and eventually, when interest in them flags, we can use the two big footprints for parking

So, after watching four years of people fighting over the big hole, we're now to have nothing more than some dreary architecture sheltering a theme park for the dead, a high-rise corporate office park and a Wal-Mart.

The World Trade Center is back in business.

I'd weep, if I could care any longer.

[image from thinkandask]

dangerous woman

Cindy Sheehan has been arrested for not moving from the sidewalk in front of the executive mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue. White House press secretary Scott McClellan:

"it's the right of the American people to peacefully express their views. And that's what you're seeing here in Washington, D.C."

And it's the right of a pseudo-authoritarian regime to arrest us if we try it without asking permission.

[image of Molly Riley from Reuters via Yahoo!]

An Iraqi detainee at a jail in the outskirts of Baghdad, 2004. Troops from the army's elite 82nd Airborne Division routinely beat and mistreated Iraqi prisoners at a base near Fallujah in central Iraq with the approval of their superior officers, a New York-based human rights group said [AFP caption]

"3 in 82nd Airborne Say Beating Iraqi Prisoners Was Routine"

The prodigious fool and duplicitous monster who let a very gullible nation believe Iraq was responsible for September 11, and who then told its very frightened citizens that Iraq was about to drop nuclear bombs on them, is the one who did this. Our natural proclivity for violence was the perfect instrument.

If we are citizens of a democracy*, we are all guilty, but the beatings and torture which continue today began four years ago at the very top, with the commander-in-chief himself.

*
perhaps a dubious assumption today

[image by Jewel Samad from Agence France-Presse file via Yahoo!]

bedlam immediately followed the arrest of the organizer of Cindy Sheehan's appearance in Union Square [the guy in the yellow shirt is a plainclothes punk "kid" who tried to start trouble before the rally began, according to a witness, Kim Arnold, one of the principals of the site where this image was spotted, tanasimusic]

Barry has a very good take on what happened when Cindy Sheehan tried to speak in Union Square on Monday.

No innocent in the ways of our benighted republic, including its most worldly city, he suggests, "They should have added some religious content". ["worldly" is a relative thing here in America]

Incidently, the secondary headline on Sarah Ferguson's Village Voice article reads:

City’s Finest pulls move even Bush wouldn’t have tried

[image courtesy of Mike Fleming via tanasimusic]

in Afghanistan the Taliban remain an enduring threat, freedom only clings to life, especially for women, and more Americans are dying than ever before

Sixty-nine American service members have been killed in Afghanistan this year, the NYTimes reported today in an article discussing Pentagon and military officials' plans to start pulling out of the country which was the site of "Operation Enduring Freedom" in 2001.

The first paragraph of the article tells us that the contemplated reduction, as much of 20 percent of our current troop level of 20,000, would be "the largest withdrawal since the Taliban were ousted [my italics] in late 2001." Check that verb. Not untypically the paper is being a bit disingenuous, since the article continues for four long columns packed with the disconnect of these phrases I've pulled out from the text. They describe the current very real insurgency and why our allies don't want any part of a combat role:

"handle the counterinsurgency mission"
"where much of the fighting is occurring"
"the American combat operation"
"contribute troops to counterinsurgency"
"small special forces involved in combat"
"where American troops have clashed with Taliban"
"anticipated spike in insurgent attacks"
"attacks against American forces"
"stepped-up American offensives in areas sympathetic to the Taliban"
"commander of daily tactical operations in Afghanistan"
"soldiers to fight throughout the winter"
"keep the pressure on Taliban fighters"
"effort to impress villagers in the Taliban heartland"

The total count of U.S. military fatalities since the beginning of the war which "ousted the Taliban" almost four years ago is 231. According to at least one site* which breaks down the statistics by year, the numbers have been going up each year since 2001:

2001: 12
2002: 43
2003: 47
2004: 52
2005: 77

The caption for the photo above as it appears on the Times site reads:
A patrol vehicle from Company A, 508th Infantry, casts shadows in a town in Paktika Province, [southeast] Afghanistan.

*
whose statistics were compiled from Department of Defense and Central Command press releases [the discrepancy in its 2005 total and that in the Times may be due to different ways of measuring the years used in the calculations]

[image by Scott Eels for the Times]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that U.S. President George W. Bush has the power to detain Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen who has been held for more than three years as a suspected enemy combatant without any charges being brought against him. [my italics]

Padilla continues to be held in solitary confinement on a military base. For the first two years of his confinement he had no access to a lawyer, not that it could possibly change his situation anyway.

Remember the Constitution? Remember Habeus Corpus? Remember enduring freedom?

Guilt by suspicion of association, solitary confinement, no charges, no trial - forever. Sounds to me like a recruiting poster for revolution!

The terror has come home, and it's us. We've become expert at manufacturing enemies where there never were any before, both at home and abroad. It's clear we really have lost the "war" we called by the name of a tactic we ascribed to the other.

According to the same Reuters account J. Michael Luttig, the judge who wrote the decision for the three-judge panel, is "a conservative who has been under consideration by the Bush administration for a possible Supreme Court nomination."

Remember separation of powers? Remember real conservatives? Remember justice?

[image, titled "Solitary Confinement," from wolispace]