Amerika, zemlja velika

[pacey defender]

They hate us for our freedom

interesantno. na listi nema kube i država iz južne amerike.

[Indy]

After leading the way in remotely-operated warfare—killing terror suspects and insurgent leaders with drones—the White House is now trying to push for international guidelines on drone use. In aninterview with Reuters, former White House National Security Council spokesperson Tommy Veitor said that the Obama administration wants to set the legal standards for drone use as Chinese and Russian drone programs begin to reach the capabilities of systems like the US's Predator and Reaper."People say, 'What's going to happen when the Chinese and the Russians get this technology?'" Veitor told Reuters. "The president is well aware of those concerns and wants to set the standard for the international community on these tools."Some of this decision may be driven by legal considerations at home. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbiaruled Friday that the Central Intelligence Agency could no longer simply refuse to confirm or deny that it kept records of drone strikes. The CIA is now required by law to "explain what records it is withholding, and on what grounds it is withholding them," as American Civil Liberties Union Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said in a written statement on the decision. And there has been increasing pressure from Congress for the White House to be more accountable for drone operations. This includes the recent filibuster of new CIA director John Brennan's nomination by Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, brought on by concerns over the potential use of drones to kill terror suspects within the US's borders.Caitlin Hayden, who replaced Veitor as spokesperson for the National Security Council, also spoke with Reuters. "We are constantly working to refine, clarify, and strengthen the process for considering terrorist targets for lethal action," she said. "We are establishing standards other nations may follow."

Edited March 18, 2013 by Indy

[Gandalf]

They hate us for our freedom

od kada se dissaproval interpretira kao hate? Edited March 18, 2013 by Gandalf

[Indy]

Pa, kad se pogleda izvor članka, ne bih ni očekivao ništa pametnije.

[Gandalf]

ovako se krade na izborima, i sve legalno. :0.6:

Edited March 18, 2013 by Gandalf

[Prospero]

al su ga dobro džerimanderisali

[WTF]

Pa isto tako ovde kod mene™:

United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina, 2012[3]
Party Votes Percentage Seats Before Seats After +/–
Democratic 2,218,359 50.60% 7 4 -3
Republican 2,137,168 48.75% 6 9 +3
Libertarian 24,142 0.55% 0 0 -
Write-In 4,446 0.10% 0 0 -
Totals 4,384,115 100.00% 13 13 —
Redistricting

[3opge]

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/dying_vets_fuck_you_letter_to_george_bush_dick_cheney_needs_to_be_read

[malkin]

http://dangerousmind...eeds_to_be_read

bio je Jang jutros kod Ejmi Gudman

[Prospero]

malo retrospektive ili "da li mrzimo slobu buša što je vodio rat ili štoo ga je izgubio".

Fantasies of the Iraq Hawks</body>Robert W. MerryMarch 22, 2013There probably isn’t much more to be said about the tenth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. But perhaps there’s something to be said about what’s been said about the invasion on the occasion of its tenth anniversary. The musings that have emerged on the subject offer revealing insights into the state of the country’s foreign-policy discourse after nearly a dozen years of constant war.For some, it is an occasion to lament what is viewed by critics as a hopelessly flawed presidential decision that could never have yielded any outcome other than the calamity we now see in Iraq and environs. Consider the David Ignatius column in Thursday’s Washington Post. Ignatius supported the war in the period leading up to it because he saw a possibility that it could foster a greater degree of freedom and political pluralism in the region. It’s understandable that such a prospect would stir the imagination of someone who had spent more than two decades covering these tragic lands, as Ignatius had.But now he thinks otherwise. Indeed, he writes, “I owe readers an apology for being wrong on the overriding question of whether the war made sense.” Nodding to the war’s lingering defenders, who insist it all could have worked out fine if the occupation hadn’t been botched or had U.S. troops remained indefinitely, Ignatius writes: “We’ll never know whether the story might have been different if better planning had been done for ‘the day after,’ or the Iraqi army hadn’t been disbanded, or several other ‘ifs.’”That’s true. We’ll never know, and thus today’s defenders of the war end up basing their defense on what are essentially gauzy speculations. Not so, Ignatius. He writes: “But the abiding truth is that America shouldn’t have rolled the dice this way on a war of choice.” Further, he now calls President George W. Bush’s war decision “one of the biggest strategic errors in modern American history.”Former U.S. Senator Jim Webb of Virginia goes further. Speaking at a TNI luncheon the other week, he flatly declared the war to have been the single greatest strategic blunder in American history. He can make such a statement without apology because he opposed the war before it began. Writing in The Washington Post some seven months before the first bombs fell, he asked, “Is there an absolutely vital national interest that should lead us from containment to unilateral war and a long-term occupation of Iraq? And would such a war and its aftermath actually increase our ability to win the war against international terrorism?” He added that nations such as China could only view the prospect of an American military consumed by turmoil in the Middle East as a “glorious windfall.”Ignatius, Webb and many other tenth-anniversary war critics base their judgments on the outcome of Bush’s war decision, not on speculations of what the outcome might have been. Consider: Before the war, America was flush with cash. It had Iraq’s Saddam Hussein at bay, a brutal but broken dictator who could be—and was—rather easily contained in his own space. And yet, even in his reduced state, Saddam posed an important counterweight to the ambitions of neighboring Iran, thus helping maintain a valuable balance of power in the region. Al Qaeda didn’t have a presence in Iraq, as the secular thug Saddam had no intention of allowing any such threat to undermine his rule. True, he maintained Sunni dominance over the majority Shia, but this had been the political reality in Iraq for centuries—under the Ottomans, the British, the British-installed kings and the succeeding dictators. And while this wasn’t pluralism, it did breed stability.Now America is broke, in part because of the estimated $2.2 trillion invested in Iraq. Iran, unchecked by Iraqi power, is on the prowl in the region as never before. Al Qaeda is pursuing openings there that didn’t exist during the Saddam days. Sectarian strife is rampant and on the rise. The entire region has been destabilized, in part because of the Iraqi invasion, and Islamic fundamentalism is more thoroughly entrenched in the region than ever. China, as Webb and others predicted, has exploited America’s Middle East preoccupation to flex its muscles in Asia. And all this represents the strategic cost, leaving aside the 190,000 people killed by the war, including 4,488 U.S. service members, 3,400 U.S. contractors, and 134,000 Iraqi civilians.Now let’s look more closely at the arguments of the war’s defenders. A good place to start is The Wall Street Journal’s March 20 editorial, “Iraq in Retrospect.” The arguments include the following:First, it wasn’t just the president and his intelligence officials who thought erroneously that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, the initial top selling point for the war. Just about everyone else thought so, too, and Bush’s executive culpability is leavened by that fact. And when Bush took office, Iraq represented “a simmering and endless crisis for the U.S.—one that Saddam appeared to be winning.” Hence, the war was justified even absent WMD in Iraq.But the problem was in the execution: U.S. officials never anticipated the insurgency that would follow the invasion. They extended Paul Bremer’s regency over too long a period. They didn’t go after Syria and Iran, which were supporting the insurgency in various ways, and hence lacked the stomach for wider military action in the region. They accepted a mediocre military leadership in country for too long. They “offered shifting rationales for the war.”Still, according to this view, Saddam was deposed and killed. Iraq was neutered as a regional power. A sociopath was replaced by a leader with a mere “authoritarian streak.” Bush created a great opportunity for an ongoing U.S. military presence in the country, but then President Obama botched the opportunity by failing to negotiate a status of forces agreement with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Finally: “Don’t be surprised if someday Iraq is remembered as the war George Bush won and the peace Barack Obama lost.”Thus do we see the stark distinction between the Ignatius/Webb view and the WSJ view. The former looks at the outcome and the real-world price and concludes the outcome wasn’t worth the price. The latter looks at the price and concocts a fanciful outcome that could have happened—and would have justified the price had it actually materialized.The problem with the latter view is that neither history nor politics turns on might-have-beens. Napoleon might have won at Waterloo, in which case he would be considered one of the greatest figures in the history of the world. Lee might have won at Gettysburg, in which case the country would have split in two for at least an extended period of time. Nixon might have defeated Kennedy for the White House in 1960, in which case his presidency might never have been destroyed by scandal. Gore might have defeated George W. Bush in 2000, in which case there probably wouldn’t have been a U.S. invasion of Iraq.But we don’t know, and history will never know. In fact, history doesn’t care. Neither did U.S. voters care when they judged the Republican Party in 2006 and 2008 in the wake of the Iraq fiasco. What they knew was that Bush invaded Iraq, and it turned into a disaster. That’s all they needed to know.Now, ten years later, as we look at the retrospective commentary on the war, it’s instructive to search for the rhetorical and logical contortions. The Wall Street Journal editorial and Charles Krauthammer’s comments on Fox News and Weekly Standard justifications are filled with them. No so, the straightforward observations of David Ignatius and Jim Webb, who look upon the world as it actually is.

[DarkAttraktor]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0q_-Uu6mTMedit: +http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNbXpRReaHk Edited March 28, 2013 by DarkAttraktor

[Gandalf]

http://www.theatlant...ericans/274434/"Mapping Muslims: NYPD Spying and Its Impact on American Muslims," is available in its entirety here. The abstract objections to police officers spying on innocent Americans based on their religion are presumably familiar to readers, so let's focus on concrete costs to the innocent victims:

• Said a community organizer, "We're Arabs, we talk about politics all the time .... Politics is all we do! Every coffee shop, it's either Al Jazeera or a soccer game on TV. This new idea that we must be suspicious of those who speak about politics -- something's wrong." And one business owner stated, "I don't allow Al Jazeera on in our hookah bar. Particularly when things flare up in the Middle East. We can't control what people start saying in response to the news, and we never know who else is in the bar listening."

• A community organizer states that "almost every rally and public forum I've attended in the last year begins with some type of disclaimer or call-out of informants and undercovers who might be in attendance and recording the conversation. Most speakers don't even know if such a disclaimer protects them in any way, but I feel it to be a necessary announcement so that the audience participants are conscious of the environment in which we are organizing."

• Nearly all interviewees thought they knew someone who was an informant or an undercover officer. The reasons provided were diverse and contradictory, reflecting the widespread internal suspicion that surveillance has triggered within the American Muslim community. Someone viewed as overly religious was suspect, while another who frequented the mosque without seeming particularly religious was equally suspect...

Edited March 29, 2013 by Gandalf

[Indy]

The Texas Republican Joe Barton stands out even among his fellow conservative Republicans who have made it an article of faith to deny the existence of a human component to climate change.On Wednesday, Barton cemented that reputation by citing the Old Testament to refute scientific evidence of man-made global warming, drawing on the story of Noah's ark."I would point out that if you are a believer in the Bible, one would have to say the great flood was an example of climate change," ... "That certainly wasn't because mankind had overdeveloped hydrocarbon energy." ...

[Indy]

:heart:http://youtu.be/9WGtMMXQcEg

[Indy]

Justice is now spelled JustUs ... pogledati obaveznohttp://youtu.be/ijl0v3P6ZMU