Confessions

I'm back.

As my man Usher said:

These are my confessions
Man I'm thrown and I dont know what to do

In the past few weeks, we've seen some of the most ridiculous confessions this side of the Soviet Show Trials and the Cultural Revolution. First, our man in the scoop t-shirt, Khalid Sheikh Muhammed:
confessed that he plotted every terrorist attack since 1776, from the explosion on the USS Maine to 9/11 to the Kennedy assassination. KSM isn't the nicest guy on the block, and he could certainly use a full-body wax, but it's pretty obvious he was tortured day and night for three years in some hole down in Cuba until he was ready to sign anything they put in front of him with his fingernail-less hands.

It didn't need to be that way. They could have brought KSM into District Court in Manhattan (ironically, in the heart of the civilization he tried to destroy), afforded him all the liberties that he hates, given him the care and consideration in prison that he denied thousands of innocents, and systematically given him a public thrashing that was fully respectable and lended credibility to the Western way of life.

That's justice. That's why we're better than they are. I worked for a while on the Pinochet case, and went through thousands of affadavits detailing torture and murder in places like the Villa Grimaldi in Santiago. It's disgusting, wrenching, terrible. So one day I asked my boss (who was the last one out of the palace before Pinochet killed everybody during the 1973 coup) if he ever felt the urge to just go in there and take care of Pinochet rather than deal with the prolonged bureaucracy and politics of a trial. And he mild-manneredly explained that he wanted to give Pinochet exactly what Pinochet had denied: justice.

Because we're better than they are. (It's the same argument for being against the death penalty.)

Now we've got the Iran-UK situation. Another show trial, more propoganda. Who did the Iranians think they were kidding? How dumb do they think we are? The Brits wisely said whatever they had to to avoid going to Iranian prison for 7 years for something they didn't do. The Iranians lied their sexist faces off about pretty much everything, then magnanimously gave the prisoners freedom as an Easter present. (NOTE: Easter is the next-to-last popular holiday in Iran, edged out by Purim.) And now the world is that much closer to nuclear war.

Two confessions, two lies. And for what? To assuage the egos of tremendously high-powered arrogant idiots, Bush and Ahmadinejad, who need propoganda to sustain their illegal, morally deprived regimes. Yeah, Bush's regime is illegal. He spies on people and lies about wars and fires people who disagree with him. And he never really won in the first place. And he killed New Orleans. I could go on.

Point is, the Gestapo is back, even in the West. I sometimes wonder why my generation doesn't get truly angry about this stuff like our parents did. This is just as bad as Nixon, right? Is this any different than Vietnam? Why aren't we in the streets stopping traffic and blowing kisses and getting kids to vote? Does that stuff work any more? Hell, I can't even be bothered to blog more than once every four months.

As usual, no easy answers. Stay in the light. And buy my dad's book for a look at how the battle of good versus evil has been with this nation from the start.