Zotanamogate

While I was heartened to hear that USAF Senior Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, like Army Chaplain (Capt) James Yee before him, had been cleared of charges of espionage and treason, I am nevertheless still deeply disturbed by the lack of media attention given this case.

Granted, the allegations made a huge splash when they first surfaced in the fall of 2003, fueled to a white hot frenzy by prosecutorial whisperings of possible death sentences. At that time, the government was happy to have us believe that the tentacled reach of Al Qaeda extended all the way to the ranks of the U.S. Military.

But as a military member of some 25 years, I wasn't buying it. I know too much about the nature of classified documents and the security measures used to protect them to place much faith in the government's allegations that each man was found in possession of hundreds.

Everything that has happened since has proved me right. Charges against Chaplain Yee, you'll recall, were dropped in March 2004, three months after Army Specialist Joseph Darby first set in motion the events that led to the Abu Ghraib scandal of April, 2004.

In dropping the charges against Yee, the governemnt announced they'd made a mistake and the documents weren't classified after all.

Last week, we get much the same concerning the case against Halabi: documents that were first classified "Secret" are now seen as "For Official Use Only".

If you are looking for an explanation of how the government could have been so wrong in their assessment of the value of these documents, consider a couple of very salient facts:

1) In determinging the classification of a document, one must consider the degree of harm its release would cause to the United States. Therefore, the documents possessed by Halabi and the Yee were, in the Fall of 2003, seen to contain information which would cause "serious damage" to national interests if it were commonly known. Again, that was in July - September 2003.

2) By March 2004, those documents were no longer considered clasified; that is, the information could no longer harm the United States.

September 2003: Chaplain Yee arrested with a laptop full of classified documents

December 2003: The Red Cross begins filing complaints about mistreatment of U.S. held enemy prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib and locations in Afghanistan.

January 2004: Specialist Darby files a formal complaint with his chain of command at Abu Ghraib, detailing allegations of abuse and providing photos. The complaint works its way through the chain of command and a formal investigation is initiated.

So what was the information that was a serious threat to national security in Summer - Fall 2003 but was not a serious threat in March 2004?

I would submit that it was information detailing the severe abuses that have been occurring at Guantanamo since early 2003.

And if it became necessary to arrest two of our soldiers on trumped up charges to keep that fact from coming to light, well, no measure is too drastic to protect this administration, because what is good for the administration is good for the country and vice verse. Likewise, what is a grave threat to the administration is a grave threat to the nation.

And in the Summer - Fall of 2003, any hint of torture and abuse of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners, some of whom were as young as 13, would have been very grave indeed, as borne out by later events.

But in March 2004, with the leak of the Abu Ghraib scandal expected to hit the news wires at any moment, and given the nine month softening up of Chaplain Yee, and the imposition of a life-long gag order guaranteed to secure his eternal silence on the matter, it seemed not only safe but prudent to drop charges against him.

Plain and simple is the fact that this administration, who rose to power in large part because of their reputation for loving and supporting "The Troops", has allowed the unpardonable sin of slandering and defaming subordinates in order to protect the dirty secret that is the torture of our enemy prisoners of war.

Add to that the shameful, cynical, criminal treatment of these two U.S. soldiers. Then think of the treatment the lowest ranking troops got at Abu Ghraib, where they have been left twisting on the meat hook of public scrutiny while the brass bespangled policy makers get a free ride or are asked to retire.

It is truly an upside down world when those among the weakest of us, who yet fight so valiantly for American freedoms, can be so casually and callously denied their own freedoms, and have their reputations so blackly impugned.

And where is the press in all this? Meekly subservient to their corporate masters and far, far too afraid of alienating the uber-zealots of the far right fringe to fully investigate either instance.

There is a strong need for a resurgence of hunger and aggression amongst the Fourth Estate. They are so grateful for whatever small crumbs might fall from the master's table, and so afraid of being denied access to that table, that they have allowed this administration free license to invade countries under false pretenses, spy on and imprison their own countrymen, hold citizens without due process, seize and torture citizens of other countries, and alienate the whole of America for their own dark purpose.

For starters, let's get down to basics......

Now that you understand let me reply to your Post....
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You're a 1-bit brain with a parity error
You swine. You vulgar little maggot. You worthless bag of filth. As we say in Texas, I'll bet you couldn't pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.
You are a canker. A sore that won't go away. I would rather kiss a lawyer than be seen with you. You're a putrescent mass, a walking vomit. You are a spineless little worm deserving nothing but the profoundest contempt. You are a jerk, a cad, a weasel. Your life is a monument to stupidity. You are a stench, a revulsion, a big suck on a sour lemon.
You are a bleating foal, a curdled staggering mutant dwarf smeared richly with the effluvia and offal accompanying your alleged birth into this world.
An insensate, blinking calf, meaningful to nobody, abandoned by the puke-drooling, giggling beasts who sired you and then killed themselves in recognition of what they had done.
I will never get over the embarrassment of belonging to the same species as you. You are a monster, an ogre, a malformity. I barf at the very thought of you.
You have all the appeal of a paper cut. Lepers avoid you. You are vile, worthless, less than nothing. You are a weed, a fungus, the dregs of this earth. And did I mention you smell? Try to edit your responses of unnecessary material before attempting to impress us with your insight. The evidence that you are a nincompoop will still be available to readers, but they will be able to access it more rapidly.
You snail-skulled little rabbit. Would that a hawk pick you up, drive its beak into your brain, and upon finding it rancid set you loose to fly briefly before spattering the ocean rocks with the frothy pink shame of your ignoble blood.
May you choke on the queasy, convulsing nausea of your own trite, foolish beliefs. You are weary, stale, flat and unprofitable. You are grimy, squalid, nasty and profane. You are foul and disgusting. You're a fool, an ignoramus. Monkeys look down on you.
You are unreservedly pathetic, starved for attention, and lost in a land that reality forgot. And what meaning do you expect your delusionally self-important statements of unknowing, inexperienced opinion to have with us? What fantasy do you hold that you would believe that your tiny-fisted tantrums would have more weight than that of a leprous desert rat, spinning rabidly in a circle, waiting for the bite of the snake?
You are a waste of flesh. You have no rhythm. You are ridiculous and obnoxious. You are the moral equivalent of a leech. You are a living emptiness, a meaningless void. You are sour and senile. You are a disease. You are a puerile, one-handed, slack-jawed, drooling, meatslapper. On a good day you're a half-wit. You remind me of drool.
You are deficient in all that lends character. You have the personality of wallpaper. You are dank and filthy. You are asinine and benighted. You are the source of all unpleasantness. You spread misery and sorrow wherever you go. You smarmy lagerlout git. You bloody woofter sod. Bugger off, pillock. You grotty wanking oik artless base-court apple-john. You clouted boggish foot-licking twit. You dankish clack-dish plonker. You gormless crook-pated tosser. You churlish boil-brained clotpole ponce. You cockered bum-bailey poofter. You craven dewberry pisshead cockup pratting naff. You gob-kissing gleeking flap-mouthed coxcomb. You dread-bolted fobbing beef-witted clapper-clawed flirt-gill.
You are a fiend and a coward, and you have bad breath. You are degenerate, noxious and depraved. I feel debased just for knowing you exist. I despise everything about you, and I wish you would go away.
I cannot believe how incredibly stupid you are. I mean rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated-rock-hard stupid. Stupid, so stupid it goes way beyond the stupid we know into a whole different dimension of stupid. You are trans-stupid stupid. Meta-stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid gotten so dense that no intellect can escape. Singularity stupid. Blazing hot mid-day sun on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one second than our entire galaxy emits in a year. Quasar stupid.
Your writing has to be a troll.
Nothing in our universe can really be this stupid. Perhaps this is some primordial fragment from the original big bang of stupid. Some pure essence of a stupid so uncontaminated by anything else as to be beyond the laws of physics that we know. I'm sorry. I can't go on.
This is an epiphany of stupid for me.
After this, you may not hear from me again for a while. I don't have enough strength left to deride your ignorant questions and half baked comments about unimportant trivia, or any of the rest of this drivel. Duh. The only thing worse than your logic is your manners. I have snipped away most of what you wrote, because, well... it didn't really say anything.
Your attempt at constructing a creative post was pitiful. I mean, really, stringing together a bunch of insults among a load of babbling was hardly effective... Maybe later in life, after you have learned to read, write, spell, and count, you will have more success. True, these are rudimentary skills that many of us "normal" people take for granted that everyone has an easy time of mastering. But we sometimes forget that there are "challenged" persons in this world who find these things more difficult.
If I had known, that this was your case then I would have never read your post. It just wouldn't have been "right". Sort of like parking in a handicap space. I wish you the best of luck in the emotional, and social struggles that seem to be placing such a demand on you.
Originally Posted by FReeper: Firehat

P.S.: You are hypocritical, greedy, violent, malevolent, vengeful, cowardly, deadly, mendacious, meretricious, loathsome, despicable, belligerent, opportunistic, barratrous, contemptible, criminal, fascistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, avaricious, tasteless, idiotic, brain-damaged, imbecilic, insane, arrogant, deceitful, demented, lame, self-righteous, byzantine, conspiratorial, satanic, fraudulent, libelous, bilious, splenetic, spastic, ignorant, clueless, illegitimate, harmful, destructive, dumb, evasive, double-talking, devious, revisionist, narrow, manipulative, paternalistic, fundamentalist, dogmatic, idolatrous, unethical, cultic, diseased, suppressive, controlling, restrictive, malignant, deceptive, dim, crazy, weird, dystopic, stifling, uncaring, plantigrade, grim, unsympathetic, jargon-spouting, censorious, secretive, aggressive, mind-numbing, arassive, poisonous, flagrant, self-destructive, abusive, socially-retarded, puerile, clueless, and generally Not Good.
Thanks to FReeper: b4its2late

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In this photo we see Silly at the door when I say "Disruptor"	Silly immediately takes up her position on the desk and contemplates the "ZOT" button	Here, Silly decides that the "ZOT" is in order, and she reaches for the "ZOT" button	Here, Silly advises me of a successful "ZOT" operation.

Criterion	Your Score (1-10)	Comments
"Supporting" the troops while denigrating their chain of command	10	One of the best!
Bush/Cheney as Illuminati conspiracy/cabal	2	"Dark purpose" simply isn't sinister enough
Amount of work on a post we'll just ridicule	10	Probably took hours
Pretending to be conservative or a long-time FReeper	0	Need a lot of work here
Class warfare	8	Good, but likely too stealthy for most of us buck-toothed rednecks to detect.
Waiting long enough after sign-up to post	0	Same day. No good!
Naderite corporation-bashing	5	Only once that I saw
Number of times "administration" is used	6	Average, but that's good considering most trolls can't spell it properly
Exclamation points	0	You'll just have to resurge your hunger and aggression
Misspelled words	0	Dude, get some more bong hits before typing!
Condescension while educating the ignorant evangelicals	8	Almost MoDo territory!