Suggested Discussion Outline

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johnkarls
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Suggested Discussion Outline

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SUGGESTED DISCUSSION OUTLINE

The Nomination of John Brennan to Head The CIA

(Brennan embraced Enhanced Interrogation Techniques during his 25-year CIA career and, as Obama’s Counter-Terrorism Chief, has overseen The Drone Program and The Kill List for the last 4 years)


A. Drones

A-1. Torture??? Especially when a target is only maimed for life???
A-2. Deprivation of life “without due process”
A-2-a. U.S. citizens
A-2-b. Non-citizens
A-3. Capital punishment – cruel and unusual punishment
A-3-a. U.S. citizens
A-3-b. Non-citizens
A-4. Destruction of intelligence available by capture
A-5. Effectiveness in a War of Ideas against the Grass Roots Al Qaeda franchises
A-6. Top Secret classification of the Executive Orders governing the Drone Program
A-7. U.N. investigation at the request of Pakistan – Russia – China
A-8. Post-2/2/2013 distribution of original Discussion Outline --
A-8-a. Release of DOJ’s three-part test for killing Americans =
A-8-a-i. Imminent threat of attack (but “imminence” so watered down as to be meaningless)
A-8-a-ii. Capture infeasible (which is always the case now that all black sites are closed)
A-8-a-iii. Compliance with applicable “law of war” principles (necessity, distinction, proportionality and humanity)
A-8-b. Release of DOJ’s assertion that it has the right to kill “senior leaders” of Al Qaeda or its “associated forces” regardless of whether they are located on a battlefield of the “War on Terror”
A-8-c. NB: No review of President Obama’s decision required for either type of killing

B. Al Qaeda – character (command vs. franchise) and failed states

B-1. Afghanistan – Pakistani Tribal Areas
B-2. Somalia
B-3. Yemen
B-4. Libya – Benghazi
B-5. Mali – Algeria
B-6. Dien Bien Phu and Joe Biden

C. The Moral Authority For Either Us Or The Mainstream American Media To Dictate The Human Sacrifice of 10 Million Americans

C-1. Osama bin Laden’s fatwā to nuke 10 million Americans
C-1-a. The famous book on Osama’s fatwā authored by Graham Allison, Founding Dean of Harvard U’s Kennedy School of Government
C-1-b. The 178 suitcase-size nukes missing from the old Soviet Union
C-1-c. The impossibility to revoke Osama’s fatwā now that he is dead
C-1-d. Has the U.S. been effective or lucky to avoid a terrorist nuclear attack
C-1-d-i. All of our experts predicted after 9/11 that America would be nuked within a few years
C-1-d-ii. Both the Underwear Bomber and the Times Square Bomber could have nuked Detroit and Manhattan, respectively, if they had been competent (that is, we were lucky rather than effective)
C-2. Does the mainstream American media really believe in Human Sacrifice, or is their constant clamoring during the Bush Administration and eerie silence during the Obama Administration nothing more than cynical partisanship coupled with callous disregard for human life (at least American human life)
C-3. What right do we (or the mainstream American media) have to dictate Human Sacrifice?
C-3-a. Imposing your ethical standards on Aztec and Inca culture, do you even believe the majority has the right to make a Human Sacrifice of an individual who objects? That is, minority rights vs. majority rule?
C-4. Does the mainstream American media engage in “brain washing”???
C-4-a. Are their incessant false claims, for example vis-à-vis water boarding (please see the next section), nothing but old-fashioned “brain washing”???

D. Torture – Water Boarding

D-1. President Clinton’s official policy (per Tim Russert) of water boarding if necessary to save American lives
D-2. Ted Kennedy’s cynical refusal to define “torture” in the law that originated in his Judiciary Committee, coupled with his attempt to “brow beat” Bush appointees into taking responsibility for treating water boarding as “torture” because he didn’t want to take responsibility for 10 million dead Americans
D-3. President Obama
D-3-a. Executive Order banning water-boarding for show
D-3-b. God only knows how many Top Secret executive-order exceptions have been ordered
D-3-c. Refusal to permit the U.S. District Court in the trial of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani to be the first court anywhere in the U.S. or the world to consider whether water boarding is “torture” – painting the Obama Administration into the corner of treating The U.S. vs. Ghailani as a Soviet-style Show Trial since Ghailani would not be released no matter what the verdict
D-3-d. Ahmed Abdulkadir Warsame’s treatment on a U.S. Naval vessel in international waters for 2 months in 2011
D-4. The Irish Republican Army vs. The U.K. at the European Court of Human Rights
D-5. Is torture effective???
D-5-a. The fairy tale that the information obtained by torture is always inaccurate because victims will say anything to halt the pain
D-5-a-i. Ability to match information with other sources
D-5-a-ii. Ability to match information with physical realty
D-5-b. Allah, per Abu Zubahdah, knows that Muslims are only human and, accordingly, there is no shame in divulging information after the individual’s limit for resistance is reached

E. Is It More Important To Prosecute Terrorists Or To Obtain Intelligence About Future Attacks?

F. Is The American Media Correct That Our Shit Doesn’t Stink???

F-1. Polling in Arab and other Muslim countries has consistently shown that America is virtually-universally despised both before and after 9/11
F-2. Such polling after 9/11 has shown that Osama bin Laden has been lionized
F-3. Al Qaeda beheadings by scimitar of such Westerners as Daniel Pearl were conducted on worldwide television and finally halted only because Osama and Al Qaeda concluded that they were counter-productive PR-wise in TheWest
F-4. So why do we engage in Soviet-style Show Trials, such as that of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani???
F-5. And so why do we risk the Human Sacrifice of 10 million Americans???

G. Henry Kissinger vs. Colin Powell on the likelihood of Nuclear War Involving Iran

G-1. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell has guaranteed the sanity of Ayatollah Khamenei
G-2. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who is famous for our “opening to China” policy and for having previously authored as a Harvard Professor all of the basic texts on nuclear diplomacy on which the Cold War policy of Mutual Assured Destruction was based, has de-bunked Powell’s position both in a Washington Post OpEd article last fall and at Davos last week -- predicting that the attainment of nukes by Iran will result in many Arab countries obtaining nukes and, most importantly, a nuclear war in the Middle East within a few short years

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