Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. Blog, Internet resources, online reading groups, articles and interviews, Illuminatus! info.

Friday, March 16, 2012

A couple of quotations

"He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch in which only the most cunning and ruthless can survive ... he genuinely loved children and dogs, unless they were on the site of something that had to be bombed in the National Interest."

 ILLUMINATUS!, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson.

"While Shaye, 35, had long been known as a brave, independent-minded journalist in Yemen, his collision course with the US government appears to have been set in December 2009. [Abdulelah Halder Shaye is currently being held in prison on Barack Obama's request -- Ed.] On December 17, the Yemeni government announced that it had conducted a series of strikes against an Al Qaeda training camp in the village of al Majala in Yemen’s southern Abyan province, killing a number of Al Qaeda militants. As the story spread across the world, Shaye traveled to al Majala. What he discovered were the remnants of Tomahawk cruise missiles and cluster bombs, neither of which are in the Yemeni military’s arsenal. He photographed the missile parts, some of them bearing the label “Made in the USA,” and distributed the photos to international media outlets. He revealed that among the victims of the strike were women, children and the elderly. To be exact, fourteen women and twenty-one children were killed. Whether anyone actually active in Al Qaeda was killed remains hotly contested. After conducting his own investigation, Shaye determined that it was a US strike. The Pentagon would not comment on the strike and the Yemeni government repeatedly denied US involvement. But Shaye was later vindicated when Wikileaks released a US diplomatic cable that featured Yemeni officials joking about how they lied to their own parliament about the US role, while President Saleh assured Gen. David Petraeus that his government would continue to lie and say “the bombs are ours, not yours.”

"Why Is President Obama Keeping a Journalist in Prison in Yemen?" Jeremy Scahill, The Nation. (Full article here.)

1 comment:

michael said...

Tom: Apt Illuminatus! quote to lead into this criminally underreported story. I first learned of this from Glenn Greenwald's article in Slate, which led me to the intrepid Scahill.

This story is so sickening I'm going to do my level best to lobby the "liberal" media to cover it.

Greenwald:
http://www.salon.com/2012/03/14/obamas_personal_role_in_a_journalists_imprisonment/singleton/.