Countries who commit war crimes do not actually get the right to exonerate or pardon their leaders who torture.. Thom might have meant well but the gesture is not only hollow but phyrric. The FACT is, when a country commits a war crime it is the ones they commited it against who have the right to face them and pardon them and it is the WORLD COURT in Den Hague where this is done.

Oh.. we can absolve them or pardon them or even acquit them--that does not change all that they did to persons in the Middle East and Pakistan and does not really address the issue. Crimes were indeed committed, we can no more stand as proxies for those who suffered than whites can pretend to stand for slaves or native americans who dealt with atrocities--Compare apples to apples.

We shall commit torture again and then deny it or finesse what we did--we are becoming experts at justifying and denying the evil we do...

Let the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria and others have their say--we can declare our former leaders war criminals and then let them declare their wishes for guilt or pardon in effigy since we lack both the conscience and will to punish them in reality.

You're right, Franklin. Those progressives who ran on President Obama's good points and stayed to the left did win their races. The dems who ran away from the President lost and it should be a lesson.

It is time for the Democratic Party to go fully liberal and stop being the meek, mild-mannered group who just abdicated this last election. Come out LOUD AND PROUD and run on the points President Obama has accomplished - which are many - and we should see a turn around.When you become a meek lamb and hang your head you lose and we gain nothing

Same here in Florida which is fully republican with pockets of we who are native Floridians and have not lost our minds. A great many of the Florida residents are from the north - snowbirds who have come down and now refuse to leave. They brought their rethuglican ways with them.

Plus we have our share of Kluxer decendent, rec-neckers who align with the militants who have no idea what the hell they are fighting for but know it is not the black man in the Oval office. Ignorant racism is rampant - and some of it comes from the more educated which I believe is willful ignorance

But don't give up on us because we are trying our best to fight it - but it is difficult with the like of Rick Scott as governor and his AG Pam Bondo - she of postponing an execution because of a fund raiser she had scheduled fame. Criminality and ignorance on the highest order

This has nothing to do with the topic being discussed...Just thought I would share

The artical that follows was written by Hunter S Thopmson

It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV.

Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day.

The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster.

And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners.

Comment on tragedy

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They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that.

The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.

It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper.

Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying.

We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them.

This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force.

Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy.

OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing.

The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators.

The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.

_____________________________________

Sadly, I doubt anyone was more right at the time about what was to come.

Of course we're no longer a democratic-republic. As if common sense and your own two eyes didn't tell you, two academic studies have confirmed Ben Franklin's fears; we were not able to keep the government bequeth to us by our Founding Fathers. America is "officially" an oligarcy. We have a police state mentality and we're on the fast track to becoming a neo-Fascist nation.

It is my understanding that Huey Long was not a racist and proposed to lift both black and white people out of poverty equally. In fact the Klan was opposed to Huey Long because his programs supported blacks. (See http://www.hueylong.com/perspectives/politics-racism.php) After Long was assonated his Share The Wealth Society fell into the hands of Gerald L. K. Smith who, indeed, was very pro-Nazi and racist.

I have read that Long's aspirations for the Presidency helped force Franklin Roosevelt to push for Social Security and wealth distribution. It's too bad that Huey Long didn't understand that the best way to "Share The Wealth" and develop a better economy would be to adopt the principles and program of another populist/progressive Henry George.

Or the folks in the south can clearly see that Obama and the Dems are trying to shut down all industry in the US like fishing, oilfield, and coal and that's where they all work. I know it's a crazy concept but most people even in the south like to feed there families and put a roof over there head. Let's face it not much has been done for them by this adminasrtration to help them out in creating jobs.

Our instituions are infested with corrupt sociopaths. Thirty years of Oligarch's purchasing our government, laws and Democracy has resulted in one badass every man for themselves survival of the greediest. The wealthy have all they could possibly want. they are wealthy of the magnitude of Egyptian Phaeroes. There's enough to go around, as proven in post WW2 American prosperity until 1980. Are they just doing it beacause they like being mean? At long last, have they no sense of decency?

I'm embarrassed to be an American the UN is now getting involved stating we are unjust and boy are they right! I grew up listening to how great the USA is what a bunch of BS we are almost as bad as dictatorships only difference here millions don't even realize that coprporations own most of our government officials and have deregulated us so much that we suffer and our planet suffers as well.

Of course, Huey Long was a racist. Southerners like progressive ideas as long as they do not include catering to "special interests" i.e. people of color. FDR passed the New Deal with close to full support from the solid South as long as his program benefited poor whites and not blacks and did not challange Southern treatment of black people.

The trick would be to bring populists back into the Democratic fold in the South who were equally progressive on issues of color ethnicity and race.

Like Suze says, the media is in almost complete control of the media in the South & I'm not so sure Southerners have an understanding of what's at stake.

What I'm concerned about though is, Thom why do you use the right wing epithet "Democrat Party" instead of Democratic Party? Its a grade school mentality that Fox & the Tea Party use to delegitimize the left wing & we should use the correct name, The Democratic Party.