What could possibly drive  a person to commit themselves to acts of illegal and nefarious acts, and in such a brazen manner?

He kept torture manuals which stated clearly the way to false confessions was through waterboarding.  He went on to instruct interrogators who were waterboarding Iraqi military to ask about Al Qaeda connections.  

He almost single handedly engineered the privatizaiton of the Pentagon.  KBR makes billions.

He is awesome in the sense that I am in awe of how much of a criminal mastermind this guy is, who has the balls to go on TV and tell everyone it's for their own good, Colbert nailed it.  He has ballsheimers.

Stop killing children by the dozens.

Western armies live up to the worst stereotypes in the region when we fight in this cowardly fashion.  It also fuels the religious extremist`s arguments.

Wired for War by Peter Singer examines this very well, and I would recommend to anyone wanting to examine US and NATO conflicts of the coming years.  It will be perpetual and horrible, and apparently quite sustainable as long as we all pretend it isn't happening.

Now think further ahead and see how decades of killing dozens of innocents and 'insurgents' for every casualty we take will reflect on our children and their children.  Do we need to give extreme Islam more propaganda to recruit idle minds?  

Is there not something sort of righteous against fighting a phantom enemy who bombs 95 children in an air strike because we could have sustained casualties by putting boots on the ground? 

How does the US and NATO forces ever have the upper moral hand in this situation?  We know how being on the wrong moral side of a war ends right?

Counterpunch has many more details on the Afghan men women and children killed in the air strike. It is hard to read.

The British ``pacified`` Northern Ireland but the casualty rate for their people was greater than the IRA's. (In my limited understanding) 

I personally can't stomach the idea of winning that way for either side, even though it would possibly put us on the right moral side, if there is such a thing in this theater.  

The solution of course is to invest in clean local energy and withdraw from the geopolitical chessboard game and see that everyone else tries to do so as well.  

The other option is an increasingly remote war sustained for as long as we want pipelines in Central Asia under Western control.

Any notion of 'winning' will be delegated to a damage ratio.  If our kids (18-25 year old soldiers) aren't dying at all and theirs (0-25 innocents who were born in a place fought over since forever,) are, we are winning.

Does anybody really want to pass this on as an inherited trait of the liberal democracies?

For those who would argue Al-Qaeda justifies this occupation I will offer a quote from Canadian scholar Gwynne Dwyer from Future: Tense.

``If we are ever to get our sense of proportion back about terrorism, we need a logarithmic scale, like the one they use for stars.``

Some lowlife punks got lucky in September 2001 basically,  Terrorism is not a threat in the sense that nuclear weapons, chronic drinking, climate change, car accidents or poor diets are a threat.  Or even lack of universal health care.  More Americans probably die from that annually than Bin Laden could ever figure out how to kill.

I believe competent well trained police forces should handle terrorism.  Ones that respect the laws of the country they are serving.

Securing nuclear stockpiles of the US and Russia should be a much larger priority.  Making sure people like Dr. Khan don`t continue the trend of the US and Canada in the past century, by spreading dangerous technology around the globe to developing nations.  That should be a priority.  Confiscating my suntan lotion when I came back from Maui was good for a laugh though.  Money well spent.

I am consistently surprised to how blind even the most progressive dialog in the US today ignores the School of Americas.  This training facility is notorious all over South America.  This stuff is pretty undeniably systemic from way before 9/11, it just was not as intimate.  

Joseph Kennedy quote:

Expose the war crimes of Yoo, Bybee, etc. but you may want to look a little deeper afterwards as well.  

By the way does anyone remember way back in 2004 the US and Canada overthrew the democratically elected Haitian government?  Isn't that seriously messed up?

"The Ottawa Initiative on Haiti or simply the Ottawa Initiative, was a conference hosted by Canada that took place in Montreal, Quebec on 31 January and 1 February 2003, to decide the future of Haiti's government, though no Haitian government officials were invited."

Canada`s Quiet War