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Iranian Parliament and tblade agree: US Military are the Terrorists

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This is why views such as tblade’s are so dangerous.  While free speech is important, tempering that speech so as not to give aid and comfort to the enemy is equally as important.  The Iranian government use things such as tblade’s blog post regarding our military as propoganda.  This ultimately has the effect of possibly puting the lives of our service members in jeapardy.

Iranian lawmakers on Saturday labelled the US army and CIA as terrorist groups. The parliament said in a statement, cited by IRNA, that the US army has a record of terrorist operations mentioning bombardment of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs and CIA has been involved in establishment of terror networks and training terrorists worldwide.

That is why JK was so vehement in denouncing tblade’s comments. 

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  2. An idiot might think that Iran is responding to the American decision to label part of their armed forces as terrorists (thereby finishing the job of erasing the word “terrorist” of any meaning). 

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    But no, clearly Ayatollah Khamenei’s flunkies have been perusing our blog for quite some time, and realized that the time was right to make a symbolic declaration that’s unserious and unheard outside of paranoid conservatives.  We should agree that free speech is like a $5-million necklace — something so valuable it should never be used in public.

      • They’re sleeper cells already inside the United States, David.  They’re part of al-Qaeda, which was just pretending to hate Iran.  Hence why we can’t afford to use free speech unless in the safety of your own bedrooms and the telescreen is turned off.

        • I forgot to mention that I cross posted my diary in my asswipes anonymous Facebook group. Coincidentally, President Amenidijad is my the same group (don’t tell – it’s supposed to be anonymous.)

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          By the way, I wonder how the terrorists feel about devoting an entire diary entry to an ad hominem attack on a single BMG user? Clearly, eabo and JK calling me an ass wipe wasn’t enough to undercut my previous post and follow up comment. But this totally steals my thunder. I bet this diary really burns the terrorists butts, you know, them hating freedom of speech and all and undercutting their propaganda.

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          ~tblade a/k/a terrorista
          Allahu Akbar, bitches!

            • From 1980-1988 Iran and Iraq (to whom we provided financial and material support) were at war. Back in 2001, who were the biggest threats to Iran’s stability? The Taliban to the east and Saddam and Iraq in the west. Now they are gone and this increases Iran’s strength in the region. Yet it’s me, a random blogger, who gives “aid and comfort” to the supposed enemy.

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              If I would have known I could have such a profound effect on terrorism, I would have stopped the 9/11 plot. The blood of innocents are surely on my hands.

              • I bet it was your ancestor who was visiting Toronto in 1813, just walking down the street yelling “Washington…now there’s a city that would just go up in flames.  Utterly prepared for an attack, they are down there.  I’m telling you, with a barely competent military, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could burn the bloody White House down itself!  Thank goodness noone’s going to do that, because we’d never see it coming.”

                • …the old-time Butler family were real ass wipes like that. I bet my ancestors stopped by eabo’s ancestors’ house on the way down and took a dump on their American flag for good measure.

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                  Allah bless America.

  3. This is why conservatives are not going to get anywhere. It’s as if “aid and comfort to the enemy” were simply a result of reading material. “Ah! Tblade agrees with us! We’re so comforted now! We feel so aided!” A huge amount of aid and comfort was given to Iran by a Republican President who spent the last four years installing a pro-Iranian government in Iraq. Whatever chuckles and smiles Iranian readers of BMG may derive, they pale in comparison to removing someone who, you know, invaded Iran.

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    Conservatives have spent the last four years running from the reality of Iraq. Tblade can collect example after example of cases where the U.S. occupation needlessly kills Iraqis. Eabo and friends don’t care whether that’s good or bad policy. They don’t care whether it’s systemic or isolated. They don’t care about what it does for the Middle East.

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    They only care about how it sounds.

    • That they have time to call me an asswipe and post ad hominem attack diaries but they can’t engage the substance.  I’m called a terrorist sympathizer because I don’t buy the dogma of “military is always right and can do no wrong”. Why should I buy the “military is always right” party line? This is a central theme in the previously mentioned work by Milgram, “Obedience to Authority”.

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      Eabo doesn’t seem to like engaging with David’s fact’s either. How many times have we seen eabo cut-and-run from a discussion with David (and others) because David presents the facts and asks eabo a challenging question?

  4. Let me repeat Tblade’s last substantive comment on the thread to which Eabo is referring. It bears repetition IMHO.

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    …because as I [Tblade] said in my post, all these instances of Americans killing Iraqis will be dismissed using the “few bad apples defense”.

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    First: People should read about Stanley Milgram’s Obedience to Authority and Adolf Eichmann and second they should watch HBOs The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib to see how military leaders can give unofficial orders to commit unauthorized acts and atrocities (a simple example might be the “Code Red” from A Few Good Men)

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    Second: I offer this selection from the book with a familliar title, Shock and Awe.  This book was commissioned by the US Department of Defense and written by written by Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade at the National Defense University:

    There is also the option of applying massive destruction against purely civilian or “counter-value” targets such as the firebombing of Tokyo in World War II when unconditionality marks the terms of surrender. It is the cumulative impact of destruction on the endurance and capacity of the adversary that ultimately affects the will to resist that is the central foundation of this example. The shortcoming with this example is clear, and rests in the question of political feasibility and acceptability, and what circumstances would be necessary to dictate and permit use of massive bombardment. Outright invasion and aggression such as Iraq’s attack against Kuwait could clearly qualify as reasons to justify using this level of Shock and Awe.

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    Third I spent just 10 minutes on Google and found these articles:

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    Salon article describing a comment from The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib:

    Davis, in particular, offers a dire tale of how difficult it was to behave ethically in Iraq. He expresses shock that, when he asked for the Rules of Engagement on the first day of the invasion, no one could tell him. When another soldier instructed him simply to shoot at “the enemy,” Davis told the guy that he’d never left the U.S. before, so everyone looked like the enemy to him.

    MSNBC:

    Accused troops: We were under orders to kill: “The ROE (rule of engagement) was to kill all military age males on Objective Murray,” Staff Sgt. Raymond L. Girouard told investigators, referring to the target by its code name.

    The Guardian:

    Haditha marine ‘watched superior kill surrendering civilians’: A US marine told a court yesterday that he had “pissed” on the head of one of 24 dead Iraqi civilians killed by his unit and watched a superior officer kill five Iraqis as they tried to surrender.

    The Telegraph:

    They appear to have taken revenge on the occupants of a white taxi which arrived on the scene shortly afterwards. The report describes how, after telling them to get out of the vehicle, the Marines’ squad leader, Staff Sgt Frank D Wuterich, opened fire on the Iraqis with his M16 rifle from a distance of no more than 10ft, despite the fact that some of them had their hands up. The men, standing in a line, dropped to the ground as an Iraqi soldier attached to the marines unit looked on in horror.

    The New York Times:

    On the other hand, some scholars said the spate of [murder case] dismissals has left them wondering what to think of the young enlisted marines who, illegally or not, clearly killed unarmed people in a combat zone.

    “It certainly erodes that sense that what they did was wrong,” Elizabeth L. Hillman, a legal historian who teaches military law at Rutgers University School of Law at Camden, said of the outcomes so far. “When the story broke, it seemed like we understood what happened; there didn’t seem to be much doubt. But we didn’t know.

    The Sacramento Bee:

    ‘I killed innocent people for our government’…Oh, yeah. Later on I found out that was a typical day. I talked with my commanding officer after the incident. He came up to me and says: “Are you OK?” I said: “No, today is not a good day. We killed a bunch of civilians.” He goes: “No, today was a good day.” And when he said that, I said “Oh, my goodness, what the hell am I into?”

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    Apparently, it is illegal for a car to swerve in Iraq:

    Like Jimmy Massey, Darrell Anderson is fighting the dark ghosts of atrocity. A 22-year-old GI from Lexington, Kentucky, who won a purple heart after he was wounded, Anderson was stationed at a checkpoint near a police station in Baghdad, when a speeding car swerved in his direction. Darrell said he received orders to shoot. There was a family — two children, a man and his wife — in the car. Darrell’s buddies screamed: “Shoot! Why don’t you shoot? Why don’t you shoot?”…”My superior came over and said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Look, there’s children in the back. It’s a family. I did the right thing. It’s wrong to fire in this situation.’ My superior told me: ‘No, you did the wrong thing. You will fire, next time, or you will be punished. That’s our orders.'”

    Editor & Publisher:

    U.S. military investigators believe the killing of an Iraqi civilian on April 26 was planned by a small group of Marines who shot the man and then planted a shovel and an AK-47 rifle at the scene, a senior Pentagon official said Tuesday.

    The Washington Post:

    Investigators believe American soldiers spent nearly a week plotting an attack in which they raped an Iraqi woman, then killed her and her family in an insurgent-ridden area south of Baghdad, a U.S. military official said Saturday.

    The Guardian:

    American air strikes have killed more than 70 people in western Iraq, including dozens of women and children, witnesses said yesterday.

    Staff at a hospital in Ramadi, a provincial capital west of Baghdad, said they treated numerous civilians injured in Sunday’s bombing of two nearby villages. Television pictures showed women and children among bandaged patients. The US military confirmed that warplanes and helicopters had fired missiles and killed more than 70 people but said the dead were insurgents engaged in operations.

    Australian Broadcasting:

    US troops who opened fire after being targeted by a roadside bomb have killed two Iraqi policemen and two civilians south of Baghdad on Saturday, an Interior Ministry spokesman said on Sunday…The US military said on Sunday it was investigating a separate incident in which one of its warplanes bombed the wrong house in northern Iraq, killing civilians.

    Confessions of a Torturer:

    Lagouranis says he once interrogated four brothers who’d been arrested during a general search because soldiers had found a pole in their house that they’d argued could be used for sighting targets for mortars. The brothers, interrogated separately by Lagouranis, contended they used it to measure the depth of water in a canal, and there was nothing incriminating in the house. Though he was convinced they were telling the truth, his superiors would not release the men. A man arrested because he had a cell phone and a shovel met a similar fate. The army contended the shovel could be used to plant an IED and the cell phone could be used to help set it off, and though Lagouranis bought his explanation, nothing he said shook that belief. The army wanted to be able to boast about the number of terrorists apprehended, and the four brothers with the striped stick, the two who ran the aid station at the potato factory, and the man with the shovel were close enough.

    Blackwater, again from The Telegraph:

    Blackwater security guards kill Iraqi civilians: US officials are investigating a shootout in Baghdad involving the US security firm Blackwater in which eight people were killed and at least 13 wounded, the state department has said.

    Although not exhaustive or comprehensive, these articles are representative of the evidence I’ve used to form the view that there the US military culture in Iraq encourages the murder of civilians. Given this culture, the direct evidence from Shock and Awe, the fact that it has been America’s policy to murder civilians in previous wars (200,000 in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan; Dresden, Germany; Vietnam), and given that so many military and civilian higher ups have made exhaustive attempts to cover up and excuse these types of behaviors from war to war, thus giving tacit if no explicit permission to kill civilians, it is impossible for a rational person not to be skeptical of any civilian casualty in Iraq. At minimum, there is no reason to give the military the benefit of the doubt. To me the evidence is clear: the US military condones the killing of civilians making it ipso facto policy.

    End of quotation of Tblade.

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      …Watch The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (full movie linked [above]).

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      ter*ror*ism: the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims.

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      Even if I did call our military terrorists, I posted more then enough evidence to show that from an Iraqi’s perspective, US soldiers could be seen as people who commit acts of terrorism. Also, acts of terrorism were a big part of the US plan in WWII and Vietnam – what reason should anyone not be skeptical of any civilian death given the US’s history and the below evidence?
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      end quotation

      • Money quote from the Government’s own book:

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        The shortcoming with this example is clear, and rests in the question of political feasibility and acceptability, and what circumstances would be necessary to dictate and permit use of massive bombardment.

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        Notice the clear shortcomings of attacking civilian installations. The shortcomings are not the loss of human life, not the concern for human rights and dignity. The murder of civilians, according to this document, doesn’t boil down to right and wrong, it is simply a question of “political feasibility”.

  5. In November of 2001, Iranian President Khatami had this to say:

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    In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful, first of all, I would like to again express my deepest condolences to the nation of America, and express my sorrow for the tragic event of September 11. What occurred was a disaster….The September 11 attack was the ugliest form of terrorism ever seen.

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    By echoing this sentiment, Eabo Clipper is validating the enemy’s position, thus giving them aid and comfort. In fact, I fully expect the Iranian propagandists to cut and paste eabo’s comments about 9/11 and plaster them all over Tehran to show how everyday Americans agree with the Iranian government. I’m all for freedom of speech, but eabo is clearly jeopardizing American lives and the freedoms that Iranians hate so much.

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    I call on Eabo to retract his appalling statements and repudiate the vitriol spewed by Iran. If Iran hates everything the US stands for, true Americans will hate everything Iran stands for.

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