Post by jakaswanga on Jun 8, 2014 17:02:53 GMT 3
Sergeant BOWE BERGDAL, the last American prisoner in Afghanistan ---free, free at last!?
08-06-14: Hailey, Salmon, Idaho: Bob and Jani Bergdahl receive death threats!
Sometimes an event happens which, at a glance, is routine and more personal than institutional in its repercussions, but as it peels off layer after layer, and more and more is unveiled like in the act of a seedy strip teaser, soon a whole nation is searching for a moral compass as her heart registers total agitation, and the chattering classes ranting off in hysterical confusion, become guides that abandoned ship.
And this is what has been happening in the case of the last American prisoner of war, the now promoted to Sergeant, marine Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho. Bowe has been held in Talibhan custody for five years, specifically by the Haqani wing of the Talib network; and, in a swap or horse-trade against five Guantanamo inmates, President Obama secured his release.
plenty mouths of the multi-mouthed Congress says they ought have known beforehand of the negotiations! Hahaha! Politicians of whom even when the USA was going down the Fiscal Cliff, went on bickering about Michelle Obama’s butt-tight attire! ---Was she American enough? or more Afro than American bootylicious?? A committee of congress was charged to find out! Meanwhile the dollar was tattering.
And then, also, the outgoing president of Afghanistan, the (state) pick-pocket Hamid Karzai, is livid as hell on his part. He should have been told and taken in his cut, in poppy tonnage may be. In any case the deal went smooth, the parents of Bowe came to Washington, Obama basked in the momentary emotional high, then the wheels began to come off.
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images.rcp.realclearpolitics.com/243361_1_.jpg[/img]
The USA began to speak in tongues.
1. His former unit-mates, fellow marines he served with on the fateful day in Afghanistan, branded him a deserter, a traitor responsible for the deaths of his colleagues as they searched for him; and bloated commentators went live on every patriotic TV to call for his court-martial. Some, very nasty, wished he had been left to die, or for the Talibhan to sissify him or BACHA BAZI him as the term goes.
2. Obama came under sustained fire from political Washington. A bad deal! 5 for 1! And the five Gitmo inmates, the most dangerous of all! This White-House is crazy, in addition to sending the clear message to all terrorists: Kidnap an American, we will pay your price. Even senator John McCain, famous for his POW status during the Vietnam war, is nonplussed at Obama foolhardiness!
3. Hillary Clinton, undeclared but running for the Obama succession, has been speaking in tongues: and further
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has suddenly become a banana split on which a lot of important people are slipping, mentally.
Bergdahl was no ordinary soldier. Not onto drugs and an abstainer from the other mentally dissipative activities which inoculate servicemen from the process of thinking, Bowe took his time to contemplate, to mull and ruminate over the situation and events surrounding his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Increasingly he became a doubting Tom. And he wrote home about it to his father, his girlfriend, and his mother. The series of e-mails ---how they came to be leaked to the public is also a story apart, do not flatter the American army, nor politicians, nor the official version of why the USA was in Afghanistan.
They are an indictment. They are a deconstruction of a myth. And the observations, one of which qualifies the USA Army as Big Joke, are now well documented on the web, -for those with the interest and time to rake them up.
When flag-waving Americans hear a soldier call the army a big joke, a raw nerve is poked. And so tonnes of patriots threatened to move on Hailey Idaho, to put paid to the small town’s plans to welcome their most famous son. The chief of police thought it wise to go slow on that party.
4. There was a famous TV series called Homeland, in which a marine captive comes back from Iraq, turned to commit acts of terror against his country, the USA. Rogue commentators went live: wait a minute, Obama has brought back his sergeant ;)Brody. O my, an outright hate campaign.
5. Then there are the other more cerebral quagmires raised by the Swap. Bergdahl is officially referred to as POW, Prisoner of War. How about the Talibs against whom he has been exchanged. The Dick-Rumsfeld-Prof. Woo legal debauchery doctrine of enemy combatant, was of course a multi-faced waterloo, its moral depravity as a manifestation of American exceptionalism, obvious to many Americans from the start: And this: Harvard law professor Barrack Obama writhed and contorted in his own intellectual Guantanamo torture chamber, as he was force-fed the inheritance of the legal Dr. Mengele, John Yoo. To no avail. CiC Obama introduced a force-feeding regime against the opinion of the Medical Association of USA doctors; failed to close Gitmo, failed to try the inmates in proper decorum, failed to find a new term for them: Prisoners of war?
Hahaha! Lawyers! A man can edit the Harvard Law Monthly -considered the cream of the cream, become a professor at Law, and still fail to find a term for soldiers captured in war during combat. Some of these Gitmo inmatees were senior Taliban commaders in the North, fighting the rebel army later known as the Northern Alliance. The Taliban then was the recognised state authority in that country. Under intense bombing ---remember the Moabs? (mother of all bombs) the Taliban northern armies collapsed and surrendered to the American-backed Northern alliance. As they prepared to do their time-tested tribal horse-trading deals, the Americans intervened with money and picked out some they thought would be valuable in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Aces of civilisation like Professor John Yoo, professor Barack Obama, all the Yale and Columbia and Princeton law professors, however brilliant, would all be lost in the jungle as the CIA hired them to twist facts to fit a lying narrative. They would end up placing their own country outside civilisation ---outside the Geneva conventions! A moral holocaust for the country of God!
But surprise of surprises …
The illiterate Afghans kept it simple. Reporting reality without the honeyed tones dripping out of the Ivy-league forked tongues of American legal pundits. It had all been captured in a millennia old poem called Kabul under siege, composed when the city fell to Alexander the Great of Macedonia.
And the blue-eyed foreigners came
And quenched their lust for brutality
Many a Pashtun they took to realms unknown
Further to quench the insanity of their brutality
Death and Pain! Death and Pain! O Afghanistan
The sweet lying tongues of foreigners cheat us not!
I doubt there is anybody left in the world still cheated by the sweet lying tongues of foreigners! Even in Africa, when foreigners smile condescendingly and tell us Wow! You Africa really rising! We kind of look at our slums from Johanessburg to Cairo, from Maputo to Lagos, and consider the dreams buried therein which shall never come to pass, and tap our noses wondering: who is really rising!? ---Tempers of the young!?
The Bowe Bergdal tale has it all. From a believer, a super patriot, to a disillusioned deserter. From an obedient cog to an articulate retort.
Then there is where he comes from. Small town America in the middle of nowhere. His parents do not look like an American dream come true, but they ooze an inner conviction which is the original frontier spirit. They home-schooled their boy, and admonished him to obey his conscience. And the old Biblical beard which Bergdahl senior spots, resembles more the typical Mullah beard than clean-shaven Hollywood USA we see on our TV screens to represent America to the world.
The Bergdahls look like Bedouins, and TV America is uncomfortable with the depths to which their story reach. There is a fire in their humbleness which disturbs the nation.
And then the other human dread aspect: when you are a young woman, and your fiancée goes MIA, do you remain faithful in hope and become what the Luos call ‘’wife of a living grave’’, or do you MOVE ON!
Bowe Bergdahl’s honey-jar Monica Lee moved on to another tongue, albeit with his blessings and encouragement. But still, it is a story which –given the number of returning marines who murder their spouses in paranoid fits after rumours of them having flings in their absence--- again prods deep into the politics of army and empire. Ach, Henry Berry should just read the military’s own report, not to mention the open source-publications on the PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder) and some of its ‘’collateral contributors’’
But small town Idaho breeds character: when Monica Lee heard of her old love’s release, she recognised the sensitivity and complexities of the situation and immediately called her mother. They discussed it, up to involving Bowe’s parents. These are definitely a different breed of people from the ‘’fwakk you I don’t care of the big urban areas!’’
NB: a returning marine killed his partner in Alabama. She did not even acknowledge him when he came home from Iraq. She said: ‘’I am busting my a.s.s on the streets to feed the kids. And now here is another lazy ass dropped on my couch eyeing ma as.s! Drop dead! Why did you not drop dead wherever is you coming from!?’’
The Guy blew up, and blew her out. And the kids too. That is big town America. And all this, are stories the return of Bowe is forcing folks to face, even if not publicly.
For a released POW, we can see the kind of psychological red carpet the army rolls out to re-integrate one into society. In fact Sergeant Bowe is still in quarantine in a German psycho-rehab cum hospital, and will only be allowed piecemeal contacts with his loved ones, until he is certified ‘’recovered’’.
It means there is a scientific recognition of the horrors of captivity.
But now the flip side.
In the infamous Guantanamo, the Americans themselves are holding others, Muslim foreigners mostly, under conditions likely to psychologically cause injury, just as would-be the assumed case with sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. But what humanitarian or otherwise compensations do they roll out for the people they have released?
They could not care less, could they? So long the culprits do not revert to their old bad ways. The USA being a notorious litigant society, it is highly significant that there is silence on this front.
He he he! Give me another verse from that epic poem, when the blue-eyed monster took Kabul, and carried off many a Pashtun, to quench the insanities of his brutality. ----No, we are westernised and our face east is not yet a full turn, so we are more versed with classics from Rome and medieval Europe. So perhaps I better look for a poem in the aftermath of the Roman capture of Carthago.
There is a black feminine slave of exceptional beauty, a black mamba, and a legion commander has decided to save her as present to the emperor. She will be locked up in a discrete temple outside the city, where she can specialise in being the ritualised erotic toy of the god of Rome.
An old poem captures her thoughts, as the Roman General in mock respect, bows before her, calls her goddess, and requests her permission to be shipped to Rome, to please the god.
Carthago has been erased from the known World
Think of what will have to be done of me –O General
That the timid god feel safe alone with me in the temple!
O you General, seeking to enter the favour of his master,
Erase my memory and my heart and my humanity you must
Lest the god of Rome fear you plan to lock him with a cobra
Unfanged and untamed in a cage.
(To quench the brutalities of his insanities, you must make me a corpse)
Bowe Bergdahl: they say he has forgotten how to speak in english! Believe it or not! I will have to hear the Great Noam Chomsky on how natural speakers loose the lingo after five years of captivity!
Meanwhile: The CIA has started to tweet and is on Facebook and Instagram. First tweet: we can neither confirm nor deny this is our first tweet!
A Kenyan re-tweet: you guys been spying on Uhuru Kenyatta?
CIA: we can neither confirm nor deny we ever heard of Uhuru who?
Latin America retweet: how many times you tried to kill Castro?
CIA: we can neither confirm nor deny ...
Within two days the CIA hush is a chart buster in followers! i suggest Oloo tag it here on Jukwaa!
08-06-14: Hailey, Salmon, Idaho: Bob and Jani Bergdahl receive death threats!
Sometimes an event happens which, at a glance, is routine and more personal than institutional in its repercussions, but as it peels off layer after layer, and more and more is unveiled like in the act of a seedy strip teaser, soon a whole nation is searching for a moral compass as her heart registers total agitation, and the chattering classes ranting off in hysterical confusion, become guides that abandoned ship.
7"Come, let Us go down and there confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another's speech."… ---Tower of Babel story, Holy Bible.
And this is what has been happening in the case of the last American prisoner of war, the now promoted to Sergeant, marine Bowe Bergdahl of Hailey, Idaho. Bowe has been held in Talibhan custody for five years, specifically by the Haqani wing of the Talib network; and, in a swap or horse-trade against five Guantanamo inmates, President Obama secured his release.
plenty mouths of the multi-mouthed Congress says they ought have known beforehand of the negotiations! Hahaha! Politicians of whom even when the USA was going down the Fiscal Cliff, went on bickering about Michelle Obama’s butt-tight attire! ---Was she American enough? or more Afro than American bootylicious?? A committee of congress was charged to find out! Meanwhile the dollar was tattering.
And then, also, the outgoing president of Afghanistan, the (state) pick-pocket Hamid Karzai, is livid as hell on his part. He should have been told and taken in his cut, in poppy tonnage may be. In any case the deal went smooth, the parents of Bowe came to Washington, Obama basked in the momentary emotional high, then the wheels began to come off.
The USA began to speak in tongues.
1. His former unit-mates, fellow marines he served with on the fateful day in Afghanistan, branded him a deserter, a traitor responsible for the deaths of his colleagues as they searched for him; and bloated commentators went live on every patriotic TV to call for his court-martial. Some, very nasty, wished he had been left to die, or for the Talibhan to sissify him or BACHA BAZI him as the term goes.
2. Obama came under sustained fire from political Washington. A bad deal! 5 for 1! And the five Gitmo inmates, the most dangerous of all! This White-House is crazy, in addition to sending the clear message to all terrorists: Kidnap an American, we will pay your price. Even senator John McCain, famous for his POW status during the Vietnam war, is nonplussed at Obama foolhardiness!
3. Hillary Clinton, undeclared but running for the Obama succession, has been speaking in tongues:
Clinton offered a measured defense of it in an appearance in Denver on Monday. But she but did not answer when asked directly if she would have approved, if still serving as America's top diplomat.
Most politicians are trying to get their talking points straight on the Bowe Bergdahl trade, as far as what they knew, when they knew it, and how much they opposed it — but Hillary Clinton might be the only person who flipped in favor of the deal. On Tuesday morning, the Associated Press reported that Clinton had publicly defended the deal on Monday. By Tuesday evening, The Daily Beast reported that, actually, the former secretary of state hadn't been too keen on the idea in the past. The trade presents a dilemma for politicians — no one wants to be pro-dealing with the Taliban or anti-soldiers coming home. So their statements have awkwardly tried to reconcile those things. www.thewire.com/politics/2014/06/hillary-clinton-wants-it-both-ways-on-the-bergdahl-trade/372120/
Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl has suddenly become a banana split on which a lot of important people are slipping, mentally.
Bergdahl was no ordinary soldier. Not onto drugs and an abstainer from the other mentally dissipative activities which inoculate servicemen from the process of thinking, Bowe took his time to contemplate, to mull and ruminate over the situation and events surrounding his tour of duty in Afghanistan. Increasingly he became a doubting Tom. And he wrote home about it to his father, his girlfriend, and his mother. The series of e-mails ---how they came to be leaked to the public is also a story apart, do not flatter the American army, nor politicians, nor the official version of why the USA was in Afghanistan.
They are an indictment. They are a deconstruction of a myth. And the observations, one of which qualifies the USA Army as Big Joke, are now well documented on the web, -for those with the interest and time to rake them up.
When flag-waving Americans hear a soldier call the army a big joke, a raw nerve is poked. And so tonnes of patriots threatened to move on Hailey Idaho, to put paid to the small town’s plans to welcome their most famous son. The chief of police thought it wise to go slow on that party.
4. There was a famous TV series called Homeland, in which a marine captive comes back from Iraq, turned to commit acts of terror against his country, the USA. Rogue commentators went live: wait a minute, Obama has brought back his sergeant ;)Brody. O my, an outright hate campaign.
5. Then there are the other more cerebral quagmires raised by the Swap. Bergdahl is officially referred to as POW, Prisoner of War. How about the Talibs against whom he has been exchanged. The Dick-Rumsfeld-Prof. Woo legal debauchery doctrine of enemy combatant, was of course a multi-faced waterloo, its moral depravity as a manifestation of American exceptionalism, obvious to many Americans from the start:
April 2, 2008 By: Kevin Drum
THE TORTURE MEMO....The infamous John Yoo torture memo has finally been released, and it's pretty remarkable. (Part 1; Part 2.) Basically, it says that criminal law doesn't prohibit torture because it doesn't apply to the military. Treaties don't prohibit torture because they only apply to uniformed enemy soldiers. Ditto for the War Crimes Act. And federal statutes prohibiting torture don't prohibit torture because they don't apply to conduct on military bases.
We already pretty much knew that this was what the memo said. But Yoo doesn't stop there. Not only do none of these things apply, but there's no way to make them apply even if we wanted to:
Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President....Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.
And the Convention Against Torture? If the president orders someone to be tortured, that automatically suspends CAT:
Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions.
THE TORTURE MEMO....The infamous John Yoo torture memo has finally been released, and it's pretty remarkable. (Part 1; Part 2.) Basically, it says that criminal law doesn't prohibit torture because it doesn't apply to the military. Treaties don't prohibit torture because they only apply to uniformed enemy soldiers. Ditto for the War Crimes Act. And federal statutes prohibiting torture don't prohibit torture because they don't apply to conduct on military bases.
We already pretty much knew that this was what the memo said. But Yoo doesn't stop there. Not only do none of these things apply, but there's no way to make them apply even if we wanted to:
Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution's sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President....Congress can no more interfere with the President's conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.
And the Convention Against Torture? If the president orders someone to be tortured, that automatically suspends CAT:
Any presidential decision to order interrogations methods that are inconsistent with CAT would amount to a suspension or termination of those treaty provisions.
Hahaha! Lawyers! A man can edit the Harvard Law Monthly -considered the cream of the cream, become a professor at Law, and still fail to find a term for soldiers captured in war during combat. Some of these Gitmo inmatees were senior Taliban commaders in the North, fighting the rebel army later known as the Northern Alliance. The Taliban then was the recognised state authority in that country. Under intense bombing ---remember the Moabs? (mother of all bombs) the Taliban northern armies collapsed and surrendered to the American-backed Northern alliance. As they prepared to do their time-tested tribal horse-trading deals, the Americans intervened with money and picked out some they thought would be valuable in the hunt for Osama bin Laden.
Aces of civilisation like Professor John Yoo, professor Barack Obama, all the Yale and Columbia and Princeton law professors, however brilliant, would all be lost in the jungle as the CIA hired them to twist facts to fit a lying narrative. They would end up placing their own country outside civilisation ---outside the Geneva conventions! A moral holocaust for the country of God!
But surprise of surprises …
The illiterate Afghans kept it simple. Reporting reality without the honeyed tones dripping out of the Ivy-league forked tongues of American legal pundits. It had all been captured in a millennia old poem called Kabul under siege, composed when the city fell to Alexander the Great of Macedonia.
And the blue-eyed foreigners came
And quenched their lust for brutality
Many a Pashtun they took to realms unknown
Further to quench the insanity of their brutality
Death and Pain! Death and Pain! O Afghanistan
The sweet lying tongues of foreigners cheat us not!
I doubt there is anybody left in the world still cheated by the sweet lying tongues of foreigners! Even in Africa, when foreigners smile condescendingly and tell us Wow! You Africa really rising! We kind of look at our slums from Johanessburg to Cairo, from Maputo to Lagos, and consider the dreams buried therein which shall never come to pass, and tap our noses wondering: who is really rising!? ---Tempers of the young!?
The Bowe Bergdal tale has it all. From a believer, a super patriot, to a disillusioned deserter. From an obedient cog to an articulate retort.
Then there is where he comes from. Small town America in the middle of nowhere. His parents do not look like an American dream come true, but they ooze an inner conviction which is the original frontier spirit. They home-schooled their boy, and admonished him to obey his conscience. And the old Biblical beard which Bergdahl senior spots, resembles more the typical Mullah beard than clean-shaven Hollywood USA we see on our TV screens to represent America to the world.
The Bergdahls look like Bedouins, and TV America is uncomfortable with the depths to which their story reach. There is a fire in their humbleness which disturbs the nation.
And then the other human dread aspect: when you are a young woman, and your fiancée goes MIA, do you remain faithful in hope and become what the Luos call ‘’wife of a living grave’’, or do you MOVE ON!
Bowe Bergdahl’s honey-jar Monica Lee moved on to another tongue, albeit with his blessings and encouragement. But still, it is a story which –given the number of returning marines who murder their spouses in paranoid fits after rumours of them having flings in their absence--- again prods deep into the politics of army and empire.
There had been no domestic killings within the Fort Bragg garrison, which includes the Delta Force special forces troops, for more than two years until the men began returning from Afghanistan duty.
Henry Berry, the manager of family programmes at the base, said: "It's mind-boggling. To be absolutely honest, I was completely caught off guard. We're going to look at these cases to prevent similar cases happening in the future."
Henry Berry, the manager of family programmes at the base, said: "It's mind-boggling. To be absolutely honest, I was completely caught off guard. We're going to look at these cases to prevent similar cases happening in the future."
But small town Idaho breeds character: when Monica Lee heard of her old love’s release, she recognised the sensitivity and complexities of the situation and immediately called her mother. They discussed it, up to involving Bowe’s parents. These are definitely a different breed of people from the ‘’fwakk you I don’t care of the big urban areas!’’
NB: a returning marine killed his partner in Alabama. She did not even acknowledge him when he came home from Iraq. She said: ‘’I am busting my a.s.s on the streets to feed the kids. And now here is another lazy ass dropped on my couch eyeing ma as.s! Drop dead! Why did you not drop dead wherever is you coming from!?’’
The Guy blew up, and blew her out. And the kids too. That is big town America. And all this, are stories the return of Bowe is forcing folks to face, even if not publicly.
For a released POW, we can see the kind of psychological red carpet the army rolls out to re-integrate one into society. In fact Sergeant Bowe is still in quarantine in a German psycho-rehab cum hospital, and will only be allowed piecemeal contacts with his loved ones, until he is certified ‘’recovered’’.
It means there is a scientific recognition of the horrors of captivity.
But now the flip side.
In the infamous Guantanamo, the Americans themselves are holding others, Muslim foreigners mostly, under conditions likely to psychologically cause injury, just as would-be the assumed case with sergeant Bowe Bergdahl. But what humanitarian or otherwise compensations do they roll out for the people they have released?
They could not care less, could they? So long the culprits do not revert to their old bad ways. The USA being a notorious litigant society, it is highly significant that there is silence on this front.
He he he! Give me another verse from that epic poem, when the blue-eyed monster took Kabul, and carried off many a Pashtun, to quench the insanities of his brutality. ----No, we are westernised and our face east is not yet a full turn, so we are more versed with classics from Rome and medieval Europe. So perhaps I better look for a poem in the aftermath of the Roman capture of Carthago.
There is a black feminine slave of exceptional beauty, a black mamba, and a legion commander has decided to save her as present to the emperor. She will be locked up in a discrete temple outside the city, where she can specialise in being the ritualised erotic toy of the god of Rome.
An old poem captures her thoughts, as the Roman General in mock respect, bows before her, calls her goddess, and requests her permission to be shipped to Rome, to please the god.
Carthago has been erased from the known World
Think of what will have to be done of me –O General
That the timid god feel safe alone with me in the temple!
O you General, seeking to enter the favour of his master,
Erase my memory and my heart and my humanity you must
Lest the god of Rome fear you plan to lock him with a cobra
Unfanged and untamed in a cage.
(To quench the brutalities of his insanities, you must make me a corpse)
Bowe Bergdahl: they say he has forgotten how to speak in english! Believe it or not! I will have to hear the Great Noam Chomsky on how natural speakers loose the lingo after five years of captivity!
Meanwhile: The CIA has started to tweet and is on Facebook and Instagram. First tweet: we can neither confirm nor deny this is our first tweet!
A Kenyan re-tweet: you guys been spying on Uhuru Kenyatta?
CIA: we can neither confirm nor deny we ever heard of Uhuru who?
Latin America retweet: how many times you tried to kill Castro?
CIA: we can neither confirm nor deny ...
Within two days the CIA hush is a chart buster in followers! i suggest Oloo tag it here on Jukwaa!
