Pixelated Semantics

War crimes, pretexts, and the delusions of unpopular leaders

The Triumvarate of Mass Deception ride through the media today in their usual style. Mr. Blair is attacked as a "serial liar" over Irak invasion pretexts, after it became clear he was given advice "full of warnings that the invasion could be illegal" but proceeded to have the advice changed. Mr. Howard irrationally continues to defend the young Australians who trashed Gallipoli, as opposed to calling out their behaviour for what is was, he seems to prefer delusion ("I won't have a word said against them") where it's politically convenient. It would be extremely unlikely, for instance, that a crowd of left-wing students who slept on soldier's graves and left a "mountain of rubbish" at the National War Memorial would recieve any tolerance whatsoever, let alone staunch praise in the face of quite shameful behaviour.

And in another fine example of expedience over substance, while the Bush Junta makes reassuring noises about interrogation practises, their statements actually skirt any proper commitment to human rights. And if, as reported, the CIA's "interrogation methods were harsher than those employed by the military" - seeing the military's techniques clearly led to fatalities, "harsher" becomes either a truly frightening measure of extremity, or simply hyperbole. But perhaps "ghost detainees" may have another meaning, also, in that a former translator alleges authorities at Guantanamo Bay "staged interrogations of detainees for visiting politicians and generals to give the impression that valuable intelligence was regularly being gathered". The Bush administration is also making a PR case of out their information that "some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers booked their tickets on the internet using a computer in a college library", a "fact" apparently intended to bolster the government's argument that Congress should renew a law allowing it to seize library and bookstore records. (One would think that seeing Libraries are apparently such a hotbed of terrorist activity, they ought to be shut down completely. And what kind of free-thinking radical reads books anymore, either?) A nexus between acts of terror and the use of public libraries has a familiar shape, for it is the same chilling illogic that allowed non-existant WMD to excuse war crimes like Gitmo and Abu Grahib.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 9:33 am ::