(no subject)

[andrew_jorgensen]

At the end of her post on the new horror story from the war on terror, Unfogged's new blogger Alameida highlights the following assessment of guilt:

"He was probably associated with people who were associated with al Qaeda," one U.S. government official said.

Guilt by association -- that works, right?

I'm glad to know that our national security establishment has discovered that most useful of tools, the Bacon number.

Comments

[timian.livejournal.com]

I'm so sick of being horrified of what my country's doing. Fuck.

However, your comment at the blog was brilliant. Kudos.

Second attempt with working link

[londonkds.livejournal.com]

The "associated with people who were associated with" thing is a very obnoxious tendency among some of the hard-core Islamophobes in the press and right-Wing blogosphere. Whenever anybody attempts to dialogue with relatively sane and moderate Islamist political elements, there is immediately a flood of blgoposts arguing on tenuous associational that that person is actually an evil fanatic ideologically indistinguishable from Osama Bin Laden. (For an old but great example of the phenomenon, see Fistful of Euros' Scott Martens on a transparent attempt by Daniel Pipes to smear the French Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan as a terrorist.) It reminds me of what Steve Bell once referred to as the "We will never sit down with those who sit down with those who sit down with..." phenomenon in Northern Irish politics in the 1980s and early '90s, where tenuous second- or third-order connections between moderates and terrorists were used by both sides as an excuse to rule out dialogue.

[rebekahroxanna.livejournal.com]

At first I was yet again horrified.How can my freedom and liberty loving country do something like this. And then I remembered. We trained the people who tortured people all over Central and South America. We trained the people who assassinated Romero. We supported Somoza who disappeared people all the time. We supported Pinochet (and his coup) who disappeared people all the time. There is such a distance between what we say we believe and what we do.

[ann1962]

I wonder if it is just that we are hearing about it more now, more news sources than there were 20 years ago, the advent of blogs forcing other news agencies to act.

[arethusa2.livejournal.com]

And then we promoted the people who did the training. It was a unique experience to see Putin rub Bush's nose into the latter's actions, with Bush aparently not even seeing the irony.