gutter politics to which you have subscribed since you sidled over from baseball and the business world of other people’s money.

But to forgive you for terrorizing us, we would have to believe that you somehow competent in keeping others from terrorizing us. Yet last week, construction workers repairing a subway line in New York City were cleaning out an abandoned manhole on the edge of the WTC site, when they stumbled on the horrific and impossible: human remains from 9/11. Bones and fragments, eighty of them. Some as much as a foot long. The victims had been lying literally in the gutter for five years and five weeks. The families and friends of each of the 2,749 dead, who had been grimly told in May 2002, that there were no more remains to be found, were struck anew as if the terrorism of that day had just happened all over again.

And over this weekend, they have found still more remains. And now this week will be spent looking in places that should have already been looked at a thousand times, five years ago.

For all the victims in New York, Mr. Bush, the living and the dead, it is a touch of 9/11 all over again. And the mayor of this city, who called off this search four and a half years ago is a Republican. The governor, with whom he conferred, is a Republican. The House of Representatives, Republican. The Senate, Republican. The President, Republican. And yet you can claim that you and you alone can protect us from terrorism?

You can’t even recover our dead from the battlefield. The battlefield in an American city. When we’ve given you five years and unlimited funds to do so.

While citing a Military Commissions Act so monstrous that it has now been criticized by even the John Birch Society, you told us, Mr. Bush, quote, “there is nothing we can do to bring back the men and women lost on September 11^th, 2001, yet we’ll always honor their memory and we will never forget the way they were taken from us.” Except of course, for the ones that have been lying under a manhole cover for five years.

Setting aside the fact that your government has done nothing else for those five years but pat itself on the back about terror, while waging pointless war on the wrong enemy in Iraq and waging war on the cherished freedoms in America, just on this subject of counter-terrorism, sir, yours is the least competent government in time of crisis in this country’s history.

These are the stakes indeed, Mr. President. You do not know what you are doing. And the commercial, the one about which Zawahiri might say, “hey, pretty good, we love your choice of font style,” all that further needs to be said about that is to add three words to Shakespeare. Mr. President, you and that advertisement of terror are full of sound and fury, signifying–and competent at–nothing.

Article by Junaman

Wing-nuts, gun-nuts, religious-nuts

FUCK OFF

We fight for every person that has ever: woken up with the tax man coming for the shirt off their back, denied their soul to Rupert Murdoch, thrown a fax machine out of a second storey window. Every man woman and child that has gone insane navigating the bureaucracy of their native land.

If it has happened to you we give a fuck!
If it has happened to someone you know we give a fuck!
If you want to talk about a deity down on his luck talk to us!
If you want your voice heard we have a megaphone!
If you blackmail us we won’t listen!
We will not back down!
We will not move in any given direction but outwards!
No company can buy us!
No politician can sway us!
We are the voice of the loud and obnoxious!

WE ARE INCOMPETENCE INCORPORATED!

Written by Red Domino
Incompetence Inc. was created by Junaman

TPC currently prints and distributes the magazine Incompetence Inc. which is a compilation of articles for www.junaman.wordpress.com and other blogs