Before we continue I would ask that you view the video.  At 9:49 in the video, you will see that, after killing a dozen unarmed civilians in a residential neighborhood, the helicopter opens fire on a van that has stopped to pick up a wounded man, killing another four or five men in the van and wounding two small children who miraculously survived.

The jocular tone of the U.S. soldiers as they communicate on the radio in macho military jargon, laughing and “high fiving” about what they have done, is not only sickening but I think revealing.  It shows a pathological detachment from the human suffering they have just visited upon people who posed no threat.  What they claimed was a weapon turned out to be a camera, carried by a young Iraqi journalist.

It is also obvious to anyone with an ounce of discernment that these young soldiers were exaggerating the threat in their attempts to obtain permission to open fire, and then again when they saw an opportunity to kill civilians who were obviously rendering aid to the wounded man.

It was referred to as the “Superior orders defense” until the Nuremberg Trials – where ex Nazis were tried for war crimes committed during WWII.  Since then it has been called the Nuremberg Defense – which is to deny responsibility for ones actions as “following orders”.

Under Nuremberg Principle IV, “defense of superior orders” is not a defense for war crimes, although it might influence a sentencing authority to lessen the penalty. Nuremberg Principle IV states:

“The fact that a person acted pursuant to order of his Government or of a superior does not relieve him from responsibility under international law, provided a moral choice was in fact possible to him.”

As I see it this condemns the soldiers in the helicopter, and exonerates Private Manning. A moral choice was possible, and in fact the gunner in the Blackhawk helicopter can be heard pleading for orders from his superiors to open fire.

Private Manning was privy to evidence of a war crime and I believe he had a moral obligation, if not a duty, to report it.  Thank God he also had the courage to do it.  Reporting it to the military would have been an obvious waste of time.  As evidenced in the opening statements of the video, the military had already done their best to cover up the incident.

I spent 43 months in Iraq, not very far from where this crime occurred in July 2007 – although by then I was gone.  I left Iraq in May of ‘07.  While I was there I spent all of my time “inside the wire”, but I knew second hand what was going on in Baghdad, and the almost total disregard the soldiers, as well as the thousands of armed mercenaries, had for Iraqi civilians.  I’m glad hard evidence of the fact has begun to “leak out”.

I believe the only legitimate reason for military secrecy is a tactical one – to prevent the endangerment of American soldiers – not to hide their atrocities.

Private Manning personifies the type of individual we admire when we see them portrayed in movies.  The prototypical “American” who stands up to oppressive regimes which operate in secrecy.  When will we wake up and see what our government has become.  At some point in our two hundred year history it has mutated into a totalitarian monstrosity far worse than the one our forefathers fought to free themselves from.

So which soldier is the hero?  I think we both know the answer to that question.  We should all wish there were more like him.

Why not?  Maybe the media considered this “news” too controversial?  Or maybe they were told to “leave it alone”.  After all, Americans might become indignant and demand to know why the country they consider to be the world’s leader in humanitarian issues is actually the world’s largest stockpiler, vendor and user of a weapon most of the world now views as a crime against humanity.

Cluster bombs are very efficient at killing, but they are indiscriminate and years after a conflict the duds that didn’t explode upon impact are killing and maiming civilian populations.  They become land mines and some American bombs are still killing 30 years after they were dropped.

This is what they look like

This is what they do

Here is a list of the countries who have have ratified the treaty banning the use of cluster munitions that went into force recently, on August 1, 2010.

Albania, Austria, Belgium, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Comoros, Croatia, Denmark, Ecuador, Fiji, France, Germany, The Holy See, Ireland, Japan, The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Lesotho, Luxembourg, The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Malawi, Mali, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Montenegro, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Niger, Norway, Samoa, San Marino, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Slovenia, Spain, United Kingdom, Uruguay and Zambia.

Notice anyone missing?

The United States has refused to even sign the treaty, which has been signed by over 100 of the world’s nations, let alone ratify it.  To be fair neither has China, Russia, or Israel.  All of course known for their enlightened stand on human rights.

It is important to note that these are not defensive weapons.  No one would drop cluster bombs inside the boundaries of their own country.  These are offensive weapons in every sense of the word.

American Made

It’s estimated that near the southern border of Lebanon a million unexploded bomblets are still waiting to explode, courtesy of the U.S. and its ally Israel.  They were made in America and delivered by the Israelis during their war four years ago with the Hezbollah.  Removing them is a slow, laborious and dangerous task, as you can see in this video as French soldiers of the UN remove them from a soccer field in Lebanon.

The country that contains the most unexploded ordnance is Laos, which holds the distinction of being the most bombed country in the world.  American bombers dropped more than 2 million tons, in a bombing campaign that lasted nine years from 1964 – 1973 and was kept secret from Congress and the American public.  That is over twice the tonnage of bombs dropped in Germany during all of World War II.

It is estimated that bombing Laos cost 17 million dollars a day, every day, for nine years.   In contrast America has recently been lauded for increasing it’s economic support of the clearing of unexploded bombs in Laos to 5 million dollars per year.  At the current rate of disposal it will take 100 more years to clean up the mess.  In the meantime 6,000 Laotians have been killed and countless others have been been maimed for life.  Just recently seven people were killed when a man hit a bomb while chopping wood.  Two days later two boys were killed while playing with two tennis-ball-size cluster bomblets.

Put this in some kind of meaningful perspective.  Nine years after 9/11 Americans are still enraged that terrorists killed 3,000 of its innocent citizens, and yet in Laos twice that many have died since the bombing stopped over 30 years ago.  Bombs dropped by American warplanes on a citizenry that had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam – a war of dubious value.  They will continue to be maimed and killed for decades to come.  How would we feel if New Yorkers were faced with the same aftermath and could expect to step on an unexploded bomb while working or playing in their city – for the next 100 years!

Ignorance on the part of the American people is the only possible excuse for their incredible dissonance, and the discrimination that has resulted.  But is that an acceptable excuse?  Do we excuse the German people because they didn’t know what Hitler was up to?  Does a citizenry not have an obligation to know what they’re government is doing, and then hold them accountable when it is discovered that they’ve been up to no good?  Does secretly dropping two million tons of bombs on a population of innocent people constitute “up to no good”? (And do not argue that they were not innocent.  It is absurdly impossible to drop two million tons of bombs and accurately hit only the bad guys.  And certainly those who have died and continue to die 30 years later are innocent.)

Lest anyone think I am anti-American, understand that I am 100% American.  It’s the U.S. government that is anti-American.  Don’t become confused and think for a minute that Washington is America.  It is a city filled with criminals who have in every way imaginable subverted the American ideal.

My father was aboard a ship in the Pacific during WWII.  He was young and terrified.  My mother used to mention that he only weighed 95 lbs and had bleeding ulcers when he came home from the war.  I remember as a very young boy, watching him eat soda crackers in milk – good for his stomach.  I also remember the day I realized dropping nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians was an evil thing to do.  I remember it because I shared my views with dad and he became enraged at the very idea.

“What do you know?”, he asked between gritted teeth.  “You weren’t there.  I was.  The Japanese did their best to kill me.”  I knew that, because he’d told me many times about Japanese aircraft attacking his ship.  And I recalled his story about Tokyo Rose threatening his ship by name on her famous radio broadcast, and the Captain, taking the threat seriously enough to change berths.  The ship that took its place was attacked by the Japanese that evening.  It was a fact Dad verified for Mom once when they met another sailor in Oklahoma City who had been on the ship the “Japs” had mistakenly torpedoed.

I can understand the emotional investment my Dad had in justifying the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a cowardly act.

I’ve watched just about every movie John Wayne ever made, and, like most Americans I equate the characters he played with the American ideal of heroism and valor.  What would we think if at the movies we’d watched the “Duke” burst into a home and, with his machine gun spraying bullets, began mowing down the wife and children of even the worst villain?  I don’t think we’d cheer.

The John Wayne I admired would have taken one in the chest himself before he would have killed an innocent person.  He was brave.  And we live in the home of the free… the land of the brave.  Or so we like to believe.

Hiroshima after the bomb

On August 6th, 1945 at a time when the war in the Pacific was nearly over and the Japanese were already prepared to surrender, the Enola Gay dropped “Little Boy”, the first of two nuclear bombs to be dropped on a civilian population, on the Japanese city of Hiroshima and incinerated 80,000 men women and children – almost entirely civilians.  Within a few days tens of thousands more would die, and over the next several decades tens of thousands more from radiation related diseases.

Were they really ready to surrender?  It depends upon who you ask, so lets ask another one of my heros… someone who ought to know.  Let’s ask “Ike” – five-star general, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in WWII and 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower. I’d trust his opinion.

“…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”
- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

America only gave the Japanese three days to consider the horror of what had happened before they dropped a second bomb called “Fat Man” on Nagasaki, with the same devastating results.  Why so soon?  Why not give the Japanese a week or ten days to consider surrendering?  Call me cynical but I think – and evidence suggests – that this was an opportunity to test new weapons and time was of the essence.  There could be no justifiable “real world” test of the second bomb after Japan surrendered.

Even Wikipedia, which I consider to be a government friendly source of information, states in its article Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

These cities were largely untouched during the nightly bombing raids and the Army Air Force agreed to leave them off the target list so accurate assessment of the weapon could be made.

These were two bombs of different designs – Little Boy utilized uranium and Fat Man was plutonium based – and both of them had to be “assessed”.

We don’t want to see ourselves as evil, or as complacently looking the other way while our government and its military hit men commit evil in our names, so we readily accept, and use a new term for killing innocent people during war.  It is now called “collateral damage”.  There has been a lot of collateral damage in Iraq.

Tell me again why we’re in Iraq, and why tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died?  WMD’s (weapons of mass destruction)?  No… as our former president once joked from the podium while speaking at a dinner for radio and television correspondents -  “Those weapons of mass destruction have gotta be somewhere… maybe under here.  Nope… no weapons over there.”  And they all laughed.  The official reason had become an official joke.

So why are we there?  I suspect it’s for the oil.

And why are we killing innocent women and children in Afghanistan?  65 years after Hiroshima the American military is still dropping bombs on civilian populations.  Ironically this fact is in a news item today (on the internet, and not likely repeated by the MSM – mainstream media) that the official inquiry has found that a U.S. air attack in Helmand province last month resulted in the deaths of 39 civilians, all women and children.  The U.S. military had previously stated the dead were all militants.

The investigation shows the July US-led raid killed 39 civilians in Helmand

Americans become fighting mad if you try to remove “under God” from their pledge of allegiance.  Polls found that 77% disapproved when a judge ruled that a monument with the ten commandments on it be removed from a state building.  Why?  Because America is a nation of Christians.  Their motto is WWJD – What would Jesus Do?

It’s a good question.  And if you are not a follower of Jesus (and I’m not) then ask yourself another question – WWJWD – What would John Wayne do?

I just can’t see Jesus or John Wayne killing innocent people for any reason.  Certainly not to test a bomb or keep American automobiles supplied with gasoline.

My most recent revelation fascinates me the most.  I have lived all these years ignorant of the amazing fact that the subject of a Walt Disney animated film was my great (x11) grandmother.

John Rolfe was a colonist, and successful tobacco farmer whose English wife had died.  Pocahontus had been captured and was being held for ransom at Henricus where John lived.   According to this account in Wikipedia He was a pious man who agonized over the potential moral repercussions of marrying a heathen.

As I contemplated this event from 400 years ago I soon realized how significant John Rolfe’s decision was to me.  Had he decided against marrying this “heathen” I would not be here today!  What I would have brushed away as an interesting bit of historical trivia just a few days ago is now a pivotal event in bringing me into existence.  It set my mind to contemplating just how many other insignificant events in history have transpired, any one of which, if altered, would have eliminated the possibility of ME.

I’m not the only one who would not be here now had old John’s piety outweighed his lustful desire.  I am removed from Pocahontus by 12 generations in one line (Menefee) and by 11 through another (Moorman).  Taking the nearest I find that by doubling the number of grandparents for each generation I have 1,048 great (x11) grandmothers.  Each of them must have an even larger number of grandsons and granddaughters.  So eliminating young Thomas (the son of John and Pocahontus) would have quite a ripple effect.  Multiplied by the fact that the elimination of his grandchildren would have created a further “domino” ripple effect spreading out and eliminating potentially millions of progeny.

If we go back a thousand years the number of grandparents each of us have number in the billions – which proves there has been considerable inbreeding in the creation of the human race.   The number of people who are directly related to say, Charlemagne, may be in the thousands, but indirectly there would have to be billions, if not every human in the civilized world.

That being the case there simply are no insignificant persons in history.  The elimination of a single life would have changed our world.  Unless you don’t consider not being here at all a significant change.  Oh there would still be billions of people here… they just wouldn’t be us!!  I find that philosophically fascinating.

It now becomes abundantly clear, and perhaps inanely obvious, that we are all here, and who we are, because of trillions upon trillions of dangerously close calls, chance encounters, and random events.

A sword tip just misses a vital organ; the doctor arrives too late because of a broken wheel on his carriage; someone decides at the last minute to attend a dance; or a baby is born after a woman is sexually assaulted by a victorious soldier.  All of these singular, and oftentimes trivial, moments in history don’t just have the potential to ripple forward in time, with effects growing geometrically with each generation… they do!  Given enough time they have affected the very existence of every one living today.

The deep philosophical implications of this idea are fundamental.  Without supernatural intervention on the most basic level, would we not be just the product of chance – of random events?  If God is not a super-freak of control, dictating the outcome of every minute event (both positive and negative – including pregnancy producing rapes), then we are all just here by accident.

It’s a well established, verifiable fact that the Twin Towers fell at “free fall speed”.  In other words the same amount of time a brick would have fallen an equal distance through air – unobstructed!

Simple physics proves such a collapse would be impossible – given the official explanation.  It won’t take a lengthy scientific discourse to understand why, but first let’s define some terms.

Gravitational Potential Energy: Potential energy is the energy stored in a body or in a system due to its position in a force field. When a mass is lifted up, the force of gravity will act so as to bring it back down.

In other words, if you put a bowling ball on closet shelf seven feet above the floor you have not only stored the bowling ball, you have stored potential gravitational energy equal to the weight of the bowling ball.

Kinetic Energy: The energy an object possesses due to its motion.

If you nudge that bowling ball off the shelf the potential gravitational energy is converted to kinetic energy which accelerates the ball toward the Earth at a rate of 32 feet per second, per second.  In other words, after 2 seconds the ball will be traveling at 64 feet per second, and after 3 seconds at 96 feet per second, and so on.

Place the bowling ball on a shelf 1,350 feet from the ground (the height of the twin towers) and it would take about 10.5 seconds to hit the ground.  In a vacuum it would take only 9 seconds.  Why would it take less time in a vacuum?  Air resistance.

Air resistance: A contact force that opposes the motion of objects moving in air. An object will fall faster in a vacuum than it would falling through the atmosphere because it takes some of the gravitational energy to push the air molecules out of the way.

In fact an object falling through the atmosphere will reach a maximum velocity when the air resistance is equal to the accelerating force.  They balance and the falling object reaches what is called “terminal velocity”.  That is why a ten pound bowling ball will fall faster than a ten pound piece of plywood.  Their mass is equal but the plywood offers more surface area to the friction of air resistance.  That’s how skydivers slow their fall by wearing a bat suit.

This is the Mirabella V.  At 246′ in length, and a displacement of 816 tons, she is the largest single masted sailing yacht ever built.  What does the Mirabella V have in common with the Twin Towers?  Her sail area is equal to the square footage of each of the tower’s 110 floors – 40,000 square feet.  That’s a lot of air resistance.

So, let’s assume that each of the 110 – 40,000 square foot – floors of the Twin Towers were barely supported by chewing gum, or toothpicks, rather than massive steel beams, and just waiting for the slightest nudge from above to begin accelerating toward Earth.  Does it makes sense that they would all have “pancaked” in 10.5 seconds… the same amount of time a bowling ball would have fallen the same distance?  Are we to assume the air resistance made no difference whatsoever?

Lest you think the air between each of those floors would not have made a difference, let me show you one more picture that illustrates the ability of air resistance to absorb kinetic energy – a highfall airbag used by stunt men when they jump from tall buildings.

A highfall airbag creates resistance which decelerates a falling stunt man by absorbing kinetic energy.

Each floor of the WTC towers was not only a large sail, but an enclosed “airbag” as well.

Even if we discount entirely the resistance offered by massive amounts of steel, and we discount the tremendous amount of energy necessary to pulverize the concrete we witnessed in a pyroclastic flow of volcanic proportions, and theorize that all the floors had to do was “pancake” through thin air… that air alone would have resulted in a collapse time much greater than 10.5 seconds.

But we don’t even need a much greater time.  A measly half second per floor would have totaled 55 seconds!  The fact that NO additional time is present means SOME additional energy other than that supplied by gravity was absolutely necessary.  The question is, where did that energy come from?

I’ve accepted the fact that nothing short of a confession signed by George Bush or Rudy Giuliani would convince many skeptics that 9/11 was an inside job… and that would have to be witnessed by Jesus Christ himself.  It’s just too unbelievable for some folks to believe.

Deductive should trump inductive reasoning, but some opinions are not a product of reasoning.  And nobody said humans are reasonable.

I am a conspiracy theorist!!  But so are you!!  As is anyone who has an opinion concerning what happened on 9/11.  I get tired of this phrase being used as a pejorative.  If the media wants to vilify a group it seems that all they have to do is give them a name – any name – and then continually use it with negative connotations and bingo… everyone turns off their brains, quits thinking and just chants the phrase.

Let’s define the words.

Conspiracy – an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.

Theory – a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.

By these definitions 19 highjackers armed with box knives is a conspiracy.  And it’s a theory until there is a hell of a lot more evidence to support it than just the retelling of the tale as if it were a proven fact.  Too many of the actual facts show it to be an impossible scenario.

For instance, the theory, within the theory – the “pancake theory”.  This is the official explanation of how the WTC Twin Towers collapsed in approximately 10.5 seconds.

The theory states that the jet fuel weakened the steel beams supporting the building.  They used to say it melted them, until even the dumbest of the dumb were finally convinced that jet fuel (kerosene) does not burn hot enough to melt steel.  I have a kerosene stove on my boat and my steel pan has yet to melt – or even weaken.  The theory is that because the beams were weakened the upper floors collapsed onto the floor below which began a cascading collapse bringing all the floors down on top of one another.  It was officially referred to as “pancaking”.

Now consider this photo taken as the collapse of one of the towers began.

Within just a few seconds tons of pulverized concrete and chopped up steel beams were being ejected.

Ask yourself this question.  Can a pulverized hammer driver a nail?  If your hammer turns to dust with the first blow… how do you strike the second blow?

You surely understand where I’m going but in case you don’t let me try to set up a thought experiment for you.  You have a stack of bricks, each separated by a space of say… ten brick thicknesses.  Let’ assume these bricks are supported by some structure that is just strong enough to hold the bricks above it, and that any acceleration (we can’t say additional weight because there is only the weight of the bricks to bring down the stack) will cause a brick to fall on the next lower brick.

Now assume you were able to accelerate the top brick with enough energy to pulverize the  brick below it into fine dust. ( The first thing that should be obvious is that gravity alone would not be enough, unless the brick were far enough away in height to accelerate to terminal velocity.  But, for the sake of argument let’s assume a drop of a few feet would be enough.)  What would happen at that point?  Would the pulverized brick hit the next brick with enough force to continue a cascading collapse?  If so… would it have enough force to pulverize the next brick?

If you don’t get my point yet, or if you simply buy the idea that the bricks would (all 110 of them) collapse into a pile of pulverized dust (except for the dust that floated away to land elsewhere), then I’ve got a conspiracy theory you’d probably accept.

Once upon a time there were these Muslims who hated us… uh… because we’re free.  And they hated us so much that 19 of them learned to fly small Cessna airplanes, and armed with box knives…

However, it is not a place to share one’s political concerns.  I love them, but they prefer to keep their heads securely buried (in the sand or up their asses… pick a metaphor) rather than share an opinion.

Facebook is not a place where I can vent.  And with every passing day I have a growing need to vent.

So… I’m posting again.

Dried chiles sell for 80 pesos per kilo.  The pickers get 5 pesos for each basket they pick and can pick 50 to 60 baskets in a day on average.

The pickers are mostly Indians from the south of Mexico – migrant workers who live here temporarily during the harvesting season which lasts for more than six months.  While the parents are working in the fields the children take care of one another and entertain themselves like poor children do.  I am impressed by the maturity of the little mamacitas, girls barely older than their younger charges strapped to their backs with nothing more than a soft blanket.

Barely bigger than the siblings they care for, these Indian girls babysit while their parents harvest chiles in the fields near Mazatlan Mexico.

I’ve got more photos but I’m on the boat and my connection is so slow I’ll have to wait for another time.

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