Why torture doesn't work

I remember when Abu Zubaydah was captured and we were told it was the next best thing to getting Bin Laden himself and that by torturing him, the Yanks were gunna save zillions of lives.

Guess what?

Turns out, surprise surprise, that the Yanks were bullshitting.

Zubaydah was a mentally ill equivalent of an Al-Qaeda dogsbody who knew nothing about anything

And that torturing him only produced false leads that lead the Yanks to watse millions of hours and dollars chasing shadows.

Hot asterisk action

I like these threatening emails that have been sent to AIG executives. Nothing like a good old-fashioned threatening missive. The beautifully coy way in which the American papers apply asterisks somehow adds to the charm. The last one is by far the best.

Needless to say, I sympathise with the sentiments.

-- All you motherf***ers should be shot. Thanks for f***ing up our economy then taking our money.

-- Dear Sir: Ya'll should have the balls and come clean and give back the bonuses. I know you would never do this so the gov't ought to take you out back and shoot everyone of you crooked sonofb****es...I would be very careful when I went out side. This is just a warning. If I were ya'll I would be real afraid. Thanks, Bill.

-- I don't hope that bad things happen to the recipients of those bonuses. I really hope that bad things happen to the children and grandchildren of them! Whatever hurts them the most!!

-- You f***ing suck. Paying bonuses to the d*****s that made bad bets losing your company billions of dollars. I want to f***ing puke. Publish the list of those yankee scumbags so some good old southern boys can take care of them.

-- You mother-f***ing, c***s***ing, d***l****ers need to be taken out one by one and shot in the head. There's a special place in hell for you pond scum. Watch your backs because someone will come to get you, you can be sure.

Off with their heads!

Today the G20 protests begin in olde Lahndahn towne. Its the usual suspects coalition of unions, beardy left wing vicars and the concerned middle class marching through Hyde Park.

Good on them. We need everyone working to change the world in their own way.

But things will get interesting later in the week when the real protests kick off.

There is talk of storming the Stock Exchange, of occupying banks, of hanging effigies of bankers from lamposts.

This is just the start of what is required though. We need to hang some real bankers from lamposts in the Square Mile. Now.

If you are getting a bit squeamish at the thought, you would do well to read this fantastic piece from The Guardian's outgoing Africa correspondent Chris McGreal.

The crux of McGreal's recollections of his years covering Africa is when he describes watching the execution of a Hutu militia leader that had had not only personally murdered people, but even worse, had been a key figure in whipping up the bloodlust that saw one million Tutsi and liberal Hutu killed in 100 days.

Having witnessed first hand the horror of the genocide - the churches with bloody handprints on the wall, the hurriedly dug mass graves with limbs still sticking out of the dirt - McGreal notes with surprise that for all his lifelong Guardianista left liberal stance against the death penalty, watching the men responsible for the slaughter being executed themselves does not arouse any passion in him. Instead, he decides that they really do deserve to die.

We must be the same with the bankers. The Hutu Interhamwe may have killed with machetes, but the bankers did it with CDOs and plain greed.

And hundreds of thousands, if not millions, will die in the collapse they have caused. They will kill themselves - and increasingly their families and workmates, as Mark Ames at The Exile has noted - when they lose their jobs and homes. They will eat cheap shit food and die younger. Males become far more prone to acts of murderous violence. We will drink more and smoke more and do more drugs.

And that's without even contemplating the now rapidly looming reality that the only way the capitalist system can maintain control in this meltdown is with a good old large scale war.

So fuck the bankers and fuck their accomplices. Hang them from lamposts and take their shit.

Huzzah for the bobcat!

Yes! After my call of only a few days ago for more obscure animals to attack people, a bobcat has invaded an Arizona bar and laid into three folk.

Top work bobcat.

Sadly, the States being the States, local cops - the amusingly named Cottonwood Police - went and busted a few caps in its furry butt under the spurious excuse that said bobcat was infected with rabies or something.

Bonjour Madame La Guillotine

So mega thief and ruiner of tens of thousands of lives Sir Fred 'The Shred' Goodwin is having a big old sook because some people broke his windows and keyed his car.

Listen fucko, I retort, consider yourself very lucky it is only your windows that have been broken.

I have been calling for the selective public execution of various global criminals for a while now. Fred the Shred and that Cassano or whatever he's called from AIG would make an ideal opening pair.

But, you will mumble, having been brainwashed into a pathetic servility by decades of this neo-liberal gangster culture of ours, that won't ACHIEVE anything. Look at China, they execute corrupt executives and it doesn't stop corruption.

Oh yes it will achieve results. Firstly, natural justice will be served. These people are heartless criminals and need to be punished accordingly. I'm not calling for a cruel and unusual punishment. Just a burst to the back of the head from an AK. In public. After they have listed their crimes and expressed genuine remorse.

Secondly, there's a big difference between us and the Chinese. The Chinese have an inbuilt fatalism. The execs there who get caught know deep down that one day they will be and that their final destination will always be state exceution.

But the likes of Goodwin are different. They are bullies, psychopaths even and they honestly think they can get away with it. They are laughing at us as we speak. So what they say? You broke my windows? I screwed you out of billions and got away with it!

But once we dispense some traditional old style Kalashnikov justice to a few of them, their true cowardly nature will come out. We will encourage them to turn on each other and they will. We will offer some amnesty if they reveal the full misdeeds of the others and like the vile serpents they are, they will fall over themselves to condemn their old mates in order to save themselves.

And once we have executed those they informed on, we will kill the informers too.

And it will be glorious.

It's in them thar hills ...

Coming as I do from a part of the world that was literally born out of a gold rush -the storage vaults at the bottom of the Treasury building on Spring Street are something to behold - I must say I found this story about the second Californian gold rush quite heart warming.

In Victoria, they estimate that there are still tonnes of gold to be had, albeit much of it requiring deep mining, rather than the close to surface alluvial gold you can just pan out like these Californians are doing.

In fact, according to some estimates, there's so much gold left under Bendigo, that it would actually be economically viable to raze the twon and move its inhabitants, then dig the bugger up to get all the gold underneath.

Eureka!

Sickening stuff ...

As I've mentioned before, one thing I don't want to do here is get into the mindlessly boring Israeli - Palestinian conflict.

There's more than enough places on the Net where you can get yourself involved in that vicious little circular argument if you want.

But I couldn't not post this picture of this vile T-shirt available in Israel now that celebrates IDF snipers killing pregnant Palestinian women.

Every time you hear about how the Palestinians indoctrinate their kids to become murderers etc etc, think about this paragraph from the long Ha'aretz article at the link:

Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it."

Nasty

Regular readers of this blog will know that in between posting links to apocalyptic stories about the economic shitstorm and sticking the boots in Gordon Brown's Britain, I like to lighten things up by featuring heart-warming tales about people being eaten by various wild creatures.

Thus, I was intrigued to read this story today about a poor bugger in Indonesia who got mauled by two Komodo dragons after he fell out of a tree.

From the piece:

The reptiles, which can grow up to 10ft feet long and weigh as much as 150lbs (70kg ), have shark-like serrated teeth and a bite that can be deadly. Its saliva contains roughly 50 different known bacteria strains, so infection is a risk.

I reckon being attacked and partially devoured by Komodo dragons would probably be the worst thing that could happen in the realm of When Animals Attack, although as a mate pointed out, its probably not too much fun being mauled to death by any kind of wild animal.

My favourite - though obviously not for the unfortunate victim or her family - was when this poor scientist woman got mauled to death by a leopard seal while diving in Antarctica.

That's a pretty cool way to check out.

More politics later or tomorrow.

(And hopefully more obscure animals eating people)

Time to tape the clips together ...

We need to publicly execute some of those responsible for the financial crisis.

I'm normally against the death penalty but in a case like this where guilt is so obvious and the magnitude of the crime so enormous, occasionally you have to take action.

We could start with some of the senior staff at RBS and AIG. Despite us having to bail them out, these scum then pay themselves bonuses and fat pensions. If we don't take a stand, the parasitical gangsters that got us into this mess will realise that even as we stare into the precipice, we still haven't got the strength to really fight back.

If we don't act now, they will crush us forever. These people are psychopaths in the purest medical sense of the word. They only understand terror.

Anyone who doubts the need to use my old Russian friend the Kalashnikov to dispense some much needed justice - and more importantly, to draw a line in the sand - should read this and get back to me.

I'm not advocating full revolution. Just the murder of say 250 selected criminals to remind the rest that we mean fucking business and they best be falling into line.

The descent into national socialism

I have been saying for a while now that Britain is heading inexorably into a national socialist state.

The key ingredients are already in place. A well established security state. The state now owns the means of production - the financial services industry. And there is and always will be a strong latent racist/xenophobic strand to British culture, one this current government has no problem in stoking. See today's announcement about making Johnny Foreigner pay £50 more for a visa.

All we need now is the charismatic catalyst, the man or woman, who puts the ingredients into the pot and cooks up the vile soup. It will happen. He/she is out there.

But what of the United States? Will The Age Of Obama mark the beginning of the end for anything resembling democracy in the US?

Is, as this long but very insightful article argues, the Obama presidency the new Weimar Republic?

Because we all know what happened to that.

Expose the charlatans and their lies

It is a sad day when the failure of modern mainstream journalism has become so complete that a professional comedian does a better job than those who claim to practise the great craft of exposing and disseminating the truth.

But Jon Stewart's 'take down' - to use the American vernacular - of the charlatans of the financial markets, most notably their cheerleaders on CNBC like Jim Cramer, is by far and away the best effort by any media figure so far to challenge the people who bear a great deal of responsibility for the awful economic mess we are in.

I'm a bit of a dewy eyed optimist when it comes to journalism. I still retain this quaint belief that if journalists or opinion formers masquerading as journalists - the pundits - get something completely wrong, then something should happen.

They should face some punishment, or comeback. Ideally, the 'market of ideas' would mean that people would say 'Oh, they got that wrong, I'm not reading/watching them anymore'.

But what do we do when the nature of our mediascape means it is owned by a very small number of people with deeply vested interests, who keep these people in their jobs not because they are journalists, but because they are paid mouthpieces.

The examples come from across the spectrum.

As the good boys at The Exile point out, many of the pro-Iraq war writers and talking heads who lied us into that charnel house still have their jobs and many even have the temerity to think they can use the same trick as regards Iran.

Even in the provincial world of Australian Rules Football, Caroline Wilson, chief football writer at The Age who confidently told us the smart money was on North Melbourne being relocated to the Gold Coast in 2007 when no such thing ever happened swans on with seemingly no blowback.

How wrong do these people have to be before they lose their jobs?

Luckily for us - and not so luckily for them - the scale of this financial crisis means that people are no longer willing to put up with more bullshit. People are working out they've been systematically lied to and aren't willing to put up with it any more.

We aren't even 10 per cent into the giant steaming pile of crap that confronts us.

What comes out the other side will be a very different beast from what we have today.

How it works ...

And it has begun. Britain has officially started printing money in an attempt to get itself out of economic malaise.

The snooty name for this is 'quantitative easing'. Of course it is not just printing money, say the Bank Of England and Treasury spinners. Only a fool would say that. Instead, they tell us, QE is about the Bank of England creating 'new funding' with which to buy up the debt of various companies - and more worringly government - thus allowing those entities to spend money they'd earmarked for debt on other things, thus stimulating the economy.

You with me? Thought not.

You're wondering how it REALLY works. This is how it works.

I bank with an institution that has recently come under majority government control. Just the other day, they sent me a letter telling me they'd upped the limit on my cedit card three-fold.

Now, you'd think a financial institution that is fundamentally bankrupt and needs to be bailed out by government might be tightening the purse strings, not throwing cash around unbidden.

Welcome to the wonderful world of QE. Essentially, the government is lending me the taxes I'll pay them in the future now in the hope I'll spend it. Then obviously pay back that money from what I'll earn in the future, while the actual future taxes will balance out what they've lent now.

In theory it works. But what if I spend the money and then lose my job, something quite likely in a recession.

Or - what if I weren't a UK citizen and simply took this money and bailed home? Then they'd lose the money twice - once now and then in the future when I'm not around to pay the tax they are banking (literally) on.

Yet Gordon Brown has the temerity to say Britain is best placed to weather the recession.

In fact, if he says it one more time, I will take their money and piss off back to Oz, a country that has yet to have even one quarter of 'negative growth'.

The reality of survivalism

One of my favourite sub-strata of the Internet is the very well established right-wing Yank fascination with with what would happen if ... when ... society collapses and a man is forced to defend his God-fearing family from the 'two legged wolves', usually folk of shall we say, another colour.

The fantasy is deeply entwined with the hilariously crap white nationalist movement and almost always contains strong racist and anti-Jewish ... the rule of ZOG etc ... tropes.

Although this notion reached its apogee in the late 90s with the Clinton era crackdown on the militia, it has survived and in these troubled economic times (copyright everyone), it is making quite the comeback. Could the much ballyhooed apocalypse finally be upon us?

It is the favourite fantasy of middle aged white American men who substitute guns for their shrivelled, inadequate genitalia and political emasculation by the late capitalist system.

It is of course, utter bullshit. Red Dawn was not a documentary.

Anyway, here, one of the best writers on the Net - The War Nerd - gives a scathing deconstruction of this quasi-fascist fantasy survivalist crap.

Courage under fire

The definitive line taken by the British media - the tabs anyway - following the Real IRA attack on the Antrim army barracks and the murder of the PSNI officer in Craigavon is that the men who carried this out are cowards.

They are not.

Let me repeat here that I do not support what they did. No-one wants to see that part of the world return to a savage cycle of violence.

But the guerillas who launched those attacks must be seen for what they are: a small isolated unit of guerillas fighting a battle that has minimal public support. But it does have some public support, otherwise they wouldn't exist.

To misquote Mao, the water these dissidents swim in cannot be very deep, but it is there.

And to launch a full frontal attack on a British Army base, or even on another trained and armed officer like the PSNI man, takes courage. It also takes planning and dedication. Similar to 9/11. Again, a reprehensible thing, but to call someone willing to hijack a plane with glorified stationery and then fly said craft into the World Trade Centre a coward is simply moronic. Its an unbelievably courageous act carried out to further a vile goal and with horrendous results.

Talk to British military types who went up against the IRA and they'll tell you that they were - and still are as this latest event showd - tough, gutsy, smart and ruthless.

Exactly the qualities we like to associate with OUR soldiers.

And when a bunch of goddam beardy Muslims turned up yesterday to point out that from THEIR point of view, the actions of the 'Coalition', like say bombing a village from a fighter jet at 20,000 feet on the 'suspicion' that the 'enemy' may be there, were cowardly, all hell broke loss.

Ah well. Luckily most of us know that war is a racket fought by poor people to further enrich already rich people and only scoundrels are lured by the patriotic lies issued by every side, be they the lies of The Cause, or Our Boys, or Jihad.

Or do we?

The boys are back in town

Two soldiers dead on the weekend and now a policeman killed near Craigavon as well. The Real IRA has taken responsibility for the attack on the barracks - and that attack, whatever your views on Northern Ireland, must be seen as the work of a well-drilled guerilla unit, a worrying sign for those of us who want peace- and the Continuity IRA is now claiming the Craigavon shooting.

Nobody should be surprised about these latest outbreaks. It hasn't been in anyone's interest to report it but there have been a series of bomb, gun and rocket attacks against Army and PSNI forces in Northern Ireland in the last few months.

The reality is that there's provinces of Afghanistan and Iraq that are safer for British forces than Northern Ireland right now.

There is also another element coming into play. The drastic cooling, some would say freezing, of the Irish economy combined with similar happening in the British economy means the supply of money going to Northern Ireland to fund expansion of services in rundown areas and employment schemes for ex prisoners and so on, is drying up.

A clear, if unspoken, element of the peace process was the notion that the "revolution will be drowned in baby milk" and while the funds were flowing, that went well.

But now, things are different. If, as I suspect, the Republic pulls out of the recession quicker than Britain, then there will be a clear economic argument for Irish unity as well.

Also, on all the news reports, we hear that the dissidents have "no community support". They might not enjoy widespread acclaim but they obviously have enough people in the community willing to aid them that they can store relatively large amounts of sophisticated weaponry and plan attacks like the raid on the Army barracks knowing they have a network of safehouses and the like in which to retreat.

If I was a betting man, I'd lay money on the two guys who pulled the trigger at the barracks attack having got a Ryanair flight out of somewhere like Shannon or Knock early yesterday or Sunday morning with the full intention of settling down in somewhere like Croatia where the dissidents have close contacts for the summer.

Brits have sook about Obama 'snub'

Some Brits are having a sook because Obama didn't give Brown the full red carpet treatment.

Why in hell would he? Brown is a discredited joke who presided over much of the disastrous economic policy Obama is now trying to unpick.

Obama knows that the US economy was as much broken on the deregulated London financial markets Brown used to boast about as it was in any Michigan sub-prime mortgage default.

And now Brown swans over excpecting the lecture the bloke on how to fix it?

If only Brown read this fabulous and prescient blog, he would have known not to expect too warm a welcome in Washington.

British soldiers torturing Obama's Grandad probably didn't help matters much either.