Congress has now authorized President Obama, at the discretion of his Administration, to prohibit release of photographs taken between 2002 and 2009 showing American soldiers, contractors, and agency personnel violently abusing foreign detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. This effectively ends a lawsuit before the U.S. Supreme Court in which the American Civil Liberties Union had sought the release of 21 such photos under the Freedom of Information Act. Lower courts, including the influential 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, had ruled against the government's efforts to hide the pictures, but with new authority granted by Congress, which came in a budget bill to fund the Homeland Security Department, Defense Secretary Robert Gates moved quickly to block judicial review of the ACLU case.

Gates went further to block an additional 23 pictures that are rumored to show more abuses contrary to American law and international treaties to which the United States is a signatory.

Among the acts clearly evident in the photos is at least one of a prisoner apparently being sodomized by an American soldier using a broom handle. Other rape or simulated rape photos — along with various alternate demonstrations of brutality, degradation, and violence against prisoners, including mock executions — are said to be in the now-sequestered images.

In signing the bill to keep the photographs of what some allege are American war crimes from being released, President Obama defended the Administration's successful thwarting of the Freedom of Information Act by saying that allowing the pictures to be seen by the public would "further inflame anti-American opinion" and "put our troops in greater danger."

Obama's stance on the evidence of war crimes committed by Americans involved in foreign conflicts flies directly in the face of his declarations and directives on his first full day in office, when he said, "My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government."

More Blackouts to Come?
Rumors cannot be confirmed, but insiders say that Mr. Obama is seriously considering asking Congress to give him the authority to classify a whole series of photos showing other abuses committed by Americans.

High on the agenda would be any photographs showing extra-judicial lynchings of African-Americans by Whites. Although historians and civil rights advocates argue that the photographs are invaluable evidence of past racism in American, President Obama is leaning toward the argument that the horrific photos "further inflame anti-White opinion" in African-American communities and "put White people in greater danger of being called 'cracker' when walking through less-cultured neighborhoods."

Also on the agenda would be photographs from the Holocaust in Europe showing dead, dying, and abused Jews. Again, while historians and many others argue that the photographs are part of a crucial, on-going lesson in the need to control the unspeakably monstrous impulses of societies gone awry, President Obama is receptive to the argument that Holocaust photos "further inflame anti-fascist opinion" and "put hate-mongers like Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and certain Ron Paul fans in greater danger of being called freak-show crackpots they actually are."

Decisions on these extensions of the Obama Obstruction of Justice Doctrine have not been finalized, but leading Right-wing legal minds are excited, nonetheless. What liberals thought was going to be a progressive President is transforming before their eyes into a unitary executive with high aspirations to alter the very reality of what citizens see of America when it is doing the noble work of the Empire that will not abide a rule of law that includes accountability for the Empire, itself, and its violent, criminally culpable, failed leaders.

New pictures of the abuse of detainees in the Middle East are starting to trickle out, as offered in a link from Peter of Lone Tree's latest Big Brass Blog post. As noted in a comment there by contributing writer Debra, these photographs seem relatively mild, principally because they appear to show nothing more than Arab men naked.

Despite what might at first glance seem like nothing more than soft-core pornography, those pictures carry large subtext that spans Islam, American culture, and the chasm that exists between ourselves and those we harm.

Throughout history and across cultures, forced nudity has been a common and widely practiced form of subjugation against both men and women. As I commented on another blog some time back, it is still used to this day as a means of establishing control over those forced to display their genitals.

It is practiced (or, at the very least, it used to be) in the military during basic training; it is used by law enforcement personnel, especially in the penal system; and it is used widely, routinely, and ritualistically in hospitals and other medical settings. Its purpose, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, is subjugation: the person forced to be naked is reduced, made vulnerable, and psychologically (and physically) put at disadvantage.

A considerable percentage of pornography involves nudity of females with the purpose of sexually arousing men by the humiliation the women are supposed to be enduring. Female pornographic actresses often feign embarrassment (as well as ludicrously contorted, surprised, and pained looks on their faces) specifically to enhance the appearance of degradation through which they are being put. To many men, this is erotic. In a patriarchal society, women are supposed to learn to associate their own involuntary nudity with eroticism only because they are taught to define their sexuality in terms of the effectiveness with which they can arouse men.

Government authorities now allegedly, routinely — with no reserve at all — force people, both men and women, into compromises of dignity in public settings. The Transportation Safety Administration supposedly uses clothing penetrating scanners at airports, and this has become common knowledge among air travelers, at least by assumption. You are being seen nude, your genitals are on display, and your right to the privacy of your very body is removed without even the slightest concern for your sentiments, religious convictions, or possible protestations. That this is done by strangers is all the more important as a means of control of people about to board airplanes. The theory (unstated and subject to righteously indignant denials) is that this subliminally degrading experience assists in docilization, much the same way as forcing prisoners to be naked is supposed to subdue them.

The forced nudity in the pictures of detainees being abused is quite a bit worse, however. Unlike Christianity — in which most of the practitioners have become quite loose and liberal in their beliefs, taboos, and ritualistic, everyday lives (and this applies every bit as much to Evangelicals and some Fundamentalists) — a considerable percentage of Muslims adhere operationally more closely to traditional values. That is not to say there is some extraordinary uniformity in Islam. There is not; in some tribal regions of Aghanistan, for example, the use of very young boys for sex acts is well documented, but this is most decidedly a cultural tradition, not a mainstream, religiously sanctioned activity. Exceptions like that aside, in mainstream Islam, there really is a better articulation from early childhood of what is and what is not religiously acceptable. A Muslim mother would be far more likely to tell her son from early on that his penis is not something he should display nor even touch in many circumstances. This does not mean he will not, especially in his years when his body and his will are at war within, but what it does mean is that he will know when he does that it is not a good thing. In American culture, male hierarchical structures have gone so over the top that we now accept as somehow "correct" and "healthy" that penises can be touched. Most Americans would accept a male child touching his penis as somehow acceptable, if maybe a little embarrassing. The idea has become pervasive that harshly, consistently reprimanding a boy for "being a boy" will psychologically damage him.

Although we have residuals of aversion in American culture to penis display, the perception of the penis as good is pervasive. Virtually every rock musician uses an electric guitar as a blunt symbol of an erect penis being masturbated, and the brandishing of firearms in popular television shows and movies is nothing other than metaphorical penis display in its "natural" context of violence, competition for dominance, and the prospect of death (and, therefore, reproductive denial) for the loser.

We have gotten to the point where women actually believe that sucking on a man's penis is something other than her voluntary submission to a man's will so completely that she is willing to engage in what the man understands very well is an unsanitary act meant to degrade, debase, and dehumanize her. Fellatio is, in its culmination of ejaculating on her face or down her throat, meant to make her dirty enough to be called whatever the man wants to call her in his own mind and to his friends, should he so choose.

Very few people in our culture would entirely agree with what I wrote in that last paragraph, and many would take greater or lesser exception to what I wrote in prior paragraphs about American culture's sexual desensitization. I would submit that this is very much part of why we in this culture cannot understand the awfulness of how peoples of other cultures are affected by things we consider routine and even okay. We "get over it," even when it is bad for our deepest well-being. We celebrate the bad, we laugh at cruelty, we play feigned shock and titillation with sex. We even put on parade the Lolita look of the shaved vulva and the emaciated, pubescent-looking female ice skaters in tiny costumes, all while soothing our consciences with blanket bans on pictures of nude, under-aged females and stories of shocking, shocking pedophiles hunted down. But then what do we do? — We prowl the Web to see just how much of Miss California's titties she actually showed in those Victoria's Secrets photos she did when she was all of 17 years old.

Turn our heads? Heck, no. We might miss something good.

Many of the men in those detainee abuse pictures were not brought up with that cacophony of mixed messages that defines the American way. Those Arab men were told by their mothers not to look at naked people and not to touch themselves down there. They were always told to keep themselves modest, and to do as Allah bids.

For some of them, that last directive is why they are detainees: they were in battle for Allah, and we Americans were on the other side of that fight.

What we did to them in captivity has served quite well to prove to them that they were right.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Year after year during the Bush II era, the U.S. government ran massive budget deficits. Over the course of the next several years, the red ink will flow at a rate at least twice as great as the very worst of the past seven. That means, quite simply, the government does not have anywhere near enough money flowing in from tax revenue to pay for its expenditures. Any person or business accepting a check from the government, either as a rebate or as a bailout, is getting most of those funds from foreigners who are lending the money to the U.S. Treasury for disbursement to the taxpayers and bailout recipients.

Yes, our children and our children's children will be paying for this bonus and that $600-per-person check last year; but they will be paying for considerably more than two rounds of pandering handouts that will be largely ineffective against a freight train of recessionary forces that will not let up until a sufficient level of asset devaluation has been realized in its own course, at its own pace, and for our own good.

Our children and our children's children will be paying for a lot more than a wad of C-notes stuffed into our pockets in a frenzy of hasty counter-cyclical fiscal policy crafted over the past week.

As a starting point in the calculus of accounting for the debt our progeny will bear in our names, our children and our children's children will be paying for the wars our leaders prosecuted. By some estimates, when all is said and done, the war in Iraq alone will have cost $3 trillion.

Moving on to other highlights and sidelights of our generous gifts to the future, our children and our children's children will be paying for all the government-authorized infrastructure of domestic surveillance and other "security" and law enforcement pork, the rampant building of prisons, the trillions of dollars in money handed out to financial institutions, car makers, and other companies, as well as the interest on the money we have been borrowing at the rate of hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

But here's the really good news: not all of what our children and our children's children are going to pay will be in cash money. By having labored under year after year of trade deficits of staggering proportions, we have been exporting dollars to foreign central banks in exchange for cheap imports from those countries, one of which, China, has for years been deliberately and systematically pegging its currency at a ludicrously low level against the American dollar to the purpose of making its imports very cheap here and our exports very expensive there.

Those central banks that accumulated foreign reserves of greenbacks lent some of that money back to us at the federal, state, local, private business, and personal levels. (Yes, if you borrowed money for a home, a car, or even college tuition, through the labyrinthine complexities of global finance you were actually borrowing money from foreigners who had gotten that money from you every time you bought cheap imported merchandise.) What the foreigners did not lend us of those greenback foreign reserves, they used for equity investments in everything from real estate to corporate stocks.

That means the foreigners with those greenbacks have now taken both of the two so-called "claims on future cash flows": they have the "prior claim" due in debt service and retirement of principal owed to lenders, and they have the "residual claim" due to owners after debt obligations have been satisfied (as the prior claim).

That means our children and our children's children will pay in cash for our excesses of the past eight years and those we are about to commit in trying to right that awful time, but they will also pay in loss of control over their own destinies because we have consigned them to sharecropper status on the very land their ancestors toiled to the bone and died valorously to make theirs and pass on to future generations of Americans.

But it goes even beyond that awful fate: for the past nearly eight years, in our name the United States government has killed, tortured, and otherwise disrupted the lives of countless people in places as far-flung as Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons in Second World countries, and in our very own nation's cities, factories, and farms. While we, ourselves, are a quite docile people (notwithstanding our folkloric bravado to the contrary), those of other nations may not be so willing to forgive and forget our violence against them.

The bitter call to vengeance will echo across generations for peoples we have wronged, and we very likely will find that all of our talk of "hope and change" does nothing to quell the fire of rage that will burn in the hearts of men and women whose fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, aunt, uncles, and cousins we harmed so savagely when we let slip once again the remorseless dogs of our national soul at its very worst.

We, ourselves, can talk all we want about "Not in my name was this done" and "Never again," but those flaccid jingles will blow away as dust in the fire and shrapnel unleashed upon our descendants by the children and the children's children of the men we tortured in our nationalist zeal, the families we slaughtered in our pre-emptive wars, and the nations we shattered in our unbridled hubris.

We are the recidivist addicts, convulsing through our history from one bout of hegemony to the next, with precious but all-too-brief periods of sworn rectitude before our next debilitating high in manufactured casus belli and self-righteous manifestations of hypocritical morality.

Yes, our children and our children's children will pay: they will pay in cash, and they will pay in blood; and worst of all, they will pay with their own precipitous falls to the gutter from the highs of fiscal and military recklessness they learned from us, their ancestors who could not wash the blood from our hands before passing the future to the broken heirs to the throne of Empire in its nightfall.

We shall be most fortunate if the debt they will pay in our name comes due only after we are safely sequestered in the insular, eternal comfort of our graves.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

With a new year comes renewed hope for better: a better economy, better leadership, better opportunities.

Better this and better that.

Certainly, I deserve better, now don't I? Surely, what has happened to date is not my responsibility. It was not I who mismanaged the macroeconomy so magnificently that we are now plunging into what might very well be a second Great Depression! In fact, just to show how not responsible I am for this fiasco, I can wave years of literature I have written warning about the inevitability of this very mess. I can show years of lecture notes and podcasts from the economics classes I've taught wherein I veritably roared that the economic policies of the Bush Administration were going to lead to disaster.

No, this whole economic mess is not my fault at all.

Neither is the catastrophe in Iraq. It's not like I invaded that country on a pack of wholesale lies. In fact, I was right there condemning the outrage of it all. Yes, I was. I even used my Photoshop skills to create and publish really harsh visual critiques of George W. Bush and his pack of neo-conservative enablers. Not to be outdone by any other critics, I even coined the term "neoconnies" to degrade those nasty cowards who would never, themselves, go to war but who would send tens of thousands of American troops right into the teeth of crazed jihadists and assorted other malcontents, "freedom fighters," and religiously excitable folks.

No, that whole Iraq thing is most definitely not my fault.

And while I'm at it, don't blame me for Afghanistan, either. I've had my say about how we dealt with the Taliban until the Taliban didn't want to play on our terms with oil pipelines, which made the Taliban our sworn enemy that needed a good old American-style regime change on the pretext of an outrage that was committed against us.

Ah, and that brings me to the whole "Attacks of September 11, 2001, upon the United States" thing. It's not like I didn't do my part to point out all the wildly improbable coincidences surrounding that awful series of events, like how Vice President Dick Cheney was in charge of NORAD that morning, the very morning NORAD could not muster fighter jets from its huge inventory to knock out a handful of lumbering sky boats that had been hijacked. My goodness, but I stuck my neck out to be called a "conspiracy theorist," and that really hurt my academically high-and-mighty sense of myself!

Oh, I almost forgot: I'm not responsible for the torturing of people by the United States government. I think I even posted a picture of one of those Iraqis being horribly mistreated at Abu Ghraib, and I'm pretty sure I was glad when the trailer trash that did those things was thrown in prison to rot. How else was the United States going to make people feel okay about themselves, and how else was the Pentagon going to get seriously professional and secretive about enhanced interrogation? Boy, did I have some harsh things to say about all that stuff.

And let me not forget to mention that I'm on record —in writing, no less!— as being firmly opposed to all the snooping and spying our government is doing. I've even gone out on a limb and written about how awful it is that the Transportation Security Administration brutes use technology to look at naked people by the hundreds of thousands, day after day, at airports. I've condemned how our very own law enforcement community is a huge deployer of Websites and online content to attract everything from wannabe terrorists to losers trying to find unlawful pornography. I've surely stood my ground on those matters, and I've even been labeled some kind of "civil libertarian" in the process.

Furthermore, I've made it abundantly clear that I know U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald whitewashed the investigation of the outing of CIA NOC operative Valerie Plame, and I've been more than adequate in connecting that outrageously inadequate investigation to the collapse of the rule of law in this country. Talk about putting my butt on the line! I've damned judges, law enforcement personnel, and even a U.S. Attorney, and these are the kinds of thugs who could turn me into a convicted felon on false charges and media hype without even so much as breaking a sweat before lunch.

No, none of what has become of this country is my fault. I'm just a citizen of Empire, a hapless, not-responsible victim who's done more than his share to stop the madness; and no one can hold me to account.

It's not like there was anything more I could have done. I mean, come on: yeah, sure, I could have taken up arms in open rebellion; but, God! — that's a bit over-the-top, now isn't it? Give my life for the cause of liberty? Die for what I believe in?! Do things that might get me thrown in prison where I'd get gang-raped to the gleeful cheers of all those people who think that's part of just punishment of criminals?! End up being reviled forever by just about everyone because all the newspapers and TV news shows would portray me as a real live terrorist?! Good God! I'm not a terrorist, and I surely don't want everyone calling me one for the rest of eternity, for goodness sake! Get real.

I've DONE my part.

That's why I deserve a really good year. First, I want one of those tax cuts our new President is promising. I deserve it: the rich got theirs during the Bush years, so now it's my turn, by God. I don't care if the Republicans' tax cuts drove our federal deficits into mind-numbing territory. I want mine, now, and so what if the federal budget deficits are going to explode into heretofore unimaginable ranges nearing a trillion dollars a year?

I get mine, and then we'll talk about that fiscal responsibility the Bush incompetents never exhibited.

And I want federal spending, too, and I want it to go to my priorities this time. The war-makers, war-mongers, and all their pork-barrel beneficiaries got theirs during the Bush years; now, it's time I got mine. After all, no one can argue that I don't deserve it.

As far as paying for all this stuff, we'll just print more money! Hell, the Federal Reserve was doing that for the rich by rocketing the growth rate of M3 out of control, so now the Fed can do the same for M1, the kind of money I use. Hyperinflation? Who cares? Besides, the "laws of economics" are all dead, anyway: that's how the Bush people saw it, and now liberals and Leftists are openly making the same claim!

Of course, what the Fed can't print we'll just borrow from the Chinese. They're the ones who pegged their currency for years at a ridiculously low value to the dollar, which made their crap ridiculously cheap here, thereby sucking trillions of American greenbacks and millions of American jobs into their pockets, so they have all that U.S. money to lend back to us so we can keep living way beyond our means. And all we have to do in return is let them be our lender, meaning they have claims on future cash flows from America's treasure for generations to come. And when those foreigners holding all those greenbacks have lent us all the money we need, they can go on a shopping spree, buying up our land, our companies, and our financial securities (which are really great bargains, right now, by the way, for those nice foreigners).

I'm on a roll, here, so let me announce the rest of the stuff I deserve. I want health care coverage, and I want the best money can buy. I want everyone to pay for moi. It's not like I'm to blame for my illnesses. Sure, I smoke, and I want everyone who doesn't to make me all better. Sure, I've let my body go to Hell, but it's not like everyone else should get off the hook for that. I want my meds: I want chemicals hawked by massive pharmaceutical companies that make me think my life should go on and on and on because — hey! — I deserve to live because I contribute so very, very much to this world.

Here's something else I expect: I want this government of ours to bail out all the huge companies that are going under; in fact, I want the government to take equity stakes in all those companies so it can both regulate and own American business. Big failed, so let's get as big as big can get by turning the federal government into a giant holding company. Now that's gotta be too big to fail, right?

Right.


Now for the moment of clarity.

I am a citizen of Empire, and this is an empire that always had its dark side, even as it truly did, at least sometimes, make the world better for its policies and actions, especially when they were expressions of the best in all of us as decent, humane people. Those policies and actions, however, turned thoroughly and pervasively ugly during the presidency of George W. Bush.

I knew early on that this was no ordinary turn of Empire. These men and women who had become our public expression of collective will were relentless in a way I had seen only in the awfullest of circumstances in my life. Reason, rhetoric, law, logic: none of these ephemeral and obtusely frail pieces of the high civilization would have any effect whatsoever. Like the policeman who will not be talked down from the firearm he is pointing at me, like the savage dog mauling me, this Administration was immune to words, to pictures, to outrage, to chants, to thought. I knew that, and I knew it early on.

Yet, what did I do?

I wrote. I reasoned. I petitioned, I expressed outrage. I protested.

I did the very things I knew very well would not work, but I did nothing else.

I am every bit, by blood and by soil, a citizen of Empire.

And somehow, despite that, I think I deserve better than to end my days in the long, bleak night of that Empire?

Right. Sure.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

I know little that is genuine truth, but of this I am most certain: the United States government, as a matter of policy set each and every day to practice, systematically and of necessity lies. Its elected representatives, its civil servants, its judges, its contractors, its instrumentalities, agencies, commissions, operatives, and private advocates lie. They lie with numbers, and they lie with words.

Most perniciously, they lie with facts.

Their reports, their pronouncements, their justifications, their declarations, their accusations, their claims, their projections, and their promises are, prima facie, lies. The fruit of this poison tree issuing forth from the seeds of prevarication are the laws of the land: by the very nature of the seed from which is born this foodstuff that nourishes our civil society may not come a rule of law that is fit for all who live under the flag of this nation.

We have, in the words of the former neoconservative favorite Francis Fukuyama, come to the end of history: the legislation enacted by the Congresses, the affirmations by the Presidents, the interpretive and legislative rules crafted by government agencies are uniformly in their effect to the end of predating upon the weak to provide foul swill to a wanting public that is appeased by hateful violence of the state masquerading as law enforcement. No further history may be written when a civil society has become a docile mob living vicariously, even while cowering in fear, ignorant of the difference between compliance and obedience, assuming the latter is a refined and civilized extension of the former.

To believe anything that emanates from this government is to be at peril of embracing a lie, whether that lie be from a conservative or from a liberal. The individuals who comprise the sentient heart of this government are liars, and they must be such in order to be a part of this government. They cannot help themselves; they cannot even so much as see that they are lost to the lies they must sustain in order to remain a part of the official instrumentation of something far greater than they and far more corrupt than they should want themselves to be.

This, I know: only the truly evil conservatives and liberals want the nation we have come to have in this degraded century; yet, none of better nature can stop it. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama is a bad man in any materially moral sense. Although the details of their visions of this nation may differ markedly, each wants a good place for the citizenry, a safe place for the people, and a free place for the men, women, and children of this world.

Neither, however, can give us back that which we have lost; so they must lie with earnest promises, meaningful plans, serious vows, and reasoned logic about the way forward to better times. And people will believe them; people will vote for them and be excited about them, and many of those people will remain hopeful even as these men, each in his own ways, renders evidence of his intention to do other than what his acolytes think he will do.

This is the way of the foolish as they goad their putative leaders forward along the narrowing passage of perilous lies below which is the chasm of precipitous, calamitous consequences.

For example, we can stay in Iraq as an occupation force, as John McCain would have us do, or we can leave in short order, as Barack Obama would want; but these two roads converge in a wilderness, and that place is called collective damnation. If we stay, we continue the destructive imposition of military presence ruling over people who want us gone; but if we leave, we wash our hands of the horrific tragedy we—yes, we a people—created. Both John McCain and Barack Obama must lie to the American people, for each is compelled to craft a platform to hide from those who would elect them the miserable truth that we have already made monsters of ourselves, and whatever we now do is to the purpose of serving ourselves, even as we, both liberals and conservatives, find our own convenient reasons for dismissing our absolute, categorical responsibility for the wreckage we have made of a sovereign nation.

Take a long, hard look at a killed Iraqi child. Tell yourself that this is not your doing. Soothe yourself. Tell yourself you are not responsible; it's someone else's doing. It's an insurgent; it's a bad American airstrike; it's George W. Bush. It's someone else who did it, not you. Then, once you feel all better, be sure to vote for the candidate who will tell you what you want to hear: we need to leave Iraq, or we need to stay there. It's all the same: seeds from the fruit of a poison tree of lies that will, themselves, bear lies tailored to your need for self-exoneration.

This is how the valence of Hegelian historical inevitability gets assigned, and the folly of self-deception cannot long be held at bay, certainly not this time, because the same force that makes corrupt any choice we now select in our dealings in the Middle East will one day become tangibly manifest in the fire and shrapnel of embittered terrorists who will unmercifully punish us just as we unmercifully butchered their ancestors and kin.

Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama can mitigate the inevitable: lies beget consequences, and those consequences are not only the superficial catastrophes of far away places we can keep at bay by hiding in our homeland.

The United States economy cannot now be saved from tribulation because no leader could be elected on a platform of truth about that which must be done. Neither can our United States of America as a nation of free people be saved, for it is already dead: freedom has become a commercial slogan in the unrelenting program of law enforcement run amok by fearful legislators whipped forward by those whose appetite for obedience by the people has become married to the unstoppable train of technological innovations that cynically thwart the simplicity of constitutional due process.

To the extent that an engine of systematic lies is the foulest of enemies of a free people, the United States government is, then, an enemy of the American people that was once collectively free; and to the extent that collective freedom exists only when each within that aggregate is free, this government of pervasive, metastatic lies is an enemy to each and every person who is free by natural law that transcends the particulars of time, place, and circumstance.

In passing, I note that this conclusion I herewith openly publish, even as it defiantly expresses my intention to freedom, at once definitionally serves the repressive state to the end of actionable claim against me. I have no harbor in the Constitution, for it is now subservient to what the highest court of the land calls "constitutional law," which is the body of that very same court's own rulings, which are mandatory precedent upon all lower courts in the land. Even if, by some oddity of case, the courts were to defend my right to speech, the federal legislature has both actively and tacitly given its permission to the President to do as he pleases in extra-judicial pursuit of "terrorism," however the government chooses to define it. Both pretenders to the throne of Empire have endorsed the wretched disposal of constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures, yet their respective supporters refuse to see them as two faces of the same tin coin of authoritarianism ringing mightily while delivering nothing of value to the besieged Constitution and those it rightfully protects.

I am not afraid of this government, for I know it is the engine of empire dying before my mortal eyes. I need do no more than write and speak of its collapse, for it hastens its own death with each passing day, with each passing, more outlandish, more insistent lie.

I need only wait, write, and teach; and in that last modality of my death watch upon this wrongful and elderly monster whose name is Anathema, I shall prepare the young for the time that is to come that they may be not only prepared through revelation for a circumstance of awful tribulation, but knowing of why it has come, how it will proceed, and to what ends they must dedicate their learning and, indeed, their very spirits that they may continue on past the time when this government, of its own tragic destiny, has passed into sullen history, yet one more failed state of glorious ideals eviscerated by the consuming and all-destructive spiral of lies and their consequential burden of corrosive, suicidal distension.

And so I pause in the course of my own journey to the end of days to defy this government—nay, to challenge this government—to silence me. I dare this government to call me its enemy as I have, in this place for all to see, called it the enemy of my freedom.

Silence me lest I remain to my solemn task of shining a light down the darkling and now inexorable path that is the way to the cemetery of empire.

I wish only that the light I cast could illuminate for me that which lies beyond the graveyard, for I know that the better place—a bright place of learned hope and vigilance in freedom—exists, yet I know neither its form nor its time. That good place is there, but I cannot see it, so I must craft my hope of its good and great landscape within my soul, that place where lies cannot make permanent camp, that place my government long ago abandoned to the ill shadows of fleeting fortune and paltry powers that sovereigns so willingly substitute for a living spirit fed by the wellspring of a people unbridled in their freedom.

While hope is never enough, knowledge is abundance; and so, even as I sound the clarion call of the end of this history, I offer a horn of plenty to those who can steadfastly endure this government's crying shame of decadence in political oppression and economic misery in its last years and days. In caution, though, be forewarned: the wrath of generations to come will lay to waste the lives and deeds of us all for the disdain with which we dispensed with hope through action in the name of safety through surrender. Woe be our name as the truth we cannot see becomes the justice we shall suffer.

As both meek and magnificent promise, I give you this: the time of tribulation, bearing as it must the cruel twins of consequences and truths, will someday and inevitably pass; then all of us, both the living and the dead, shall once again be free.

Free we shall be until, of course, lies once again become empire and ignorant, self-serving people find life in the shadow of empire preferable to death in defiant rebellion.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.

Yet again, it is happening. The bloodhounds of the mainstream media have found a means by which responsibility for the systematic, outrageous violence of an unjustified, illegal war can be deflected. Abu Ghraib was a testing center for how mainstream media wannabe hunting dogs and their lesser, subscriber-deficient, me-too pups in the Blogosphere can make one group, essentially loathsome and faceless, the roguish out-group of American militarism, allowing those in authority all the way to the top of the chain of command endless opportunities to show their concern for—indeed, their very umbrage at—threats to Americans' sense of propriety when it comes to brutality.

The corporation of mercenaries called Blackwater now stands in line for its turn as the whipping boy. Tuesday evening, October 2, 2007, two—count 'em, two!—headline stories at CNN.com: "Mom: Blackwater should never forget my boy" and "Blackwater pilot before crash: This is fun." The New York Times, that bastion of doggéd investigative journalism that served as the Bush Administration's top propaganda tool in the run-up to the American-Iraqi War, pounds it out: "Chief of Blackwater Defends His Employees," a headline that belies the framing in the story intended to deepen readers' sentiment against mercenaries, as brave and controversial an approach to journalistic subject matter as declaring that Mom and apple pie are good.

First, mercenaries are a dislikable breed through and through. They have been in wars, on battlefields, in state-sanctioned military activities since time immemorable. They are thoroughly hated in many situations. Even the putative godfather of irascibility in realpolitik, Niccolo Machiavelli, found them wanting. That said, they can be quite effective, which is why Alexander the Great was so merciless in butchering fellow Greeks fighting for the Persian Empire: those Greek mercenaries were among the best soldiers Persia was fielding, and Alexander wanted to send a message to fellow Greeks everywhere that they might want to consider an occupation other than fighting for the enemy.

The history of mercenaries and their venality aside, Blackwater mercs are doing exactly the same things that are being done by special ops, black ops, and other actual soldiers of the United States armed forces. Special units of real, uniformed, American soldiers are prosecuting a global war of staggering brutality. President George W. Bush gave an order—at one time referred to as a “GADA” (go anywhere, do anything)—similar to, but far more extensive than, the GADA issued by President Ronald Reagan years ago: assassinations; field executions of unarmed people stopped for questioning; violent, on-the-spot interrogations of detained individuals; and other activities abominable and o-so-necessary in the passions of the age and the minds of those with no better solutions to a world in which others hate us and want to hurt us.

As explained in Robert Parry's recent article, "Bush's Global 'Dirty War'," at Consortium News, violence in contravention of international law, American law, and plain decency is happening all over the world, and it is our soldiers committing these unspeakable cruelties. Parry relates the following incident from Afghanistan, one for which two soldiers faced disciplinary action:

"Two U.S. Special Forces soldiers took part in the execution of an Afghani who was suspected of leading an insurgent group.

"Though the Afghani, identified as Nawab Buntangyar, responded to questions and offered no resistance when encountered on Oct. 13, 2006, he was shot dead by Master Sgt. Troy Anderson on orders from his superior officer, Capt. Dave Staffel.

"According to evidence at the Fort Bragg proceedings, an earlier Army investigation had cleared the two soldiers because they had been operating under 'rules of engagement' that empowered them to kill individuals who have been designated 'enemy combatants,' even if the targets were unarmed and presented no visible threat."

So now the mainstream media have the private contractor Blackwater for their whipping boy du jour, a boy, it must be stipulated, wholly worthy of being whipped mercilessly and sent to bed without any supper; but this is nothing more than the latest episode in the continuing gambit of pointing to the minor actors like those same dedicated media hounds did with the hillbilly trash at Abu Ghraib. The ruse should now be so transparently obvious: its intention is to keep the klieg lights from turning on the central, spreading, ungodly cancer that has come to be “the American way” in trying to control a world that is leaving America behind. A few heads rolled and got prosecuted for Reagan's dirty war in Central America, a war that ultimately, by some accounts, left more than 45,000 people dead. In that instance, the major players in the Reagan Administration who were actually prosecuted and convicted were ultimately granted clemency by President George H.W. Bush, and some of them, along with those like John Negroponte, who was never prosecuted, are now working for the Administration of President George W. Bush. A few heads rolled in the Abu Ghraib scandal, but those poor suckers—being nothing other than deliciously villifiable, common, poor trash—are in prison, while their superiors, all the way up to President George W. Bush, himself, proceed onward, pursuing the very same, if not even more systematic and aggressive, policies of torture, renditions, extra-judicial executions, and other mayhem.

Readers are, of course, encouraged to enjoy what will come to be the mainstream media's continuing, exciting coverage of all that is evil about Blackwater Corporation and its venal mercenaries and their terrible, terrible ways. It is good theater, and it will sell newspapers for a while. Official outrage will attend this media circus: the Democrats in Congress are already jumping on the bandwagon, declaring their disgust, anger, and outright shock at what Blackwater mercs have been up to, these being the same Democrats who just slipped the Bush Administration a quick, cool $70 billion in stop-gap funding to continue the American-Iraqi War while they finish work on a final Defense Department budget for the fiscal year. Eventually, the President, himself, will visit the podium and intone gravely about the matter. Good theater, all around; the American people will get to feel the pulsating power of moral rectitude, and the politicians will pop a feather in their cap and call it righteousness.

But only a very few will wallow in exquisite frustration, especially at the news media, groveling once again as its august and worthy legion always do to this Administration as it leans forward with wholesale, systemic, unlawful extremities of violence that have become the vast tapestry of cruel and pale substitutes for compehensive, intelligent, forward-looking foreign policy. The mainstream media grapple mightily with miserable tidbits they can use to show their diligence in reporting the "truth"; and all the while these toothless, cowering watchdogs of public interest deliberately, with calculation and prejudice, ignore the larger, far more comprehensive and ugly truth that stands before them, the great truth of our time hiding right in plain sight lit so brightly that it would veritably blind the American people, even as it enraged them to self-righteous denials. For the record, here is that larger truth:

We are Empire, and we commit evil neither as error nor incidence, but as policy reflecting our very nature.

If you disagree with that, you are probably already looking forward to the next war scandal at which you can either shrug your shoulders or shake your fist and demand yet more flesh of the low-lives who merely carry out the orders of Empire as it backs further and further into the corner of history closing in on its final chapter.


The Dark Wraith has spoken.