Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
Sorry for the lack of updates. I have decided there is something unsavory and a tad depressing about a blogging lifestyle in June. I am moving out of the spot in Loring Park right now, getting into the web development job at Macalester. Right now I gotta take apart my desk & get it ready for my dear roommate's movers or his head's gonna explode.
There are quite a few separate things I wanted to write about, but first I wanted to do a little *actual* research with some books from the library. I've got the books now, so I'll be on that once things are set up in St. Paul.
Don't expect much for updates until Saturday at the earliest.
Michael Bower, known for playing Donkeylips on I think the old Nickelodeon show Salute Your Shorts, says Scientology is bollox.
This shit is disturbing: WWTDD.com: Connie Chung is insane.
You can watch "Why we fight" the documentary on Google Video.
Juan Cole is always the go-to guy for Iraq analysis and his bit on post-Zarqawi is good.
AP:News analysis: Iraq insurgents fight on despite major setbacks:
Sunnis demand the release of a top Sunni religious leader Saturday in Tikrit, Iraq. Protesters said the United States wrongly detained him. (BASSIM DAHAM/Associated Press)
A very busy and weird first week of the summer. On the up side, I got a very well-paying job doing web development programming & such with the Macalester development office and a studio apartment back on Grand Avenue. The Mac job is probably only short-term but I'll learn ASP.NET, the industry standard of these things.
As one might expect, I have some mixed feelings about going back to St Paul. Minneapolis is a very cool city that's blowing up pretty big right now, but it is also expensive, and the vibe is not quite right for me. Most of my homies are back in St. Paul and it's a lot cheaper too.
So in some ways it is a step forwards but spatially it looks like a step back. (I wouldn't be qualified for the job without recently learned skills though, skills I learned in the last year).
Also I lined up some ducks in a row as contributors for the new site. We're going to have three occasional visual artist contributions, plus Studio 302 - some music from upstairs, and the Phillips Report, a page set aside for my friends living in a house down there.
A lot of folks are interested in setting up some cool shit, but this week has turned out to be about pulling together factors of a "real life" that we've heard rumors about. Fortunately it looks like I will be out on the stoop, making pretty good money and paying down my credit cards and student loans real soon.
St Paul is a good place, although it bothers some people. I saw Prairie Home Companion, which begins and ends in Mickey's Diner. All in all, not a bad film, but one thing bothered me theologically: the Angel of Death can enter the diner.
But perhaps more importantly, there you can see it coming.
Heh, as it happened, the time where I set up the 'Drupal2' server and they migrated my site to the new server overlapped, such that the Drupal2 database was eaten by a grue and will never be heard from again. No matter, for I have gotten the main Drupal test server, located at
to have the proper photo gallery features. There has been a bit of a learning curve to PowWeb's new administrative interface, but it is certainly an improvement, and the handy CGI error screen has been most helpful here.
Aside from gaining a full-time job, the big goal this coming week is to get this Drupal thing rolling the whole way. I have talked with some of my musical minions and they may throw some tracks up, which will be nice.
The photo gallery system has a Flickr-style tagging feature, which easily integrates with the rest of the site. This whole system of categories/topics/keywords is called taxonomies in Drupal, and among other things, it will be very easy to add more of them, arrange them in basic heirarchies, provide "what's related" and other such features.
Also there is going to be a randomly loading banner image that will be nice and different every time.
Create an account on the new system if you like. It will be sweet!
Sen. Arlen Specter is pissed with Dick Cheney about White House interference in their hearings on mass wiretapping and phone data mining. TPM has the angry letter from Sen. Arlen Specter to Vice President Cheney.
Stephen Kappes returns to the CIA after being chased out by Porter Goss, NY Times reports. I have no idea how to interpret this, save one bit at the end:
A man of military bearing and a storied past, Mr. Kappes would become the first person since William E. Colby in 1973 to ascend to one of agency's top two positions from a career spent in the clandestine service. General Hayden has said that his return would be a signal that "amateur hour" is over at the C.I.A., which has seen little calm since Mr. Kappes's departure. A no-nonsense former Marine officer who insists on addressing his elders as "sir," Mr. Kappes speaks Russian and Persian; served as the agency's station chief in Moscow and Kuwait during a quarter-century at the C.I.A.; and played a pivotal role in the secret talks with Libya that culminated in December 2003 in the agreement in which Col. Muammar el-Qadaffi agreed to give up his chemical and biological weapons program. ...After leaving the agency, he became an executive vice president at ArmorGroup, a private security firm based in London.
Well that is sketchy on the face of it, though I haven't heard of ArmorGroup in any especially nasty things. More on them here and Kappes here.
Victor Davis Hanson: a fog-headed, bespectacled wistful neo-con, (perhaps best deemed a 'Gonzoconservative') he's the armchair general's armchair general. When you need to make fusty locutions about the wisdom of the Peloponnesian War, he's your man. He is one of these guys infatuated with how the Athenians and Spartans fought, using it as a kind of triumphalist template to encourage Americans to support wars because the Greeks did it. Davis' most recent was "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War", which, despite hashing through the details of the good old days, is basically supposed to tell you that the Athenians were Right to fight Sparta. In reality, the war was a terrible idea, brought on by stupid, belligerent Athenians who doomed Athens to the dustbin of history. But it felt really fucking cool at the time to Greek Victor Davis Hansons... As this response to his book "A War Like No Other" makes clear, he's fucking stupid because the war destroyed Athenian power. But this is the kind of guy that the Hoover Institution puts up as their military historian.
He described the Abu Ghraib scandal as 'hearsay.' He also has rambled at length about secret Mexican plans to generate that AZTLAN separatist thing in the SW United States. In this case, he is defending General Tommy Franks' dumb decisions in the execution of the Iraq invasion against the content of 'Cobra II', an insiders' account of the early war filled with many anonymous interviews: Commentary - Refighting the War. One bit:
Even American psychological operations, an often over-hyped element of war-fighting, worked well: when American planes showered leaflets on it, an entire Iraqi division guarding Baghdad more or less melted away, leaving behind only 2,000 of its original 13,000 combatants.
Except for the part where we decided to fuck them over after the war and they kept fighting us anyway. It takes guts to ride the horse both ways:
Nor do Gordon and Trainor credit the still more telling fact that, following the Afghanistan campaign in the fall of 2001, some fifteen months of national and worldwide discussion ensued concerning Iraq, including the excruciatingly drawn-out United Nations debate. Rarely, in truth, has the United States conducted so prolonged and so public a discussion about its intentions in the run-up to any war.
The authors are more on target in dwelling on the administration’s preoccupation with weapons of mass destruction at the expense of other, more compelling writs for action. As they point out, the WMD issue warped the public presentation of the war and later diverted some resources away from reconstruction to numerous wild-goose chases after nonexistent or no longer existent arsenals. Yet even here there is a disconnect in their version of the WMD issue—attributable, no doubt, to the selectivity of their sources. While suggesting deceit on the part of an administration bent on overplaying a fanciful danger, they do not question the sincerity of General Franks’s frantic efforts to warn his commanders about the impending threat of chemical and biological attack.
In other words, since the WMD lies took 15 months to pound into everyone's head and consequently fucked up the post-war stage, this is... um... very patriotic. Thanks. Oh by the way, his other contributions to the Neo-Con Commentary rag are summarized:
"Donald Rumsfeld, we are told, had a bad summer and a worse fall. But what Midge Decter's biography reminds us is that we need this seventy-one-year-old veteran far more than he needs us."
"The real strategic issue is not how many soldiers are on the ground, but how they are used."
"Far from tying us down, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and its aftermath have enlarged our strategic options."
"The antiwar movement contains a large element of plain anti-Americanism; where does it come from?"
I think if you poked a hole in his ear, a reeking cloud of burnt popcorn stink would come out.
Howard Fineman is like the Beltway media version of Hanson: totally stodgy, but perhaps two pixels to the left of Joe Klein. Fineman:
But perhaps the netroots' favorite avatar in waiting is Gov. Brian Schweitzer of Montana. In their eyes he's the rootin'-tootin' real deal, a rancher turned politician who believes in government activism set free from traditional liberal thinking and interest-group methods. This week a protégé of Schweitzer's, a rancher named Jon Tester, won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate. Kos happily noted that Tester comes from "the middle of nowhere"--Big Sandy, Mont.--and provided a link to a Yahoo map to prove it.
So that's the place to start from in this new political era: not Washington, but the middle of nowhere.
As Kos puts it, "No doubt." Mainly because DC is a total mess and fog-brains like Fineman are part of the problem.
Juan Cole was blocked from working at Yale. The Jewish Week observes : Middle East Wars Flare Up At Yale: Controversial academic shot down for appointment; was campaign against him politically motivated?
Juan Cole, one of the country’s top Middle East scholars, was poised for the biggest step of his career. A tenured professor at the University of Michigan, Cole was tapped earlier this year by a Yale University search committee to teach about the modern Middle East. In two separate votes in May, Cole was approved by both the sociology and history departments, the latter the university’s largest.
The only remaining hurdle was the senior appointments committee, also known as the tenure committee, a group consisting of about a half-dozen professors from various disciplines across the university.
Last week, however, in what is shaping up as the latest in a series of heated battles over the political affiliations of Middle Eastern studies professors, the tenure committee voted down Cole’s nomination. Several Yale faculty members described the decision to overrule the votes of the individual departments as “highly unusual.” The reasons behind the rejection remain unknown; several calls to a Yale spokeswoman went unreturned.
But university insiders say that the uncharacteristic rebuff may have been influenced by several factors, central among them the political commentary Cole writes on his blog, “Informed Comment.” They also contend that Cole’s nomination was torpedoed mainly by senior professors in both departments who were concerned with Cole’s controversial persona. Often favoring a pugilistic tone and consistently criticizing Israel’s policies in the West Bank, Cole has attracted a visibility that has made him a favorite target of several conservative commentators.
When Cole’s potential hiring became publicly known, several of his detractors, including the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin and Washington Times columnist Joel Mowbray, took various steps to protest the decision. They wrote op-ed pieces in various publications and Mowbray went as far as to send a letter to a dozen of Yale’s major donors, many of whom are Jewish, urging them to call the university and protest Cole’s hiring.
Cole, while refusing to comment on the tenure committee’s vote, told The Jewish Week he believes that “the concerted press campaign by neoconservatives against me, which was a form of lobbying the higher administration, was inappropriate and a threat to academic integrity.
“The articles published in the Yale Standard, the New York Sun, the Wall Street Journal, Slate, and the Washington Times, as part of what was clearly an orchestrated campaign, contained made-up quotes, inaccuracies, and false charges,” he said. “The idea that I am any sort of anti-Jewish racist because I think Israel would be better off without the occupied territories is bizarre, but I fear that a falsehood repeated often enough and in high enough places may begin to lose its air of absurdity.”
Well, I think it sucks because Juan Cole is basically The Dude on these matters. Billmon's reaction to this was worth checking:
I’m sure Mowbray doesn’t have a clue about the perverse irony of what he’s done – which plays directly into every conceivable anti-Semitic stereotype about wealthy Jews pulling strings from behind the scenes. Neither Al Jazeera nor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could dream up a scenario more calculated to confirm every Middle Eastern prejudice about what (and who) drives U.S. foreign policy. How can we explain to them that it’s just the educational bureaucrats at Yale, who would probably do whatever it takes to please any well-heeled group of donors – even if it involved putting on bright red lipstick and getting down on their knees. Especially that.
....Well, they’ve finally got their man... The Bush administration has done a 180 on Iran policy, the GOP Congress is stumbling towards defeat, the Likud Party (Israel branch) has been reduced to a corporal’s guard and the dream of a Greater Israel is irreparably lost – in other words, the neocon world has come apart at the seams – but at least Juan Cole isn’t going to Yale. Mission fucking accomplished.
To his credit, Cole is saying he's not too upset because his current job is pretty sweet:
I am doing what I enjoy doing, which is studying and teaching the Middle East and South Asia, and communicating about it to various publics. I have not, and short of foul play cannot be stopped from doing what I am doing, and what I enjoy. I welcome critiques of my work. There are obviously some critics, however, who go rather beyond simple critique to wishing to silence or smear me. In the former, at least, they cannot succeed by mere yellow journalism. So I have what I want, but they cannot have what they want. I win, every day.
Cole's work is top-notch, and it's a damn good thing that someone in academia has the guts to take on the Likud-Republican Complex these days.
All right, I think that does it for today. Are we entertained yet?
In a subtle irony that only the Somalis could pull off, Mogadishu has been captured by Islamic militias after more than a decade of chaotic civil war. Apparently the kiss of death for the more secular warlords was when word got around that the CIA was paying them to keep fighting the Islamic guys. Summary from DailyKos: Bush searches for "Plan B" for Somalia.
While wandering around the Cedar-Riverside area last night (there was a benefit for the Arise Bookstore at Bedlam Theatre) I was reminded yet again that this little patch of Minneapolis has deep connections to a place on the most opposite pole of the international political system imaginable. I considered that the odds of an Islamic militia taking over the Minneapolis' West Bank area, given the HAMAS in the other West Bank, and Mogadishu, well, the odds must be up to like 3% by now.
WaPo reports that the guns have mostly stopped firing in the battered capital:
The thugs manning the roadblocks are gone. The warlords are on the run. And the guns in a city long regarded as among the world's most heavily armed have fallen silent. Most, in fact, have disappeared from view.
Since Islamic militias took control of this city last week, U.S. and other Western officials have worried that Mogadishu's new leaders would impose a severe, Taliban-style government and harbor terrorists. But after 15 years of deadly chaos, residents interviewed expressed jubilation that somebody has made their city safe, and that for now, the daily crackle of gunfire is finally gone.
"Our ears are resting now," said Diiriye Jimcaale, 45, who has been unemployed since the onset of inter-clan warfare forced him to close his small clothing shop in 1991. Anxiety remains, both about the militias' ability to maintain order and about the possibility that extremist elements within the movement will go too far in imposing Islamic rule. Residents speak of a wave of cinema closings after the militias took control of the city June 5. Rumors circulated that public showings of the televised World Cup soccer tournament would be banned.
But on this Friday night, sounds of the match floated through Mogadishu. The streets bustled with activity. The city's largest market, near the site where two U.S. helicopters crashed in 1993, as depicted in the movie "Black Hawk Down," hummed with business. Cab driver Yusuf Ali Muhammed, 39, felt so safe that he left his longtime bodyguard at home, saving himself $5 in security fees, he said. Wielding an AK-47 rifle, as his guard did each night as they drove through the city, is now prohibited. Yet even without it, Muhammed said that he could now go anywhere in the city at any time. Before, he stuck to the few neighborhoods he knew best.
More commentary about the new Somalia situation, and an op-ed from Omar Jamal in today's Star Tribune. Jamal is saying that it's gonna be Taliban-style:
Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al-Qaida, praised the bravery of the militia and its victory in kicking the "infidels" out of Somalia. He further infiltrated the militias by funding and sending experts to train them.
The warlords were oblivious to the Trojan horse that Bin Laden had sent them. Al-Qaida continued to try to get a foothold in Mogadishu, while the warlords continued to pillage and drag an already impoverished people into more suffering.
There's been good reporting in the Strib about the local reaction. Eric Black's story from June 10 ought to be read: Somalis ponder the possibility of peace: News that Islamic fundamentalists are behind the new calm in Mogadishu sparks a flurry of opinion among Minnesota Somalis:
Somali faces crowd around a coffeehouse table in Minneapolis, listening intently, speaking passionately, interrupting occasionally, expressing opinions about a swarm of questions that arise from the latest developments in Mogadishu. They believe, or maybe just hope, that peace may be breaking out in the war-ravaged capital of their homeland. Out pour the views:
Yes, the victory of an Islamist coalition in the battle for Mogadishu is a good thing. But not if they turn out to be Taliban-style Islamists. But they aren't. Well, some of them are. Are there Al-Qaida-linked terrorists hiding in Mogadishu? Yes, I know it for a fact. No, it's a rumor. Foreigners could never hide in Somalia, because everyone knows everyone. We hate terrorists. Make sure you tell your readers that. We are making new lives in America and grateful to be in Minnesota.
[.....]
The Starbucks Somalis don't have answers to the biggest questions. Can the Islamists hold the capital? Will they try to take over the whole country? Will they work with the transitional government? Are they harboring terrorists? Will Washington tolerate their rise? But almost every opinion is represented. Then a break in the cacophony as a new face arrives. The others defer for a trice to the respected editor of a Somali newspaper, the Warsan Times. The news is a mixture of good and bad, says editor Hassan Shabac. "The warlords who have put our people through 16 years of hell have been driven from their strongholds."
The killing has stopped, for the moment. The bus fare to cross Mogadishu has plummeted from 3,500 Somali shillings last week to 1,000 shillings, because buses don't have to pay the warlords for permission to pass. Most heads at the table nod.
The Union of Islamic Courts is a coalition of two factions, with very different characteristics, Shabac calmly continues. The moderate faction could probably work out a deal with the provisional government. Some around the table have voiced hopes that a deal between the provisional government and the moderate Islamists will complete the struggle to end Somalia's 16 years of stateless limbo.
But then Shabac drops the other shoe, which bodes ill for the young men's hopes and the old men's dreams. The other faction, Shabac says, is made up of Islamic hard-liners from the Al-Ittihad organization. Their agenda: Impose an Islamic caliphate on the whole country and eventually the whole region of Africa. Their Wahabbi-style Islam is so strict "it would make life under the Taliban look like paradise."
The locally produced Warsan Times, with a decidedly idiosyncratic website layout, opines:
US INVOLVEMENT IS SEEN NECESSARY TO END SOMALI CONFLICT
Us has been blamed for providing financial and military support to the anti terrorism coalition that are fighting to survive in Mogadishu against the powerful umbrella of Somali active religious zealots. It may be too late for US to get involved in Somali politics when the religious guys destroy Somali federal government and force Somali president Mr. You to ask Ethiopia for political asylum in six months from now.
It was well known that the Alitihad organization was training nine years in Marka, Somalia peacefully, so they can easily overtake Somalia without strong resistance. It is to my surprise that and also to many Somali scholars who are carefully studying Somali politics that anti terrorism terrorists where able to withstand the wrath of Islamic Para-military punishment this long.
Somali warlords have lost grounds so as popular support to defeat Islamic soldiers, because of them not finding a reasonable solution to Somali conflict, therefore, Somali people are willing to support religious guys because somehow they were able to bring peace and prosperity to those they rule. Somalis are tired of being jerked right to left by worlds with empty promises. These warlords are interest oriented while carefully drafting temporary agendas for the rest of the people they rule.
US have actively tried to facilitate food and rations to millions of displaced starving Somali people but they failed and lost many soldiers in the process. Now, for the world peace will it be easy for US government to stabilize Somalia by ending the Somali civil war and establishing responsible government in Mogadishu? For those who don’t remember this is how that good will ended.
US has lost many brave soldiers in the process of capturing elusive general Mr. Aided who was the most powerful general in Somali nation at the time, however, the liberal US government cut and ran after losing 18 exceptional brave US marines. Let me say this the withdrawal was important, because it gave the impression that America was vulnerable to terrorism and that if casualties were high enough they could be coerced into abandoning hazardous overseas commitments.
I don't know about that. What the hell could the US really have done to stabilize Somalia after the 'Black Hawk Down' incident anyway?
It's been a rough 15 years for Somalia, and I wish them all the best. It's too bad that the UN-organized provisional government (and its representatives who base themselves in Minnesota) couldn't bring about a better situation on their own terms, but it's quite possible that this new Islamic government is more interested in 'delivering the goods' of peace, quiet and prosperity than imposing harshly radical, Talban-style repression.
But if they do, it'll probably fall to the denizens of Cedar-Riverside to straighten things out. Time for another cup of coffee.
The long promised Lots of Goodies:
Dear Leader Pawlenty has seen the massive 35W-Highway 62 crosstown rebuilding/redesign fall apart, because for some reason he thought that since the state doesn't have the money, he could convince contractors to shoulder the costs themselves, and pay them back later.
I am drinking two cups of coffee now so I can drill through all-a this. First of all see the Ali G video with TV news anchor Sam Donaldson. He's a game guest, in particular with repeating Cohen's obscene gestures. There was a trailer for a new Borat movie this fall but it got taken down by Fox within hours. JAGSHEMASH! Can Cohen stay sharp with Borat and Ali G, or will people be sick of it by then? I don't know, but the many Borat clips on YouTube are sweet.
Trey Parker and Matt Stone's "Favorite memo ever": watering down the South Park movie to satisfy the MPAA: (via the excellent celebrity-jabber What Would Tyler Durden Do? site)
More coming in a bit. The coffee is making me flush so I'm gonna take a shower
Now that's what I call freedom!
Tony Snow and Dan Bartlett don their Darth Vader helmets on the Bush plane to Mess'o'potamia
It is late but I am just posting to note that the major barrier in moving the site over to the Drupal - a problem so onerous that has delayed me for weeks while I hunt for a real full-time job and chill at political conventions - has abruptly been solved this late Thursday evening. All true computing breakthroughs occur after 3 AM, it is well known.
I started from scratch on a new Drupal installation now at Drupal2.hongpong.com, and basically I discovered that I did entirely foolish things when trying to install the AcidFree gallery/media juggling system. There was no flaw on the developer's work at all, just my own dumb ass.
Behold a working gallery page as the cops march towards protesters in New York City at the RNC - 2004. Register for the site if you like (registered users from the old installation will be brought over in a bit).
In other positive news, I found a benefactor on the Internet to refer me into the BlogAds system so there will hopefully be enough revenue to cover the web hosting fees.
Get used to seeing this little Drupal face. It's happening!
I really promise that there will be forthcoming photos and goodies from the DFL convention. Today I got a haircut and checked out some more job stuff. Now I am going to have a social life. I think we could say that the number of words on this site are inverse to Dan's productive activity, and for that I ought to be saluted so far this week. However I can still post a couple photos.
Sen. Becky Lourey gives a press interview after the first gubernatorial ballot. The intrepid MPR reporter Tom Scheck is the cue ball behind the guy in the green Kelley shirt.
The Teamsters were the muscle behind the event - controlling the doors and such. This was after the first ballot, during intense floor delegate lobbying operations.
Consulting with future Attorney General Matt Entenza about important matters - and making that Macalester grad look short!
I promise there will be updates later. For now, life rolls on.
Well there's lots of stuff to say about this weekend's adventures at the DFL convention in Rochester (and some genuinely awesome pictures) but right now I am grabbing some lunch and then going to a promising job interview in Bloomington.
We had some service interruptions over the weekend as the PowWeb hosting company switched over their systems to a new, better arrangement that should offer better performance.
I cross-posted the latest about Yellowcake and PSY OPS to the DailyKos and the Agonist. On the Kos it gathered about 20 comments, mostly encouraging. The content of the post skated pretty near the 'tinfoil hattery' that Kos editors have tried to dampen. As Servantsavant said:
I'm not surprised that this great diary didn't get found and recommended with the openly stated policy from many of those in the dKos leadership that connect-the-dots diaries are not welcome at DailyKos. Anyone who even wanted to recommend probably thought better of it, lest they be banned by meta-cops for making meta-Jesus cry.
The best thing about the Vanity Fair article was that it was in Vanity Fair - probably the only MSM that would dare to touch the subject or connect the dots.
Can you imagine reading about this in the Washington Post or the NYT? Of course you can't and you know why. It can't be said here. .....
Third, every person who has done any work blogging the subject is written off and shouted down by the forum leadership of their potential audience. We're about winning elections and we don't want to be sounding like kooks if we're going to win elections.
So HongPong, I applaud your courage and I appreciate the important work you're doing connecting the dots.
That is quite encouraging. Perhaps more encouraging was the email I got from a twin cities TV host who happened to stumble across the entry..... More goodies later, but first I gotta deal with this Bank Account problem.
"To me there is no benign interpretation of this," says Melvin Goodman, the former C.I.A. and State Department analyst. "At the highest level it was known the documents were forgeries. Stephen Hadley knew it. Condi Rice knew it. Everyone at the highest level knew." Both Rice and Hadley have declined to comment.
The great Meta-Story – the major narrative, the center of gravity of the past few years – is the "core reality" of why the war in Iraq started, and its interesting corollary, the Republican claim that "investigations will make us sad and hurt America." More or less, all along, the plan was to scare the shit out of America and make the Democrats appear weak. This was done by planting fake stories about evil foreign menaces, and as time goes by, more and more details about this essential backdrop to the 'War on Terror' burble up from the morass of this young, dumb century.
The story of the Niger forgeries is definitely woven into the major Bush Administration scandals - the fake war intelligence, the AIPAC spy scandal, the Chalabi-defector manipulations, and it directly spawned the Valerie Plame scandal. When Plame's husband publicly called out the forgeries, Scooter Libby and others "outed" his wife as a CIA agent, more or less because they wanted to "play dirty" to defend fake elements of the war propaganda, such as the forgeries.
On March 14, Senator Jay Rockefeller IV, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote a letter to F.B.I. chief Robert Mueller asking for an investigation because "the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq." But Senator Pat Roberts, of Kansas, the Republican chair of the committee, declined to co-sign the letter.
Then, on March 19, 2003, the war in Iraq began.
The core of the war's meaning is a kind of elusive ghost, having iterated through WMD paranoia, the fun of Democracy Building, the heavily implied 9/11 link, Palestinian militant financing, and of course a handy sense of racism and imperial control fantasies, along with the often acceptable oil seizure (and for quite a few million fundamentalists, cleansing Babylon of evil, clearing a path for Zion and the Second Coming).
We should observe that Iraq's WMD chase distracted the army from stabilizing Iraq, saving its bureaucracies and businesses, and instead sent it on wild goose chases for mustard gas shells in the desert. So this deception, labeled "classic psy-ops" in the article, not only started a 'fake war', it directly killed American soldiers and thousands of Arabs. These fuckers are going to prison, someday.
The dicey thing about the invasion of Iraq was that it was a 'heavily engineered' event in history, and the vast majority of reporters and media people can't quite handle the problem, though they're finally getting better. To a true conspiracy theorist, "engineering" is always behind everything, while in reality, historical events come around as much as by chance, self-delusion among leaders (groupthink) and social trends. However, the Iraq war was a centrally propagated, mean little joke on history, and its perpetrators were clustered in the DC beltway. Crucial points that persuaded Congress to support the war were based on planted information and disinformation, subverting the democratic public's ultimate right to make the biggest decisions of war and peace.
Let's summarize what is pretty much known: Basically, in a nutshell, some neo-cons (widely thought to be Michael Ledeen and his boys like Michael Maloof and Larry Franklin) planted Niger government documents forged in French to the U.S. embassy in Rome, using shady Italians to cover their tracks as "cut-outs." Ledeen, a top neo-con all-around, and his allies like John Bolton, Scooter Libby, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, David Wurmser and a pretty narrow cluster of people used this planted intelligence to spread terrifying stories like "Saddam is getting the Bomb" and "he is allied to this big Zarqawi conspiracy" throughout 2002, preparing Americans to accept another war.
Ledeen is also suspected to be tied to this scheme because he spent a long time in Italy hanging around with crazy right-wing P2 Masonic Lodge types (P2 is Propaganda Due - known for doing cool shit in the Vatican Bank scandal and Operation Gladio - a covert European strategy during the Cold War, intended to suppress Communists and leftists, which spawned all manner of strange and perhaps mythical episodes of rightwing violence, "false flag" incidents, intended to psychologically manipulate the public - or so say disputed Wikipedia articles.). Ledeen developed a loving interest in "Universal Fascism", more or less.
One strange thing is that any low-level analyst could determine they were forgeries because they were incredibly bad. This was one reason that Sy Hersh suggested maybe Ledeen didn't actually do it. They were so bad that they had the wrong ministers for their supposed date, and the French was really, really bad.
Now, the Counter-Attack: A bunch of the CIA's oldest and meanest, Colin Powell's chief of staff, and others have stepped forward to label this manipulation as "Black PSY OPS" or something along those lines. They have been in the background, steadily emerging since 2003 (especially on the Internet), offering a flipside alternative to the scrupulously observed media narratives about the war and WMDs as "honest mistakes", supporting Rummy, Bush, and Karl Rove's ballot box engineering nearly every step of the way. Tragically, in 2004, Kerry's "centrist" campaign consultants lacked the cojones to attack the intel spoofing, even though Kerry helped bust up Iran-Contra, their grandest scheme.
What is a Black PSY OP?
Aside from the drug trafficking, the trickiest aspect of the War on Terror to understand is the shadowy idea of "information operations," information dominance or information warfare, military doctrines whose effects on democratic public knowledge and behavior are both highly partisan and quite subversive in nature. Check out the military's Information Operations overview for info (PDF). Layered above this is the Pentagon's "public relations" or "strategic communication" (PDF) strategy - the well-lit, Victoria Clarke world, the embedded reporters, the in-your-face narrative, emotionally exciting, an intense Confrontation with that Other presented in the media, especially television.
The process of creating, planting, laundering and marketing those fake stories would properly be called "black propaganda" or "black PSY OPS", especially as they manipulate the American public. "Black" signifies misdirection or deception in source or content of information or disinformation.
A psychological operation or "PSY OP" is a sort of operation which manipulates the perceptions of a target audience or group. Sun Tzu understood this. For example, using a vast visual display of weapons to intimidate an enemy into surrender is a basically psychological operation. This can also include planting contradictory stories to divide and confuse an enemy. Background here at the Information Warfare site:
'Psychological Operations: Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator's objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also consolidation psychological operations; overt peacetime psychological operations programs; perception management. ' US Department of Defense
Here's an example of where the military PR blends into information operation and Black PSY OPS. These are my rough categories, basically suggestions based on authenticity of content and source, and intended target audience - and its political relationship to the source of the information, especially voter blocs:
1) A school is rebuilt in Fallujah and a New York Times reporter is embedded with a unit that is helping open it. This is an authentic "strategic communication" which could also be a White PSY OP, but not deceptive in itself.
2) The military spokesman falsely says a school is being rebuilt in Fallujah but no reporters can get there and no media offer any dissenting reports. This is an information operation, but perhaps not a Black PSY OP because the source is authentic.
3) A authentic school story is purchased (by say the Lincoln Group) in an Iraqi newspaper to reinforce Iraqi public perception of the "clear-hold-build" strategy. This is a PSY OP, but not a Black PSY OP because its content is true. It could be a Gray PSY OP because its source is mis-represented, though. The Iraqi paper is essentially a "cut-out" for the US military PSY OP unit's work.
4) A fake school story is purchased by the US military in an Iraqi paper. A military spokesman or media contact tips an American reporter (or a right-wing blogger looking for the "real happy news the media hides") to the story in the Iraqi paper. The translated, planted report boosts the emotions of those Americans who hear it. This is a Black PSY OP and Covert Propaganda. This especially matters to Democrats because:
5) The Covert Propaganda and Black PSY OPS directed at the American public by the executive branch and its allies will always be designed, by habit or accident, to favor the ruling party.
Technically it is illegal for the government to plant "covert propaganda" into the American public's brains, but what this means is unclear. The Bushies have been caught a few times sending video news releases that have been repackaged by TV networks as authentic news segments.
4th Generation Warfare: The US gets manipulated via information operations: In 4th generation warfare theory, a multi-tiered strategy to achieve political objectives in a tactically fluid and confusing environment is applied by all parties. Unfortunately, with everything in Iraq, some parties have found ways to manipulate the Pentagon by their own information operations. The goal is to trick the US into attacking different parties against their own interest.
This would include how Iran helped Chalabi generate the fake "defector" intelligence before the invasion of Iraq, and how petty squabbles between Iraqi parties are mis-represented as Terrorists vs Counter-Terrorists, and the US hits one side with overwhelming air and land-power for no compelling reason. In those situations, the US itself has suffered an information operation that caused it to overreact and alienate the population, increasing power for some local parties while directly killing off their rivals. Chalabi purged the many middle-class professional "Baathists" (in name only), people the US didn't need to attack, but did anyway, because Chalabi manipulated U.S. perceptions. Recent U.S. attacks against recent Marsh Arab tribes around Basra bear the marks of manipulation, according to a source for Juan Cole:
' The [sectarian conflict near Suwayra] faded out in November of last year. It suddenly errupted three days ago. There were actually three days of violence in that area. The first day was an attack on Obaid by members of the Ghuran tribe who were members of the Mahdi army (at least they carried Mhdi army id's). 14 people were killed. The second saw an attack from Suwaira security forces (although the area administratively belongs to Baghdad).
The third day saw a massive assault by Iraqi and US army accompanied by helicopter gunships and fighter planes. The assault lasted for 10 hours . . . It is absolutely fascinating for me to see that piece of information being propagated on Iraqi news channels, newspapers and websites as a land dispute. It was originally based on a "police source".
It is now almost certain that the US army was misled into taking action against one of the two parties yesterday. The whole thing was a 'sectarian' assault that failed miserably the first time. It failed again this time . . .
In yesterday’s ‘American’ raid only one man was killed – young Marwan (!!) 6 were injured and about a dozen detained (exact number unconfirmed).
Today, all tribes in the area (Sunni and Shiite) were in uproar against the Ghurraan. Their 3 acts were seen as treacherous. The Ghurraan shaikh, Saad A. A. al-Bassi sent word to Obaid that he was enlisting support from his tribe to disown the sub-clan that was responsible (known as Rattaan). A few hours ago I received word (unconfirmed) that Saad was arrested by the Iraqi National Guard!
Another staged petty confrontation would be the U.S./Shiite operations against the Turkmen Sunnis of Tal Afar & northern Iraq. These could all be examples of the U.S. military suffering from successful PSY OPS targeting.
Back to the Forgeries: Two of the "pissed off CIA dudes" we have listed on the sidebar, Larry Johnson and Pat Lang, have gone on record with Vanity Fair that the Niger uranium forgeries – the claim that "Saddam Hussein sought uranium in Africa" – was systematically fabricated and inserted by neo-cons into the American intelligence community, a colossal conspiracy which led to trapping the American army in the snake pit of Iraq. The story weaves a byzantine path through the unique hell of Italian intelligence, such as this:
Among those Berlusconi appointed to powerful national-security positions [in 1994] were two men known to Ledeen. A founding member of Forza Italia, Minister of Defense Antonio Martino was a well-known figure in Washington neocon circles and had been close friends with Michael Ledeen since the 1970s. Ledeen also occasionally played bridge with the head of SISMI under Berlusconi, Nicolò Pollari. "Michael Ledeen is connected to all the players," says Philip Giraldi, who was stationed in Italy with the C.I.A. in the 1980s and has been a keen observer of Ledeen over the years.
Enter Rocco Martino. An elegantly attired man in his 60s with white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, Martino (no relation to Antonio Martino) had served in SISMI until 1999 and had a long history of peddling information to other intelligence services in Europe, including France's Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (D.G.S.E.).
By 2000, however, Martino had fallen on hard times financially. It was then that a longtime colleague named Antonio Nucera offered him a lucrative proposition. A SISMI colonel specializing in counter-proliferation and W.M.D., Nucera told Martino that Italian intelligence had long had an "asset" in the Niger Embassy in Rome: a woman who was about 60 years old, had a low-level job, and occasionally sold off embassy documents to SISMI. But now SISMI had no more use for the woman—who is known in the Italian press as "La Signora" and has recently been identified as the ambassador's assistant, Laura Montini. Perhaps, Nucera suggested, Martino could use La Signora as Italian intelligence had, paying her to pass on documents she copied or stole from the embassy.
Shortly after New Year's 2001, the break-in took place at the Niger Embassy. Martino denies any participation. There are many conflicting accounts of the episode. According to La Repubblica, a left-of-center daily which has published an investigative series on Nigergate, documents stolen from the embassy ultimately were combined with other papers that were already in SISMI archives.
SISMI director Nicolò Pollari acknowledges that Martino has worked for Italian intelligence. But, beyond that, he claims that Italian intelligence played no role in the Niger operation. "[Nucera] offered [Martino] the use of an intelligence asset [La Signora]—no big deal, you understand—one who was still on the books but inactive—to give a hand to Martino," Pollari told a reporter.
Rocco Martino, however, said SISMI had another agenda: "SISMI wanted me to pass on the documents, but they didn't want anyone to know they had been involved."
As the frightening forgeries materialized in the American intelligence community, one analyst after another marked them as forgeries, but soon one neo-con after another kept stuffing their claims into the speeches of Cheney, Bush, the talking points of pundits on the radio & TV (this was a particular function of the Office of Special Plans, Kwiatkowski has said).
Vanity Fair describes the "echo" effect that manipulated allied intelligence agencies into perpetuating the fake charges. Basically, it is like telling your 10 most arrogant and powerful acquaintances the same bullshit, but passing it through intermediaries or "cut-outs". This makes the artificial disinformation (aka a "PSY OP" that intel agencies are supposed to detect) instead appear authentic and broad.
The Niger forgery is merely one piece that has been traced pretty far back along the chain, via all these pissed off CIA people and others around various parts of the chain. But the same pattern of...
Terrifying Claim->lots of intel agencies get claims->international echo effect in analysis/policy->scary public leaks and tales - a la Judith Miller->drumbeat of scary media stories->WAR
...was the basic pattern around the false stories from Ahmed Chalabi and his defectors, which people like Larry Johnson, Kwiatkowski, essentially this whole gang have railed against for years. So Vanity Fair describes how the intel agencies were bombarded with "Yellowcake" reports:
Over the next two years, the Niger documents and reports based on them made at least three journeys to the C.I.A. They also found their way to the U.S. Embassy in Rome, to the White House, to British intelligence, to French intelligence, and to Elisabetta Burba, a journalist at Panorama, the Milan-based newsmagazine. Each of these recipients in turn shared the documents or their contents with others, in effect creating an echo chamber that gave the illusion that several independent sources had corroborated an Iraq-Niger uranium deal.
"It was the Italians and Americans together who were behind it. It was all a disinformation operation," Martino told a reporter at England's Guardian newspaper. He called himself "a tool used by someone for games much bigger than me."
What exactly might those games have been? Berlusconi defined his role on the world stage largely in terms of his relationship with the U.S., and he jumped at the chance to forge closer ties with the White House when Bush took office, in 2001. In its three-part series on Nigergate, La Repubblica charges that Berlusconi was so eager to win Bush's favor that he "instructed Italian Military Intelligence to plant the evidence implicating Saddam in a bogus uranium deal with Niger." (The Berlusconi government, which lost power in April, denied the charge.)
Then there are the surface political motives for SISMI doing special disinformation favors for the New Bush White House:
During the Clinton era, the neocons persisted with their policy goals, and in early 1998 they twice lobbied President Clinton to bring down Saddam. The second attempt came in the form of "An Open Letter to the President" by leading neoconservatives, many of whom later played key roles in the Bush administration, where they became known as the Vulcans. Among those who signed were Michael Ledeen, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser.
According to Patrick Lang, the initial Niger Embassy robbery could have been aimed at starting the war even though Bush had yet to be inaugurated. The scenario, he cautions, is merely speculation on his part. But he says that the neocons wouldn't have hesitated to reach out to SISMI even before Bush took office. "There's no doubt in my mind that the neocons had their eye on Iraq," he says. "This is something they intended to do, and they would have communicated that to SISMI or anybody else to get the help they wanted."
In Lang's view, SISMI would also have wanted to ingratiate itself with the incoming administration. "These foreign intelligence agencies are so dependent on us that the urge to acquire I.O.U.'s is a powerful incentive by itself," he says. "It would have been very easy to have someone go to Rome and talk to them, or have one of the SISMI guys here [in Washington], perhaps the SISMI officer in the Italian Embassy, talk to them."
Lang's scenario rings true to Frank Brodhead. "When I read that the Niger break-in took place before Bush took office, I immediately thought back to the Bulgarian Connection," he says. "That job was done during the transition as well. [Michael] Ledeen … saw himself as making a serious contribution to the Cold War through the Bulgarian Connection. Now, it was possible, 20 years later, that he was doing the same to start the war in Iraq."
Brodhead is not alone. Several press outlets, including the San Francisco Chronicle, United Press International, and The American Conservative, as well as a chorus of bloggers—Daily Kos, the Left Coaster, and Raw Story among them—have raised the question of whether Ledeen was involved with the Niger documents. But none have found any hard evidence.
My evidence is that I personally talked to Ledeen for a while at Macalester and he seemed diabolical, anarchic and crazy. However that ain't fingerprints. After 9/11, the article describes the path of the Niger forgeries as "murky," and moves on to tackle how tightly Michael Ledeen himself was tied into the rest of the neo-con rhetroric & action machine that catapulted the U.S. into Iraq on all that dodgy intelligence. Of course around here, I have stuck by the line from Dr. Rashid Khalidi, who told me in an interview way back in October 2003:
Me: A Frontline interview with Richard Perle was published with the documentary “Truth, War and Consequences.” He talked about the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, which reviewed intelligence on Iraq prior to the war. Perle said the office was staffed by David Wurmser, another author of the Clean Break document. Perle says that the office “began to find links that nobody else had previously understood or recorded in a useful way.” Were the neo-cons turning their ideology into intelligence data, and putting that into the government?
RK: I can give you a short answer to that which is yes. Insofar as at least two of the key arguments that they adduced, the one having to do the connection between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, and the one having to do with unconventional weapons programs in Iraq, it is clear that the links or the things they had claimed to have found were non-existent. The wish was fathered to the reality. What they wanted was what they found.
It was not just the Office of Special Plans, or whatever. There are a lot of institutions in Washington that were devoted to putting this view forward. Among them, other parts of the bureaucracy, and the vice president’s national security staff. The vice president’s chief of staff Lewis Libby is a very important member of the neo-con group. He and the vice president have created the most powerful national security staff that anybody has ever had in the office of the vice president. I’ve read published assessments, which say that this is actually more influential than Condi Rice’s staff, the real NSC. This is another center of these views.
And then there are the think-tanks—I would use the word ‘think’ in quotes—like the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution and so on, all of which are devoted to spreading similar ideas. Basically any fantasy that Chalabi's people brought in, “we have a defector who says,” was turned into gold by these folks.
We now know this stuff, with a few exceptions, to be completely and utterly false, just manufactured disinformation designed to direct the United States in a certain direction. Whether the neo-cons knew this or not is another question, but I believe Chalabi’s people knew it. I would be surprised if some of them didn’t know it.
Along this basic line, we have followed along on this case at Hongpong.com pretty much since it opened up, though we've let it slide lately since very little has happened in the case in a long time, and the Scooter Libby trial it spawned has basically dragged on with only a trickle of information.
Well, that's all for now. I am going to the DFL convention in Rochester now. Remember that your brain is a military target.
A quick note from the Montana situation: our man Andy Tweeten has been working in communications and field ops for Jon Tester, and operating the TesterTime campaign blog.
Tester just trounced his primary opponent, a rather scuzzy lawyer/state auditor named Morrison, by a resounding 61% or so. David Sirota says: Populist Jon Tester Scores Huge Win Against D.C. Dems & For the Rest of Us. This means that he's going to fight the highly corrupt (Abramoff-ultra-tainted) Senator Conrad Burns in November. See also:
Secret to Tester's win: Large margin of primary victory surprises political observers
By CHARLES S. JOHNSON of the Missoulian State Bureau
HELENA - Jon Tester's victory in the Democratic U.S. Senate primary Tuesday night was like a prairie fire sweeping across Montana. As the vote tallies were reported, political observers across the state were stunned by the magnitude of Tester's win in what had been seen as a tossup.
“Although it was clear that Tester was coming on like a rocket in the last couple of weeks, I'm frankly surprised at the margin of the win,” said Pat Williams, a former Democratic congressman and senior fellow at the University of Montana. Tester, a Big Sandy farmer and Montana Senate president, grabbed 76 percent of the vote in Missoula County, 72 percent in Lewis and Clark County and 66 percent in Cascade County.
In his own neck of the woods, Tester saw his vote balloon to 91 percent in his home county of Choteau, 89 percent in Liberty County and 84 percent in Hill County. Tester won 60.8 percent of the total Democratic vote to defeat chief rival and State Auditor John Morrison, who had 35.5 percent. And the drubbing occurred even though Morrison's campaign spent nearly twice as much as Tester's.
The winner captured 48 counties, Morrison took seven counties and they tied in Fallon County, according to unofficial election returns. So what happened? How did Tester's campaign catch fire? What doused Morrison's campaign?
“I think in a nutshell it was grass-roots,” Tester said Wednesday. “We hit the issues that Montanans are connected up with - energy, health care, jobs, public land issues, ethics, fiscal responsibility.” Tester said he will stay with that grass-roots model as he runs against Conrad Burns, the three-term Republican incumbent, in the general election.
“Ultimately, what I heard and what I saw last night was that voters want a change,” he said. “They're tired of the same old, same old. They want somebody to represent Montana values and they want honesty.” Here are some factors cited by political observers.
n Ethics and the Morrison affair. Both Tester and Morrison regularly attacked Burns over the incumbent's ethics because of Burns' ties to convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the central figure in the congressional influence-peddling scandal. In April, however, Morrison was on the receiving end of allegations of ethical improprieties.
News stories ran that told how Morrison had an extramarital affair with a Bigfork woman before he was elected auditor in 2000. The woman later married a Flathead Valley businessman, David Tacke, whom Morrison's office investigated for securities fraud. Critics suggested Morrison's office went soft on Tacke, a claim Morrison heatedly disputed.
Jennifer Duffy, managing editor of the Cook Political Report in Washington, D.C., said news of the Morrison affair and his handling of the Tacke case was the turning point in the campaign.
OK, your opponent's affair is pretty much a sophomore mistake. But basic fact that Jon Tester is a terrific candidate with an excellent haircut and a nice populist style. I am really proud of Andy for his excellent work on the ground, and I wish him the best in what's going to be a barnburner mountain folk populist-vs-DC taint election of total buzzcut badassery!
Vanity Fair has kind of a blockbuster article out. I have to run off, but you guys need to look at this. It's both "nothing really new" and also "holy shit this is insane" at the same time. I will have more later putting it in some context, but for now smoke crack & enjoy.
The War They Wanted, The Lies They Needed
The Bush administration invaded Iraq claiming Saddam Hussein had tried to buy yellowcake uranium in Niger. As much of Washington knew, and the world soon learned, the charge was false. Worse, it appears to have been the cornerstone of a highly successful "black propaganda" campaign with links to the White House
By CRAIG UNGER
......"A Classic Psy-Ops Campaign"
or more than two years it has been widely reported that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of intelligence failures. But in fact it is far more likely that the Iraq war started because of an extraordinary intelligence success—specifically, an astoundingly effective campaign of disinformation, or black propaganda, which led the White House, the Pentagon, Britain's M.I.6 intelligence service, and thousands of outlets in the American media to promote the falsehood that Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program posed a grave risk to the United States.
The Bush administration made other false charges about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.)—that Iraq had acquired aluminum tubes suitable for centrifuges, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaeda, that he had mobile weapons labs, and so forth. But the Niger claim, unlike other allegations, can't be dismissed as an innocent error or blamed on ambiguous data. "This wasn't an accident," says Milt Bearden, a 30-year C.I.A. veteran who was a station chief in Pakistan, Sudan, Nigeria, and Germany, and the head of the Soviet–East European division. "This wasn't 15 monkeys in a room with typewriters."
In recent months, it has emerged that the forged Niger documents went through the hands of the Italian military intelligence service, SISMI (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare), or operatives close to it, and that neoconservative policymakers helped bring them to the attention of the White House. Even after information in the Niger documents was repeatedly rejected by the C.I.A. and the State Department, hawkish neocons managed to circumvent seasoned intelligence analysts and insert the Niger claims into Bush's State of the Union address.
By the time the U.S. invaded Iraq, in March 2003, this apparent black-propaganda operation had helped convince more than 90 percent of the American people that a brutal dictator was developing W.M.D.—and had led us into war.
o trace the path of the documents from their fabrication to their inclusion in Bush's infamous speech, Vanity Fair has interviewed a number of former intelligence and military analysts who have served in the C.I.A., the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), and the Pentagon. Some of them refer to the Niger documents as "a disinformation operation," others as "black propaganda," "black ops," or "a classic psy-ops [psychological-operations] campaign." But whatever term they use, at least nine of these officials believe that the Niger documents were part of a covert operation to deliberately mislead the American public.
The officials are Bearden; Colonel W. Patrick Lang, who served as the D.I.A.'s defense intelligence officer for the Middle East, South Asia, and terrorism; Colonel Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell; Melvin Goodman, a former division chief and senior analyst at the C.I.A. and the State Department; Ray McGovern, a C.I.A. analyst for 27 years; Lieutenant Colonel Karen Kwiatkowski, who served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia division in 2002 and 2003; Larry C. Johnson, a former C.I.A. officer who was deputy director of the State Department Office of Counterterrorism from 1989 to 1993; former C.I.A. official Philip Giraldi; and Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of operations of the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center.
I made some good bank working the state convention. Last night we were driving down 94 in pouring rain and lightning struck a transformer right next to us. It exploded in a huge hail of sparks, and at that moment we decided it was fate instructing us to go bowling at Minnehaha Lanes.
It's 6/6/06 and it's my dad's birthday. I am in fact Damien. Sorry, more updates later, perhaps tonight if you're good. Chairman Mao has promised to finally contribute some stuff this week, and in honor of that his icon has been changed to Aleister Crowley pouting.
There is another round of the Minnesota state Republican Convention at 8 AM today (Saturday). I'm crashing now, got up hella early at 8 Friday too. David (i.e. "Roy")'s fan belt ripped apart when he stopped by to check the scene. Therefore he's snoozing on the futon now. More later. In the meantime, look at this Hades-esque situation. Pawlenty was speaking at the time. There are a lot of strange details to say later. For now, this photo says it all. No editing here at all - Blood Red is Gubernatorial.
Billmon tells a quality story about catching the Cairo-Luxor train on his trip to cover economic fora in Egypt.
I liked Alternet's Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State, especially, well, comprehensive domestic monitoring and "the Long War."
Andy Rooney can't handle Ali G.
I am posting some goofy stuff to spice your Thursday. Take it with triple grains of salt. Aside from the Zogby Poll, most everything below is basically fruitbat tinfoil stuff, the skimmings of the crazy paranoid side of the internet.
Empirical 9/11 skepticism: Zogby Poll: Over 70 Million American Adults Support New 9/11 Investigation:
May 22, 2006 -- Although the Bush administration continues to exploit September 11 to justify domestic spying, unprecedented spending and a permanent state of war, a new Zogby poll reveals that less than half of the American public trusts the official 9/11 story or believes the attacks were adequately investigated.
911Truth.org Urges 2006 Reform Candidates to Recognize a Powerful New Constituency
The poll is the first scientific survey of Americans' belief in a 9/11 cover up or the need to investigate possible US government complicity, and was commissioned to inform deliberations at the June 2~4 "9/11: Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming Our Future" conference in Chicago. Poll results indicate 42% believe there has indeed been a cover up (with 10% unsure) and 45% think "Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success" (with 8% unsure). The poll of American residents was conducted from Friday, May 12 through Tuesday, May 16, 2004. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of +/- 2.9. All inquiries about questions, responses and demographics should be directed to Zogby International.
According to Janice Matthews, executive director of 911truth.org, "To those who have followed the mounting evidence for US government involvement in 9/11, these results are both heartening and frankly quite amazing, given the mainstream media's ongoing refusal to cover the most critical questions of that day. Our August 2004 Zogby poll of New Yorkers showed nearly half believe certain US officials 'consciously' allowed the attacks to happen and 66% want a fresh investigation, but these were people closest to the tragedy and most familiar with facts refuting the official account. This revelation that so many millions nationwide now also recognize a 9/11 cover up and the need for a new inquiry should be a wake up call for all 2006 political candidates hoping to turn this country around. We think it also indicates Americans are awakening to the larger pattern of deceit that led us into Constitutional twilight and endless war, and that our independent media may have finally come of age."
(The poll sponsors see knowledge of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 as a bellwether issue, because if people do not know this elementary fact, they have probably not been exposed to any independent 9/11 research at all. Because the number of respondents who support a new investigation of 9/11 (45%)) is roughly the same as the number who knew about the collapse of Building 7 (52%), it can reasonably be extrapolated that if the entire public were exposed to independent 9/11 research, about 90 percent would support a new investigation of the events of that fateful day.)
Wow. No wonder Loose Change is a top Google Video download. Scholars for 9/11 Truth have had trouble with their Wikipedia entry.
Internet dudes find link between Titan Corporation defense contractor and massive 5.5 ton cocaine bust. On my birthday no less: San Diego Defense Contractor Linked to Company in 5.5 Ton Cocaine Bust:
The MadCowMorningNews has uncovered evidence implicating a San Diego defense contractor, The Titan Corporation, in fraud involving the shadowy St. Petersburg FL company involved in last month’s mysterious 5.5 ton cocaine seizure in Mexico.
Titan is already embroiled in major scandals which include the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and conviction and a $28 million fine for fixing a Presidential election in the African state of Benin. The company is also receiving attention for its role as the biggest campaign contributor of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
A MadCowMorningNews investigation of Titan Corp. also revealed that the firm has a curious and so-far unexplained connection to Makram Chams, a mysterious Lebanese man who provided assistance to Mohamed Atta and other terrorist hijackers in Venice Florida before the 9.11 attack.
Chams, who owned a convenience store in Venice, befriended and assisted the terrorist hijackers before disappearing after the 9.11 attack, leaving behind a thriving Kwik-Check mini-market which has since stood abandoned in the heart of the Venice business district.
Evidence in SEC filings recently brought to our attention reveal what happened to Chams: he went to work for Titan. According to documents filed by the company, Chams was a contractor working for Titan Corp in Saudi Arabia as recently as last year.
This was posted on some site called LibertyPost with a lot of strange comments afterwards.
A little more silly conspiratoria: France saves us from British terror bombing: I ended up with some more wild conspiracy stories and I will post them in the name of Thursday afternoon boredom. The idea is floated around paranoid corners (cloakanddagger.de) that last Thursday's Amtrak powerdown was in fact a narrowly averted "false flag" terrorist attack that "Dunblaine Pedophile Tony Blair" and "N.S.A. British-Mossad" nearly pulled off, but a French/American team killed the power to prevent trains sailing into government-planted bombs (noted on Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet). And former Illinois governor George Ryan and Fidel Castro are both Mossad agents. I really really don't believe it - in fact it is sort of an obvious inversion and the silly writing style doesn't enhance the entertainment value. But there you are. There were also theories that the London bombing was staged by the Brits. Check Total Information Analysis for more along these lines.
Obligatory scheming shadow powers note: The Bilderberg Group is meeting in Ottowa, Canada June 8-11 according to AmericanFreePress.net. They are "especially concerned about Venezuela" right now according to the strange AFP.
Some vet named Patrick Briley: CHERTOFF CREATED TERROR PRETEXTS FOR US POLICE STATE and Did the Fed's Cover Up Oklahoma University Bombing?
There Is No Conspiracy - Only Official Policy. Mostly related to Chavez. Sure, whatever.
The Late Great Sherman Skolnick: An oddball Chicago guy named Sherman Skolnick passed away at 75 after decades of messing with the notoriously corrupt Illinois legal system through the "Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts." Here's part 29 of his "Overthrow of the American Republic", Coca-Cola, the CIA and the Courts, part 16. Here's the Cloak and Dagger Obit. This really weird biography from DailyCatholic.org says he managed to get a federal judge thrown in jail, which is quite impressive.
PP also has paranoid things to say about mysterious Mexican separatists that wish to secede from the southwest US and form "Aztlan". Here's what Aztlan say today about Sensenbrenner's anti-immigrant proposals. I guess they are playing into his hands. I have heard that the NSA, FBI, etc. monitor these sorts of secessionist groups, which I would say is probably a logical thing to do.
Of course you can trust this man - Jeff Rense
I had an argument about skim vs 2% milk the other day, then ran into this milk conspiracy on arch-conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense's site, Rense.com: The Pus-Bacteria Moustache Marketing Milk And Disease and more "truth" about milk. Rense has plenty of other weird stuff like UFOs, and this thing about how AIDS was created by the government as they engineered a "Gay Cancer". (check out the shady polio vaccine site too). 9/11 was a Cheney-orchestrated Reichstag Fire type event. Ok fine.
Well that is all from the crazy paranoid side for now. I don't really know how to lend coherence to this post and I sort of feel like a bastard for even writing it. Go back to your fucking cable news now!
Looks like I'm going to handle the booth a bit for Politics in Minnesota at the Republican state convention down at the Minneapolis convention center this afternoon, Friday & Saturday. I woulda been able to make some bank if I could do the DFL convention at Rochester, but it looks like I'll have to deal with the Chunkies graduating from high school next Saturday.
Mordred sends word that he's busy moving out of his apartment in Tucson and I think going to Santa Fe. But he sent along a REALLY sweet video of one North Carolina Republican's Vernon Robinson's ad for Congress.
His platform is basically pretty straightforward:
Vernon Robinson's Public Policy Views in a Nutshell
I am pro-Constitution, pro-national sovereignty, pro-military, pro-veteran, pro-growth, pro-business, pro-property rights, pro-marriage, pro-adoption, pro-farmer, pro-school choice, pro-states' rights, pro-religious freedom, pro-Pledge of Allegiance, pro-death penalty, pro-gun, and pro-life.
I will secure our borders and demand the vigorous enforcement of our immigration laws. I support market-based reforms of government entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.
I am unabashedly and unalterably opposed to racial quotas, special rights for homosexuals, the United Nations, the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits, women in combat, pork barrel spending, useless government programs and agencies, onerous regulations, and all tax hikes.
Securing Our Borders
Our current immigration policy is a treasonable threat to both public health and national security. We do not need a wall to secure our borders. Five thousand Marines and 100 UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) can do the job tomorrow. We must also make English the official language of the United States. Any local government or college that interferes with immigration enforcement should lose its federal aid. Finally, automatic citizenship for those born here must be replaced with the baby adopting the citizenship of the mother. These steps must precede any guest worker program.
.....Defending Marriage and Traditional Values
I will always fight for what's right and you will always know where I stand. We cannot redefine marriage as any grouping of adults and children. I will vigorously oppose homosexual marriages, marriage-lite proposals and adoptions, as well as "gay" Scoutmasters. While my opponent believes that those in a drag queen parade and Rosa Parks are both civil rights leaders, I will join the dozens of Congressmen who sponsored an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that provides that "Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman."
There was also some funny stuff about stopping the "feminization" of the military and shutting down bases in Japan, Germany and Korea.
I can only hope that the denizens of the MN GOP are half as entertaining.
I wandered off and didn't feel like writing on Memorial Day. However the many sacrifices of America's soldiers, sailors and Marines should be noted. Before this strange and dark administration took the helm, I had a pretty serious view of what service in the military meant. In part this was because there were two other Daniel Feidts who fought for the United States.
Daniel S. Feidt Sr., my grandfather, enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II, even though he could have avoided service since he was an elected Minnesota state senator, more than 30 years old, and color-blind. He went into the intelligence section and planned raids against the Axis from Britain, Egypt and late in the war, at the Poltava air base in recaptured Ukrainian territory. At one point there was a Nazi air raid and a bomb whizzed through his tent and out the other side. He eventually reached the rank of major, and since he was a lawyer, they asked him to go work at the Nuremberg trials, but he declined because it was time to go back stateside and start a family.
Another interesting story was the one of Daniel Feidt of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who fought in the Civil War. We have transcripts of his letters home, which really would be interesting to put up here. I am not certain if he is my direct ancestor, though.
But the Daniel Feidts had the good fortune to survive their brushes with war. Not so for my dad's cousin, Bruce William Heskett, who was killed in a tank in Quang Tri, South Vietnam on 29 June, 1970. He was born 20 April 1945 and came from Spokane. He was a first Lieutenant, cut down only a few months into his tour that commenced on the 8th of February that year. He served in the 5th Infantry Division, A Company, 1st Battalion. His official death code was "Hostile, Died; Ground Casualty; Gun, Small Arms Fire". The summer after 7th grade during our trip to Washington I took an etching of his name on the Vietnam memorial.
Quang Tri province, near the DMZ and the Ben Hai river that divided the country, saw nine years of fighting, intense bombing, free fire zones, and extensive land mine and Agent Orange contamination. Of the 3,500 villages, only 11 remained by the end of the Vietnam war. (see a 1975 Army study of the Northern Provinces)
Just in time for Memorial Day, a batch of Henry Kissinger's old documents have been released by the National Security Archives. Almost two years to the day after my dad's cousin fell in central Vietnam, Kissinger had a charming and 'loquacious' conversation (PDF)with the Chinese Prime Minister at the Great Hall of the People. It's interesting for a lot of reasons, but this passage got news coverage:
If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.
Some folks couldn't live with it. These, and a few million more from Southeast Asia. Words can't really wrap around the reality of it. There were worthwhile ventures in the World Wars, perhaps Korea, maybe a bit of the Balkans. And of course keeping the Confederates down. Our citizens (and immigrants trying to become citizens) who stick it out are braver than my imagination can handle. But their commanders are only carrying out the policies of the generals, and the generals are (hopefully) only developing policies under orders from the civilian leadership, with transparent oversight from Congress. These days several links in that chain seem to be shattered, and the result are dead-end policies in places that American troops shouldn't be, and autonomous actions that don't support any kind of realistic goals.
They go without body armor so that privatized military firms can make off with fabulously lucrative contracts. The brass cower under Rumsfeld and look the other way when units in places like Abu Ghraib and Haditha go crazy under the stress and lack of support, among a confusing labyrinth of enemies, spies, mercenaries, contractors and the hapless local population.
The responsibility falls to those of us state-side to go after the military's uniformed and civilian leadership for its policies of deploying depleted uranium and caustic white phosphorus, private mercenaries instead of body armor, picking fights with clans instead of negotiating, its alarmingly delusional pattern of planting Psy Ops fake news stories (such as "Zarqawi's" February 2004 letter) instead of taking responsibility for their failed policies.
The good and honorable folks in uniform are getting left to twist in the wind not by us, but by a leadership that has failed to deploy them responsibly, provision them properly, hand down realistic policies, accept blame for failures or plan adequately. It's on us to fish a way out of this, if Memorial Day means anything at all.