Surprise! Canadian Forces Commander Was A Serial Killer

Col. Russell Williams, Canadian Armed Forces

Like every other day, I suppose, it's been a day of sick news.

An Obama administration task force is now trying to strengthen legislation that would uphold [read: shred] the Constitution by making sure the telecoms don't do anything that might interfere with warrantless government surveillance. This action provides even more [read: less] support for Barack Obama's claim that voters who don't work as hard as possible to support the Democrats are "irresponsible", since their civil rights are so endangered by Republicans.

And Bush's Secretary of Defense [read: Attack], Robert Gates, is still running the Pentagon, and plenty of other Bush cronies are still filling their appointed offices, and virtually all the Bush policies are still in place, although a few things are actually worse now. So it makes perfect [read: no] sense for John McCain to describe Obama as running "the most partisan administration I have ever seen".

Pakistan's Foreign Minister spoke at Harvard University and made the totally [read: scarcely] understandable claim that Iran has "no justification to pursue nuclear weapons."

According to Dawn, Shah Mehmood Qureshi told his Harvard audience:

"Who's threatening Iran? I don't see any immediate threat to Iran."
...
Qureshi also pointed out that Iran was signatory to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Pakistan and India never signed.

“They have an international obligation. They have signed NPT and they should respect that,” he said.

To clarify: India, Pakistan and Israel all have nuclear weapons but have not signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, so technically they should not be allowed to have nuclear weapons at all, or nuclear power either.

The United States, which has signed the NPT, acts as if the treaty has been nullified, and uses nuclear weapons against civilians in places like Iraq.

And Iran, which has also signed the treaty and therefore should be allowed to have nuclear power, is being hampered in its pursuit of same by the repeated claim (rejected by the Iranians, and never proven or even partially substantiated by anyone) that Iran is trying to develop nuclear weapons.

The absurdity is compounded by the fact that Iran is threatened by neighbors with nuclear weapons, and also by a rogue state halfway across the world with more nuclear weapons, and therefore the diplomatic [read: propaganda] tack at the moment is to claim that Iran is not threatened.

If it wasn't so sick, I could laugh even harder.

But the sickest laugh of the day comes from Canada, where

The decorated former commander of Canadian Forces Base Trenton, in eastern Ontario, pleaded guilty [on Monday] to all 88 charges against him — including two counts of first-degree murder, two counts each of sexual assault and forcible confinement and 82 break-ins and attempted break-ins.

According to the CBC,

Thousands of explicit photos that Col. Russell Williams took while wearing women's and girls' lingerie show how his sexual obsession escalated from lesser crimes to sexual assault and murder
...
He admitted to police he sought out homes where "attractive young women" lived, targeting those in their late teens to early 30's.

Col. Russell Williams photographed himself wearing lingerie

The Crown said Williams's behaviour was obsessive in the number of break-ins, in the meticulous manner in which he dealt with stolen clothes and in the sheer volume of photos he took and methodically filed.
...
Williams would place lingerie in boxes or bags when he got home. He was so obsessive in his collection of undergarments that he had to burn some of his trophies in a field to make room for more.
...
Williams took thousands of explicit photographs of himself at crime scenes — wearing women's and girls' lingerie, and masturbating on their beds — which he put in a complex file folder system with a date stamp.

The folder system gave a sense of how long Williams was in homes and what he did. He kept a log that stated the nature of the offences and stored evidence of the murders and break-ins on two hard drives. Police found them stored above the ceiling in the basement of his Ottawa home.
...
Crown prosecutor Robert Morrison ... said Williams's repeated sexually obsessive behaviour dates back to 2007 and 2008 — long before he escalated to actual sexual assaults on women — or the eventual murders ... In some of the photos, Williams is in a girl's lingerie, wearing parts of what the Crown said appears to be his Canadian military uniform.

That's the sick part; now for the laugh:

The Canadian media are turning themselves inside out in their attempt to answer the question: "How could  a guy like this rise to a position of power in an organization such as the Canadian military?" The question is more difficult than first appears, because media types and analysts must answer it without admitting any reality into the discussion.

They can't talk about the fact that psychopaths and the military are made for each other, or the obvious reasons why this is so. But I can.

Listen: People who enjoy wielding power over others tend to seek positions in which they can do so legitimately. They become policemen and soldiers and prison guards, and politicians and "news" anchors. The most extreme of these people seek out the most extreme situations, and nothing suits a psychopathic killer better than a job in which he is required to kill people. There is no draft in Canada, so the only people in the military are those who voluntarily decided to enlist.

This photo taken by Russell Williams was used as evidence against him.

Now: Armies seek out people who enjoy wielding power over others, who can live seemingly "normal" lives punctuated by episodes in which they take part in the tearing, shredding, crushing and burning of human flesh -- all for the "noble" cause of spreading liberty and freedom, of course. Those who bring strong administrative skills to the table, who are comfortable giving orders, and who are capable of manipulating large groups of people -- sometimes sending them to faraway lands to kill and die -- are quickly promoted.

In Canada -- just as in the USA -- it is not permissible for media types to say "our country is involved in an aggressive foreign war against people who have never attacked, or intended to attack, us or any of our friends." Instead the coverage starts and ends with the idea that Canadian soldiers are always doing the right sorts of things overseas, giving the little Afghan kids candy bars and so on.

And so we don't get any reality, and we don't get any insight, and we are all left to scratch our heads and wonder: "How could a guy who commanded stuff like that, have gone home and done stuff like this?"

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To catch up on the adventures of Holmes and Watson, who are still trying to crack open the Gareth Williams mystery, click here.

Brushes With Death And (Wild) Life

Medical emergencies (large and small) in my "real life" family are conspiring with my ongoing personal maladies to create vast and nearly impenetrable barriers between me and my various dormant blogs.

I apologize once again to my (relatively few but extremely devoted) readers for my repeated long absences.

My inability to blog (at all, let alone properly) is doubly (or triply) unfortunate in view of events (large and small) about which I would write reams of utter nonsense if only I had more time.

If the planets line up properly (or improperly, depending on your point of view), I may be able to write something worth reading about some of these events, sometime in the unspecified future.

But for the moment, I can only give you what I've got.

My father almost died since we last spoke. He had major surgery a month ago and his recovery has been fraught with complications. And last week we almost lost him.

Fortunately for us, he was moved from a small community hospital to a major medical center, in what became an ambulance race against the Grim Reaper -- and the ambulance won.

So he got into good hands, and just in time, and therefore he is still alive, although he remains in intensive care, in a room very similar to the one shown here. We are fortunate that he has good health insurance, as this is scary enough already.

My dad and I have exchanged heated words once or thrice over the years, and we still have very serious areas of disagreement, some of which I have written about in the past.

And those things still matter to me, but not at this level. He's a good man and we're not ready to say goodbye to him. Yet his condition remains critical and his care remains intensive. So everybody is on tenterhooks, and everything is suddenly tentative.

Which is to say: more tentative than it already was, with 73 simultaneous global disasters imminent, most (if not all) of which remain "over the event horizon" for most (if not all) of the people around me -- in my "real life", that is.

It sometimes seems the only sane people I can think of are the ones I "know" in the virtual world -- in my "unreal life", so to speak.

How fitting for 8th Century Amerika, slip-sliding into the New Dark Ages with a "cultural" view of "reality" so screwed up that only in the virtual world does political discourse maintain any semblance of contact with the truly real.

My father's brush with death was punctuated for me (and my wife and kids) by an episode involving our cat, an orange tabby very similar to the one shown here.

One afternoon a few days ago, he curled up on the couch in my home office and went to sleep. Late that night he was still there, and I wanted to sit down.

I tried to shoo him away but he didn't move. So I reached down to help him get going, and I found out why he wasn't moving. He was all done moving -- all done forever.

Breaking the news to the kids the next morning wasn't a lot of fun. The rest of the day wasn't any easier. We buried the cat under a tree in our back yard. I said a few words. The kids cried and screamed a bit, after which they felt somewhat better. When they lose their only grandfather, the news will be even tougher to break -- and to receive.

We're gonna miss that little cat. And we're gonna miss the old man, too. His passing is not exactly imminent, but he's in rough shape, and even if he does recover and regain a good deal of his former health, he's not about to last forever.

Nobody lasts forever, as far as I know, although it does seem that professional psychopaths and state-sponsored war criminals live several decades longer than normal humans. How old is Kissinger, 185? Maybe that's their secret: they don't stress out over guilt pangs.

When I go to see my dad in the hospital, I have a choice between a long fast drive on the interstates and a couple of slower, more direct routes that run through little towns and villages. Normally I choose the shortest slow route, although I could drive many miles farther and pay tolls all along the way in order to arrive five minutes sooner.

Last week I was doing the slow drive and I came to a crossroads where the light was green, but it had recently been red and the intersection was full of cars. I didn't quite have to stop before everyone in front of me got going, but I had to slow way down.

And as I was creeping along at 2 MPH, a golden eagle drifted across the road in front of me. It was enormous and gorgeous and very similar to the one shown here.

It was just coasting along at my eye level, and at one point its body was almost directly above my front bumper.

The wings were spread but not stretched; one was almost touching the truck in front of me, and the other came within an inch of my windshield. If not for the glass, I could have reached out and touched a wing.

The big bird was heading for a stand of tall trees on my right, and just drifting along. There was a small, slow-moving gap in the traffic, and for some reason that was appealing. I don't understand why: one flap of the wings and the eagle could have been well above the traffic. But that didn't happen. Instead, it just snuck across between me and the truck.

I've never been that close to a bird that big, and -- like any sudden encounter with big wildlife -- it was a jolt from another dimension. Not that I didn't need one.

One of the most common fallacies which infect the current "real-life" political discourse is the notion that always and everywhere there are only two choices. You're either with Bush (i.e. Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza, Gates, Obama, Biden, Hillary, Gates again...), or you're with the "terrrrisss". That's been around for a while. Either you stifle all criticism of Israel no matter what, or you're an anti-Semite. That's been around for a while, too. These idiocies persist, and multiply. Nowadays, either you can have your social security, or you can have "health care reform", but not both. And there is no third option.

That's the basic problem with any two-party system, anywhere, anytime: there is no third option. And that's the starting point for American politics. Throw in centuries of corruption and decades of rampant militarism and now you have a thoroughly corrupt, heavily armed, extremely powerful state in which the two options available are more or less identical, and there is no third option.

In my "real life" I do software design and often I need to answer questions of the form "What are my options for implementing blah blah blah?"

An overwhelming percentage of the time, I come back with a large number of options. There are almost always five or six or eight different ways to do blah blah blah. Rare indeed is the blah blah blah that can only be done in one or two different ways.

This is not to say that software design -- a virtual occupation which relies on truth and logic and pays my real bills in my real life -- is anything like functioning in "the real world" -- where nearly every bit of news and political commentary is likely false, and truth and logic must be abandoned on a daily basis.

On the other hand, very often -- in the virtual world as well as the real one -- there comes a fork in the road which offers more than two options.

In this case, I'd much rather die the way my cat died, than live the way my father is living.

But if I had my choice, I'd be heading for the tall trees with a golden eagle.

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Message From Guantanamo: "America is Double Hetler in unjustice"

I direct your attention to the following article, dated June 3, 2009, by Michelle Shephard of the Toronto Star:

Gitmo protest captured on film

WASHINGTON – A Guantanamo Bay detainee committed suicide late Monday just hours after two Chinese Muslim captives staged the detention centre's first public protest, increasing the pressure on U.S. President Barack Obama to outline his plan of how he will close the offshore prison.

Was it really a suicide? No details on which to base a judgment seem to be available, which is par for the course. And as for Obama and "pressure" to "outline his plan", that's not all the so-called "suicide" increases, but journalists can only say so much, even if they work in foreign countries.

Yemeni Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, 31, is the first prisoner to die since the White House changed hands four months ago. His suicide follows weeks of criticism from both ends of the political spectrum over the fate of the remaining 240 Guantanamo detainees.

News of the suicide was emailed to the media just as a flight bringing journalists from Guantanamo landed in Maryland.

Based on the track record of the organization sending that email, it might be best to refer to Muhammad Salih's death as a "so-called suicide", at least until further details emerge.

But I say this with two caveats, neither of which is likely to be satisfied, ever.

First, even if further details about Muhammad Salih's death do emerge, will they be credible? Probably not, especially if they are not corroborated. Will they be corroborated? Probably not, especially considering that detainees are being held at Guantanamo precisely to hide them, both from the media and from the protections normally afforded accused individuals under US and international law.

And second, how much is a man supposed to take? How much of the responsibility for Muhammad Salih's death must be laid at the feet of our government -- which held him for more than seven years, with no charge or trial or hearing, and no prospect of any of these in the near or distant future? -- which went to extreme lengths to deny him and all the other detainees any legal recourse or challenge, even though it never intended to charge them? -- which offered mountain tribesmen thousands of dollars apiece for any "terror suspects" they happened to capture, at the same time as innocent civilians were fleeing the bombing of their homes in Afghanistan?

Or to put it another way, given the scope and scale and ferocity of the forces arrayed in a deliberate and knowingly unjustified attempt to ruin the lives of Muhammad Salih and many others like him, how could his death be considered anything other than murder?

The press had been at the U.S. naval detention centre for the war crimes court hearing of Canadian Omar Khadr.

Khadr, 22, is accused of war crimes, including the murder of a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002.

And he's still in prison in Guantanamo despite two very inconvenient facts: that he was a child when he was captured, and that the "evidence" against him is clearly fabricated.

But then again, the same forces that ruined the life of Muhammad Salih are deployed against Omar Khadr, as they have been ever since ... since ...

Here's the big news! A protest! and information coming from detainees:

Hours after Khadr's brief hearing Monday, fewer than a dozen journalists on the trip, including a Toronto Star reporter, witnessed a rare unscripted moment on the base when two Uighur (pronounced Wee-gur) detainees managed to hold an impromptu protest.

The group was at an Oceanside prison known as "Camp Iguana," where 16 Uighur and one Algerian detainee are imprisoned.

As the journalists neared the fence line, the captives held up messages written in crayon on prison-issued sketch pads, knowing the Pentagon prohibits journalists from speaking to detainees.

For a few minutes they silently turned the pages quickly, as journalists shot video, photos and scribbled down their messages.

"We are being held in prison but we have been announced innocent a corrding to the virdict in caurt," one message said. "We need to freedom (sic)."

Most of the detainees currently held at Guantanamo are (or surely must be considered) innocent, either because they have been cleared of wrongdoing by a military court or because they have never been charged to begin with. And that's why

[a]nother stated, "America is Double Hetler in unjustice," seemingly comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis.

Seemingly? Seemingly?? What else could they possibly be talking about? They were obviously comparing their treatment by the U.S. government to that of the Nazis. But then again, journalists can only say so much.

The Uighur prisoners with Chinese citizenship have been cleared for release but there's nowhere for them to go since the minority group is persecuted in its Communist-controlled homeland. The U.S. government has tried for months to find a country willing to provide the group asylum.

That's a laugh. It's a sick laugh, to be sure, but that's the only kind of laugh we get anymore.

The US government has spent years and years telling anyone who will still listen that these people are despicable terrorists, "the worst of the worst", and so on. Even now Dick Cheney is going around saying that if they are merely transferred to civilian prisons in the US, they will be plotting terrorist attacks against us from their cells. It's ludicrous, but that's what takes priority now according to the mainstream media. And reporters can only say so much ...

Reporters were ushered away from the fenced-in area shortly after the Uighurs had their written protest. One of the captives yelled as the gate was locked behind the group: "Is Obama Communist or a Democrat? We have the same operation in China."

Journalists were later forbidden from sending photos or video footage of the signs until Guantanamo officials received clearance from the White House – which didn't come until about 14 hours later.

No, truly. It's a free country. Always has been, always will be. Seriously.

But the best [read: worst] is yet to come:

Pentagon ground rules signed by reporters stipulate that images of detainees must be pre-screened and cannot identify the captives due to regulations in the Geneva Conventions prohibiting the exploitation of prisoners of war.

Isn't that just rich?

A whole new category of mock-legal language was created, and the prison camp at Guantanamo was built, precisely in order to circumvent the Geneva Conventions and their prohibitions against the exploitation of prisoners of war.

And that's why Guantanamo detainees like Muhammad Salih are not normally called "prisoners", much less "prisoners of war". Instead they are called "enemy combatants" or "illegal enemy combatants" or simply "detainees".

Long, involved, and utterly cynical "legal" documents were created in order to give a semi-plausible veneer to some of the most blatant falsehoods of the terror war, documents whose existence has never been a secret, documents some of which have themselves been coming into the public eye recently: documents whose purpose appears to have been to deny these people "prisoner of war" status so that the protections mandated by the Geneva Conventions can be semi-plausibly described as not applicable to them -- and so that the Pentagon can ignore the Geneva Conventions in dealing with them.

So for the Pentagon to turn around and say that journalists cannot publish the names or faces of the captives, because to do so would be a violation of the Geneva Conventions...!

They don't even care anymore how transparent their lies are. They really couldn't care less whether or not you can see through their charade instantly. Is it because they have the big bucks, and the big weapons, and the big media, and the big politicians on their side, while we only have one another and the truth?

Back to the alleged suicide.

Hours after the protest guards found Salih unresponsive in his cell in a separate area of the prison and attempts to revive him failed.

We can be sure that the attempts to revive him were most vigorous, but what happened to Muhammad Salih in the hours before he was found unresponsive? And what happened to him in the years before that?

At least we know the answer to the latter question.

He had been held without charges at Guantanamo since February 2002 and appeared to have joined a lengthy hunger strike, according to medical records released in response to an Associated Press lawsuit.

How many years could you be held incommunicado, halfway across the world from your family, with no charges or evidence filed against you, no right to challenge your incarceration, and no prospect of ever obtaining your freedom, much less justice -- how many years of that could you take, even without any "enhanced interrogation techniques", before you decided it might be a good idea to stop eating?

Then again, a journalist can only say so much.

On the other hand, Michelle Shephard does manage to provide the photo above, and some very telling context:

Three detainee suicides in June 2006 under the George W. Bush administration drew international outrage, further fuelled by comments about the military's reaction.

"They have no regard for human life, neither ours nor their own," then-Guantanamo commander Rear Adm. Harry Harris Jr. said. "I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us."

The psychopathy [*] on display here is striking, and perfectly fitting for a commander of a place such as Guantanamo.

They killed themselves -- and nobody else -- as an act of warfare against us!

We -- their oppressors: the people who held them in captivity for years, with no charges, no evidence, no due process and no hope -- are the victims of their deaths.

It doesn't get much more "Hetlerian" than that.

~~~

Psychopathy -- the personality disorder we see in the people-without-conscience who are variously called psychopathic, sociopathic, anti-social, and moral imbeciles -- comes in a variety of forms.

The most common psychopathic personality type is called "aggressive narcissism".

The following traits have been identified in a seminal work by Robert D. Hare as indicative of aggressive narcissism.

Read this list and try not to think of Harry Harris Jr., the former Guantanamo commander.

* Glibness/superficial charm
* Grandiose sense of self-worth
* Pathological lying
* Conning/manipulative
* Lack of remorse or guilt
* Shallow affect
* Callous/lack of empathy
* Failure to accept responsibility for own actions

Read that list again and try not to think of the Pentagon, or the mainstream media, or the "leaders" of our mainstream political parties.

Read it one more time and try not to think of our long record of violent foreign intervention, or our history of slavery and racism, or the obliteration of the people who lived here before America was "discovered", and the utter contempt with which their cultures and their descendants have been treated ever since.

"Double Hetler in unjustice" may be spelled incorrectly, but it is seemingly an understatement.

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Come, Let Us Celebrate The Best Of America, Living And Dead

To honor America and observe Memorial Day, let us now savor a few words from an anonymous AP stenographer, courtesy of the Los Angeles Times:

Obama marks Memorial Day with tribute at Arlington

In brief remarks after he laid the wreath and observed a moment of silence at Arlington, Obama saluted the men and women of America's fighting forces, both living and dead, as "the best of America."

"Why in an age when so many have acted only in pursuit of narrowest self-interest have the soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines of this generation volunteered all that they have on behalf of others?" he said. "Why have they been willing to bear the heaviest burden?"

"Whatever it is, they felt some tug. They answered a call. They said 'I'll go.' That is why they are the best of America," Obama said. "That is what separates them from those who have not served in uniform, their extraordinary willingness to risk their lives for people they never met."

What kind of people are willing to risk their lives -- and throw away their souls! -- for the likes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, or Bill Clinton, or George H. W. Bush, or any of their predecessors?

Obama called them "the best"; he forgot to mention that they're also "the brightest".

Obama said he can't know what it's like to walk into battle or lose a child.

"But I do know this. I am humbled to be the commander in chief of the finest fighting force in the history of the world," he said to applause.

This is beneath derision, and it went down swimmingly, of course. I understand completely.

Let's all have big parades to honor our professional and patriotic mass murderers, living and dead!

Let us line the streets to watch the psychopaths and fools -- and those who support the psychopaths and fools -- march by.

Let us complain about how nothing much has changed since the election, how Barack Obama shows the same chicken-hearted reluctance to move that ruined the second Bush-Cheney administration, and how -- despite years of furtive planning -- we still haven't got off our butts and righteously obliterated Iran.

Let us join together and decry the incompetence in the Beltway, which explains why we haven't won yet in Iraq or Afghanistan, and why we may not make any real progress there until after the next election.

Let us weep for the "victims" of the seemingly endless series of "government accidents" which have got us involved in "the wrong wars" at "the wrong times".

But let us never say a word word about the millions of people our heroes have killed over the years; the tens of thousands our heroes have incarcerated and tortured; the tens of millions whose homes and families our heroes have destroyed; the hundreds of millions whose homelands our heroes have violated, overtly or otherwise, and in whose nations "democratic institutions" are allowed to exist only if the "duly elected representatives" find it politically expedient to toe the line.

That's our line, by the way.

So let us celebrate that line, just as we celebrate the psychopaths and fools who enforce it.

Let us wave our flags for those extroardinary people who have made sure -- on our behalf -- that the kids in these pictures, and millions of others just like them, never had a chance.

After all, we wouldn't want to be anti-American, would we?

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Christmas And The GWOT [2]: Personal Salvation And National Destruction

In my previous post, "Christmas And The GWOT", I wrote about not wanting to celebrate Christmas in the midst of the Glorious War On Terror, and readers responded with many interesting comments of their own. Most were well-informed and well-meaning, as far as I could tell; yet virtually all of them missed the point I was trying to make. And that tells me I didn't make the point at all.

One comment said I was "conflating Christmas with the crazies' war on the universe". As I understand the meaning of the term "conflate", I wasn't doing that at all. Perhaps I should have been.

Other comments mentioned commercialism and the weather; still others attempted to raise my spirits. And I appreciate the sentiments. But my spirits don't need a boost.

My disenchantment with Christmas doesn't stem primarily from my aversion to the crass commercial consumerism with which the season manifests itself each year. Nor does it have much to do with the weather.

Yes, it's the cold, dark, damp season; but fortunately my family and I usually manage to stay warm and dry. And yes, the plastic crap is everywhere and the advertising is atrocious, just like every year only worse; but I've been avoiding that for my whole life and nothing is different about it now.

I think I'm mostly feeling alienated from Christmas during the GWOT because of what goes on in church.

My stand against the GWOT is based on hard-earned knowledge and understanding, and also on what I thought were firm moral Christian principles. Principles like "Thou shalt not kill" and "Thou shalt not steal" and "Thou shalt not bear false witness"; little things like that.

These are the sorts of things -- other than my family -- that bring me to church. I want to hear the preacher say "Thou Shalt Not Kill!" and I want to hear it loud, in the widest context possible.

I want to hear him say, as Barack Obama's suddenly jettisoned former pastor Jeremiah Wright put it, "Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. Terrorism begets terrorism."

I want to hear a long-winded explication of Matthew 25:31-46, the passage where Jesus says:

[31] When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory: [32] And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth [his] sheep from the goats: [33] And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

[34] Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: [35] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: [36] Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

[37] Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed [thee]? or thirsty, and gave [thee] drink? [38] When saw we thee a stranger, and took [thee] in? or naked, and clothed [thee]? [39] Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

[40] And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me.

[41] Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels: [42] For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink: [43] I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

[44] Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

[45] Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did [it] not to one of the least of these, ye did [it] not to me. [46] And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

I want to be reminded that what I do to the least of my fellow humans, I also to do God. I want to be told that every week. I want to remember it every day. And I want everyone else to be reminded of it as well.

But -- even though I attend what may be the most "enlightened" Christian church in the area -- I never hear anything of the sort.

Instead I hear John 3:16. And I hear it over and over and over:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

I hear it in its shorter forms, and I hear it in longer forms as well. No matter what the subject of the week happens to be, the preacher almost always gets around to telling us:

If you believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He died to pay the wages of your sin, then you can ask him into your life, and He will dwell in your heart and become your personal Savior. And all your sins will be cleansed by His blood and you will be assured of a place in Heaven.

Sometimes he tells us that in Christianity -- alone among all the world religions -- salvation comes through faith, not works. He says we cannot earn salvation through good deeds because we are all sinners; but instead we can be granted salvation through God's grace, not because of our deeds but because of our faith.

The main attraction of Heaven, of course, is eternal life, which is held to be much more "real" than our troubled but temporary life here on Earth. And to some -- most? -- believers, life here on the planet seems to be more or less meaningless.

If you'll forgive me for saying so, I've never been much impressed by the promise of eternal life. I figure when the time comes for me to die, I'll have had about as much of life as I can handle. I've had almost enough already. And I'd be quite content to die and decompose, like the worms in the garden. Such is life, as I see it. But apparently I'm unusual.

Perhaps because I'm not bowled over by the product on offer, I go to church with my shields and filters on -- the same as I live the rest of my life. I don't take every word as "gospel truth" -- even if it comes from one of the Gospels (John 3:16, for instance) -- but I do listen carefully. I notice the things that are missing (like Matthew 25); and I notice the things that have changed.

When I was young, we never heard any talk about Jesus as a "personal Savior" -- of course we didn't have personal computers back then, or personal trainers either. The modern emphasis on the personal aspect of Christianity -- the idea that you must have a personal relationship with Jesus so he can become your personal Savior -- makes Jesus out to be something of a personal trainer for the soul. It also helps to separate us as individuals from the groups to which we belong, formally or otherwise.

The undeniable good we do as a congregation is always congratulated, but the equally undeniable harm we do as part of a larger group is never mentioned.

Whenever the subject of the GWOT is touched on, it's always a shame that the war has been going on for so long, and that our soldiers are being killed. The fact that we're not winning is never in the picture; but it's never very far away, either.

On the other hand, the damage we are doing -- cold-blooded murder, relentless torture, bombing weddings and funerals ... none of this is ever part of the discussion; it's not in the picture; it's not near the picture; it's not near the frame; it's not even in the gallery.

Personally, I'm a bit dubious of the value of eternal life, and somewhat skeptical of the promise, as well, so even though I go to church regularly, I tend to see everything a bit differently than those around me do.

Many of them seem to feel -- and some have told me explicitly -- that they will bear any injury in silence, trusting in their final reward, which will compensate for all the pain they have suffered, pain which in "the big picture" is more or less meaningless.

There are a couple of problems here. First, we have a recipe for becoming and remaining oppressed. Those who will bear any injury in silence will continue to suffer further injuries. Of that there is no doubt.

Worse: if you believe the pain you have suffered is meaningless, it doesn't take much of a leap to conclude that the pain you have inflicted is meaningless as well.

Then there's this: if you believe in Jesus, if He has become your personal Savior, if His death has already paid the wages of the sins you committed, and the sins you have yet to commit, then you can do anything you want -- and you needn't feel guilty about anything.

Thus the great promise of Christmas has been transmuted into a justification for national psychopathy.

By reducing the rich and complex message provided by the life of Christ to a single verse, and by ignoring everything else, including all the most powerful words spoken by Jesus himself, we can be assured of our personal salvation, even while destroying one nation after another, including our own.

And that is why I choose not to celebrate.

It's not about commercialism or consumerism.
It's not about the weather.
It's not the cold or the dark.
It's not about any lack of joy in my life.

It's about the insanity.

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Lost In The Land Of Make-Believe

The election of Barack Obama has seemed to many people like a magic trick -- a wish come true, in some cases the wish of a lifetime.

It's a result that seems to confirm their belief that America is still capable of pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Many seem to think that Obama himself can pull a rabbit out of a hat -- or multiple rabbits out of multiple hats -- whenever he wants to.

But there's a nasty surprise in all the magic: Obama is the rabbit, and the trick is on us!

In "The Era of Magical Thinking: SOFA Smokescreens and Presidential Power", Chris Floyd makes some very important points, beginning with this one:

The American media is by and large swallowing the propaganda line that the Iraqi cabinet's acquiescence to a "Status of Forces Agreement" (SOFA) with the U.S. occupation force means that the Iraq War will be over in 2011.

Not only the mainstream media are swallowing it; many bloggers, on both left and right, are drinking it too: they should know better but then again it's clear that they don't want to.

This will further cement the conventional wisdom that the suppurating war crime in Iraq is now behind us, and the topic will be moved even further off the radar of public scrutiny.

More fiction for more chumps. But who really wants to know the truth? Do you?

Most Americans seem quite happy with "the conventional wisdom".

But as usual, there is a wide, yawning abyss between the packaged, freeze-dried pabulum for public consumption and the gritty, blood-flecked truth on the ground. As Jason Ditz reports at Antiwar.com, the so-called "deadline" in 2011 for the withdrawal of all U.S. forces remains, as ever, an "aspiration," not an iron-clad guarantee. The pace and size of the bruited "withdrawal" will remain, as ever, "conditions-based," say Pentagon and White House officials -- a position long echoed by the "anti-war" president-elect. And as we all know, "conditions" in a war zone are always subject to radical, unexpected change.

Or radical, entirely expected change, as the case may be.

Ditz also hones in on a very important -- and almost entirely overlooked -- point: the ballyhooed "agreement" (which has yet to pass the Iraqi parliament, of course) "just covers the rules of US troops operating in Iraq from 2009-2011, and... nothing would prevent a future deal keeping the troops there past the scope of the SOFA." American negotiators had originally insisted on stating this point explicitly in the text of the agreement, but finally removed it to allow their oft-disgruntled puppet, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, to claim, falsely, that the SOFA will at last rid the country of the widely-loathed American presence.

It will not. If, by the end of 2011, America's bipartisan foreign policy elite -- and the profiteers of the vast, interlocking corporate conglomerate that fuels the War Machine -- decide that it is in "the national interest" (i.e., their interests) for the occupation to go on, it will go on. If they feel they have squeezed Iraq dry enough, then they may well move on to greener pastures -- in a newly "surging" Afghanistan, no doubt, and perhaps even Pakistan. But that decision will not be in the hands of the Iraqis.

Indeed. As I have written on more than one occasion, no important decisions are in the hands of the Iraqis.

There appears to be only one way in which the Iraqis could force all the widely-loathed Americans out of their country.

They would have to take over our government.

But it's too late; the Israelis have already taken it over.

Chris Floyd shifts gears, and we go with him:

II.
Of course, going this far into the weeds on the details of the "agreement" ignores the fact that the entire process is actually a brutal sham.

Exactly. I have been reading Cernig at At-Largely on the "negotiations" leading up to this "agreement", and seeing a lot of depth in the weeds but no understanding of the fact, as Chris points out, that "the entire process is actually a brutal sham".

Most recently, in the November 13 piece entitled "Hawks Pressure Obama To Ignore Iraqi Sovereignty", Cernig wrote [my emphasis]:

There's certainly a gap between Obama's campaign promise of 16 months and the 36 months of the SOFA wording, but the hawks are seemingly advocating ignoring that SOFA hard limit too, if "conditions" warrant it. If Obama doesn't stick to that timetable, he has to explain why he's setting the SOFA negotiations and the stated intentions of the Iraqi government during those negotiations - that the US withdraw from urban areas by end 2009 and entirely by 2011, no exceptions or takebacks - aside. That's a no-no, as the US cannot unilaterally go ask for an extension of the UN mandate and expect to get it. A continued presence would then be an absolute infringement of Iraqi sovereignty and make the US presence clearly an illegal occupation. It seems to me that its the folks who are pushing for doing just that who are out of bounds. Not only are they asking to set international law at naught but inviting a massively renewed insurgency.

But when Obama becomes the decider, he won't have to explain anything! That's the interesting thing about the job, remember?

Apart from that, the invasion, destruction and continued occupation of Iraq already qualify as an "absolute infringement of Iraqi sovereignty". "Iraqi sovereignty" has ceased to exist.

International law has already been "set at naught". And five years ago the people who started this war crime were counting the demolition of international law among their greatest victories!

But, according to Cernig, it won't get really illegal unless three more years pass and then the Americans violate the SOFA.

Stunning , isnt it?

Here's Chris Floyd again:

Disregarding for a moment the murderous nature of the Hitlerian war crime perpetrated on Iraq by the American government -- which removes the situation from any kind of "normal" considerations of diplomacy -- what we have here are negotiations dealing directly with the very essence of a nation's sovereignty, and America's continuing, intimate -- and armed -- involvement in that nation's life. It is absurd in the extreme to pretend that this is not a treaty-level matter, requiring full debate and a vote in the Senate, but simply a side issue to be left up to the President's discretion.

The whole thing is absurd, of course.

If it hadn't already killed more than a million people, and destroyed the lives and livelihoods of millions of others, it might be somewhat funny -- because it's so twisted. But it's not funny at all.

Bush wiggles away from congressional oversight in starting the war, then wiggles away from any Constitutional-style international treaty as well.

Yet that is the case. Bush makes the deal alone -- after all, as Obama continually reminds us, "we only have one president," and even if he is a twerpish, murdering, nation-gutting son of a bitch, we should all defer respectfully to his judgment.

Alleged judgment, please!

All Obama asks is that any agreement to extend the war crime in Iraq will provide "sufficient protections for our men and women in uniform."

That's it. That's all he asks; that's all he's allowed to care about. And that's all we're supposed to care about, too.

It's a totally psychopathic mindset, where outrageous expressions of destructive power are honored and the suffering of innocent victims is disregarded. But this is the kind of mindset a militaristic nation needs to inculcate in its soldiers. If the country has pretenses to democracy then the militarists need to create an entire nation with this mindset, not simply an army that "thinks" that way.

But this has been happening in the USA for a long time: popular culture worships psychopaths (from shoot-em-up video games that make killing "fun", to allegedly "true crime" documentaries that glorify the serial killers): modern politics, business, the military and the "news media" select for psychopathy; and the best liars get the best jobs.

But in the meantime, "protections for our men and women in uniform" constitute all the reason that could ever be needed for the indefinite continuation of this immense crime against humanity -- to the end of the SOFA, and beyond.

As for "sufficient protections" for the Iraqi men and women -- and children -- out of uniform, who have been killed and displaced by the millions, our singular president and his successor have little to say. As always, they play no part in these high affairs of state.

This is exactly true and it's one of the easiest parts of the puzzle to sort out.

This war crime -- like all war crimes, like all politics -- is a power struggle, nothing more or less.

Do the Iraqi people have any power? No.

Can they vote American politicians out of office? No.

Can they prosecute American soldiers, politicians or pundits for war crimes? No.

So who cares about them? Certainly not the people who are committing this enduring crime.

The Iraqi people simply do not matter at all.

And neither, apparently, do the American people, or their elected representatives.

Two questions here. First, the American people.

Do the American people have any power? No.

Can they vote American politicians out of office? Sometimes. But only under certain conditions.

Can they prosecute American soldiers, politicians or pundits for war crimes? Absolutely not.

So who cares about them?

As for our "elected" representatives, the situation is less clear but no more hopeful.

The combination of rigged elections and corrupt media makes it impossible that we could ever elect a president who actually represented us.

The same combination makes it impossible for any major party to select such a person as a presidential candidate.

Since the Glorious War On Terror began, every prominent politician who has opposed the military-industrial-media complex has been turned, or demolished, or both.

Early in 2004, Howard Dean looked like an anti-war Democratic presidential candidate in the making -- and he was promptly destroyed by extraordinarily slanted "news" coverage of a fairly ordinary, if rousing, speech.

So to the fore stepped John Kerry, a "hero" of the anti-war movement who served in Vietnam and then led the charge against that war. He suddenly started winning primaries despite having almost no personal appeal, and guess what? By the time the nominations had been sealed and the debates rolled around, Kerry's position on the war crime in Iraq was slightly to the right of Bush's: thus Kerry of anti-war stood before the nation and told us with as straight a face as he could manage that we needed more troops, more allies, and more effort, so we could "win" this war crime.

Four years later, the Democrats had made it very clear that seriously anti-war candidates were too "fringe" to be taken seriously, even though upwards of two-thirds of the country supported some variety of anti-war position. So Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich were ignored and barred from debates and so on, while Barack Obama became the candidate of hope and change and even peace!

Obama has embraced all the bogus basics of the Glorious War on Terror; he's made a pledge of undying, unconditional support for Israel; he's even pledged to resume the vain hunt for the dead man who didn't attack us on 9/11. But he has remained a symbol representing hope and change -- just like he represents us, meaning: not at all.

At lower levels of the political ladder, the dynamic is exactly the same, although the dirty tricks are smaller and less visible. Anyone who doesn't toe the party line -- support for Israel, continuation of the Glorious War on Terror, continuing increases in military and homeland security budgets, and so on -- is turned or demolished, or both.

Meanwhile, up on the Hill, we are continually lied to by people who think we know nothing and who are usually right. So Harry Reid, the Democratic Senate majority leader, was lamenting the other day about how even though the Democrats have increased their majority in the Senate, they still have less than 60 seats.

Reid was implicitly talking about filibuster, and in effect he was saying that if he had greater than 60/40 control of the Senate, the Republicans wouldn't be able to filibuster against a Democratic legislative agenda.

What Reid doesn't want you to think about is this: If the Republicans can stop a Democratic agenda with just over 40 seats, then the Democrats could have done the same thing to Bush for all those years when they had more than 40 seats, and yet they pretended to be helpless.

But all of this is entirely in keeping with our cowed and craven post-Republic era, where in the end, all must yield to the prerogatives of the "commander-in-chief." The constant use of this title as a synonym for "the president" is yet another mark of our democratic degradation. For of course the president is only the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in wartime -- not the military commander of the entire country. It has been astonishing to see the erasure of this distinction not only in the popular mind but also among our powerful elites. It is one of the clearest expressions of the true state of the Union: a nation that has willingly submitted itself to rule by a military junta, surrendering, without a shot, the liberties it once claimed as its very raison d'etre.

Yes! Absolutely! And this is the point -- definitely the main point, and quite possibly the whole point, of the Glorious War on Terror.

Republican strategists have been saying for a long time that American presidents were "weak" if they didn't wage war. Conversely, if a president does wage war, he gets to be commander-in-chief. And if he wages endless war, he gets to be commander-in-chief forever.

So it was no accident that this vicious little twerp, who wasn't legitimately elected in 2000 -- at whom and at whose selection people used to laugh -- stood on a pile of smoking rubble and spoke the famous words:

"An act of war has been declared against the United States."

It didn't make very much sense, and the small amount of sense it did make wasn't true, but the media started talking about how this vicious little twerp was "presidential". And you believed them!

You waved your red, white, and blue flags, and you sang "God Bless America" and you felt something you'd never felt before: Pride. National pride. Pride of purpose. Pride in belonging. Your country was being hijacked, and you were proud to be a part of the hijacking party.

Maybe you personally were not proud. Maybe you personally were not part of the party. But everyone around you was, or nearly everyone.

I wasn't proud. I was sickened. I was utterly horrified, not just at what had happened, but because of what it meant would happen next.

On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, one of my neighbors asked me a tough question. "Why don't they stand up and fight?"

The question was tough because I knew he didn't want to hear the answer: "They don't want us to know who they are!"

It was so clear -- it was so obvious! Here were Rumsfeld and Rice and Kissinger and everybody including Bush himself, all sneering and leering and telling us this was the beginning of a war that wouldn't end in our lifetimes!

How would they know that?

Maybe because that's the way they were planning it.

And they planned it well: not perfectly; not perfectly by any means. There are hundreds of holes in their tale. But they planned it well enough to get away with it.

And now we're paying the price -- and we're going to keep paying that price -- for as long as we both shall live.

So now we lurch from election to election, hoping that this time we will get a "good" commander, a benevolent tyrant. Witness the plethora of recent articles in our most august journals, wondering anxiously what Obama will do about the concentration camp in Guantanamo, and the issue of "preventive" indefinite detention, and the torture techniques instituted by Bush, and the secret, warrantless wiretapping of the American people, and the "signing statements" that ignore the Constitutional authority of the elected legislature and impose the arbitrary will of the president, and all the other authoritarian powers now claimed by the Unitary Executive.

It's all a distraction, of course. It's all right up there with the speculation about "the first dog" and whether the president-elect will try to impose his will on the so-called playoff structure of American college football.

The unspoken assumption behind all the stories is that it is up to Obama, alone, to decide these issues. It is he who will now decide how we define torture. He will now decide what's to become of the captives in Gitmo and the other gulag hidey-holes around the world. He will decide whether or not to "re-visit" the spying powers that he voted to give the Executive just a few months ago. And so on down the line.

But the unspoken assumption is a false one; the reality is that Obama won't be allowed to decide anything of the sort. He will be presented as a decider but he has already declared his intention to be the front man of a unification government.

The "unity" Obama will bring will not heal us, of course. It's not designed to do that. We are divided according to any number of criteria: racial, economic, geographical, political, and so on; Obama doesn't intend to do anything about these divides other than possibly proclaim them irrelevant.

The "unity" Obama promises does nothing for the most serious division in America -- between the people who are so enraged over the course America has taken during the past eight years that they have brought Obama to the pinnacle of power, and the people who steered that course.

Obama's administration represents a reconciliation between the two groups. And to a certain extent, it's working. Websites and writers who appeared to stand firmly against the American imperial project have turned out to be merely anti-Bush, and quite satisfied with the "change", even if it is only cosmetic.

Chris Floyd again:

All of the extraordinary hopes now invested in Obama boil down to this: the powerless wish that he will be a "good" king, well-intentioned and masterful, and not a cruel and bumbling ruler like the last "commander."

He may certainly be "masterful". He may avoid "bumbling". But Barack Obama has already shown that he has no intention of being a "good" king.

A good king would never renounce the pastor who taught him this:

Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. Terrorism begets terrorism.

A good king would not resume the costly, deadly and ultimately fruitless, and powerfully misleading search for a dead man.

A good king would never try to pretend that racism isn't "endemic to America"; or that America's problems in the Middle East are caused not by its own actions or the actions of Israel but rather by the "perverse and hateful ideologies of Islam".

Barack Obama has told all these lies, and many more; he has pledged more war against countries that never attacked -- or even intended to attack -- us.

Chris Floyd has the right words for the thoughts going on in the heads of the people who brought Barack Obama to power and now hope he will bring them the "change" that he taught them to "hope" for.

Magical thinking. Cringing and fawning. Looking to the Leader to make everything right. This is the state of American "democracy" today -- even after the historic "transformation" of Election 2008.

I am still amazed at the depth of the self-deception going on, the willingness to be deceived that I see almost everywhere.

Oh well. I deceive myself, too. I know where this is headed. I know what it would take to stop it. I know that's not about to happen, and I know that blogging about it isn't going to make any difference. But I do it anyway.

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Beyond Sick: Canada Mourns A Fallen Psycho Warrior

The American way of war has come to Canada, and it's incredible what a dose of manure can do, even in the cold!

Here's a case study in the process by which a government can take a menace to society, put him in a uniform, and ship him halfway around the world where he can be a menace to some other society until he gets himself killed there and comes home a national hero.

Either sheer ignorance is sheer bliss, or Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star had to be very, very careful writing the story of Darryl Caswell.

Under the headline "Loved son a family's loss, a nation's hero", and with the sub-title: 'Why didn't he get one more ticket?', Daniel Dale's ode to a national disgrace begins this way:

Darryl Caswell took out a loan to buy his baby, a Honda CBR600RR sport motorcycle painted orange. He didn't spend $13,000 to drive slowly.

At least Daniel Dale is upfront about the fact that Darryl Caswell was just the sort of fellow you'd avoid if you wanted to live a long and healthy life. Unfortunately, some other people were not so lucky.

Near Bowmanville [Ontario], his home-town, and near Petawawa [Ontario], where his Royal Canadian Dragoons were based, Caswell careened through the streets, sometimes in excess of 150 kilometres [93 miles] per hour, seeking thrills, courting danger, "this orange blur," his stepmother says, on dark, small-town nights. Darryl being reckless. Darryl being Darryl.

Darryl being Darryl? Seriously? That's it?

"Careening through the streets" of a small town "in excess of 150 kilometres per hour"? Please!

He was a menace to society. He didn't care if he killed himself.

He didn't care if he killed anybody else, either.

Seriously.

Families of innocent people killed by "thrill-seeking", "death-defying" assholes like Darryl Caswell mourn in every city and town of any size, yet their grief is never immortalized like the grief Canadians are expected to feel for this "national hero".

Seriously.

In the summer of 2006, Caswell got a speeding ticket – another speeding ticket – riding the bike near Peterborough. His superiors, unamused, issued a warning: one more ticket, no more Afghanistan.

Why do they give maniacs tickets for repeatedly driving more than three times the speed limit in a residential area?

Why don't they just throw them away and lose the key, before the maniacs kill somebody?

Because they have a better use for maniacs like Darryl Caswell.

Caswell burned his tires. He put the Honda in storage. At the end of January 2007, he deployed to Kandahar.

Caswell was headed to the war. And that's why his superiors were unamused.

"Caswell's gonna kill somebody", they must have thought. "Let's make sure it's not one of ours."

On the home front, more than a year later, his father is still deep in denial.

"They said, `One more speeding ticket, you won't be able to go on the mission,'" says his father, Paul. "You wonder, why didn't he get one more ticket?"

Paul Caswell, 49, is a conveyor belt inspector and repairman. He has worked for 30 years at Bowmanville's Goodyear plant. He speaks plainly, grieves quietly. But he has questions, "the what-ifs."

He is a father still trying to accept, more than a year later, that his son was in that country on that patrol in that vehicle on that road at that moment.

It couldn't be any other way. Parents who raise maniacs are always in denial.

In 2004, Darryl worked at Goodyear for six months. For a young man who needed speed, factory work was numbingly mundane. He joined the army. Less than three years later, he was in Afghanistan. Less than five months later, his body was transported home.

"Why couldn't I have kept him at Goodyear? Why didn't he want to stay there? Good job for me all these years," Paul says. "Just wasn't for him, all black and dirty. He was doing what he wanted to do, but you ask yourself, `what if?' You hear there was supposed to be a minesweep that day. Minesweep was supposed to go down and clear the path first. But it got behind or broke down or something, so they went anyway. And that's when Darryl hit it, and that was the end of it. You'd think today's technology – you can check out your backyard on Google – why can't they be watching those guys and see when they're burying bombs and stuff?"

Paul now rides the Honda.

And isn't that just perfect?

Darryl Caswell's grieving father -- who apparently hasn't progressed to asking why Canadian troops are occupying a nation halfway around the world, which never attacked Canada, or any other NATO country, and never planned to do so -- now drives his late son's suicide machine.

And he wishes his country could establish 24/7 wall-to-wall surveillance in Afghanistan, so more maniacs like Darryl don't get killed there. Seriously.

Daniel Dale's tale turns to Caswell's brother, Logan, who was celebrating his 12th birthday when he got the bad news about his brother's death in Afghanistan.

The phone rang at the Caswells' comfortable Bowmanville house on June 11, 2007, Logan Caswell's 12th birthday. Trooper Darryl Caswell, Reconnaissance Squadron, 2nd Battalion, Royal Canadian Regiment, had promised his little brother he would call.

"I was waitin' for that call," Logan says. "Waitin' and waitin'..."

But Darryl, 25, was not on the line. The call was not for Logan.

While leading a supply convoy north of Kandahar City, the Coyote reconnaissance vehicle Darryl drove had struck an improvised explosive device. Less than two months before he was to return home, he was dead.

"I just thought to myself, it had to happen on my birthday," Logan says. "I didn't even cry. I just screamed."

It's a horrible thing, and you have to scream with him.

But even as Logan Caswell was screaming, the word was being passed down from Ottawa: "We've lost another psychopath; fire up the tribute machine."

Darryl's body, like the bodies of the 56 Canadian Afghanistan casualties before him, was flown to the military's base in Trenton, then driven west for an autopsy in Toronto. His family trailed the police-escorted hearse to the coroner's office, Paul and his wife, Christine, at their "lowest," Christine says, Darryl's death "finally real," their devastation mitigated only by the throngs of people who lined Hwy. 401 overpasses, wearing red and holding flags, to pay their respects.

For all but two of the repatriation convoys since Darryl's, Paul and Christine have stood on an overpass themselves. They wear red. They hold flags. From above, they watch strangers re-enact their nightmare.

"It's hard when we go, because it brings everything back," says Christine. "But we go because we know what it meant to us."

The military propaganda machine couldn't have better representatives than its very own victims:

Christine, a vivacious 46-year-old with blue eyes and blonde hair, married Paul in 1993. This Saturday afternoon, she wears a red Support Our Troops shirt, three pro-troops wristbands. A heart pendant, pictures of Darryl and Logan inside, hangs around her neck.

The families must go through hell; that's a given. So their pain is assuaged by the most vicious of fiction.

This fiction is a phony salve that leaves a permanent infection on the surrounding communities. And the disease spreads through intense government PR efforts which drive propaganda such as the piece we are now reading.

She can smile, now, when she flips through the Darryl photos she has placed on the coffee table of their family room. ("He loved his turkey and dressing. Darryl was meat and potatoes." "He was small but he was mighty. Strong as an ox." "Him and his dad, boot camp graduation. Darryl loved that photo. They had a special bond.")

She can laugh, now, when she tells Darryl-being-Darryl stories. ("Logan, remember when Darryl chased the chicken?")

"I'm getting to that point where I have a lot of good memories," she says. "I don't cry as much. Logan was getting sick of me crying."

Sick? This is way beyond sick!

Unfortunately, it is becoming more typical all the time.

The death of a soldier is unlike the death of anyone else. Darryl, a life-long daredevil, might well have died pursuing a private adventure. But he died in Kandahar, in a war of choice he deeply supported but millions of Canadians oppose.

A war of choice? Whose choice?

Have we sunk so low that our governments can now start, or join, foreign wars that are opposed -- on solid moral grounds -- by millions of people, yet perfectly ok for those who choose to fight, and who are called national heroes for doing it?

We have, you know. You bet we have.

We have sunk a lot lower than that.

And so the Caswells' loss, so deeply personal, was also both public and political, a subject for introspection and a catalyst, like 96 other soldiers' deaths since 2002, for national introspection. Darryl, their son, was now a national hero. For months, there were plaques to receive, ceremonies to attend, politicians to meet, interviews to do.

Some might be asking themselves questions like, "How long must this go on?"

The answer appears to be "Forever. The endlessness justifies the meaninglessness."

In November, Bowmanville High School honoured Darryl, a graduate, in its Remembrance Day ceremony. In May, a street in a new Bowmanville subdivision was named Darryl Caswell Way. Later in May, his name was added to Bowmanville's cenotaph.

"It's all great," says Paul. "Everybody has just been great. It's a great honour for the town. But it gets to be – we didn't really have a chance to have down time, to grieve normally. We didn't have a whole lot of break, with the town, the media and everything. We tried to be good with the media, get his name out there, let 'em know. But we've gotta get on with our lives, get some normalcy back."

It's all great! It's great for the town to be assosicated with a dead menace to society -- as long as it was a foreign society.

It's great for the family of the dead thrill-seeking menace to be feted all over the place. But enough is enough.

Framed photos of Darryl used to hang throughout the house's main floor. "Too much," says Christine.

They moved the photos to a corner of the basement. They seek a better balance between remembering and forgetting.

"You don't want people to forget about him," says Christine. "He's our son. We don't want anyone to forget about him, or who he was as a person. But we're at a point where we've gotta heal."

I cannot disagree with that sentiment. I only wish Christine knew how true it was.

They really do have to heal -- not just from the loss of their son but from a lifetime of propaganda.

They know nothing. They've been through all this and they still have no clue.

And that's why their government can take advantage of them the way it has.

And that's why they're continuing the tradition.

Three months or so after the phone call, Logan had his room painted in camouflage, a mural of his brother driving the Coyote armoured vehicle on the wall opposite his bed.

Framed photos of Darryl sit on his shelves. Darryl's T-shirts hang amongst his on his rack. Beneath his television, there are the shoot-'em-up video games he and Darryl played for hours, the ones he can't bring himself to play alone.

For several months after Darryl died, Logan slept on the floor in the basement recreation room, near the pool table, or at the foot of his parents' bed. "I have a chair in my room," he says softly, "and all I saw every night was him sitting, playing video games. Creepy. I don't really believe in ghosts, but..."

Creepy is right! This is creepy on a generational scale. And it's so American.

Canadians used to pride themselves on not being Americans, and not being like Americans, either. At least some of them used to.

Canadians used to pride themselves on being peacekeepers. Sorry about that, cold friends! This is the post-9/11 world, you know. You're all Americans now!

The family couldn't handle the rebellious kid but maybe the Army could. And maybe that was a good deal, for them, for a while:

As a teenager, Darryl lived in Bowmanville with Christine and Paul and in Sarnia with his mother Darlene and younger sister Jolene Cushman.

In high school, Christine says, he was sometimes a handful – an angry kid who had trouble following rules he did not create himself. He drank. He skipped school.

But he matured dramatically, perhaps never more noticeably than after he joined the military. "We couldn't believe the change when he completed basic training. ... He was so obedient, so sharp, very disciplined, well-mannered," Paul says. The man whose arms were covered by tattoos, who drove his 14-tonne Coyote so fast his comrades called him "Ricky Bobby," the name of Will Ferrell's deranged NASCAR driver in the film Talladega Nights, now told Christine how to fold laundry.

This is a public service message for parents of unruly teenagers:

See what they can do for your young psycho in Basic Training: they can teach him to act obedient, sharp, disciplined, well-mannered ... and they can even make him fold laundry!

They need to train him in obedience so they can get him to do what they want him to do: go overseas and kill and maim people he otherwise would never have even heard of.

Some soldiers need to be trained to overcome the fear of death. Darryl Caswell apparently wasn't one of them.

Some soldiers need to be trained to overcome the fear of killing. Darryl Caswell apparently wasn't one of them, either.

The Army loves guys like Darryl Caswell. All they had to do was whip him into line, teach him how to fold his laundry, teach him how to obey orders, and ship him out.

The lucky ones come home without the box, of course. Instead they come home physically wounded, or psychologically ruined, or both.

It's a horrific waste of human life; and that's not even counting the damage they inflict!

And all for a lie. Or a pack of lies.

To the end, Darryl thought of himself [...] as a work in progress.

Only in Afghanistan did he "find" himself, he wrote in his last journal entry, dated June 7, 2007. He had not yet shed his "dark shadow," he wrote in an earlier entry; he was not yet able to show people his "true self."

But he was close, he wrote June 7, and closer than ever to being the man he wanted to be. He had a new appreciation for life in Canada and for his family's love. He had a new desire to start a family of his own. He was going to walk the streets of his country with a newfound "sparkle and glow."

"It's like everything I do is new, and my life has been reborn," he wrote. Four days later, it was over.

And now all that remains is the private grief and the public adulation.

Paul says he tries to keep busy to keep his mind off his son. Christine says she thinks about him from morning to night. Too often, she says. A little less and things would be easier.

But a little less is hard. Hwy. 401, 1,500 metres from home, is the fastest route to work. When the weather is nice and she is not running late, Christine takes Hwy. 2 instead. The Highway of Heroes makes her cry.

It really is very sad -- but not in a way this Toronto Star report would ever actually tell you.

One of the comments posted on the Star website got it just about almost right, in one respect, anyway:

My sympathy to the family who lost a loved one. Your son was doing very necessary and noble work in Afganistan. It's hard for Canadians to really understand the work being done in Afganistan because it is not really covered by the media. Thank you to our troops for representing Canada in such a positive way internationally. I'm proud to be Canadian.

There's a nugget of truth in there, and even though it's in nega-talk, it applies to both Canada and the United States:

It's hard for anyone to really understand the war crime in progress in Afganistan because it is not really covered by the media.

So let's take a look at some of the things the media won't tell you:

Afghanistan has never attacked Canada.

Afghanistan has never attacked any NATO country.

The NATO mission in Afghanistan is based on more lies than you can count, even if you start counting as recently as 9/11. But the American subversion of Afghanistan has been going on for almost 30 years.

On July 3, 1979, U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a presidential finding authorizing funding for a clandestine operation in Afghanistan, which was known as Operation Cyclone, also known as The Bear Trap.

Under Operation Cyclone, Americans working through friendly overseas cutouts recruited the baddest Islamic bad guys they could find, trained them in terror, gave them equipment, money, vicious primitive ideology and logistical support, and infiltrated them into Afghanistan via Pakistan.

Once in Afghanistan, the newly minted Islamic terrorists -- whom we called freedom fighters -- began to stage attacks on the Soviets just across the border. The idea was to lure the Soviets into Afghanistan, and bleed them dry. The devastation of Afghanistan, the incredible cruelty to be inflicted on the Afghan people, the horrible suffering they would endure for decades; none of these were part of the "equation".

The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December of 1979. And they did terrible damage. Americans made sure the "freedom fighters" remained well-supplied, well-motivated, and well-supported. The Soviets continued to bleed. And the Afghan people continued to suffer.

In 1980, Carter lost his bid for re-election; Ronald Reagan took over in 1981 and opened the spigots. Freedom-fighters everywhere were welcome to unlimited American aid, as long as they were terrorizing communist countries, or countries that bordered communist countries, or countries in which people had heard of communism. The flow of money, weapons, and ammunition into Afghanistan increased dramatically -- and went on for years. And so did the suffering.

If ever America were to move -- hypothetically, of course -- in the direction of positive change, it would necessitate facing up to the reality of the most horrible crimes of our past, and fomenting terrorism surely must rank as one of them. Deliberately luring a second country into invading, occupying and destroying a third country ranks right up there, of course.

Much more has happened since then, of course. The "freedom fighters" we supported stopped being "mujahideen" and became "al Qaeda", and they turned against us, unless maybe they didn't, and either they did things or else they only got blamed for things that other people did. We may never know; but remnants of these Afghan freedom fighters appear to have been used by western intelligence against the Russians in Bosnia and Chechnya, and in other terrorist attacks as well ...

... including the most famous one.

And in October of 2001, without offering the world any evidence implicating Afghanistan in the "terrorist attacks" of the previous month, George Bush attacked Afghanistan, using war plans that were already sitting on his desk as the twin towers disintegrated, and then he dragged NATO into his war crime of naked aggression, and here we stand. All these years later, NATO continues to pound on Afghanistan, and the lie has become: We are needed there until we can stabilize Afghanistan.

But the truth of the matter is that Afghanistan has been a dangerous, unstable, terrorist-infested place for the past 30 years, precisely because the Americans have wanted it that way. The idea that Americans could somehow stabilize Afghanistan is absurd.

But that's ok, because the Americans don't want to stabilize Afghanistan anyway; now they want to own it. And they won't be happy until they do. But that will never happen, which suits them fine, because they are not in this war to win, only to fight. Fighting is more profitable, for those who don't have to do the fighting. And you know who won't have to do any of the fighting.

Instead, the killing and the dying are contracted out to young rebels who can't stand a day without a jolt and a half of adrenaline, to whom life means nothing, especially the lives of others. And when they come home in a box, they become national heroes.

A closing comment from the Toronto Star website encapsulates the insanity that has taken hold of us all, in one way or another:

Lest we forget...

People here disparaging the war against Afghanistan don’t have a clue about the history of the Afghan war-mongers. You have never been invaded by these people. But people who have suffered at the hands of the Moghals or Afghan kings ought to know. Why do you think Canada’s freedom isn’t challenged today? Just imagine if the Iraqi’s or the Taliban’s or any of the Muslim nations had the firepower the west has today, it would all be over for the western world. They would use every conceivable weapon to annihilate this world. That has been seen for 500 brutal years in South Asia. The British did rule south Asia but were never even a fraction as ruthless as the Islamic kings. So we ought to be grateful to these soldiers who are keeping us free for hundred more years to come.

In case you didn't catch the logic, it goes like this:

We have to kill all the people in all the Muslim nations, even though they don't threaten us, and even though they can't threaten us; because if they could threaten us, then surely they would do so.

Such is "progress" in the Great White North.

Once the true north strong and free, now simply martys on the road to hell.

Happy Remembrance Day, O Canada.

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