So I guess this war is enough like the Iraq War that President Obama, like his predecessor, can only visit the troops at night, in secret. And the whiff of triumphalism is familiar, too: "we never quit". Really? Lebanon 1984 didn't happen? Vietnam came out differently than we remember?
Still, the most jarring part of the Obama fly-in to Bagram was the part of the base he (apparently) didn't visit: the secret prison we've been running there for years. It's Gitmo on steroids.
Try here, here, here, here, here, here and here for the info on that "other" Bagram.
The Obama some of us want to believe still exists would have at least acknowledged the unpleasant truth. The Obama who does exist just gave the troops a boilerplate pep talk, "never quit" and all, and flew into the dawn.
Follow Harry Shearer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/letwits
But I can also imagine the unintended consequences of the perfect vs. the slow justice of the good. If Obama had landed and said "there are killers here, and when I find you, I will personally kick the chair out from under your feet...", well, we all agree there would be consequences. War is hell, even fake ones, and Obama has the unenviable task of navigating us all back to reality from a VERY fake time in our history, while a third of the U.S. population thinks he's not REALLY the America-born president he claims to be.
Right now, other than for the discovery of some treasonous act, we MUST re-elect Obama and the democratic majority back into office this November. If we now scare off the swing voters, all baby steps forward will be repealed and Obama will be impeached over a signing statement or an appointment... doesn't really matter, as long as it's plausible long enough to destroy every little stupid thing we've accomplished.
You must realize that fully half the population of the United States is dumber than the average American. To badly quote some smart guy I don't remember, never underestimate the power of stupid people in large numbers.
You are correct that the average American has the intellect of a 16 year old so that does imply that we have a large number of Americans under the 16 year old reading, comprehending level. Keep cutting the education budgets and allow Texas to write the curriculum for all states, we need some dumbing down.
- Human Rights First
http://www.humanrightsfirst.info/pdf/Fixing-Bagram-110409.pdf
The link is a 19 page PDF I haven't had a chance to read it all but the first paragraph should explain how full of it Harry is. Honesty being the color of the day harry how about a little honesty in your never ending quest to attack the president.
Because ONLY time will tell, just like the document says.
In other words, how do you know he didn't visit it?
I think what you mean is, why didn't he publicly visit the prison, to acknowledge its existence. Because it's a secret.
Sure, it's something to keep an eye on, but I did elect the guy to do his job, part of it is making decisions based on military briefings I will never see. Evidently, he feels that the prison is necessary, and that its secrecy is necessary.
There's a lot of eye rolling going on, as if the guy with arguably the toughest job in the world is just screwing around. You might not have liked his "boilerplate pep talk," but he did make his position clear - our presence in Afghanistan is necessary. What we're doing over there is necessary.
That's his position. Vote for a republican if you want to next election, sure. But I'm not going to micromanage his strategic military decisions anymore than Tea Partiers ought to try micromanaging his domestic decisions.
I mean this with all due respect. I will absolutely promise to read up on these prisons and see if I'm as outraged as you are, but the fact is, I still trust the guy. It's that simple.
If only the AC of E would have built the walls in New Orleans as strong...
The speech was sickening, it could have been written by Cheney. It was full of hyperbole and untruths. Not everyone back home supports this insane military occupation. Not everyone supports the escalation, 30,000 more troops, selling drones to Pakistan. Not everyone is in favour of the civilian death toll caused by occupation troops. He should just speak for himself and his military/industrial complex.
"Whiff of triumphalism," is it? .... The intellectual disdain in that phrase is flippant and unbecoming, considering the situation it references.
The POTUS flies in to a war zone to give moral support to our troops who are fighting a war (not a "band of brothers" playing a musical gig, mind you), laying their lives on the line .... and Mr. Shearer is criticizing PO for giving them a pep talk?
Questions of the morality of that war OR the policies which led to the war and continue to sustain the war deserve a substantive debate with passion and conviction at the appropriate time and place .... and a troop visit by the president to the battlefield is not the place to talk about Vietnam or, as Mr. Shearer so ingenuously puts it, "at least acknowledged the unpleasant truth." (Want to know what the troops consider an "unpleasant truth," Harry? Getting their heads blown off the next day. Yeah, pretty much trumps the unpleasant truth you were referring to.)
Finally, how does Mr. Shearer know that PO gave his talk and then picturesquely "flew into the dawn?" Unless the credentials of "Actor, author, director, satirist, musician, radio host ... " gave him security clearance to be made privy of the President's movements, Mr. Shearer has no idea whether PO actually did stop off to review the "secret prison."
And that's the point. The "secret prison" remains secret, even with the President within hearing-the-gurgling-from-water-boarding distance of it.
To avoid this issue from the distance of Washington DC is one thing, but to avoid it at it's source is quite another.
And as for those brave soldiers "laying their lives on the line," what a "pep talk" Obama could have given them, if he'd reminded them of what they're supposedly fighting for. A little thing called justice, and a commitment that they do not represent a government that tortures anyone, innocent or guilty.
Because these troops have the most to lose in real time from our continued operation of this "secret prison" in the event any of them are captured, the admission of it's existance, and immediate call for it's shutdown, by this visiting President, might have been the greatest "pep talk" they could have ever hoped to receive.
2 deaths in Bagram and you are flipped out. While I agree someone has to account for those two deaths in our custody I am not hypocritical enough to argue that it represents torture, evil, or whatever without knowing what happened. Let me ask you this, how many deaths were there last year in US prisons Harry since death in prison is a sign of torture and unconscionable treatment or a war crime... since it makes you outraged, how many? 7000 . Seriously. 7000 a year according to DOJ statistics. So forgive me if I am not shocked that 2 peopled who are either pretty seriously bad men or innocent people wrongfully accused but trapped in a tough circumstance, died. 7000 people die in US custody every single stinking year.
At some point, only Obama is the one with the power and the courage (?) to put his foot down about what's not only morally correct in all of these matters, but in fact, essential for the well being and future prosperity of America.
America is broken and it needs real fixes, not half measures or a return to our economic policies of the 90's which have already reaped all possible benefits out of the middle class and given them to the richest 2%.
Hello Corporatocracy, Goodbye America. There is no left anymore. It's ALL corporate control, all the time. Whether it's the wingnuts in the WH who like to torture people for the fun of it, or whether it's the eloquent buddy of the banksters who gives good speech, but has no real political morals, what's it matter when the outcomes are virtually identical?
You can't lay out a plan to leave anywhere, when you know you'll have to leave enough troops there for decades to come. Same with Iraq. We need to either get out completely, or stay, but don't pretend we're really going anywhere, anytime soon.
It's worth remembering that Afghanistan didn't attack the USA and we still haven't caught Usama bin Laden, yet the president has surged troop levels there in the hopes that an Iraq-like victory can be had.
When Pres. Obama says "we never quit," he approaches it from the negative, as if quitting was the predominant likelihood; by doing so he opens the door ever so slightly toward easing the American people into a mindset of defeat. Either that or he's trying to prepare us for the equally likely possibility that we may be there in a stalemate for years and years but "we never quit."
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that there will be no accountability for the Bush crimes.Correct he did say that the Afghan
wr ws the right war,when he was campaigntng,other than that he is not the Obama that he was as senator and his opposition to serious investigations and other decisions that
seem to follow Bushs lead,makes me believe that Rham has too much influence.I was
an Obama supporter,and I havent given up completely.and hope that he will get a
better chief advisor