Despite decades of terrorist violence, Spanish police would not have been permitted to do what the FBI has done in New York.

Spain has been suffering terrorism for over thirty years and some of the most violent terrorism occurred while the country was trying to create a democracy after forty years of fascist dictatorship. Perhaps because of the experience of fascism: torture, beatings, anonymous informers, etc, today's Spanish legal system is very punctilious in guaranteeing the rights of the accused.

In Spain "sting" operations are forbidden. Evidence procured by agents provocateurs would not be admissible in court.

It looks like the FBI, posing as Pakistani Al Qaeda talked a pitiful group of intellectually challenged petty street criminals into parking what they thought was a car full of explosives in front of a synagogue. The non-explosives were thoughtfully supplied by the FBI.

After parking the cars full of popcorn in front of the synagogue this gang of idiots was arrested while leaving the scene of the crime and their massive plot foiled. The FBI says these poor fools have no contacts whatsoever with any other terrorist groups anywhere. How could they when the only "terrorists" they ever met in their lives are the FBI agents who gave them the non-explosives?

In short, these men are going to go back to jail for many years because of their bad intentions, because, at worst, parking a harmless car in front of a synagogue is a parking violation not a felony. This is as if you said to me, "I really hate john over there!", and I handed you a water pistol and said, "Snuff the sunuvabitch!" and you squirted him with water and got sent up for attempted murder.

You could say that the role of the FBI here was literally "satanic", deliberately leading weak minded men "into temptation" and then betraying them. If the FBI hadn't intervened these people would have probably never got beyond mugging old ladies for their social security checks in all their lives. If people can go to jail for their bad thoughts, no wonder the USA has the world's largest prison population.

It would be interesting to know how much it cost the US treasury to set up and entrap this bunch of hopeless turkeys.



 

Netanyahu avoided publicly committing himself to accepting an independent Palestinian state as the outcome of peace negotiations. Instead, he spoke of "self-government" for the Palestinians and laid down what sounded like a new precondition: The Palestinians would have to "allow Israel the means to defend itself."

What Netanyahu apparently means by that is a Palestinian state minus the means to defend itself, or to control its airspace, or its international passageways. Not unreasonable concerns given Israel's experience with Gaza, but to put forward such requirements at the outset looks more like a well-practiced Netanyahu negotiating tactic: Raise the bar as high as possible and require the United States to lift the Palestinians over it before he has to make any concessions. Martin Indyk - The Daily Beast

It would seem that the Obama administration's goal is to create a "Palestinian State" that would be a giant Gaza: an Israeli prison camp, where the inmates would run the day to day affairs of the camp. In exchange for this Israel would have friendly relations with the Arab world and all of the mad mullahs of Iran's evil schemes would be forever foiled. We are led to believe that to achieve this wonderland Israel would have to make many of what Ariel Sharon used to call, "painful concessions".

Just as a hypothesis, mind you, let us assume for a minute that all of this is just so much bullshit, a good cop, bad cop pantomime.

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There is a polemic going on at TPM as if the the comparison of George W. Bush to Woodrow Wilson were some sort of sacrilege. Wilson's heroic reputation is not universal. Quite a few people think that his leading the USA into WWI was the direct cause of the rise of Adolph Hitler and with him the Holocaust and most of the problems we have today in the Middle East. I'll explain.

More "show and tell".

This time I discovered that making a video during rush hour, when you live on a busy street in the financial district, one that is also being repaired, can lead to a certain degradation of sound quality. I sweated with the editing program to improve the sound, but this was the best I could do. Sorry.

The idea of the video commentary is that the ball is in the court of America's progressives and if they want any results: health care, peace etc, they must put the same pressure on Obama as they tried to put on Bush. Obama being an intelligent "pragmatist" will bend to that pressure unlike Bush, who was a stubborn, ignorant fanatic.

If the left doesn't pressure Obama he, like a good pragmatist, will bend to the pressure of the right.