••can ye pass the acid test?••

ye who enter here be afraid, but do what ye must -- to defeat your fear ye must defy it.

& defeat it ye must, for only then can we begin to realize liberty & justice for all.

time bomb tick tock? nervous tic talk? war on war?

or just a blog crying in the wilderness, trying to make sense of it all, terror-fried by hate radio and FOX, the number of whose name is 666??? (coincidence?)

Thursday, October 27, 2005

yoogate

john yoo's at it again.

he's not content to have poisoned impressionable soldiers with his tortuous definition of torture.

it's not enough for him to have naive students to corrupt with his weirdly distorted ideas of justice.

now he's smooth-talking the npr audience with his honeyed lips.

as a guest on talk of the nation yesterday, the ex-justice dept torture-memo writer essentially denied that accused terrorists have a right to due process of law, because war is not law enforcement, so captured persons don't need to be proven guilty.

yoo justifies that by pointing out that we took and held many prisoners in past wars without treating them as accused criminals, who otherwise would've had due process rights, &c. it's always been considered acceptable to interrogate enemy prisoners to obtain militarily useful information.

yoo, who now teaches at berkeley, unwittingly shows why we went to war rather than hunting down and prosecuting terrorists as criminals: going to war is easier than the painstaking work of criminal law.

war doesn't require presumption of innocence or proof beyond reasonable doubt or even a preponderance of evidence. soldiers kill with no more than probable cause, if that. prosecuting criminals requires preparing a case for each individual. in war, a handful of memos can cover thousands of killings and cases of torture.

iraq isn't the first war to come about under such a doctrine. bush's daddy killed at least 500 innocent panamanians to arrest one man. before that, ww1 began as retaliation for one man's crime.

war is chaos. some say "controlled chaos," but nobody can control war. one side's superior strategists may determine who wins, but modern war always kills far more noncombatants than fighters and has unintended and unexpected consequences.

ever hear of chaos theory? the butterfly effect? sensitive dependence on initial conditions?

widespread militarization and a slew of entangling alliances preceded the shooting of archduke ferdinand and led to millions of deaths in ww1, which caused the rise of hitler and stalin, who killed many more millions and started ww2, which led to nuclear weapons and the cold war, which led to korea, vietnam, and US-sponsored resistance to the soviet invasion of afghanistan.

the korean war contributed to the still-unresolved nuke proliferation crisis we see today. the vietnam war led to dollar destabilization, greater energy dependence, and the cambodian killing fields. afghanistan produced the taliban and al qaeda, which got us to 9/11.

i'll leave japan, china, india, pakistan, israel, palestine, and the various other nations of asia, africa, and latin america out of it. it already has enough complexity to make my point without them.

we had a chance to break one of the cycles. terrorism had for decades been dealt with as crime rather than warfare. calling it war legitimizes terror, because terrorists already consider themselves at war, so whoever admits it's war plays into their game.

bush could have used the phrase "war on terror" metaphorically, as in "war on crime" or "war on poverty," but he chose to declare war literally.

thus opens one more door to chaos.

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