Morning Mail - 8.15.11 (Ignorance is Bliss)

Douglas Freeman: In all the years you've been doing this, how often can you say that we've produced truly legitimate intelligence? Once? Twice? Ten times? Give me a statistic; give me a number. Give me a pie chart, I love pie charts. Anything, anything that outweighs the fact that if you torture one person you create ten, a hundred, a thousand new enemies.
(Source: Rendition)

You’ve got a choice as an American. This is a choice that for some strange reason most Americans will never take advantage of. You have a choice not to know. You have the choice to go to sleep at night and wake up the next morning turn on the news and the worst news that you’ll probably see is a homicide or maybe a house burned down and a family lost their home. Worst case scenario, Casey Anthony is allowed to adopt a child. What you won’t hear is that at the Starbucks near your job, 30 people were killed and 70 injured in a bombing. That’s a liberty that Americans take for granted every day, they can rest assured that they are protected.

I’ve posted this here before, but I’ll post it again, as some of you are new to the blog.

Col. Jessep: Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who's gonna do it? You? You, Lt. Weinburg? I have a greater responsibility than you could possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know. That Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you are entitled to.
(Source: A Few Good Men)

In my personal opinion, most people in this country think they have some clue of what’s going on in this country and what we are doing internationally to protect our interests. We’ve been subject to so many #gotems over the years, that I’m fairly sure most Americans are convinced they have a clue and have no clue whatsoever. I might have been the only one who noticed that a helicopter went down in Afghanistan that was carrying the Navy Seals who took out Osama Bin Laden. I might have been the only one who then noticed that the terrorists who we said were responsible for this were taken out a few days later. Am I the only one who wants to see some fucking due process? I’m sorry I’m sure they are all guilty, but I would like to hear what these people have to say for themselves.

But then again, do I really want to know? Because my life is pretty peachy and fine today.

I’ve posted this here before too:

Durant: My government will never negotiate for me.
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Then perhaps you and I can negotiate, huh? Soldier to Soldier.
Durant: I am not in charge
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Course not, you have the power to kill, but not negotiate. In Somalia, Killing is Negotiation.
Abdullah 'Firimbi' Hassan: Do you think if you get General Aidid, we will simply put down our weapons and adopt American democracy? That the killing will stop? We know this. Without victory, there will be no peace. There will always be killing, see? This is how things are in our world.
(Source: Black Hawk Down)

We’ll go to work today, we’ll think we’re safe. We’ll get on public transportation and we’ll go to our jobs and we’ll imagine that somehow our lives are all working to help keep us safe. But we’re all just plugged in safely to the Matrix. I am not a conspiracy theorist, but I will tell you this much, WMATA scares the shit out of me. If someone really wanted to set it off, that’s probably where they’d start. I’ve rode trains in NYC too and the same exists there. There’s just nothing stopping a terrorist attack from happening. Terrorist, I really hate that word.

I think terrorism is a ploy. It actually doesn’t exist, it’s a term that we created to make people scared and legitimize wars that are fought over issues that we really don’t want to talk about publicly. And if it does exist we’ve got no way of dealing with it. It’s just war, and it’s a war that under the current way America does business we can’t win. This happened before in history too and we just didn’t peep it all that well. Actually when you study it, every superpower always falls because they a new form of warfare comes out and does away with the old. England was able to overthrow Spain because of a superior Navy. America was able to overthrow England because we stopped fighting wars with our chests puffed out and started wising up to using our environment to tactfully win. And Germany almost took over the world with the machine gun. Until of course America installed our current Air Force which has left us as the “superpower” that we are today. But terrorism… or what we define as terrorism today is a new beast.

Around the time that Osama was killed I said that I actually think that he was already dead, or that he never existed in the first place, or maybe they always knew where he was and just neglected to pop him. You see, we needed Osama more than we’ll ever know. We needed to see war the way that we grew up seeing war. For example, kill Hitler and stop the Nazis. What we are not capable of conceptualizing is that you can kill the presumable leader of Al-Qaeda and nothing changes. That’s why you needed to sell Americans on the fact that we were looking for this ambiguous figure called Osama. As long as we were looking for him then we were coming THIS much closer to ending the War on Terror. Well they killed him, and nothing has changed. So what’s the excuse now? And seriously, when do we see this War on Terror ending?

But then again, you have a right not to know any of this and to just plug into the Matrix.