Media Excises Deep and Murky Context in Pan Am Bomber Story.

Today's 'featured" news story is on the release of a man from Libya by the Scottish Government from a prison where he was sentenced to serve a life sentence.  The man has cancer and is expected to die within 3 months.  We know he was convicted for blowing up a transcontinental flight. 

My problem with how the media is covering this is that story is being presented without context. 

We/the U.S./Reagan blew up some boats off the coast of Libya.  They retaliated and blew up a night club, La Belle Disco,  killing two U.S. service men and a civilian and wounded many dozens of people.  We attempted to assassinate Mumamar Qadaffi in a strike on Qadaffi's home that did not kill him but did kill his infant daughter.  Several Libyans then were then involved in the bombing of the flight that was exploded over Lockerbee, Scotland. 

Read a recount of this tit for tat escalation that helped no one but killed hundreds. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/1653848.stm  

Reagan chose to engage in Israeli style "diplomacy" -- i.e. assassination of a a country's leader.  The U.S. and most western govenments have chosen not to engage in assassination of leaders as it elevates the person in power to a symbolic level akin to that of a regal status where the person and the government or country are all the same.  

If memory serves me, this was also the  time the French did not allow overflight and an "errant" bomb fell on the lawn of the French embassy in Libya.   This instance of neener, neener, neener with bombs illustrated a level of in your face immaturity that is intensely troubling and frightening beyond words.

This is akin to the problem implicit within the use of drones.  It personalizes war to the level of assassination.   To have to have no contact with the people you kill was a trajectory started with the use of aerial bombings.  But this trend has expanded to the point that no support staff at all has to walk among the people who will be bombed.   This is supremely arrogant.   Our technological capability has evolved to a level where we cannot justify its use and maintain any sense of humanity.  We must do things entirely differently.  

My suggestion, train and disperse an educational militia primarily composed of women into areas of conflict and work with the women of the area to solve base level problems that percolate up through society to create international conflict.  Raging Grannies and CodePink Women and Women in Black would be a good population from which to initially draw for the corps.  

Women, wake up, we have to change all this.  

Peace.

Here Come The Fascists

RFK, Jr. leads a call for awareness of the vile and violent bigoted philosophies that informs Palin's small town conservatism.

Fascist writer Westbrook Pegler, an avowed racist who Sarah Palin approvingly quoted in her acceptance speech for the moral superiority of small town values, expressed his fervent hope about my father, Robert F. Kennedy, as he contemplated his own run for the presidency in 1965, that "some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies."

I read that she tried to get one of my favorite authors, Madelaine L'Engle, books banned from her town's library. Here's the story,

"Sarah Palin never asked anyone to ban a book as Mayor. As Mayor -- of a Wal-Mart and a snowmobile trail -- she was only interested in censorship in general.

As the New York Times reported this weekend, she only pushed to ban books by name when she was on the city council.

I hope that clears up everything.

Why was it so important for Brian Rogers to slip in the words "as Mayor" a week ago, before anyone had heard about Sarah Palin's city council campaign to protect Alaska from Daddy's Roommate?"

I no longer have any tolerance for hair splitting truth tellers who are micro-meters from lies in order to further their goals through deception. Vile, lying, neo-con, fundamentalists who would impose their narrow, violent, sexist, biogoted world view on us all. Eff em. This is war. I'm declaring war on fundamentalism -- all fundamentalism descended from the intolerance of Abraham's world view -- Christian, Islamic, or Judaic.

(P.S. if such attitudes of "I'm doing well so God must favor me " informed by just this kind of thinking hadn't been allowed to prosper under deregulated skies, the 2nd Great Depression wouldn't be gaining steam as we speak. Squelch the facsistic tendencies of the police state that can flip into power seemingly in an instant in such times. Poll watchers/election observers arrested. Peaceful protesters exercising their rights of free speech and journalists attempting to cover their stories are intimidated, brutalized, and jailed. What are we waiting for, a "Krystal Nacht?" -- I write this as Alan Greenspans wife, Andrea Mitchell, interviews Carly Fiorino, a fired HP Exec who walked away with a severance balloon of somewhere around 40 million dollars, about the mess our country is in. Now that is journalsim.... AAEEeee and ARGH!")