Obama sends Bush to teach Syria how to kill civilians legally

Syrian President Bashir Assad being advised
by former American President George W. Bush

In a last ditch effort to avoid air strikes and cruise missile attacks on Syria,
President Barack Obama has deployed former President George W Bush as a special envoy to instruct Syrian President Bashir Assad on the how to kill civilians without committing war crimes.

"No one alive knows more about this than former President Bush," Obama said. "He has by some estimates, authorized the killing of over a million Iraqi men, women, and children and untold tens of thousands of Afghans--all without committing war crimes or human rights violations. That's why I gave him immunity for actions taken in those wars just the other day."

Bush had already arrived in Syria and begun what he called his "Cheneying" of the young president of Syria.

He took a brief break to explain the advice he's giving Assad in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

"See, first thing I told him is we're the deciders.  We decide what's the right way to kill terrorists.  And that's the first step.  Only kill terrorists.  And they can come in any gender or age or sexual oriented minority."

The Fox interviewer Chris Wallace asked if he advised Assad against the use of chemical weapons.

"Of course I did! That's the first thing I said! There's nothing more bad than killing someone with a gas that leaves their body mostly intact.  I told him a real leader uses weapons that blows them bodies into pieces and buries them in rubble so it takes their relatives a while to find them and put them back together."

"See when they're busy doing that, they can't be terroristing as much."

"So explosives are the only weapons that are moral?" Wallace asked.

"I never said that," Bush bristled.  "We got stuff that can burn people to death. Inside and out at the same time.  And they can't put it out even in water.  They just kinda run around like a Bugs Bunny cartoon till they run out of juice, heh heh."

"You can also take them out one at a time Old West style with good old bullets even if you have to do it from a helicopter to get more of them like reporters and kids trying to help terrorists we're in the middle of killing."

Wallace asked if killing, even if limited to these legal methods, won't generate more enemies for the Assad regimes.

"You know I don't really think about that.  But if you think that's a problem, you can bring some people in and ask them how they feel about your leadership.  Sometimes you have to use special 'enhanced' interrogation methods we've developed like waterboarding to get an honest answer out of them."

"Don't those methods sometimes lead to additional deaths?" Wallace asked.

"Not that I know of.  I mean not people that wouldn't lose their life later anyway."

Wallace said there may be some limits to how Bush's experience could apply to Syria since President Assad is killing his own people and Bush was killing people on the other side of the world.

"Chris, that's what's great about America. We know how other people need to do things even if we haven't done it ourselves yet."

WHITE HOUSE PETITION: fully pardon Bradley Manning

There probably are and will be more of these various places, but posting one on the White House website makes it harder for them to say haven't seen it, and for others who stumble across it on their site, it will be like a scarlet letter.

Who knows, it might even force Obama to act.

SIGN HERE & pass it on to your friends.

FULL TEXT OF PETITION:

Pardon Bradley Manning and reduce his sentence to time served. 

His 35 year sentence is greater than that given to uniformed members of the military who tortured or massacred civilians, and typically got ten years and served far less. 

The Bush admin lied about their case for war led to the deaths of thousand of troops and a million Iraqis but weren't even tried. 

A prosecution witness in the Manning trial said NO deaths resulted from his leaks. 

Manning's leaks exposed war crimes and helped spark the Arab Spring democracy movement. 

The only "damage" he did was to the ability of our government to lie to our people about the means and motives of our foreign policy. 

Clean up the corruption and moral squalor in corridors of power in Washington instead of punishing the person who exposed it. 

SIGN HERE

NSA launches lip reading drones in United States

New leaks reveal for the first time that the NSA is using drones to spy on in person conversations within the United States.  Predator drones are taping all conversation outdoors and many indoors observable through windows not blocked by drapes or blinds.

An unnamed high-ranking official in the Obama administration said average Americans should not be concerned about their privacy being invaded.

“We’re just collecting meta-data,” the official said, adding, “like who is talking to who, where, and when, and the general tone of the conversation, you know, whether it’s friendly, business-like, or furtive. We’re certainly not recording the content of the conversations.”

Critics of the program have disputed this, noting that the NSA has advertised in many deaf publications for lip readers to serve as analysts.

The Obama administration has responded that lip-reading of the actual content of conversations will only be done when there is suspicion of a terrorist activity, like non-violent protests of tar sand pipelines or further Occupy protests of financial crimes on Wall Street.

The administration official said the lip reading program will be discontinued once their acoustic sensors are able to isolate individual conversations from background noise.

They had no comment on why the drones were armed.

Guatemala Chamber of Commerce says genocide conviction "will will discourage foreign investment"

Forensic anthropologist, 

remains of genocide victim, 

possible relatives of victim

Democracy Now has been covering the genocide trial of U.S.-backed Guatemalan dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, but more damning than any details of any atrocity are the reactions of the business community and what it reveals about how they use governments like Montt's, not just in the past but today.

Most macabre is the recent quote by security guards at a mine who said protesters didn't realize that the mine "generates jobs" (a Republican talking point) before they opened fire on the protesters.

Most people don't care  or even know about communism, socialism, free market fundamentalism, or whatever. They just want decent working conditions, to be able to take care of their family, and have their employer subject to the rule of law if they don't provide the other two.

That is obviously intolerable to corporations in their dealings in the Third World--and increasingly in America and the developed world.

Eventually Americans are going to realize that the companies they work for see us the same way they do Bangladeshi garment workers and Indian miners in Guatemala, and we will change things.

If not, look forward to being buried in rubble during of sixteen hour shift or being shot for not respecting "job creators" in the near future.

EXCERPT:

One of the remarks that Pérez Molina made in response to the verdict against Ríos Montt—he was echoing the comments of the American Chamber of Commerce, which represents the U.S. corporations in Guatemala—was to say that this verdict will discourage foreign investment in Guatemala. It’s a very revealing comment, because foreign companies, when they come into a country and are looking to invest, they want some laws to be enforced, like the laws on contracts, and they want other laws not to be enforced, like the labor laws and the laws which stop them from murdering their employees if they try to organize unions. In the ’80s, the leaders of the American Chamber of Commerce described to me how they would sometimes turn over names of troublesome workers to the security forces, and they would then disappear or be assassinated. Fred Sherwood was one of the Chamber of Commerce leaders who described that. And now, with this verdict, it seems that Pérez Molina and the corporate leaders and the elites in Guatemala, in general, are worried that they may have a harder time killing off workers and organizers when they need to.
And it’s especially relevant right now because there’s a huge conflict in Guatemala about mining. American and Canadian mining companies are being brought in by the Pérez Molina government to exploit silver and other minerals. The local communities are resisting. Community organizers have been killed. There was a clash in which a police officer was killed. So Pérez Molina has imposed a state of siege in various parts of the country. And just the other day, the local press printed a wiretap transcript of the head of security at one of these mines, in this case the San Rafael mining operation, where the security chief says to his men, regarding demonstrators who were outside the mine, he says, "Goddamn dogs, they do not—they do not understand that the mine generates jobs. We must eliminate these animal pieces of . We cannot allow people to establish resistance. Kill those sons of ." And the security people later opened fire. This is the way foreign companies operate, not just in Guatemala, but around the world. I mean, it’s this kind of non-enforcement of law that made possible the Bangladesh factory collapse that killed over a hundred workers. And now they’re worried in Guatemala—

FULL TEXT