Drone Murder 222

 in Uncategorized by

I had a half-formed post in mind to work on this morning, but then I read Glenn Greewald’s latest and concluded that if you are going to devote ten minutes of your day, nothing I could write would be as profitable as your reading him.

I would only add the obvious fact that Blair had already done to New Labour precisely what Obama has done to the Democrats; and that western “democracy” has lost its meaning because the institutionally entrenched parties offer no actual policy choice to voters, but are all neo-conservative.

Allowed HTML - you can use: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

222 thoughts on “Drone Murder”

1 … 4 5 6 7 8
  • Michael Stephenson

    I never talked down to anyone as far as I am aware. Sorry to offend.

    Anyway, because something happens in a wifi hotspot and is a targeted attack doesn’t make it a basic attack. Getting craigs password over wifi is a hell of a lot less sophisticated than breaking into whoever hosts his blog.
    In this case Craig is a low hanging fruit and what I described is a simple way of getting his password. (I am a simple person)

  • Levin

    “Perpetual war” – I would tend to agree. Anyone remember George Orwell’s “1984”, where Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia (did I get the last two right?) were in perpetual war with each another…?

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    ” such as “ennemies in government” who have no qualms about all manner of attack vectors.”

    “enemas”? (still in my smart-ass mood)

    ” (I am a simple person)” Me too, Michael. Totally not techie, is my real name. I have a ‘smart’ phone but all it’s good for is calling folks.

    As for anonymity, I keep a pseudonym to avoid fame, because fame and fortune delivers a lack of privacy, so I naturally avoid anything which would enrich me in the public sphere. In that sense, I am a wildly successful chap

  • Michael Stephenson

    I totally do not understand why I am being met by such resistance here.
    Am I under suspicion?

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    Almost everyone is Michael. Trust issues are Legion in the World we live in. Don’t be discouraged.

    You are a reasonable person, from what I’ve seen. You have to have a thick skin on the innertubes.

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    How do you think Komodo arrived at his nick? Thick skin, and a flesh-eating bacteria bite. That’ll do it.

  • Michael Stephenson

    I do have a thick skin, but since what I have posted today is just factually true and good advice I don’t see how your reaction is appropriate.

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    I didn’t react to your posts, save these last ones 🙂

    See what I mean? Take it with a grain of salt. Pick your battles. I don’t know if you were on the last thread but I took a lot of shit for advocating non-violent protest. Meh.

  • Michael Stephenson

    It’s surprising how much shit a guy gets for advocating non violent protest.
    You shouldn’t doubt me other than the fact teenage girls have probably the most predictable passwords the world over.

  • glenn

    Ben Franklin: You don’t really think, for a moment, that this is genuine – surely you’re not that daft? I’d taken you to be a reasonably sensible contributor. I’m always prepared to revise my opinions based on new evidence, of course!

    All the same, I’m beginning to think that this insane cultist freak Bishop Romney is going to “win” the election next month. He’s likely to hold it for two terms.

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    Glenn; Please don’t tempt me to change my avatar descriptor, again, Snark is difficult for me.

    Moroni’s golden plates are not in Romney’s possession, so the Godhead rejects him.

    (translation; it’s bunk)

  • DavidH

    Apparently, “The US embassy in Moscow has expressed concern over the detention of a Russian opposition activist in Kiev and his transfer to Moscow”.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-20081390

    Well, sure, that would be a violation of his human rights, right? And The US has never detained anybody without due process? Never transferred those detainees around the world? Never delivered them for torture? Maybe The US embassy would be happier if the Russians simply eliminated the troublesome individual with a drone strike, along with a few innocent bystanders, controlled by a joystick from Moscow.

    The hypocrisy is blinding. And yet this is reported straight up as news.

  • DavidH

    That’s why Greenwald’s Thomas Jefferson quote is such an important point. You can’t trust Obama to do this just because he’s Obama and you like him. That makes no sense. Once you accept that Obama can have that authority then any US president can. And The US can’t complain if presidents of other countries do the same. Obama has spoken extensively of the process he goes through to approve these killings: the agonizing decisions, the meticulous intelligence, as though that somehow justifies him. Yes, that’s a process but it’s so far from anything recognizable as a “due process” that it’s laughable. It would be comic if it wasn’t so deadly serious. Maybe the Chinese judge agonizes over his decision to sentence 50 people to death in an afternoon’s stadium trial, but that doesn’t mean the process isn’t fundamentally flawed.

  • glenn

    Sorry, Ben Franklin – we have yet to benefit from a personal discussion, and I’m constantly appalled by seemingly sane people who maintain base idiocies (eg, providing cover for that secret Islamic, white-hating communist Nazism of that Marxist Kenyan mer’ka despising, Satanic abortion enthusiast in our by-god-damn White house).

  • Ben Franklin (head honcho CIA Office for Craig Murray Operations)

    S’ok, Glenn…

    It’s hard to distinguish one player from another without a program.

  • Mary

    We are used to hearing about killings of nuclear physicists, weapons inpsectors and the like but this is the first of an oil executive that I can remember. Any connection to the recent BP deal with Putin and Roffnest and the TNK-BP
    consortium’s plans for drilling in the Arctic Ocean. BP are now out of the latter.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/26/british-oil-executive-shot-brussels?INTCMP=SRCH

    ‘Under the proposed deal, BP would end up with $12.3 billion of cash and a nearly 20% stake in Rosneft, while the four tycoons would receive about $28 billion for their 50% stake in TNK-BP.

    .

    Mr. Putin spoke at his official residence during an annual dinner with academics and journalists.
    .
    He said a key factor in the decision to allow the deal to go ahead was the shareholder conflict. “Sometimes they were fighting each other with bare hands,” Mr. Putin said.

    He said he had warned the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair when they signed the joint-venture deal in 2003 that a 50-50 split wouldn’t work because no one would be in overall control. “It went from one conflict to another,” he said.

    In the end, both BP and the oligarchs wanted to sell their stakes, he said. “BP asked us for help repeatedly,” Mr. Putin said. “We tried not to intervene in corporate disputes, but when BP came to me and told me they would like to cooperate with Rosneft, we couldn’t refuse them.” ‘

    {http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203937004578078600267685438.html?mod=googlenews_wsj}

    I had not realised that Blair’s bloody hands were on that deal too.

  • N_

    @Felix @Herbie

    Carrying over from the previous thread…

    Yes, Edward Bernays’s Propaganda. A key text. Everyone should read it.

    One thing that Bernays opened my eyes to was the control of ‘professional’ opinion.

    Medics, local council officials, plumbers, politicians, police officers, schoolteachers, scientists, academics, army officers, carpet salesmen, what have you – they all mainly think what they’re told, and it comes to them through ‘specialised’ channels, through trade journals and other trade literature, conferences, etc. Dressing it up with a bit of lingo works best. Those who bring their opinions to them also have their own opinions controlled at a higher level. At the centre it’s all controlled by big business – and, if you want to make a distinction, also by state propaganda centres, although they too are actually working for big business. And a lot of it works using stock phrases. Whoever understands the facts in this paragraph, understands a lot.

    On the scale of an individual’s ‘development’ during their lifetime, anyone who doesn’t get the role of the school system in zombification, does’t get much. All serious anti-exploitation pro-humanity radicals should be home educators. There are no two ways about this.

    Understanding ‘opinion’ also gives a great handle on say 911, and – a very clear case – global warming, or as it’s now been repackaged, climate change. Spot the stock phrases.

    ‘Science’ has been branded with ‘truth’. A lot of this stuff works with phony associations that people ‘invest’ in. Think conditioned responses. But…for goodness sake…we live in a society…and one whose historical development is characterised as above. It’s a backward society and one full of lies. Anyone who thinks the method of truth was discovered in the 16th century and now expresses itself as the scientific method should, er, think some more about how stuff actually gets done in society and who influences whom and why. Of course the idea that a properly human and properly social society (socialism), is possible, is pretty much a necessity if someone is going to make headway in understanding stuff.

    People only need think of how scientific opinion is controlled, how research priorities are determined, how promotion works, etc. It is a shame that a lot of people who would otherwise have some sense tend to keel over when faced with ‘medical’ or ‘scientific’ opinion-formers telling them what’s what. On climate change, just keep in mind, that there used to be ice fairs on the Thames, and that the climate warmed up so much in the century before industrialisation that they came to an end. If anyone asks, tell them N_ on craigmurray.org.uk told you! 🙂

    Two more points.

    First, it is a big mistake to believe that the Nazis controlled everything through force. I am not even sure that in most people’s lives there was quantitatively more force applied in Nazi Germany than in Britain in the same epoch. If there was, then it was only a bit more, and not sufficient to make the social conditions qualitatively very different in this respect. (The use of a concentration camp economy, however, was.) Key fact: Hitler kept a copy of Bernays’s text on his desk.

    Last point, on the control of opinion, aka zombification. Let’s call it what it is: sick. Psychological illness. Wilhelm Reich went some way to putting his finger on it (it’s a ‘plague’ all right), but not far enough – he got distracted by sex! Anyway my last point is…compensation, the desire to hide slavishness of the mind. Cf, ‘I’m not lying to you’, almost always only said by people who are. What I’m referring to is the amazing tendency of many people to come out with all sorts of reasons for why they think something when in fact a) they’re not used to that sort of cogitation, and b) they’re just trying to justify an opinion that has been put into their heads and they’re simply regurgitating. They don’t want to admit they’re so weak, so they come across as strong and thinky. This applies to people who come out with every last bit of detailed garbage to defend the official story regarding 911 or climate change or Princess Diana… And at a much more mundane level in daily life, I remember a hotel desk attendant who refused to give me an extra chair. The real reason was of course that she didn’t know whether she was allowed, and was afraid her boss would tell her off, combined with the sort of petty-bourgeois attitude that customers exploit the businesses they buy stuff from, which so many customer-facing staff are inculcated with nowadays. Anyway she came up with about 5 reasons, quick as a flash. This is what I call the creativity of non-thought, or the creativity of gullibility Watch out for it – it’s everywhere. It’s not real creativity, and arguably not even real thought.

  • Komodo

    It was of its time, Mary. Almost anything was funny after WW2. And it was a damn sight funnier than Educating Archie. Ventriloquist. On radio. Yeah.

1 … 4 5 6 7 8

Comments are closed.