None dare call it tyranny

If you want to know what tyranny is like, look around.

The national government — specifically the executive branch — can do pretty much what it wants. It could bomb Iran tomorrow without a declaration of war from Congress. It can — and does — conduct secret wars and covert operations against countries that have done nothing to us. Of course, they are secret only to the ignorant taxpayers who must finance them and perhaps suffer when the provoked retaliation occurs. It can have men behind PlayStation consoles in Nevada fire Hellfire missiles from aerial drones on people in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere.

This tyrannical government can send any foreigner picked up anywhere in the world to third countries known for torturing prisoners. It can hold people accused of nothing indefinitely in prisons in Cuba and Afghanistan and torture them into making false confessions. It can conduct a war crimes trial in a military kangaroo court for a man, Omar Khadr, held captive for eight years after he was picked up at the age of 15 during a U.S. assault on villagers near Kabul. His torture-induced “confessions” will be admissible. All this is in violation of commitments under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict not to treat children in war as though they were adults.

It can assassinate even American citizens abroad without a scent of due process.

It is a government that can write its own warrants without judicial review — and call them national security letters — in order to conduct fishing expeditions in anyone’s electronic records. But that isn’t enough power for the present Progressive administration, which wants the freedom to examine our browser histories and email correspondents’ names. The Bill of Rights, like the Geneva Convention, has become “quaint” and obsolete.

Read the rest here.
H/T The Young Fogey

The first half or so of the linked post is pretty good and I generally agree with its complaints. The second part seems divorced from reality to me. Reasonable people can disagree with the war in Iraq. I have come around 180 degrees on that subject myself. It was a war of choice against a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Afghanistan is a different matter altogether. Sometimes I think people need to be reminded that THEY CAME HERE AND ATTACKED US ON OUR SOIL. Sorry but no one gets a free pass on that.

Afghanistan in 2001 had become the Walt Disney World of terrorism. It was being used, with the full and active support of the de-facto government, as the main base for the world's most lethal terrorist organization. An organization dedicated to the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate and the establishment of Sharia worldwide. If you allow your country to be used as the launch pad for an attack on another country and provide material support for those carrying out the attack, that is customarily regarded as a casus belli.

Yes civilians have been killed during the war. And that is deeply regrettable. But there is an important distinction between us and those we are fighting there. We make every effort, often at the expense of our own military interests and even to the point of endangering our people, to avoid civilian casualties. The other side uses civilians as human shields and deliberately targets them as a matter of policy.

I think the author needs to climb down from his high horse and take a good stiff drink of reality.

As for Iran I have no clue where he is getting his information from. He claims our own intelligence says three is no nuclear weapons program. If so I missed that. Every report I have seen flatly states the exact opposite. Even Russia is now reluctantly turning on their long time business partner.

Still if Iran does go over the top and Israel decides it's not inclined to wait and see how nutty Iran's dictator is, that's their business. As for us, I see almost no chance we will become involved in another war. I have little use for Obama, but he is I think coming to terms with an unpleasant reality. We are broke and wars cost money. He won't do anything that might endanger his precious domestic agenda.

What's more is I suspect that his military people have told him the same thing they told George Bush. Iran is not a military midgit. And they posess the ability to inflict a cripling blow without ever using nukes. They control the land on the eastern side of the Straits of Hormuz. That means that they can very easily shut down the flow of about half of the world's oil supply and short of a full scale invasion there is damned little we could do about it.

The simple truth is that we have no real military option for dealing with Iran. And unfortunately, they know it.