(The Dell ate my awesome post, so this is what you're getting instead. I hate it when that happens!) While the big government wing of the GOP has been yammering about simultaneously assassinating Julian Assange and the First Amendment, the media has been ignoring a cable that would normally create a headline of glee over at any number of the Islamaphobic sites the GOP is currently burgeoning with:
WikiLeaks: Texas Company Helped Pimp Little Boys To Stoned Afghan Cops
Before somebody says, "Hey! that's a private contractor!" let me point out a couple of sentences from the article.
Prime among Atmar's concerns was a party partially thrown by DynCorp for Afghan police recruits in Kunduz Province....Many of DynCorp's employees are ex-Green Berets and veterans of other elite units, and the company was commissioned by the US government to provide training for the Afghani police. According to most reports, over 95 percent of its $2 billion annual revenue comes from US taxpayers.
Let's just not go there, ok?
Skipping ahead a little bit, turns out that one of the leaks the Afghani foreign minister feared involved news of a deviant party thrown by DynCorp.
...bacha bazi is a pre-Islamic Afghan tradition that was banned by the Taliban. Bacha boys are eight- to 15-years-old. They put on make-up, tie bells to their feet and slip into scanty women's clothing, and then, to the whine of a harmonium and wailing vocals, they dance seductively to smoky roomfuls of leering older men.
After the show is over, their services are auctioned off to the highest bidder, who will sometimes purchase a boy outright. And by services, we mean anal sex: The State Department has called bacha bazi a "widespread, culturally accepted form of male rape." (While it may be culturally accepted, it violates both Sharia law and Afghan civil code.)
Well, that explains the lack of shrieking from the Islamophobes on the militant right. Much like Hussein had stabilized Iraq, the Taliban had stopped this crap. But now American money is there, financing the sex lives of pedophiles who are violating Sharia. Maybe that's why Lindsey Graham wants us to stay there forever.
Does anybody think that Fox News is going to headline this? After all, they're total humanitarians. They must be, because they've featured a plethora of pieces on the lack of women's rights in Afghanistan since Bin Laden fled town.
Well, what about Glenn Beck? Pfffft. For this entire week, Beck has been painting a line from Assange to George Soros, all the while claiming that's not what he's doing. (His audience is not confused about that, but I am.) Do you think Glenn Beck read the cables? I do - he seems like a guy who does his homework. If he did, why is he choosing the "shoot the messenger" message? If he read the cables, and ignored this, what does that make him? And if he didn't read them? Same question.
OK, so the old media is out. But what about the bloggers? While I would almost like to see how some of the right wing blogs would try to spin this, they won't. There's not really any way to accuse either the Muslims or the Democrats of something nefarious, so they'll steer clear. After all, the story doesn't really fit the picture they've painted all these years, so it's best to just ignore it. They hate us because we're free, after all.
Meet the new media, same as the old media.
To all you people who keep saying that this stuff needs to stay secret to protect the troops, rest assured that all of us want to keep the troops safe, but most of us think the troops should have come home after Bin Laden fled. But If you're saying this stuff needs to stay secret to protect the government, then you can go dance with the Trostskyites that brought you to my party. They're supposed to protect us, not themselves, and that's exactly what they're doing here. Shame on you for supporting it.
EDITED TO ADD: Memeorandum is ignoring us as usual, but they have links to other bloggers covering the story. The Other McCain isn't on that list yet, but he's also apalled.