OSAMA BIN LADEN'S ACTIONS, AND OUR reactions to them, have defined my adult life. 1 was in New York City on September 11th, 2001, a senior in college. After the towers collapsed, I walked 95 blocks to get as close to Ground Zero as possible, so I could see first-hand the destruction that would define our future. By the time I got to Baghdad four years later, very few Americans believed that the people we were fighting in Iraq posed a threat to the United States. Even the military press didn't bother lying about it anymore, referring to our enemies as "insurgents" rather than "terrorists." A woman I loved was killed in Baghdad in January 2007 - Al Qaeda in Iraq took credit for it - and my younger brother fought for 15 months as an infantry platoon leader, earning a Bronze Star. Other friends, both American and Iraqi, suffered their own losses: homes, limbs, loved ones.
By the fall of 2008, when I had moved on to Afghanistan, bin Laden and Al Qaeda were barely footnotes to what we were doing there. "It's not about bin Laden,'" a military intelligence official told me. "It's about fixing the mess." This added to the growing despair Americans felt about the war: If it wasn't about bin Laden, then what the fuck was it about? Why were we fighting wars that took us no closer to the man responsible for unleashing the horror of September 11th? A top-ranking military official told me last year that he didn't think we'd ever get bin Laden. Yet each time our presidents and generals told us why we were still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, they always used bin Laden and September 11th as an excuse. As long as they insisted on fighting these wars we didn't need to fight, the wound to the American psyche wasn't allowed to heal.
Right from the start, the idea of the War on Terror was a fuzzy one at best. We were promised there would be no "battlefields and beachheads," as President George W. Bush put it. It would be a secret war, conducted mostly in the dark, no holds barred. And that's how it might have played had we got bin Laden early on, dead or alive. But that's not what happened. Instead, we went on a rampage in the full light of day. We got our battlefields and beachheads after all. Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Fallujah, Ramadi, Najaf, Mosul, Kirkuk, Basra, Kabul and Kandahar again - the list went on and on. We couldn't find bin Laden, so we went after anyone who looked like him, searching for other monsters to put down: the Taliban, Saddam Hussein, Abu Musah al-Zarqawi.
In the end, bin Laden got the carnage he had hoped to unleash. Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on September 11th. Since then, 6,022 American servicemen and women have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more than 42,000 have been wounded. More than 3,000 allied soldiers have died, along with some 1,200 private contractors, aid workers and journalists. Most of the killing didn't take place in battles - it was in the dirty metrics of suicide bombs, death squads, checkpoint killings, torture chambers and improvised explosive devices. Civilians on their way to work or soldiers driving around in circles, looking for an enemy they could seldom find. We may never know how many innocent civilians were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, but estimates suggest that more than 160,000 have died so far. Al Qaeda, by contrast, has lost very few operatives in the worldwide conflagration - perhaps only "scores," as President Obama said this month. In truth, Al Qaeda never had many members to begin with. Not since Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, setting off World War I, has a conspiracy undertaken by so few been felt by so many.
After learning of bin Laden's death, I congratulated my friends in the military and the intelligence community, tweeted my appreciation to President Obama and his team, then sat back and listened to the horns honking outside my apartment in Washington. I thought of all the dead, and what adding this fucker's name to the list actually means. My hope - and it is not one I have much hope in - is that our political leaders will use bin Laden's death to put an end to the madness he provoked. Withdraw our remaining troops from Iraq, a country that never posed a threat to us. End the war in Afghanistan, where we will spend $120 billion this year to prevent the country from becoming a hideout for AI Qaeda. As bin Laden's death makes clear, our true enemies will always find a hideout, no matter how many people we torture and bribe and kill. For the past 10 years, we have used the name Osama bin Laden to justify our wars. Perhaps, now that he is dead, we can use it in the cause of peace.
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
16 Aug 21:12:53 www.google.com.pk passive of conditional 3
The grammatical rule underlying any passive transformation is based on the introduction of the auxiliary “be “ in all its tense forms , being present, past or future in addition to position shift between the subject and the object.
This rule is applicable to any sentence where the verb is transitive.
Let’s look at some examples.
The US government exerts pressure on file hosting servers.
In this sentence,
“The US government” is the subject,
“Exerts” is the main verb in the simple present tense,
“Pressure” is the object of the verb,
“On” is a preposition,
And “file hosting servers” is the object of the preposition “on”.
In any passive transformation we obviously ask the question “what” or “who” preceded by the verb.
In our example “exerts what?”
The answer is “pressure”.
So the word “pressure” will become the new subject of the passive transformation.
We introduce the correct form of the verb “be” in the simple present tense since the original verb “exerts” is in the simple present tense and we change our main verb into a past participle, taking into consideration whether it is regular or irregular and finally we introduce the “by” phrase and the subject of the active sentence, which is called the agent.
The sentence then becomes:
Pressure is exerted on file hosting servers by the US government.
That’s it.
Let’s go to the question asked over and over by visitors to this blog: the passive of conditional sentences.
Any conditional sentence can be transformed into the passive whatever type it is, type 1, 2 or 3 on condition the verb is transitive, which simply means that the verb has an object and obviously it answers the “what” or “who” question.
Conditional sentences are made up of two clauses, a “subordinate clause” which is the “if clause” and a “main clause”- a cause and an effect.
Let’s look at an example.
When there’s a cause-effect relationship between two sentences, a conditional sentence is always possible.
If the US government exerts too much pressure on file hosting servers, file sharing will soon die. ( “can” and “may” can be both used instead of “will”.)
Let’s ask the “what” question.
“Exert” what?
The answer is “too much pressure”.
So the passive transformation of our conditional sentence will be:
If too much pressure is exerted on file hosting servers (by the US government), file sharing will soon die.
Our example is of type 1.
We can follow the same steps in conditional type 2 , 3 or mixed conditionals.
The search quest of a visitor from Pakistan was about the passive of conditional type 3.
The passive transformation of conditional type 3 is as simple as that of conditional type 1 if we master our grammatical tools.
Let’s look at an example in conditional type 3 now.
Someone: he stole the money. They took him to jail.
There’s certainly a cause-effect relationship between these two sentences.
Since the time context in this situation is in the past, so, evidently, conditional type 3 is needed here.
And since the context, the reality of the situation is positive , we are going to imagine something which is totally the opposite, negative; hence conditional type 3 is called unreal or imaginary past.
If he hadn’t stolen the money, they wouldn’t have taken him to jail.
But the reality is: they took him to prison because he stole the money.
Let’s ask the “what” question.
He “had stolen” “what”?
The answer is “the money”.
So “the money” will become the new subject of conditional sentence in the passive.
The past participle transformation of the verb is not necessary since in conditional type 3 we need the past perfect.
And we need to introduce the verb “be” which is the key in any passive transformation.
The main verb in the active conditional sentence is in the past perfect, so “be” in the past perfect is “had been” and in our case it is “hadn’t been”.
Our sentence will become:
If the money hadn’t been stolen by him, they wouldn’t have taken him to jail.
Sometimes both clauses of the conditional sentences can be transformed into the passive and our example is no exception.
If the money hadn’t been stolen by him, he wouldn’t have been taken to jail. That’s it.
I hope I’ve been as much clear as possible in my explanation.
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
Laurie Penny wrote Tuesday: “Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.”
Posted by Penny Red - Laurie Penny
I’m huddled in the front room with some shell-shocked friends, watching my city burn. The BBC is interchanging footage of blazing cars and running street battles in Hackney, of police horses lining up in Lewisham, of roiling infernos that were once shops and houses in Croydon and in Peckham. Last night, Enfield, Walthamstow, Brixton and Wood Green were looted; there have been hundreds of arrests and dozens of serious injuries, and it will be a miracle if nobody dies tonight. This is the third consecutive night of rioting in London, and the disorder has now spread to Leeds, Liverpool, Bristol and Birmingham. Politicians and police officers who only hours ago were making stony-faced statements about criminality are now simply begging the young people of Britain’s inner cities to go home. Britain is a tinderbox, and on Friday, somebody lit a match. How the hell did this happen? And what are we going to do now?
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder 'mindless, mindless'. Nick Clegg denounced it as 'needless, opportunistic theft and violence'. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge - declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was "utterly unacceptable." The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:
"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"
"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you." Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’
There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.
Tonight in London, social order and the rule of law have broken down entirely. The city has been brought to a standstill; it is not safe to go out onto the streets, and where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer. As I write, the looting and arson attacks have spread to at least fifty different areas across the UK, including dozens in London, and communities are now turning on each other, with the Guardian reporting on rival gangs forming battle lines. It has become clear to the disenfranchised young people of Britain, who feel that they have no stake in society and nothing to lose, that they can do what they like tonight, and the police are utterly unable to stop them. That is what riots are all about.
Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.
No one expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.
I’m stuck in the house, now, with rioting going on just down the road in Chalk Farm. Ealing and Clapham and Dalston are being trashed. Journalists are being mugged and beaten in the streets, and the riot cops are in retreat where they have appeared at all. Police stations are being set alight all over the country.
This morning, as the smoke begins to clear, those of us who can sleep will wake up to a country in chaos. We will wake up to fear, and to racism, and to condemnation on left and right, none of which will stop this happening again, as the prospect of a second stock market clash teeters terrifyingly at the bottom of the news reports. Now is the time when we make our choices. Now is the time when we decide whether to descend into hate, or to put prejudice aside and work together. Now is the time when we decide what sort of country it is that we want to live in. Follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter. And take care of one another.
We're anticipating that a version of PROTECT IP will be introduced in the House of Representatives in coming weeks, so we've pulled together this video to remind the world about what makes it so awful. Please check it out and pass it on.
PROTECT IP would give the government the power to force Internet service providers, search engines, and other "information location tools" to block users' access to sites that have been accused of copyright infringement -- the initiation of a China-style censorship regime here in the United States.
And Blessed Are The Ones Who Care For Their Fellow Men!
