For the Record

George Bush is an idiot

For the record, George Bush is an idiot.   Not just an idiot---the kind you feel sorry for---but a complete and unabashed idiot---the kind you rightly despise.

"My job is a decision-making job. And as a result, I make a lot of decisions," the president said.

He elaborated on that point later.

"I delegate to good people. I always tell Condi Rice, `I want to remind you, Madam Secretary, who has the Ph.D. and who was the C student. And I want to remind you who the adviser is and who the president is.'

I got a lot of Ph.D.-types and smart people around me who come into the Oval Office and say, `Mr. President, here's what's on my mind.' And I listen carefully to their advice. But having gathered the device (sic), I decide, you know, I say, `This is what we're going to do.' And it's `Yes, sir, Mr. President.' And then we get after it, implement policy."

Astonishing.   A complete, unabashed idiot of the magnitude of George Bush is---get this---president of the U.S.  Even ignoring all the destruction and devastation he and his fellow right-wingers have wrought on the U.S. and any country or people in their sights, the fact that---by whatever hook and crook---such a complete, unabashed idiot became president of the U.S. is itself enough to establish that the U.S. has entered its period of ultimate decline and fall.

And who are the compliciters saying "Yes, sir, Mr. President" to this complete, unabashed idiot?

Where did all the good people go?

When the basic illusions have been exhausted...

[What follows is from John Cusack's interview with Naomi Klein, a journalist in the tradition of Robert Fisk and Seymour Hersh, and author of recent articles and a book on Disaster Capitalism.]

Cusack: One of my favorite quotes is from Arthur Miller, who said: "An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted."  And with The Shock Doctrine, you are basically trying to shatter and obliterate the illusion of the neo-liberal or neo-con fundamentalist free market -- this official narrative wherein we not only are supposed to worship free markets that really aren't free, we must actually kill to feed them.

What the book rightly asks is what many have felt for a very long time: shouldn't we make a moral choice that you either make defense policy or you profit from it? I think that kind of transparency would be very important to have in the public sphere. Those people who go on CNN and are treated as impartial statesmen when, in reality, the book -- which is triple footnoted and sourced -- suggests otherwise. They did hold their former jobs...I guess by defintion they are statesmen....but if we are compelled to be honest we know they are other things as well... I'm speaking of people like George Shultz or Richard Perle.

Klein: Right.  If we look at who the real intellectual engines of this war are, we'd see a web of people who are not simply the statesmen they appear to me but card-carrying members of the disaster capitalism complex -- shareholders, board-members and directors of companies that profit directly and enormously from war and other disasters --

Cusack: Who would these people be..?

Klein: Well, for instance, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was a propaganda arm of the Bush administration, publicly making the case for the invasion of Iraq.  And it was founded by Bruce Jackson, a vice president of Lockheed Martin who had been out of his job for just three months.  Jackson stacked the committee with old colleagues from Lockheed -- Charles Kupperman, Lockheed Martin's vice president for space and strategic missiles was on it, and so was Douglas Graham, Lockheed's director of defense systems. And even though the committee was formed at the explicit request of the White House to make the case for war in the public mind, no one had to step down from Lockheed or sell his shares. Which was certainly good for committee members, since Lockheed's share price jumped 145 percent thanks to the war they helped engineer -- from $41 in March 2003 to $102 in February 2007. The Committee for the Liberation of Iraq was chaired by George Shultz, who wrote op-eds and went on TV beating the drums, and was presented just as this respected statesman. But Shultz hasn't been in office for decades.  And in the meantime, he'd been working for Bechtel -- at the time he was calling for the invasion, he was still on its board, and since Bechtel is a privately held company, we don't know anything about his holdings. We do know that Bechtel was one of the biggest winners of the reconstruction game in Iraq, landing $2.3-billion in contracts.

Cusack: How about James Baker and the $1 billion kickback that the Carlyle Group used him to try to get from the government of Kuwait, which you wrote about in The Nation?

Klein: Right.  I talk about the incredible power of the "formers." One of the distinguishing features of the Bush administration has been its reliance on outside advisers and freelance envoys to perform key functions: James Baker, Paul Bremer, Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Richard Perle, Bruce Jackson, and so on. So you have Congress playing a rubber-stamp role during the pivotal decision-making years, and Supreme Court rulings treated as little more than gentle suggestions, while these mostly volunteer advisers have wielded enormous influence, especially when it comes to Iraq. Their power stems from the fact that they used to perform key roles in government -- they are former secretaries of state, former ambassadors and former undersecretaries of defense. All have been out of government for years and, in the meantime, have set up lucrative careers in the disaster capitalism complex. And because they are freelance government contractors, they aren't subject to the same conflict-of-interest rules as elected or appointed politicians. The effect has been to eliminate the so-called revolving door between government and industry and allow the disaster industries to simply set up shop inside the government, using the reputations of these supposedly illustrious ex-politicians as cover.

As you say, in the press, they maintain their credibility as statesmen -- their current, far more relevant work in the corporate world is almost never mentioned. You brought up Baker. He was Bush's debt envoy to Iraq while he was still a partner in the Carlyle Group, which is a major arms trader whose fortunes have exploded since the war. He was also still a partner at Baker Botts, which represents some of the largest oil companies in the world, as well as Halliburton.  Kissinger is another classic example of the power of the formers because he's primarily been a businessman, not a statesman, now for some 25 years. He met with Bush and Cheney regularly making Iraq policy -- according to Bob Woodward, more than any other advisor. But who was he representing in those meetings? Kissinger has repeatedly put his business interests ahead of the public interest, most dramatically when he resigned as chair of the 9/11 Commission rather than disclose his list of corporate clients at Kissinger Associates.

Another example is Richard Perle.  Richard Perle headed the Defense Policy Board. Just two months after 9/11 he launched a venture capital firm called Trireme Partners that exists to invest in the homeland security and defense sectors.  One of his first investors was Boeing -- it sunk $20 million in Trireme. Meanwhile, Perle is using the Defense Policy Board to make the case for war. And of course Boeing was another one of the huge winners from the invasion of Iraq.

So I asked the question, "Why is it that we refer to Richard Perle merely as an ideologue -- rather than, say, as an arms dealer with an impressive vocabulary?"

Cusack: The question becomes one of intellectual honesty and basic morality. I wanted to talk about the players or the heirs of the Friedman legacy who are in the public sector today... The Grover Norquists and Bill Kristols of the world come to mind ...You also talk about the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute as pursuing the goal of the elimination of the public sphere and the total liberation of corporations.

Klein: I refer to the people in those think tanks as "the people who are paid to think by the makers of tanks" because a huge amount of the funding for these think tanks is coming directly from the weapons and homeland security industry. They are funded by some of the wealthiest families and the wealthiest corporations in this country so the question of intellectual honesty really has to come up. They exist in a strange intellectual gray zone where they get money in order to think. And besides, I'm not sure thinking really belongs in tanks.

Cusack: So you're saying that the Shultzes and the Perles and the Kissingers and the Jim Bakers of the world are embedded in the homeland security/privatized war economy?

Klein: More than embedded. I mean, they are it.

Cusack: I was trying to --

[laughter ]

Klein: Why are you trying to be polite?

Cusack: I don't know. I don't know. That's part of the problem, too: being polite with this immorality and not having the courage to call something what it is...The refusal of the Congress to challenge Bush in a meaningful way is proof of the Democratic complicity in the new economy. To name only right wing people is to ignore the central thesis of intellectual honesty as the first step in a long corrective march... So we'll have to talk about what Democrats are in on this game and name them, too...we'll have to get into that later.

How it works

When the govt is run by a band of deranged and lawless radicals, aided and abetted by team-playing conservatives, craven journalists and bedwetting Democrats.  Glenn Greenwald comments:

More revealing still is Goldsmith's description of how the Bush administration systematically violated one law after the next -- employing tactics that are truly the hallmark of the most lawless third-world dictators:

"In his book, Goldsmith claims that Addington and other top officials treated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act the same way they handled other laws they objected to: "They blew through them in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations," he writes.

[...]"

They literally decided they would break whatever laws they wanted -- one law after the next, in critical areas -- based on patently baseless memos issued by obedient followers like John Yoo. Not only did they do this in complete secrecy from Congress, they refused even to allow Executive Branch officials who were told to follow orders to see the legal basis for what they were told to do. Addington, whom Goldsmith described as "someone who spoke for and acted with the full backing of the powerful vice president," would simply demand compliance with what Cheney wanted. And anyone who objected was subjected to this (emphasis in original):

"Months later, when Goldsmith tried to question another presidential decision, Addington expressed his views even more pointedly. "If you rule that way," Addington exclaimed in disgust, Goldsmith recalls, "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands." "

While our national media was glorifying the Great Commander-in-Chief and actively disseminating their most manipulative claims and mocking Democrats on the pettiest of grounds (The Serious National Security Grown-ups are in Charge; John Kerry windsurfs! John Edwards loves his hair!), the Bush administration was dismantling the rule of law, systematically violating long-standing statutes and treaties at will. We were ruled by a truly lawless government, while our media institutions and political elite sat by meek and respectful.

Perhaps most infuriating is the fact that, as it turns out, violating these laws in secret was not even necessary -- because Congress was, and still is, more than happy to legalize whatever they wanted to do. Almost immediately after the Supreme Court finally imposed some mild limitations on the President's detention and interrogation powers -- first in Hamdi, then in Hamdan -- Congress, as Goldsmith says, "promptly passed a law that gave him everything he asked for, authorizing many aspects of the military commissions that the Supreme Court had struck down."

And the terrorist bomb about which David Addington was fantasizing in order to get rid of FISA was equally unnecessary, since the Democratic Congress, in the face of the types of threats Goldsmith recounts Addington routinely made -- "the blood of the hundred thousand people who die in the next attack will be on your hands" -- just eviscerated the crux of FISA's protections by law. Hence, what began as the administration's illegal and secret abuses have become the legally sanctioned policies of the United States.

It is critical to emphasize that Goldsmith -- like James Comey and John Ashcroft -- is no hero. He is a hard-core right-wing ideologue who continues to support many of the administration's most radical positions, including his view that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions does not apply to terrorist suspects (the position rejected by Hamdan). And it was Goldsmith who ultimately approved of the modified (and plainly illegal) NSA warrantless eavesdropping program.

Moreover, Goldsmith explains that he had not even intended to address the NSA surveillance program in his book, but changed his mind once he was served with subpoenas by the FBI in connection with the ongoing criminal investigation to find out who the whistleblower was who alerted the country to this illegality -- an investigation which Goldsmith supports. As Goldsmith says: "I'm not a civil libertarian, and what I did wasn't driven by concerns about civil liberties per se."

Goldsmith is commendable only by comparison to the truly extremist and reprehensible likes of Cheney, Addington, Gonzales and Yoo. He is, by and large, a True Believer in the Bush "War on Terror" and in theories designed to expand substantially executive power. That is what makes his revelations all the more credible, and all the more disturbing. What he is describing is a band of deranged and lawless radicals who, during his tenure, ran our government and who, after they forced him out, continue to do so.

But with little meaningful opposition to any of this -- either in the media or in the Congress -- little attention will be paid to these extraordinary revelations, and our government will continue to be shaped in the image of Dick Cheney and David Addington. Now that they have obtained most of their original wish list from a compliant Congress, just imagine what they are dreaming of, the still new unchecked powers which they believe are only "one bomb away."

Waking up to power

Here is a brilliant commentary by Keith Olbermann on Bush's commutation of Libby's sentence.  The comparison with the trajectory of Watergate---where Nixon's injudicious firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox was the final straw leading to Nixon's resignation---indicates how the political landscape has, since then, hardened into a seemingly impermeable crust of criminality and corruption.

At issue now as then, Olbermann suggests, is Cox's question of whether we are to be a nation of men, not laws.  I agree, but on the other hand it has always been persons, and more specifically certain of their virtues---their integrity, their compassion, their desire to do good, their desire to avoid shame---that have ultimately kept us safe from the abuses of those in positions of great political power.  What has happened since Nixon had the decency to resign is that right-wingers have woken up precisely to the fact that it wasn't laws that were preventing them from achieving their nefarious purposes; that if they ditched their scruples and shamelessly went for the gusto, nothing in particular would stop them.  The real question now, as then, is whether we are to be a nation of law-abiding persons, not criminals.  And what's different now is the answer given by those even at the highest stations of government: yeah, we're criminals; so what?

This right-wing strategy has succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams thanks not just to the opposition's still playing by the old rules and assumptions, but also because almost no one has been able to admit to themselves or anyone else that criminals have been installed as the leaders of the U.S., much less take appropriate action to put them behind bars or at least out of office.  Human virtues are also the ultimate ground of the laws' being enforced, and here too things have evidently taken a turn for the worse.

The true measure of power

The true measure of power is how much you can get away with, which makes the gangsters running the U.S. effectively all-powerful.

The U.S.'s 3 party system

Upon contemplating events like Bill Clinton's decimation of social services, or the  Democrat-controlled House's giving Bush yet another free pass at Iraq, one might understandably wonder just what concrete differences are supposed to separate Republicans and Dems.   Hence, as my mother noted, some of the best commentary on the vote explained it by the U.S.'s having a one-party system, with the infamous military-industrial-corporate complex in control. 

That's on the right track, but Pachacutec over at Firedoglake makes a strong case that there are 3 parties, not one, in the U.S.: the DC/K Street Elites, the Grassroots Theocrats, and the Grassroots Progressives.  The analysis has the ring of truth about it:

When we watch the election results on Tuesday, understand that we are watching three political machines at war with each other.

 

People commonly believe we have a basic two-party system, but we really have a three party system.  Each party machine has its own core constituency, its own philosophy of government and its own media megaphone.  While you're watching CNN or whatever on election night, here's the perspective you won't get from Wolf Blitzer or the pundits, who themselves are part of one of these machines.  Here are the three parties:

DC/K Street Elites: As the name implies, these are the people whose constituencies are the big money lobbies in DC.  Those lobbies are mostly big corporations, which include GE and Time Warner.  Their media machine includes establishment media outlets like the major networks, all the cable news stations, the major newspapers including the Washington Post, the AP and the New York Times, Clear Channel radio, defense contractors like Haliburton, Northrup Grumman and CACI, and the anti-net neutrality telecoms like Verizon and Comcast.

This machine has no natural voting constituency of note, so it needs to ally itself with some grassroots machine that can deliver voters in order to stay in power.  Because it has no real popular support for its agenda, it has to lie to sustain whatever political alliance it creates with an outsourced grass roots movement. Ideologically, this machine does not really care what grassroots movement it uses for vote getting, though it finds a more pliant ally in the right wing, since right wingers are authoritarians and unlikely to poke holes in this party's lies or Rube Goldberg Machiavellian contortions.  Because of all these deceptions and feints, this machine operates like the one in the video above.

This party has been in control of US politics for pretty much my entire life.  It made common cause with Barry Goldwater's right wing movement, and made a strategic shift to accommodate the Theocratic Grassroots movement described below.  However, it also does business with "third way" Democrats like the Clintons and their establishment DC allies operating under the label of the Democratic Party.  Rahm Emanuel belongs to this machine, as do Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid, Barack Obama, Heath Shuler and most of the rest of the DC Democrats, especially, but not exclusively, in the Senate.  This party brought you Viet Nam and Iraq, because both were good for business and provided lots of room for war profiteering.

This party believes government is the tool of its elite constituents.  It seeks an equilibrium nationally with itself in power, and once this is achieved, it promotes "bipartisan" collegiality to sustain the status quo.  It equally favors John McCain, one of its members, and Joe Lieberman, another of its members.  It includes as well the so-called "Bloomberg Democrats" who favor big business, war and bipartisan comity, indifferent to party affiliation.  Its establishment media arm simultaneously favors its outsourced, right wing theocratic vote getting arm while presenting "objective" news under the guise of he-said, she-said "fairness" between establishment Republicans and Democrats.

ASBOs

Leave it to New Labour, which has done so much to encourage the Big Brothering of the U.K., to come up with a new way to meddle in people's lives: Anti-Social Behavior Orders, civil orders against trespasses so broadly defined that any mildly irritating behavior or general mischief would seem to qualify.  The legislation enabling ASBOs was introduced in 1999 as part of the Crime and Disorder Act and is increasingly implemented:

The number of orders made has escalated over the six-year period that ASBOs have been available. During the first eight months in 1999, only 104 orders were made. However, there has been a significant escalation with more than 2,600 orders made since November 2003.

So, for example, ASBOs have been served on people---frequently kids: 4/10 are under 17---for begging, posting flyers, shouting or swearing, ringing doorbells and running away, repeatedly playing the same song, playing games in the street or on various green areas, and hoarding stuff, as well as other slightly shadier activities such as throwing empty bottles, public urination, or street solicitation for (legal) prostitution.

Grounds for serving an ASBO don't need to meet the usual standards: hearsay evidence and anonymous testimony are admissible as evidence; complaints do not have to be proven beyond reasonable doubt, merely judged on the balance of probability.  Those served with ASBOs are subject to various restraints and conditions: besides stopping the offending activity, one may be subject to police check-ups, curfews, etc.  And even when (as in the vast majority of cases) the original offense wasn't criminal, violation of the restraints (e.g., continuing to play that record or violating curfew) is, so one can go to jail for up to 5 years for "anti-social" behavior; in fact, 50% of those receiving ASBOs end up in jail.

The Parliamentary Answers reveal that the breach rate has been 39% for 10-15-year-olds, 38% for 16-20-year-olds, and 31% for those aged over 21. However, figures are only available on numbers jailed for the years 2001 and 2002. In 2001, 114 persons breached by the courts following the imposition of an ASBO were jailed out of 322 issued. In 2002, 212 were jailed out of 403 issued. These figures would suggest that around 50% of those who are the subject of an ASBO eventually end up in jail.

Moreover, unlike criminal offenses, those served with orders needn't be kept anonymous and on the contrary the usual strategy is to "name and shame" offenders (yes, including the kids), putting their name and pictures on flyers (humiliation posting is allowed, I guess) and the backs of buses.  You can imagine how this affects their lives, and futures.  This article provides some details; don't miss the gallery.

Investigations!

A while back I wrote on the Leiter reports:

Lieberman is indeed good for the GOP and Bush Gang, lending a veneer of "bipartisanship" (in the Norquist sense). But what tips the balance for me is that the propaganda value of controlling the Senate is tremendous, immensely outweighing this. The party in control of the Senate gets majority representation on every Senate committee, which means two things: first, legislation individual GOP Senators would prefer not to go on the record about can be brought to the floor for a rollcall vote, rather than buried in committee; and second, committees have subpoena power. Sick of the Bush Gang sweeping the politicization of science/intel lies about Iraq/warrantless spying and break-ins/torture/etc under the rug? I daresay the corporate media is not inclined to hype these issues on its own. But imagine the incalculable damage it could do to the GOP for decades to come to have the rancid sump of six years of their rule probed over in endless detail, day in and day out, for two years. I like the sound of that!

This is now what we're getting -- eg, the Senate GOP going on record in support of endless war and the Doan fun. As predicted, the American people are disgusted by what they are now learning -- facts which the heroes in the legislature have made impossible to cover up -- which seems to be making a long-term anti-GOP realignment.

Impressive honesty

Jimmy Carter must have known that even the title of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid would draw fire, in daring to implicate Israel in systematic racial oppression of Palestinians.  But evidently he's had it up to here with this particular denial of the obvious, especially as perpetuated by his fellow Democrats:

[Good Morning America host] Robin Roberts told Carter that "many people find surprising that you come down a little hard on Israel, and that there have been some key Democrats who have distanced themselves a little bit from your view on Israel."

"In fact, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said 'it is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based suppression, and Democrats reject that allegation vigorously,'" Roberts said. "What is your response to that?"

"Well, Robin, I have spent the last 30 years trying to find peace for Israel and Israel's neighbors, and the purpose of this book is to do that," Carter responded. "But you can't find peace unless you address the existing issues honestly and frankly."

Carter said that there was "no doubt now that a minority of Israelis are perpetuating apartheid on the people in Palestine, the Palestinian people."

[...]   

Carter called Israel's occupation the "prime cause" of continuing violence in the Middle East.

"And contrary to the United Nations resolutions, contrary to the official policy of the United States government, contrary to the Quartet so-called road map, all of those things -- and contrary to the majority of Israeli people's opinion -- this occupation and confiscation and colonization of land in the West Bank is the prime cause of a continuation of violence in the Middle East," said Carter.

"And what is being done to the Palestinians under Israeli domination is really atrocious," Carter continued. "It's a terrible affliction on these people."

In his book, Carter argues that "peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens and honor its own previous commitments by accepting its legal borders."

Indeed.  An excerpt from Carter's book can be found here.

Violent suppression in Oaxaca

Events in Oaxaca have taken a turn for the worse (see here and here).  A brief summary:

In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.

The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca.  The teachers, without guns, repel this attack.

A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or removal of the corrupt governor.

At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government, many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO, to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power and left in poverty.

The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs. They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to leave).  Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.

A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began broadcasting from a public university.  Supporters of the movement took over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long excluded from public conversation.

The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will of Indymedia.  Days later, the Mexican federal government sends militarized police into the state.  They do not go after the murderers, but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent social movements from the city of Oaxaca.  At least one boy is killed by a federal police tear-gas canister.

This disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme.  You know the routine by now.  First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the future.  Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the riot troops.  Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:

The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.

This video of the invasion tells a more accurate story.  Cast your eye upon the row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as big as a two-story house.  We've seen those outfits before, of course, in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics are typically on their side.

Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your people!").  These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently oppressing.  Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human. Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in five, ten years?---to robots of war.