Earlier John McCain had forgotten we invaded Afghanistan. When talking to Katie Couric, he called Iraq the first major conflict since 9/11. Now, he has forgotten both wars. When upbraiding Russia for "invading" Georgia he made this classic mistake:
If Obama made half of the mistakes McCain has made on the foreign policy front, the press would have jumped down his throat as unfit to lead. How many passes is John McCain going to get? Watch More Young Turks Here
Does John McCain prepare for any of his interviews? First Joy Behar clowned him and then Ellen DeGeneres took him to school and now Meredith Vieira bats him around. Or as the kids would say, she pwned him (I still don't know why we substitute the "p" for the "o" in that word, but it does sound a little cooler that way).
Someone tell John McCain he needs to wake up before these interviews -- or come up with policies that he can actually defend. Watch him get dismantled by Vieira here:
It has now come to light that the detainee abuse in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq and Afghanistan started when the Bush administration ordered our interrogators to use a document called: "Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance."
This was a 1957 document that showed how the Chinese Communists tortured people -- in order to get false confessions! The only thing we changed was that we dropped the title of the document. Otherwise it is exactly the same. We have been using communist torture tactics that are designed to get false confessions. Meanwhile, The Bush administration has been calling it "enhanced interrogations" and saying we got "valuable intelligence" from it.
More details on the story here:
If you want to read the story of how we came to use this document for our own interrogations, you can click here. This is deplorable. Will anyone ever suffer the consequences for ordering this illegal torture? Will the press question John McCain on why he voted to allow the CIA to continue doing this? I wouldn't bank on it.
But if we do this, and no one ever gets punished for it, can we really say that America doesn't torture anymore? Watch the Best Web TV Show Here and Here
Weird title, I know, but it really is an interesting case, and I'm not too creative this morning with my headlines. You may have heard of Pervez Kambaksh, he's the unlucky Afghani fellow who has been sentenced to death for downloading womans rights information from the internet. Womans rights are apparently an insult to Islam and insults to Islam are punishable by death.
According to the BBC it's now in the hands of the Afghani President Hamid Karzai to decide whether or not this 23 year old law student, who is interested in womans rights, will die.
In the last 60 Minutes, the top Pentagon official in charge of attacking "high value targets" in Iraq, Marc Garlasco, admitted that the number of civilians the US is willing to kill to try to get a bad guy is 29. If there are 29 civilians or less in an area where there is a high value target, we will launch the bomb. If there are 30 or more, permission has to come from the Secretary of Defense or the President.
We explain in further detail below:
The question is at what point does our killing of civilians cross the line? Why are terrorists the bad guys when they kill civilians and we are the good guys when we do the same?
I know that there are important differences. The terrorists are targeting the civilians, where as we are trying to avoid them (though not trying very hard apparently). The flip side is I am sure that our enemies would use F-16s and B-2 bombers against our military targets if they could. One of the reasons they use suicide bombs is because they don't have many other options. That clearly does not excuse it in any way. But it does explain it.
But sinking to their level also does not excuse our actions, either. I am not unrealistic or a peacenik who is always against any war (in fact, this Iraq War is the first US war I've ever been against in my lifetime). I get that sometimes civilians die in war -- and that's an excellent reason why we should be careful before we start a war, unlike what we did in Iraq. But is there a limit to how callous we are about civilian casualties?
PHILADELPHIA - A man was acquitted Tuesday after being arrested for refusing to heed a police officer's command he stop singing in a public park. A judge found Anthony Riley not guilty of disorderly conduct, saying "This is America, not Afghanistan."
Riley, 20, had faced a three month sentence after loudly singing "A Change is Gonna Come" in Rittenhouse Square in downtown Philadelphia in March.
Hmm. "The city is now reviewing what sorts of music should be allowed in its public parks."
Earlier in the week 7 Afghan children were killed by an American air strike, NBC reported this story and Bill O'Reilly got visibly upset because he believes reporting on "bang bang" stories "helps the terrorists."
This video comes from Crooksandliars.com, Olbermann and Huffington take a look at Bill O'Reilly's "Serious Reporting."
The Afghanistan Tag is participating in this weeks Tag Series, click the link and vote.
The Taliban recently held a unique graduation ceremony for teams of suicide bombers who are meant to target Western countries. Although Canadians are not threatened, it's sad for me to see that the Taliban are still able to produce propaganda tapes like this. Why have they not been defeated yet? There is always talk about the Iraq war, but when exactly will the Afghan War end?
On a related note, I'm a couple chapters away from completing "The Kite Runner", which is a book about the struggles of an Afghani fellow. I recommend it if your interested in Afghanistan.
The Kite Runner tells the story of Amir, a well-to-do Pashtun boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father's Hazara servant. The story is set against a backdrop of tumultuous events, from the fall of the monarchy in Afghanistan through the Soviet invasion, the mass exodus of refugees to Pakistan and the United States, and the Taliban regime.
In this week's Tag Series I have included the two previous runners up. The Hunter S Thompson Tag and The History Tag, both have fallen short the past two weeks of winning the grand prize...entering the Hall of Champions. This week they will duke it out with four new-comers to The Tag Series.
Remember you can vote once every 24hrs. The winner, along with being featured in the Hall of Champions, will be featured in a video heavy post next Sunday, just like Tag Series XV winner - Science.
Currently this archive has 13 bookmarks including 9 videos. This particular video is a classic, Hunter S Thompson speaking with Tim Russert in 2003 about "Bush's War". Hunter was the runner up in TSXIV.
