This & That:
Blood on Our Hands

Just in case you don't think things are happening fast enough, and are only keeping your eye on the Iraq War Speech ball, note that

our provocative raids on Somalia and the Iranian Embassy has already prompted a retaliatory response

(handily tagged "terrorist" in nature, thus waving the expected red flag before the US population while handily ignoring our own raids in Somalia and Kurdistan).

Sans the immediate context of our incredible national misbehavior (understatement) of this week, it's easy to get uninformed Americans's ire up over the rocket launched against the US Embassy in Greece. Don't fall for it.

Meanwhile, US media also handily ignores the worldwide protests against the Guantanamo incarcerations on the fifth anniversary of that prison's initiation -- is anyone with a brain and heart still able to pretend that five years of illegal imprisonment, sans charges, trial or any due precess, isn't torture? The news about those worldwide protests was covered by the BBC yesterday (on radio and TV), and the far more significant

loss of US status in international human rights issues, reflected in this sobering news story, deserves your immediate attention --

-- tied as it is to the unreported-in-the-US protest of Guantanamo.

Any American paying attention to the devastating erosion of our world status can't help but feel infuriated and adrift. Look what President Bush's policies have done to us, as a country. The terrorists have not done this -- our leaders have done this, in our name. The European Union is supplanting our former leadership position on human rights, since we have "forfeited the role with [our] harsh treatment of terror suspects, Human Rights Watch said Thursday," making it clear that while we may stupidly play down what the Bush Administration has been doing in our name, the world has and will not.

"The leading rights group released its 556-page World Report 2007 on the fifth anniversary of the U.S. first sending detainees to its controversial detention centre in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba" -- you see how this is intrinsically tied to the protests our own media refuses to reveal? We are simply no longer credible to the rest of the world. Period. Will any US news media of note cover this profound signpost of our international status slipping yet further?

Meanwhile, the ongoing insensitivity to the harsh realities of what we're doing to those we've imprisoned (sans charges, trial or justification) in the name of our "War on Terror"

is once again reflected in our Pentagon's treatment of our own men and women serving above and beyond the call of duty in this thankless, unprovoked and interminable war,

mirrored in the thankless, unprecedented and interminable abuse of the commitment they made to serving our country.

This Commander-in-Chief is habitually abusing our own soldiers now, quite openly and without apology, with the same callous disregard and utter lack of empathy he and his extends to those incarcerated in the name of this fucking war. Bush extends the incarceration of terrorist suspects with impunity; the Pentagon extends the terms of contract and tours of duty with impunity.

The two are linked, reflecting the same disregard for human beings.

This is sociopathic behavior; a sign of dangerous disconnect from being human, from what it is to be human -- a fundamental inability to empathize, to recognize consequences for his (Bush's) behavior, to take any responsibility for his decisions, actions or inactions.

Linked further with the ongoing refusal to deal with the very real and ongoing consequences of Hurricane Katrina to the Gulf Coast and one of our once-major US cities, the sociopathic behavior becomes pathological in its extreme: Bush and his cronies are demonstratably incapable of grasping the enormity of what they have done and not done. They mouth the words, "I am responsible," but they don't believe it for a second, they refute any culpability, and carry on as if nothing is wrong, as if anyone holding them in any way responsible is being unreasonable or adversarial.

This, my friends, is madness on a national and international scale.

But let's get back to that inherent link between the Bush Administration's callous treatment of both detainees and our own troops.

With the Veteran's Administration now struggling to handle a backload of over 450,000 cases -- almost half-a-million new war vets, created by this Administration and this war, who are not getting deserved benefits for wounds they've suffered -- and no end in sight, the disastrous irresponsibility and insanity of this War, this policy, this Commander-in-Chief is now measurably monstrous.

We are monsters -- for tolerating it for another nanosecond.

This is insane.
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