Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Still figuring out what to do about the gallery. There are a lot of great photos. (Sorry for the insane load time. I may resave these down to a smaller size.)
For those of you just joining us, the twin cities now have a light rail line, about 8 miles, that will soon run from the Mall of America and international airport in Bloomington, up into Minneapolis, along to the Metrodome and Target Center, with a good deal of city between. This is the north end of the line or Warehouse District station, which is about 8 miles long now:
These pics are from Saturday night. This is approaching the Warehouse district station. I took this open-shutter shot over the shoulder (thru the cab window) of the driver.
This was earlier on Saturday. Metro Transit cleverly put free buses at each station so that more people could jump around and see the other stations. I jumped on this bus to skip ahead from Fort Snelling, where I would have been stuck for two or three trains, to the VA Medical Center one stop ahead, where I hopped on without delay. I couldn't believe that people were parked in the line at the Warehouse District station for hours, as it stretched two blocks.
These kids were riding with me on an articulated (bendy double size) bus that was travelling alongside the Hiawatha line between Fort Snelling and the VA. 
I call this one a development metaphor. The Metrodome is out of frame to the right and the Mississippi riverfront developments like the new Guthrie and condos are going up quickly.
Minneapolis City Hall at Government Plaza, photo taken from the Hennepin County Government Center.
Right after I got off at the warehouse district. The drivers liked talking to people. I am reflected:
Eager new riders. There were so many small children that I wonder if some will actually remember the LRT as their first memory...
I took a second pass at the train this evening, and got up right at the front of the cab, took some great photos and even a couple videos. There were tens of thousands of people attending the mega-multiparty throughout the city. I couldn't step out and get pictures at the southern stations on Hiawatha because of the huge lines and restrictions on time when I was cruising north, attempting to meet my friends to get back to St. Paul.
Driving back, I found that Fairview Ave. is about 3.1 miles from the Lake Street station, and the St. Paul border is 2.6 miles. There is a new bus route starting this week, the 53, which will take people along Marshall Ave. into Minneapolis, but it only stops 4 times in Minneapolis before getting to the station. Actually, that means that when I want to go downtown without paying an express fare, I can take just that line, although it takes quite a walk or getting dropped off by someone. If only they cruised up Grand right to the station...
The photos are importing right now. I don't have time to put everything together, and I am going out for another round tomorrow afternoon. I'll get some pics up here later. More to follow.....
Well, it was difficult to watch Fahrenheit 9/11 yesterday. We were in the first screening at the Mall of America theatre, which is an unreal enough place to begin with. On the whole, the movie was very upsetting, but that's the intent. It didn't play quite as fast and loose as Bowling for Columbine with the facts, and on the whole I think it works very well and will make buckets and buckets of money. I will get into more detail later.....
Because right now I am going to hop the bus down to Lake street and ride the new trains and take pictures. Excitement!!!! I will post them and put together a nice special feature page later.
I will throw out this blob of links before getting later to more prosaic things later Fri. And lots more light rail stuff.
Rumsfeld reminded his folks coercing Arabs to stand in the hot Cuban sun, he can do it for eight hours, so why can't they do four? This man is next for the Nobel prize and its no wonder the chicks still dig him. Look at all these hot interrogation docs they put out but Billmon adds that they are from far too early, before the torture scandals in question.
Resistance grows to the 'imported government' that the IGC foisted on everyone. "Pressure at Iraqi prison detailed" in USA Today:
The officer who oversaw interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad testified that he was under intense "pressure" from the White House, Pentagon and CIA last fall to get better information from detainees, pressure that he said included a visit to the prison by an aide to national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.In the area of treacherous Washington lobbyists, it seems that little pseudo-Dem fattycats have been giving away strategy to the Republicans so that they can calibrate how hard to squeeze their own party. Yes.Army Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, in a sworn statement to Army investigators obtained by USA TODAY, said he was told last September that White House staffers wanted to "pull the intelligence out" of the interrogations being conducted at Abu Ghraib.
[......]
Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting." And he said he was reminded of the need to improve the intelligence output of the prison "many, many, many times."
[....]
Rumsfeld told reporters at the Pentagon on Thursday that he recalled imploring, " 'Help, intelligence community and CIA. Give us more information.' Certainly that's a fairly typical thing in a conflict." He said he could not recall "any specific conversations" about improving intelligence results at Abu Ghraib.The Defense secretary also acknowledged that, at CIA Director George Tenet's request, he ordered an Iraqi terror suspect held for seven months without registering him on prison rolls or notifying the Red Cross, as is customary. The move delayed access by Red Cross inspectors to the detainee, a suspected member of the terror group Ansar al-Islam. But Rumsfeld said "there is no question at all" that the suspect was treated humanely. The terror suspect was never held at Abu Ghraib, but the incident illustrates the involvement by high-level administration officials in prisoner handling.
The twerps at New Republic wade into self-pity for supporting the war (David Corn says YOU SUCKAZ):
Finally the fate of Iraq is in the hands of Iraqis. If Iraq becomes a theocracy, or succumbs to a strongman, or collapses as a state, all this, too, will be the work of a free Iraq. For this reason, it is important to remember also that democratization is essentially a policy of destabilization. It demands the overthrow of one political culture so that another political culture may take its place. (That is why the outrages at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere are not only repugnant but also disastrous: "Hearts and minds" are precisely the field upon which democratizers make their stand. In this regard, nothing could be more damaging to the future of Iraq than Iraqi anti-Americanism.) It is absolutely astonishing that the planners of this war expected only happiness in its wake. Their postwar planning seems to have consisted in a kind of reverse Augustinianism: goodness is the absence of evil, Saddam is evil, Saddam's absence is good. They failed to intuit all the other evils that would emerge in the absence of this evil. They did not recognize the multiplicity of Iraq's demons; which is to say, they did not recognize Iraq.It's upside down as hell, the Iraq = 9/11 spinstorm. They claim that believing in Mohammed Atta in Prague is actually a major matter of faithful credence, a matter of your political compass rather than factual veracity. What tasty quotes from the Bush administration:
[.....]
It is no wonder that this administration has presided over a new flourishing of anti-Americanism. It accepts anti-Americanism as a compliment. It holds that all anti-Americanism is like all other anti-Americanism, and is in no way to be imputed to American behavior. In this way, the Bush administration has transformed anti-Americanism into one of the most urgent, and least addressed, problems facing American foreign policy. In a time when the safety of the United States depends more and more upon the cooperation of other states and other societies--the struggle against terrorism is a struggle against stateless villains organized in far-flung networks--the foreign policy of the United States surrendered to Gary Cooperism. Our leaders are all such legends in their own eyes. But after Will Kane shot Frank Miller dead, you will recall, he left town. The unilateralist became an isolationalist. The transition was easy. He would rely forevermore upon his sanctimony and his hauteur.
MR. RUSSERT: The Washington Post asked the American people about Saddam Hussein, and this is what they said: 69 percent said he was involved in the September 11 attacks. Are you surprised by that?I would point out the growing evidence of ethnic cleansing of Arabs in northern Iraq. This is to a great extent the backlash from the cleansing that Saddam carried out. I also find it disturbing that the former Kurd-Arab barrier is called the Green Line... what does this sound like? In fact, refugee camps of Arabs are forming, a perfectly logical outcome of stumbling into an ethnically troubled county without a plan or enough troops to maintain political order. What on earth will happen next?? Where will the newly sovereign refugees go?VICE PRES. CHENEY: No. I think it's not surprising that people make that connection.
MR. RUSSERT: But is there a connection?
VICE PRES. CHENEY: We don't know. You and I talked about this two years ago. I can remember you asking me this question just a few days after the original attack. At the time I said no, we didn't have any evidence of that. Subsequent to that, we've learned a couple of things. We learned more and more that there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda that stretched back through most of the decade of the '90s, that it involved training, for example, on BW and CW, that al-Qaeda sent personnel to Baghdad to get trained on the systems that are involved. The Iraqis providing bomb-making expertise and advice to the al-Qaeda organization.
[.....]
We know that many of the attackers were Saudi. There was also an Egyptian in the bunch. It doesn't mean those governments had anything to do with that attack. That's a different proposition than saying the Iraqi government and the Iraqi intelligent service has a relationship with al-Qaeda that developed throughout the decade of the '90s. That was clearly official policy.
Q: Mr. President, do you believe that Saddam Hussein is a bigger threat to the United States than al Qaeda?PRESIDENT BUSH: That's a--that is an interesting question. I'm trying to think of something humorous to say. (Laughter.) But I can't when I think about al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. They're both risks, they're both dangerous. The difference, of course, is that al Qaeda likes to hijack governments. Saddam Hussein is a dictator of a government. Al Qaeda hides, Saddam doesn't, but the danger is, is that they work in concert. The danger is, is that al Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.
Both of them need to be dealt with. The war on terror, you can't distinguish between al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror. And so it's a comparison that is--I can't make because I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil, and equally as destructive.
Thousands of ethnic Kurds are pushing into lands formerly held by Iraqi Arabs, forcing tens of thousands of them to flee to ramshackle refugee camps and transforming the demographic and political map of northern Iraq.Some more of that stuff from the chatty anonymous CIA agent (via Washington Monthly). This dude was on CNN Wednesday, and his voice wasn't disguised. As most have noted, he had a strange combination of honest sentiment towards our evolving catastrophe in the so-called GWOT, but Anonymous suggested we might just have to go with the high body count.....some 10,000 Kurds have gathered in a sprawling camp outside Kirkuk, where they are pressing the American authorities to let them enter the city. American military officers who control Kirkuk say they are blocking attempts to expel more Arabs from the town, for fear of igniting ethnic unrest.
Peter W. Galbraith, a former United States ambassador, who has advised the Kurdish leadership, said he recommended a claim system for Kurds and Arabs to Pentagon officials in late 2002. Nothing was put in place on the ground until last month, he said, long after the Kurds began to move south of the Green Line.
"The C.P.A. adopted a sensible idea, but it required rapid implementation," Mr. Galbraith said. "They dropped the ball, and facts were created on the ground. Of course people are going to start moving. If the political parties are encouraging this, that, too, is understandable." [?!?!? -Dan]
[....]
But in the villages and camps where the Kurds have returned, Kurdish leaders are more boastful. They say they pushed the Arab settlers out as part of a plan to expand Kurdish control over the territory.
[....]
Before the war began in 2003, Arab settlers worked the fields in the areas surrounding Makhmur. Most of the settlers were brought north by successive waves of Mr. Hussein's campaign to populate the north with Arabs, killing or expelling tens of thousands of Kurds.Exactly what happened when Mr. Hussein's army collapsed is disputed. Kurdish officials say the Arab settlers fled with the army. No expulsions were necessary, they said.
Meanwhile in the Holy Land, you got Hebron headaches.
Hurray for Krauthammer and his West Bank wall:
The more Shaul sifts through his memories, the plainer it seems that there was no particular single moment in which his view of the world changed. A year and two months of serving in Hebron, first as a soldier and then as a commander, became a nightmarish collage of sights, sounds and feelings, which gradually led him to conclude that "It's a situation that screws up everyone. Everyone goes through the same process there of the erosion of red lines and a sinking into numbness. People start out at different points and end up at different points, but everyone goes through this process. No one returns from the territories without it leaving a deep imprint, messing up his head."
[.....]
Shaul could not bear the moral erosion he noticed in himself and his comrades: "It starts with little things. At first, you only blindfold real suspects, and in the end you have some teenager who left his house during the curfew sitting next to you blindfolded for 10 hours, and it seems normal to you. A lot of things are done just to demonstrate a presence, to show that the IDF is everywhere at all times. On each patrol, they enter a few houses, put the women and children in one room and the men in another, check documents, turn the house upside down and then leave. There are no terrorists there, no special alerts. It's just done. And then there's the shooting, of course. Hours upon hours of shooting from a heavy machine gun or a grenade launcher, on a residential neighborhood, like Abu Sneina. Do you know what it means to fire grenades into a crowded neighborhood where people live? And for four hours in a row? It's a situation that brings out the insanity in people."At a fairly early stage of his army service, he considered refusing orders, and for a time, he asked his displeased commanders to assign him guard duty only within the base. After a little while, he decided that he had to change things from the inside and started a course to become a squad commander. "It was a disheartening experience. The kind of people I encountered there made me realize that there was no chance of influencing this system from the inside."
How so?
"There were a lot of people there, the next generation of IDF commanders, who weren't open at all to questions of ethics. For them, the slogan `In war as in war' was a satisfying answer to everything."
[....]
Since the outbreak of the intifada, the public has heard many reports about exchanges of gunfire between Palestinians in the Abu Sneina neighborhood and the IDF posts in the area of the Jewish neighborhood. Shaul explains that in most cases, the soldiers have no idea where the shooting is coming from, and so they developed the concept of iturim - picking out certain buildings that for one reason or another came to be marked as preferred targets for shooting. For example - abandoned buildings, buildings under construction, or buildings that just stuck out, "that we shoot at when they shoot at us."They shot at you from the buildings?
"From the neighborhood. Most of the time, there's no connection to the buildings. You don't know where they're shooting at you from, but the idea is that there shouldn't be an event without a response, so you respond with a big spray of gunfire. Sometimes they shoot something like four bullets and the IDF, in response, goes at it for four hours."
Always in response to Palestinian gunfire?
"A lot of times, we told ourselves, they'll surely start shooting when it gets dark, at six, so why shouldn't we start shooting at 5:30, to deter them? Or they go up with the armored personnel carriers into Abu Sneina and start to spray the iturim, the selected buildings, from close up. To make a show of presence."
Oddly enough Israel is still sinking under the same demographic problems it had before: you can't overlay a minority of Jews over a space that holds more Arabs; that is, with the settlements Israel is still entering a minority situation that defies stable democracy, and hence, Hebron.
Even more important, [Palestinians] have lost their place at the table. Israel is now defining a new equilibrium that will reign for years to come -- the separation fence is unilaterally drawing the line that separates Israelis and Palestinians. The Palestinians were offered the chance to negotiate that frontier at Camp David and chose war instead. Now they are paying the price.It stands to reason. It is the height of absurdity to launch a terrorist war against Israel, then demand the right to determine the nature and route of the barrier built to prevent that very terrorism.
These new strategic realities are not just creating a new equilibrium, they are creating the first hope for peace since Arafat officially tore up the Oslo accords four years ago. Once Israel has withdrawn from Gaza and has completed the fence, terrorism as a strategic option will be effectively dead. The only way for the Palestinians to achieve statehood and dignity, and to determine the contours of their own state, will be to negotiate a final peace based on genuine coexistence with a Jewish state.
A couple tidbits about the rearranging of U.S. military forces: it really says something when we are actually pulling people from South Korea to stuff into the war effort. Altogether there are a lot of changes planned in the global military system (make what you will of that Orwellian statement). Base-wise, things are moving around now.
Draft rumors flyin: anything to it? All I know is that we have the notice filling up the draft board with "Oh shit!" written on it in the living room.
The mad Reverend Moon got some attention from the mainstream media for his bizarre peace crowning ceremony where he declared himself the Messiah. I swear, if someone manages to immanetize the eschaton, Moonies will be involved.
PR flacks of the former Clark-Gore schools prepare to defend Mr Moore. (more about flackery) At least Kerry is polling well in the independents.
Why I loathe David Brooks: he is an irritating "scruffy little mascot" of the neo-cons, but I forget who said that.
So let these be the links to chew on. I have more things to figure out Friday. Can't wait for the movie.
I present a couple pictures --and a movie--that I took with a digital camera a couple nights ago.
The video is hosted from my new University web space. How nice! It should be fast. Click here for the movie! Here is a video frame of the train zooming by:
A couple more images, one from a station along Hiawatha (I shot this out of a momentarily stopped car) and another from the Metrodome station, towards downtown. It was the night before the solstice and the sun had just gone down. (That's how far north it sets here, and no further. Southward march has begun....)
In other news the almighty ANDAY (i.e. "the tweots") is coming around from Montana for the weekend. Perhaps we will take a cue from Mr Marshall and cajole him into some guest blogging about his political activities for the Democrats in Montana. Or not...
With regards to the war and all of that, I have been doing some ponderous soul searching and will weigh in on it before the Moore movie breaks out... I.E. Thursday.
The almighty seven-minute silence.
A centerpiece of Fahrenheit 9/11 will be the seven minutes, all of them, that Bush sat in the Florida classroom while the WTC burned. Psychological minutes. Minutes of very low credibility, shall we say. Roger Ebert reviews the movie.
There are goonies posing as a "grassroots" group trying to intimidate theaters into not showing Fahrenheit 9/11. The group, Move America Forward, is hosting its website from the same IP number as Russo Marsh & Rogers, a PR firm in San Francisco that among other things had people involved in the Gray Davis recall, as Cosmic Iguana dug up. They were also the same characters that got "The Reagans" bumped off network television so I couldn't see it.
The report of the 9/11 panel may wound Bush, duhh, but it is nice to see the Washington Post understanding that.
On the Fourth of July, a new book by an anonymous CIA official, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," is going to be published. This article is fascinating but I'm not getting into the juicy bits right now.
A huge examination of 9/11 tapes by Gail Sheehy.
The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline’s top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.—25 minutes before the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center’s north tower—that a group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent takeover of the gigantic bird.Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines’ disregard for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.
The response of American’s management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:
"Don’t spread this around. Keep it close."
"Keep it quiet."
"Let’s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what’s going on?"
"It was disgusting," said the parent of one of the victims, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. "The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place."
That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was told by his superiors: Don’t tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I. and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the government’s possession that would tell a very different story of how the nation’s guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.
[.....]
"This has been the attitude all the way along," Ms. Dillard observed. "Everybody was keeping it hush-hush."The failure to trumpet vital news from calls placed from the first hijacked flight throughout the system and into the highest circles of government leaves families wondering whether military jets could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 in time to keep it from diving into the Pentagon and killing 184 more people. That suicide mission ended in triumph for the terrorists more than 50 minutes after the first American jetliner hit the World Trade Center. Suppose American Airlines had warned all its pilots and crew of what their families were able to see and hear from the media?
The information hold-back may have arisen from lack of experience, or from the inability to register the enormity of the terrorists’ destructive plans, or it may have been a visceral desire to protect the airlines from liability. The airlines make much of the fact that the "common strategy" for civil aircraft crews before 9/11 was to react passively to hijackings—"to refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics."
This strategy was based on the assumption that the hijackers would want to be flown safely to an airport of their choice to make their demands.
But that defense of the airlines’ actions is belied by the fact that the F.A.A., which was in contact with American Airlines and other traffic-control centers, heard the tip-off from terrorists in Flight 11’s cockpit—"We have planes, more planes"—and thus knew before the first crash of a possible multiple hijacking and the use of planes as weapons.
[.....]
So many unconnected dots, contradictions and implausible coincidences. Like the fact that NORAD was running an imaginary terrorist-attack drill called "Vigilant Guardian" on the same morning as the real-world attacks. At 8:40 a.m., when a sergeant at NORAD’s center in Rome, N.Y., notified his northeastern commander, Col. Robert Marr, of a possible hijacked airliner—American Flight 11—the colonel wondered aloud if it was part of the exercise. This same confusion was played out at the lower levels of the NORAD network.What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.
Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility. It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."
Why, in that case, did he take onto himself the responsibility of approving NORAD’s deployment of fighter planes?
In minor media matters, CBS is waffling about airing an anti-Clinton ad.
Lately I have enjoyed looking at the blogs node707 "Just a Bump in the Beltway" , "WarAndPiece" and Spacerook. As always I recommend Mr Juan Cole and in particular this rich and huge interview he did with the somewhat maverick Pepe Escobar in Asia Times online.
Experts report that the United States Strategic Snark Reserves have been severely depleted, and absent new discoveries of snark may run dry within three years.Hunter on the Daily Kos. Yeah, that partly reflects my posting patterns of late, but really, this week I've been acclimating to classes at the University and doing more work for Computer Zone. I have good stuff to do tomorrow, should be interesting."Liberal bloggers have been using snark at an exponentially expanding rate, but it's not a renewable resource" said Lawrence Peters, head researcher at the American Blog Studies Group, a liberal think tank. "Once it's gone, it's gone."
Already the shortage has had an impact. Liberal bloggers like Billmon and Josh Marshall have taken extended vacations in recent months to recover; others, like the Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum, have dramatically curtailed daily snark output. Other bloggers have suffered more severely.
"I just couldn't take it anymore," blogger Hesiod probably would have said, had this reporter bothered to contact him or any of the other people mentioned in this story. "It started out bad, even before the Bush Presidency began, and it just kept getting worse."
[......]
...for now, experts caution that the months before the next election could see the shuttering of many liberal blogs. "There simply isn't enough snark to go around, and it's only going to get worse from here," said Peters. "Some of these bloggers won't make it to the election. Their heads will pop like grapes."
In other news, someone took a strategic photo of the notes that Bush had in front of him at one of his cheesy contrived press conferences. This photo reveals that he has a list of the reporters, not a huge surprise, but also he scrawls the same damn worthless talking points that he's parroted forever. Assuming the photo isn't faked.... Someone sent it to Atrios, and now the contest is to flip it around in Photoshop and see what he wrote. My first try produced the following image from the large source photo:
According to the speculations of the Tom Tomorrow blog, the messages read:
So that's entertainment!
Islam was A Threat -SworN ENEMy of US Destabilizing Force in
Volatile part of world
weapons of mass d.has [illegible, possible cross-out] - USED them
- Ties to terrorist orgs
- Contacts with Al Qaeda
over last DECADe
Here's something bizarre: the U.S. Air Force flies recon missions over North Korea constantly. Did you know that? This picture is from a declassified "recce forecast" directive of the Air Force, obtained by the Federation of American Scientists. How would you like to be the U-2 pilot on that mission? On the other hand, if you were a militant atheist state bent on scaring the world and dealing in nuclear parts, how would you like to be photographed in zones A, B, C, and D?
The truth comes to Time magazine. Q.E.D., as they say:
But the intelligence community's shaky performance also made the [CIA] agency vulnerable to another kind of attack: the one mounted by a group of hard-line neoconservatives who took over at the Pentagon and in the Vice President's office when Bush became President. Long suspicious of the CIA if not openly hostile to it, the neocons came into power asserting internally that the agency couldn't shoot straight and therefore its judgments couldn't be trusted.(via an insight from Billmon, as well as this one)The Bush hard-liners had long believed that stability could come to the Middle East and Israel — only if Saddam Hussein was overthrown and Iraq converted into a stable democracy. Led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, they were installed at various national-security choke points in the government, and nothing moved without their O.K. Bamford comes very close to stating that the hard-liners were wittingly or unwittingly acting as agents of Israel's hard-line Likud Party, which believed Israel should operate with impunity in the region and dictate terms to its neighbors. Such a world view, Bamford argues, was simply repotted by the hard-liners into U.S. foreign policy in the early Bush years, with the war in Iraq as its ultimate goal. Bamford asserts that the backgrounds, political philosophies and experiences of many of the hard-liners helped to hardwire the pro-Israel mind-set in the Bush inner circle and suggests that Washington mistook Israel's interests for its own when it pre-emptively invaded Iraq last year.
This is what I was saying all along... doesn't it feel sour?
A lot of people talking about the rhetoric of fascism along with crazy symbols of power. I can't say I'm a fan of that kind of crazy talk, but also as an atheist I am hearing an increasing amount of crazy talk that threatens to overrun my value system. Some are freaked out. Yes, many are. I'm not going to get into talking much about the unfortunate kidnapped defense contractor in Saudi Arabia... it is worth considering that Apaches do not have a great public reputation in the Arab world, as their networks are far less reluctant to show the Israeli ones in action. The documentary Control Room that I mentioned earlier is playing at either Lagoon or Uptown, I need to go see it.
We can't quite measure terrorism accurately. It's on the decline! Brilliant.
Measuring the self-appointed cultural warriors, look at the evil rhetoric of ol'David Horowitz from back in 2000.
Nasty bit mocking the NY Times for torching their credibility on Chalabi. Tragically, due to my unemployed status, I suspended the Times delivery this weekend. It was a nice dead pulp sort of read... This blog, page A01, monitors the Times all the time. (mahablog and the left coaster ain't bad either)
An excellent bit on Juan Cole's site about what a bad idea it was to ditch early elections in Iraq, and the shadowy motives involved. Al-sadr increases in popularity, the bloody way.
A lot of retired officials, some of them key Republican appointees of yore, have released a statement saying Bush must leave office because of all the alliances he's shattered.
Look, 2004 political campaigns are advertising on blogs and making some money. Yay for that... is it effective???? It's gotta be, in some situations.
Last bits of Reagan anti-nostalgia: "Schisms from administration lingered for years," to put it mildly. Yes, it was not all rosy tinted scenarios and photo ops. The end of the cold war: we needed Gorbachev to do it, bottom line.
A humorous bit about Iran-Contra: what if it was really quite a skim-off-the-top kind of bribery scheme?
Middle east chunking up, getting ominous etc.: "Worst is yet to come as US pays the price of failure" but sadly, "a tough time for neo-cons," widely discredited, they say.
Speaking of photo ops, Josh Marshall asks:
In fact, the prison abuse and torture story itself has become a perfect example of how two separate media storylines — ones that clearly contradict each other — can coexist and yet seemingly never cross paths.i'm going to throw in a handful of final, old, links here, which spelled out rather neatly two flip sides of the situation: the neo-con fanatic wing [one two three] and the fundamentalist Christian fanatic wing [one two three].
[.....]
In this case, the partisan divide is conventional and predictable. Administration advocates argue that abuse was isolated — just a few malefactors who got out of control — while critics claim that it was systemic, stemming from policy choices made at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House.Yet, while this debate is being carried on, we’ve also had a steady stream of evidence (not pictures, but reports, testimony, and other documentary evidence) that makes it fairly clear that the first debate really isn’t a debate at all, or rather, that it’s an open-and-shut case.
[....]
Let’s start by discussing what’s in the pictures: limited violence against detainees, the use of nudity and sexual humiliation as a means of “softening up” detainees, psychological “torture” like the threat of death (such as the case of the picture of the man standing, arms outstretched, who was told he’d be electrocuted if he fell), and the use of attack dogs to frighten if not necessarily attack prisoners.Those are the acts contained in those lurid photos. But even from the internal reports and official statements coming from the Pentagon and other branches of the administration, it’s clear that each of these methods was approved and authorized as a way of preparing detainees for interrogations.
First, there was approval for using an enumerated list of interrogation techniques for al Qaeda terrorists housed at Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities. Eventually those techniques — honed in Afghanistan and Guantanamo — were OK’d for use against detainees in Iraq. We even know that the importation of those methods into Iraq probably happened in the late summer and early fall of last year. Most of the techniques mentioned above are specifically mentioned in the list of authorized methods issued by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in Iraq. The rest are detailed in other memos and reports made public over the last month and would certainly be covered by the new “torture memo” out this week.
[......]
Yet the debate over who is responsible for what we see in those pictures continues, even when we have plenty of evidence that the tactics they were using were either specifically authorized by policymakers at the Pentagon or widespread at U.S.-detention facilities commanded by the same folks now prosecuting those reservists in the photos.Isn’t it about time that we just come clean with ourselves and admit that those half-dozen reservists really probably were just following orders?
Well there you have it, a few of the fine trends making up this turning point month.
Well well then, I've got two classes at the university tomorrow... this is going to be a good time. On Sunday, for my dad's birthday, as a family we rode around the Mississippi waterfront area on Segways. 'Twas excellent. The company, Human on a Stick, has a website, and hopefully soon a few pictures they took of us will appear in the photo gallery. They took us into the base of the Mill City Museum and gave us cookies halfway through the trip. I won't share more because I have to get to bed soon.
However, here is some of the stuff which has been backing up in my browser windows in this June of Suspense.
First area: in Israel there is confrontation over the stability of Sharon's government, as the hard-rightwing pro-settler parties dropped out. Housing Minister Effi Eitam and Tourism Minister Benny Elon (a favorite of evangelical Christians) couldn't handle supporting the withdrawal from Gaza and parts of the West Bank, so they quit the government. (more on the arguing inside the NRP) Now Sharon's government has only 59 of the 120 Knesset members' complete support, and some members of the Likud party are now voting against the government in no-confidence motions, while some of Sharon's Likud ministers are failing to show up for key votes altogether. As usual it is so complicated that the parentheses are nested:
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Likud members on Monday night that the 12 party dissidents were forcing him to invite Labor Party to join the coalition, a move he was not happy to take.
He explained that the current coalition was unable to function with only 49 MKs (59 coalition members, together MKs David Tal (One Nation) and Michael Nudelman (National Union), but excluding the 12 "rebels").Sharon decided Monday night that "at this stage" he will not fire Likud Minister Uzi Landau or Likud Deputy Minister Michael Ratzon for skipping a no-confidence vote on the disengagement plan. The motion, filed by the National Union party, was defeated in the Knesset on Monday.
[....]
Likud "rebels" Landau and Ratzon preferred to risk Sharon's wrath by skipping the vote than support the government's position on evacuating from the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank. Sharon told his cabinet members Sunday that they must attend all votes and support his disengagement plan.
[....]
Meanwhile, half the National Religious Party faction - party chairman Effi Eitam and MKs Yitzhak Levy and Nissan Slomiansky - voted against the government on the anti-disengagement motion. The other three NRP faction members - Minister Zevulun Orlev and MKs Shaul Yahalom and Gila Finkelstein - refrained from voting.
[........]
National Union MK Binyamin Elon, who was fired as housing minister prior to last week's cabinet vote on disengagement, blamed Sharon for betraying the Likud movement, its constitution and its members, who voted to defeat the pullout plan in a May 2 party referendum.Elon quoted from a section of the Likud constitution saying that the Jewish people have an eternal right to the Land of Israel, and said Sharon was threatening his ministers so they wouldn't oppose his disengagement plan.
Quite a few people are skeptical about Sharon's disengagement plan. On another TV talk show, "Hot Mishal," Netanyahu remarked that the government had not actually decided on evacuating settlements - "In nine months, we'll have to sit down and see what's what." This is Bibi's way of saying that for the time being, it's all talk. The left and the media commentators don't really believe that Sharon will do what he says either. They think that when the time comes, he'll find an excuse to get out of the whole thing.Meanwhile, the real deal is that they are building a horrible fence around the grand mega-settlement of Ariel, in the center of the northern West Bank (near the area that they talk about "evacuating"). The last link, a Haaretz editorial, also describes the pain caused by the huge fence cutting through Arab towns that sit snugly against whatever might be called 'official' Jerusalem. And cash money, 300 million shekels to be dumped into the 'security' of the other unfenced settlements. They are considering building another neighborhood to fill the gap between Jerusalem and a huge bloc of settlements south of there. Very inflammatory.
[.....]
In practice, the plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza is an attempt to retain our hold on most of the West Bank. Sharon rejects Arafat as a partner for dialogue not because army intelligence whispered in his ear that the guy is a bastard. It's because he knows the conditions for an agreement with Arafat (or any other Palestinian leader) are the same as those insisted on by Sadat - withdrawal to the `67 borders and saying goodbye to the settlements. And that is not on Sharon's agenda, even in his worst nightmares.Hence from Arafat's perspective, Sharon is not a peace partner either. Sharon is focused on Gaza, and he is not preparing the Israelis for the great exodus that will enable the two peoples to live side by side in peace. Unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, which has rattled the windowsills in these parts, is peanuts compared to the quake that is on its way. The epicenter - and the solution - are inside Gaza.
The threats of the organizational chiefs in the territories should be taken seriously. This is not the time to pooh-pooh the warnings of the world's leaders, who say that terror has assumed World War III proportions and will not stop unless Israel takes steps to leave the Gaza Strip and a Palestinian state is on the map.
Earlier in the month (reported June 9), a senior U.S. official demanded the withdrawal of settler outposts. This editorial pointed out the lurching, undemocratic nature of Sharon's moves, going from stupid ministers to a stupid Likud referendum to a worthless phone poll to "prove" that the public supported the withdrawal/annexation plan (yes we are mapping out oxymorons this evening). (See also "Four comments on the situation.") On the plus side, the evacuation planning committee announced that they would envision leaving by September 2005, a terribly long time, but at least it is a sort of planning timetable... and we all know how well those work in the middle east.
On the military planning side, it's been unearthed that the military establishment sees that the situation with the Arab world is, operationally speaking, a zero-sum game. But this is also interesting: the head of Israel's military intelligence research division, a very weird man named Amos Gilad, apparently gave false reports about what Arafat's intentions and actions were in the dawning days of this whole phase of the conflict. The difference between military intelligence and politics here is pretty much nil, but basically he argued that Arafat was determined to level Israel and hence there was no 'partner for peace' worth talking to. (this was the original report by veteran journalist Akiva Eldar)
Then, on the flip side, the Haaretz settlement reporter Nadav Shragai reports on "when rabbis and politicians clash" over the settlements (in this case National Religious Party rabbis, who have a degree of organizational authority). On the pro settler side "Religious Zionists cannot retreat"!!! A call to arms, nearly.
This whole crazy thing has dwelled on the inward machinations of Israeli politics, never a healthy hobby. In Palestine, a good chunk of the Jenin refugee camp that got leveled (and many innocent people killed) in the "Defensive Shield" phase, has been rebuilt with extra big gaps between buildings for Israeli tanks to go zooming through. About 100 of the 530 "housing units" obliterated more than two years ago have been replaced. That rounds it out for this batch of info... sorry its mostly from Haaretz, what can I say, they're pretty good.
Well, it has been a week of scarce updates, because I am in the midst of looking for jobs in the Twin Cities, a somewhat scarce proposition these days.
I was batting around the idea of perhaps starting a political Wiki project using the TikiWiki software I installed, but no sooner had I fired it up than I found one of my favorite sites, the DailyKos, had started their own Wiki, the dkosopedia. The interesting thing about Wikis is they promote a sort of merging, such that there is only one wikipedia, and only one disinfopedia on the Internet, although Wikis for, say, Linux support are also become more frequently used.
I entered some stuff into the dkosopedia, and I've been generally impressed by the progress they have made, as well as the lack of disagreement among writers so far. I put stuff on the Department of Defense and Minnesota, early forms such as they are.
So the dkosopedia would serve nicely in place of any attempted wiki project of my own so far. Some people I know have been batting around other ideas.
I'll throw this in before I wander off to do the job apps... good old John Dean observes the significance of Bush hiring a personal lawyer from outside the government on the Valerie Plame case. It doesn't look good for Bush at all on this count.
Crucial new humor comes from the Bush/ZombieReagan '04 campaign, rapidly evolving. My favorite poster: "Bush is safe. I only eat brains." Honestly, this precanned celebrity necro-worship is very boring, but at least it's only reached .6 PrincessDiDeaths in terms of syrupy wretchedness.
On the flip side I will offer Antiwar.com libertarian Justin Raimondo's praise of Reagan as someone who was smart enough to leave Lebanon and probably wouldn't have believed in the Patriot Act.
My favorite site the Agonist has switched to a Scoop engine like I used to have for their news digestion. Advance! Technology! As for other sites, gotta love Jesus' General
A little older news: the Americans have issued an arrest warrant for Ahmed Chalabi's aide Francis Brooke. Hurray. And the hunt for who leaked to Iran.
This was published a few days ago on Capitol hill Blue. I would take it with an enormous grain of salt, more as a reflection of the mood than actual journalism: "Bush's erratic behavior worries White House aides:"
President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.Probably satire, but damn accurate!In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
[.....]
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”
But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”
Right now, Fox News is advertising:
I am not going to make any Iran-Contra jokes this evening, except one.
"If you helped Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah so that coke mobsters in Latin America would get more weapons, what does that make you?"
"A trusted member of Fox News... if you ran the show, you get a show!!"
Only funny because it's true. Not because it's funny. Ollie also wrote a couple books such as The Jericho Sanction, with such chapter titles as Legacy of Death, The Letter, Intrigue, Traitors & Hostages, Blown Cover, The Wolf, Making Plans While Marking Time, and other highly original contributions. Then there is "Mission Compromised," something Ollie Poo would Never Do!
Reagan and God, from the link above:
But it was in his lifelong battle against communism – first in Hollywood, then on the political stage – that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."Well, you have to admit it's better than "Bring Em On!" Billmon memorializes the great actor who filled up a suit 40% more effectively than W.
In some ways, Reagan's biggest triumph was the creation an atmosphere of existential crisis, in he could play the stereotypical role of the man on a white horse. He had a brilliant script, written by a new type of PR consultant (Michael Deaver generally gets the top credit) ready to exploit the synergies of the merger between politics and show business. And, like all great myths, it had enough correspondance with the reality of the times to be believable.Billmon follows again with a look at the Legacy:But there was always a kind of stage set quality to it - the sense that if you looked behind the facade all you'd find would be plywood and paper mache.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.There's a whole slate of good films coming out. Check out "The Hunting of the President," telling the story of Clinton's sleazy tormenters. My favorite part of the trailer might be where one journalist says "We were following these stories simply because Scaife was paying us to do it," presumably referring to the evil Republican billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife indeed dropped a fat $2,400,000 on the American Spectator magazine to go after Clinton, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation... on and on and on... more about the foundations.But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America....
The second movie is of course Fahrenheit 9/11 (Quicktime trailer). I am not a uniform supporter of Michael Moore, particularly with glaring inaccuracies that pop up all over some of his stuff. Regardless, the man is a pressure release valve on the hypocrisy and contradictions in what they're trying to sell us. He is shrill and unpleasant a great amount of the time, but that's tempered by a real quest to bring us something significant, at odds with the mainstream narrative.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.In other news, a splendid review of media bias by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
...
....saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.''What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it,'' he said.
This is just so damn goofy: an RNC promotional website for Hispanics that offers them four job choices: war veterans, teachers, senior citizens, or farmers and ranchers. Yes, that is where they fit in. (via WaPo)
Religious crusaders attacking the separation of church and state, while bringing political campaign pressure straight into churches. Safety for atheists not assured.
Well right now it is Grand Old Day on Grand Ave., so I've got to get a move on.... this year the glorious beer gardens are open to me, hurray!!!
Hard to say what the deal is with the CIA. You'd think they'd be happy that their man Allawi has been dropped in (parachuted in) as Prime Minister. But no, CIA's big hoss is quitting, Chalabi's teaming with the rising stars of fundamentalist Shiites like the Iraqi Hezbollah. Then there was the president's speech at Colorado Springs, another fine incantation of fear. But even that was fabricated, when you hear that the al-Qaeda linked group he's quoting from is probably just a crackpot with a fax machine.
You can watch Daily Show segments online now. I liked this clip about Tenet.
"Jon, the CIA's credibility has never been lower. Crazy people no longer believe the CIA is implanting a chip in their heads to listen to their dreams. They just don't think they can pull it off. It's a sad day for America when even our paranoid schizophrenics realize they don't need to wear the alumnimum foil hats anymore."(via amy sullivan)
This week i have to try to find another job since I can't get enough hours randomly making websites to get by. There are some leads out there, but who knows? At least there's finally been a bump in the number of jobs available around here.
The new server I've dubbed tarfin, after a character I made up in an old story, is kind of a pokey beast, again an old Compaq PII/266. I am not sure if it is suitable for advanced php or Perl projects. Someone told me that 266s like these are sold for around $35, so that's the kind of power we're talking about. But there is a possibility of getting a better one, if I can find another job.
The Linux project has borne some results and led to new internet possibilities. In the software packages that Gentoo's software manager, portage, makes available, I found TikiWiki, a fairly advanced web system that would let me run multiple blogs, forums, a good links directory, and the all-important (and thus far very lacking) image galleries. However, the TikiWiki system is really oriented around Wikis, which are like a sort of digital whiteboard, with their own syntax that's much easier than HTML. "Wikiwiki" is the word for fast in Hawaiian, and wikis facilitate the rapid, collective collection and organization of information, including tables, hyperlinks, and pictures, in a very public and revolutionary way.
As a test, I installed in on the desktop computer, and you can interact with the test installation at http://tiki.hongpong.com . (Incidentally this whole thing showed me how to set up subdomains at the flick of a config file under hongpong.com... there's a lot that could be done with that.) I have set it up so that people don't even have to give it their real email address. Just register in two seconds and you're set.
The Wiki feature is quite easy to use. You can put stuff on any page you open up or create. Just press the edit tab, and hit "Wiki quick help" inside the edit window for the all-important wiki syntax. To get around the site, note that the :: double colon symbols are actually buttons you press to open up sub-menus. This software has so many nice features, and it's totally Free. It is the product of a serious, sustained community development and documentation effort.
If you want to see some excellent wikis, I highly recommend the great free internet encyclopedia Wikipedia as well as the funky Disinfopedia, which is:
a collaborative project to produce a directory of public relations firms, think tanks, industry-funded organizations and industry-friendly experts that work to influence public opinion and public policy on behalf of corporations, governments and special interests.Wikis: extensible and public. Yes.
So again, the ultimate result of this whole new thing will be something unique and totally different from hongpong.com... to another internet domain????????
