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The War Journals of Hillary Clinton, Vol. 1
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(From the diaries. kos)
As bullets clawed the air around us and screams echoed down the rubble-strewn tarmac, I felt almost peaceful.
It was a simple mission, they had told me - get in, shake a few hands and mouth a few platitudes, get out. Simple. Yeah.
Things had started going wrong while we were still in the air and only gotten worse from there. So here we were, pinned down, choking on the acrid tang of cordite and the heady scent of human blood. The mission was even simpler now: survive. Whatever the cost, survive.
There was a grunt and a clatter of equipment as Sinbad threw himself down at my side. Sweat glistened on his bare arms, and I could see tendons contracting and relaxing as he squeezed off bursts from his M14. The motion was hypnotic, like a snake about to strike. Perhaps, when all this was over-
No. Concentrate. Focus on the mission. Survive.
A shout from my left drew my head around. Sheryl Crow, guitar still strapped to her back, had taken cover behind a haphazard pile of decaying corpses. Her hair, once lustrous, now lank and greasy, was held back from her eyes by a dirty red headband. Her slim nostrils flared in the dirt-smeared oval of her face, seeking air free of the funeral taint shrouding the airfield. Still, I saw a fierce exultation in her expression that I knew mirrored my own.
Her lithe, nimble fingers stroked the top of an M67 frag grenade, strumming a chord of impending doom. With one quick, economical movement, she plucked the pin free and sent the deadly payload sailing toward the ridge concealing our enemies. My eyes traced the arc, willing it to fly true, to rain death on-
"There!" Sinbad shouted. "The convoy!"
I wrenched my gaze in the direction he was pointing. The boom of the grenade registered only faintly, suddenly unimportant. Thirty yards dead ahead was the real target: the armored convoy, offering safety, shelter, survival. If we could reach it.
"Follow me!" Sinbad roared, levering himself to his feet. As I prepared to follow, a high-pitched whine arrowed across my eardrums and warm, sticky rain splashed my face.
I forced myself to look, already knowing what I would see. The big man lay there, crumpled, the left side of his head a nightmare maze of blood, brains and tight curls of yellowish-orange hair.
Time to mourn later. Survive.
I juked to my left, darting and weaving, somehow making it to Sheryl's position. Her eyes were wide, shock and fear clouding their emerald depths. "Is he-"
"Gone," I snapped. "We have to move. Now."
For a moment I wondered if I would have to leave her behind, but then her jaw tightened and she nodded sharply. "Stay behind me," she said with a brief squeeze of my hand, then she was up and running, moving like a deer.
I followed, matching her as best I could with the mindless insect hum of lead bees filling my ears and the cracked tarmac clutching at my heels. We ran, time stretching, flattening, the convoy impossibly distant, a cruel mirage, too far, too far . . .
And then, somehow, we were almost there. We had made it, we were going to -
A flat crack and the mournful twang of a guitar string. Sheryl fell, scarlet-splashed splinters from the shattered guitar seeming to hang in the air.
I stopped. Men were flooding out of the brush and streaming around the cars. One approached me, smirking, rifle held casually across his body, smoke still rising from the barrel.
"Every day a winding road," he said in heavily accented English, shrugging a shoulder toward Sheryl's body. He stepped closer, almost close enough to touch. "End of road for her today. And you."
Still smirking, he began to raise the rifle. I lunged forward, freed the ka-bar concealed under my pantsuit, and buried it to the hilt in his chest. He grunted, stiffened, and then slid backwards, the knife making a greedy slurping sound as it pulled free.
The other rebels froze, momentarily stunned. There were a lot of them - too many, surely - but it didn't matter. One day, I knew, I would be telling this story to rapt audiences as I made my inevitable march to the Presidency. Would this ragged group of smelly goatfuckers be the ones to stop me? Would they?
I raised the blade to my lips, licked it clean, and began to laugh.
Survive. Whatever the cost, survive.
tripletee
Hillary Clinton
Bosnia
Tuzla
Snark
Front Paged
Plagiarized
Thu, 27 Mar 2008 04:54:51 GMT
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Life during wartime
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In 1759, Ben Franklin may or may not have written "Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." There's some dispute over whether he penned those lines or borrowed them for a publication. But there's no disputing that this concept of individual liberty balanced with collective security was at the very foundation of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
The balancing act between essential liberties and collective security has been more than put to the test in post-9/11 America, and the balance has most definitely shifted away from personal liberty. Consider this story told by a border agent at a meeting of 200 residents in Washington's San Juan Islands.
He was there to explain why the federal government is doing citizenship checks on domestic ferry runs. But near the end, while trying to convince the skeptical audience that the point is to root out terrorists, not fish for wrongdoing among the citizenry, deputy chief Joe Giuliano let loose with a tale straight out of "Dr. Strangelove."
It turns out the feds have been monitoring Interstate 5 for nuclear "dirty bombs." They do it with radiation detectors so sensitive it led to the following incident.
"Vehicle goes by at 70 miles per hour," Giuliano told the crowd. "Agent is in the median, a good 80 feet away from the traffic. Signal went off and identified an isotope [in the passing car]."
The agent raced after the car, pulling it over not far from the monitoring spot (near the Bow-Edison exit, 18 miles south of Bellingham). The agent questioned the driver, then did a cursory search of the car, Giuliano said.
Did he find a nuke?
"Turned out to be a cat with cancer that had undergone a radiological treatment three days earlier" Giuliano said.
He added: "That's the type of technology we have that's going on in the background. You don't see it. If I hadn't told you about it, you'd never know it was there."
The border agent went on to point out that they've caught two would-be terrorists at the Blaine border region, one in 1997 and one in 1999. What wasn't highlighted in that exchange was that this was during the Clinton administration. That the pre-9/11, pre-PATRIOT Act security measures and protocols that were in effect then were perfectly adequate to detect and to apprehend these men.
So how does finding a radioactive cat at 70 mph and from 80 feet away make us safer? And what exactly else is "going on in the background" that we don't see and don't know about? Last week, I wrote about the government's implementation of the Total Information Awareness program, a program that had been banned by Congress, but that the Pentagon implemented anyway.
Huge amounts of data--e-mail information (sender, recipient, subject line, time stamp), Internet searches (both conducted searches and sites visited), both wired and wireless phone calls (incoming and outgoing, as well as location and duration), financial records (credit card activity, wire transfers, bank account information), and tracking information from the TSA--are being swept up by the NSA and monitored for suspicious patterns.
The good news since last week, as smintheus reported, is that on one facet in this Total Information Awareness Surveillance Society, Gov. Brian Schweitzer made the feds blink. Key to their plans to keep track of us was Real ID, the state government-issued ID card that would replace our driver's license with a national ID card that would have a chip including, at a minimum, name, birth date, sex, ID number, a digital photograph, address, and a "common machine-readable technology" that would allow the data to be shared in federal databases--the ones that already store all that other data being picked up by the TIA programs. Schweitzer said "no," the feds said, "ok."
Expect Montana's victory on Real ID to encourage the other hold-out states, including Maine, South Carolina, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma to flat-out reject the program, and other states to join the movement. Idaho has already made steps in that direction with the state House unanimously rejecting the program. Now states like Alaska and the powerhouse state of California to join in.
Maybe the states can do what our Congress has failed at in the past seven years--say "no" to an administration that would happily sacrifice our Essential Liberty's for the illusion of safety.
mcjoan
FISA
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