Worsted

I happen to be a death-dealing,
blood-crazed warrior who wakes up
every day just hoping for the chance to dismember
my enemies and defile their civilizations.
Peace sucks a hairy asshole, Freddy.
War is the mother-fucking answer
--Generation Kill (2008)

That's the way, uh-huh uh-huh,
I like it, uh-huh, uh-huh.
--That's They Way I like It,
K.C. and the Sunshine Band
________________

The Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©) has been rolling down the highway to hell for 8 solid years, yet many detainees have still not had their day in court in the land of the free.

President Obama holds with the Bush administration in allowing these illegal indefinite detentions. Congress passed the Military Commission Acts (2006), which was just another game of political football; three years later there has still been no significant court action on these cases.

Why does the U.S. even pretend to care about the rule of law? We claimed jailing the Worst of the Worst was imperative, yet trials for the detained are not exactly blossoming. As a nation, why do we accept such disregard for the rule of law?

The people held at Gitmo, Bagram, et. al., are not the worst. They are small fry guerrilla fighters, or at best, low-level military operatives.

The Worst of the Worst are men like Dick Cheney, George W. Bush, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Yoo, Addington and their ilk. Men who would consider worldwide assassination programs to be valid expressions of democratic action. The people held in U.S. detention are small-fry compared to these world-class criminals.

That they hide behind the veil of national secrecy and wrap themselves in the flag does not erase their blatant criminality.

Ranger guesses the CIA didn't carry out the assassination program because it was transferred and hidden from congressional oversight by hiding it in the military's black operations budget. In addition, military Black Ops could easily sidestep oversight since there are layers of denial between the shooters and the Congress critters. This is how guys like Boykin and McChrystal get more stars than the Big Dipper.

Soldiers kill people in open combat or even in secret operations, but they are not killers. While they kill, assassins kill in a manner that is not military, and they are murderous. Soldiers are not murderers unless they kill as Private Green of the 101st Airborne Division. Having Top Secret military assassins short-circuits the lines between soldierly and criminal conduct.

Cloaking the program under a secret budget is the way everybody likes it since it gives everyone plausible denial. There is evidence that General Petraeus and McKean back-channeled normal reporting procedures and violated the chain of command to short-circuit the normal operational procedures during the entire Iraq War. Why?

Why would Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Army Chief of Staff allow this to happen? Since the Army Chief of Staff was hand-picked by Bush, the answer is easy to surmise and probably smutty.

The entire PWOT © has been a denigration of American values, one which continues in both Afghanistan and Iraq. If one can swallow these wars as moral it is easy to accept the unacceptable, which is the physical cost to a nation (that would be ours) that is losing a half million jobs a month while surging in Afghanistan. Nobody likes a busybody, especially a hypocritical one whose own house is not in order.

Were this a psychiatric ward, the people leading the PWOT would be put in lock-up. In a hospital, they would be nut cases.

In Washington D.C. they are called leaders.