Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
The next three paragraphs are horror incarnate. It's like we wrapped everything wrong about the whole last six years into one little ball and fucking nuked the world. Seymour Hersh's latest:
Cheney’s office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence officer said, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.’ ”
Cheney’s point, the former senior intelligence official said, was “What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it’s really successful? It’d be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon.”
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. “The big complaint now in the intelligence community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top—at the insistence of the White House—and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,” he said. “It’s an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.’s strictures, and if you complain about it you’re out,” he said. “Cheney had a strong hand in this.”
Securing the Northern Border:
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
• striking Syria’s drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
• paralleling Syria’s behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
• striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.
"A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith & other neo-cons (1996).
Emphasis mine on 'precedent,' or 'demo', as it was called in Washington during the Lebanon planning stage earlier this year.
Ten years on, the clean break has run its course:
The clock just ran out. And now we find out that they were winding it up weeks before Hezbollah captured the Israeli soldiers. The captures were just a pretext: Israel and the United States wanted to smack Hezbollah around to demonstrate how weak the Iranian proxy was, and also to prepare American military planners for an Iranian attack with a "demo" of bombing (Shiite) missiles, bunkers and tunnels.
Of course, the demo failed. Failed Big Time. Thousands of dead all around, an inhuman consequence of the war Israel launched with American backing, but it's quite possible that Hezbollah's performance in the war has blown all the Pentagon's Iran fantasies to smithereens. In Washington, Bush and Cheney planned to kill lots of Lebanese in order to weaken Hezbollah and prepare the Iran war. That alone should chill you for a while.
It should chill you almost as much as witnessing the complete failure of the Western military style's beloved "full spectrum dominance", which we pretty much just did. Strategy, intelligence, tactics, training, logistics: all were complete failures. The Bush Administration misread Lebanon in a way that Ariel Sharon never would have. Now Israel's vaunted military "posture" has been crushed, revealed to all the world as incapable of defeating a well-armed modern infantry playing defense.
Israel's weak, almost meaningless military performance was one of the 21st century's signature moments – and the cruel ideologies endorsing the carpet bombing of Lebanon – this is the face of the Neoconservative world to come, if we do nothing.
The sense that Israel's military power would create order in the Middle East, forcing the Arabs to accept a peace deal on Israel's dictated terms, was one of the major principles of the Neoconservative philosophy, and the Revisionist flavor of Zionism before it. In the 1920s, Vladimir Jabotnisky wrote in the Iron Wall that only force would or could bring the Arabs to moderation – and today the Neoconservatives refuse, in principle, to negotiate with Evil Ones. Their fantasy that Israel and America could create a new, hard hegemonic (imperial?) alliance over the Middle East, on a foundation of splintered ethnic groups and military force, would never work. (Partly because those pesky subjects of the alliance tend to unite when they get bombed). Today, a core element of the Neoconservative philosophy has just evaporated as the UN saves the day. Its gears are gone.
Part of the Bush administration's plan here, according to Hersh, was to set Lebanon's other minorities against Hezbollah by bombing the common infrastructure of the country. This appears to me a pretty good example of the Iron Wall intended to divide Arabs so they cut a nicer deal with Israel. And yet again, it failed because it's a stupid fucking idea that has ruined Israel's fortunes with illusory violence at every turn. Hersh:
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition—including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt—that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. “But the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said.
Maybe Ariel Sharon learned this one the hard way in Beirut. He never wanted to try for the Litani River again, I think we can guess.
The information operation to justify the war was cynical and employed a "family == nation" metaphor designed to help the American audience psychologically project support for the war agenda, in a way that the ordinary spats between Israel and Arabs don't. The Israeli soldiers captured were just the 'morality' window dressing of the war makers. They were nothing but symbolic pawns, deliberately used to inspire the Israeli and American populations to support their leaders. They were just an opening bracket, a façade fronting a sinister "demonstration war" blasted through Lebanon, intended to enhance Israel and America's strategic might – and the Republican Party's dark political prospects in November.
Sy Hersh is giving us the goods again. He will probably be the one man who holds back the Iran war from happening. What he reports here is the hardest version of what I suspected: in DC they egged this war on, they planned it, they wanted to blow the shit out of Lebanon, and then Iran. They've wanted to run the Clean Break program since 1996. It is clear today that it's a failure at every level, but soon they'll hand out medals to make themselves feel better.
You need to read this whole article right away. This is another disastrous execution of an ideology that has critically damaged Israel, the United States, Lebanon and Iraq. The big winners are Al Qaeda and Iran. Tell me again why it's such a fucking good idea.
WATCHING LEBANON: Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2006-08-21, Posted 2006-08-14
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.”
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.
[snip.........]
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however, that, from Israel’s perspective, the decision to take strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier [than the kidnapping], after the Israeli Army’s signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. “Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code,” the consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that “they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population.” The conclusion, he said, was “ ‘Let’s go back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.’ ” The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be “a full-scale response.” In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 “picked up signals intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to ‘warm up’ the north.” In one intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz “as seeming to be weak,” in comparison with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience, and said “he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past.”
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear.” The consultant added, “Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.” After that, “persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,” the consultant said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting Lebanon’s infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon’s large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was “the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran.” (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
[.......]In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw from Kosovo. “Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,” the government consultant said. “The Israelis told Condi Rice, ‘You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that—thirty-five days.’ ”
.....Get ready for the New October Surprise. Michael Ledeen is pissed right now. He's gonna pull some shit to stage an Iran conflict, as James Bamford warned you in Rolling Stone.
Who, me?
It's just another disaster for the Jews and the Arabs, and certainly a disaster for America. When will these folks realize that their leaders are the real enemies, paralyzing their nations with fear to secure their own power?
And what about War Crimes charges? Billions of people want to know...
There's a whole clutch of stuff to put up here. I will restrict it to a few major items right now: how the Israelis coordinated starting this war with the United States since a year ago (when the Syrians got chased out – funny); the work covering damage to Arab civilization at Electronic Intifada, the stuff at AntiWar.com and a little bit from those totems of neoconservative doom at the Weekly Standard. Also a bit about how Israel is taking American diplomatic options off the table by sparking this – perhaps it was more important to stop America from dealing with the Arabs than the actual Hezbollah and Hamas threats themselves!
This limited batch should help illustrate various dimensions of the conflict. More are on the way, I just want something bite-sized out there....
A war pre-planned: One of those questions to reflect on, is simply how the casus belli, the root cause of the war, actually came about. The Iraq war was engineered with stuff like fake WMD stories pretty seriously, and now we are supposed to believe that the Lebanon invasion materialized in history 15 minutes after Hezbollah made off with a couple soldiers from a war front. Not bloody likely.
In this case we have ready evidence that the whole plan has been pulled off the shelf, and American officials got the full persuasive case over the last year. In other words, this is more about an entrenched policy than the actual kidnappings of the soldiers. Fortunately, the soldiers are a useful pretext for hawkish Democrats and others to bandwagon around on.
In a certain, kind of obvious sense, you could call this a conspiracy. Also interesting that the Lebanese recently caught an assassination cell working for the Mossad. (I wonder who really wanted Rafik Hariri out of the way )and who's benefiting now that the Syrian army is gone?)
San Francisco Chronicle: Israel set war plan more than a year ago: Strategy was put in motion as Hezbollah began gaining military strength in Lebanon
Matthew Kalman, Chronicle Foreign Service : Friday, July 21, 2006
(07-21) 04:00 PDT Jerusalem -- Israel's military response by air, land and sea to what it considered a provocation last week by Hezbollah militants is unfolding according to a plan finalized more than a year ago.
In the six years since Israel ended its military occupation of southern Lebanon, it watched warily as Hezbollah built up its military presence in the region. When Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli soldiers last week, the Israeli military was ready to react almost instantly.
"Of all of Israel's wars since 1948, this was the one for which Israel was most prepared," said Gerald Steinberg, professor of political science at Bar-Ilan University. "In a sense, the preparation began in May 2000, immediately after the Israeli withdrawal, when it became clear the international community was not going to prevent Hezbollah from stockpiling missiles and attacking Israel. By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks that we're seeing now had already been blocked out and, in the last year or two, it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.
In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.
The Electronic Intifada franchises for ugly reasons: The site Electronic Intifada has expanded laterally to Electronic Lebanon, a site originally intended to provide Palestinian perspectives is now focused on Lebanon. Worth considering: Precarious conditions in mountain shelters for fleeing Lebanese, and diaries such as "What will happen to us when this is all over?"
Time to get real with AntiWar.com: There has never been a more clear moment for Antiwar.com, and certainly, Justin Raimondo has done more than his share of advising us that "the Middle East escalator" still controlled by the neo-conservatives means more escalations, more spreading warfare. All the columns on this latest war are worth reading, particularly America Held Hostage, Will We Go to War for Israel?, and Playing the Sunni Card:
The U.S.-Israeli strategy aims at atomizing the Arab-Muslim world: the invasion of Iraq smashed the Ba'athist state and split it into three distinct and warring pieces – the Shi'ite south, the infamous Sunni Triangle, and Kurdistan. The same method is being employed in Lebanon, where the fragile state apparatus is about to come undone under the impact of the Israeli assault – and, soon enough, in Syria and Iran, where Kurds and other restive ethnic groups are being encouraged by the regime-changers of the West.
Divide and rule: it's the oldest strategy in the book, and particularly effective when it comes to the Arab-Muslim world, which is rife with internecine strife that only needs a bit of provocation to come to the surface in violent form.
As to whether this strategy will work, the question is: do we want it to? What "work" means, in this context, is the metastasis of Iraq's civil war. They told us Iraq would be a "model" for the region – what they didn't say is that it would be a "model" of how to destroy an entire civilization.
The goal of the War Party is to keep up the momentum for intervention created by the Iraq war and allow the conflict there to naturally spill over Iraq's borders into Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and beyond. There are many, including within this administration, who do not share this goal, and there were signs that, until recently, this "realist" faction might prevail.
.........The crushing of Lebanon beneath the Israeli boot achieves two goals for the War Party: it outflanks their enemies in Washington, and it divides their enemies in the Middle East. It is a one-two punch that could plunge much of the world into a conflict that we will never see the end of in our lifetimes: the opening shots of what the neocons refer to as "World War IV." (Note: World War III was the Cold War, according to this thinking.)
Israel is removing America's options from the Middle East Table: Strongly worth considering, perhaps more than most arguments. Steve Clemons, a DC Dem on the security scene: Some Questions Regarding Israel's Objectives: Is Israel Trying to Curb America's Deal-Making in Middle East?
Why is Israel pounding most of Lebanon rather than just the South and rather than pinpointing its attack against Hezbollah assets? Why the dramatic bombing of explosive fuel centers? The attacks both in Gaza and in Beirut seem made for Fox News, CNN and the next Schwarzenegger movie.
I think that there is little doubt that a significant part of the explanation can be attributed to the fact that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his more liberal partner in this effort, Amir Peretz -- now Defense Minister -- are not former field command generals and want to demonstrate that they can be responsible stewards of Israel's national security -- and that they won't be timid in using Israel's military capabilities.
But that doesn't explain it all. The Israeli response to the Hezbollah incursion is exactly what Hezbollah wanted. Adversaries rarely give each other the behaviors the other actually desires unless there are other objectives involved.
My view is that three broad threats were evolving for Israel from the American side of the equation. One one front, the U.S. will be attempting to settle some kind of new equilibrium in Iraq with fewer U.S. forces and some face-saving partial withdrawal. To accomplish this and maintain any legitimacy in the eyes of important nations in the region -- particularly among close U.S. partners among the Gulf Cooperation Council states -- America "might have" tried to do some things that constituted a broad new bargain with the Arab Middle East. The U.S. had even previously flirted, along with the Brits, in trying to get Syria on a Libya like track and out of the international dog house.
There was also pressure building to push Hamas -- or at least the "governing wing" of it -- towards a posture that would move dramatically closer to a recognition of Israel. Abbas was becoming increasingly entrepreneurial in creating opportunities for the constructive players in Hamas to squirm towards eventual negotiations with Israel that could possibly be packaged in terms of "final status negotiations" on the borders and terms of a new Palestinian state. George W. Bush is the first President to actually call the Palestine territories "Palestine" and may have eventually come around on trying to pump up Abbas's legitimacy as the father of a new and different state. I am doubtful of this scenario -- but some in Israel had serious concerns about this unfolding.
Lastly, despite lots of tit-for-tat tensions and enormous mistrust, Iran and the U.S. were tilting towards a deal to negotiate about Iran's nuclear pretensions and other goals. Some in Israel viewed all three of these potential policy courses for the U.S. -- a broad deal with the Arab Middle East, a new push on final status negotiations with the Palestinians, and a deal to actually negotiate directly with Iran -- as negative for Israel.
The flamboyant, over the top reactions to attacks on Israel's military check points and the abduction of soldiers -- which I agree Israel must respond to -- seems to be part establishing "bona fides" by Olmert, but far more important, REMOVING from the table important policy options that the U.S. might have pursued.
Israel is constraining American foreign policy in amazing and troubling ways by its actions. And a former senior CIA official and another senior Marine who are well-versed in both Israeli and broad Middle East affairs, agreed that serious strategists in Israel are more concerned about America tilting towards new bargains in the region than they are either about the challenge from Hamas or Hezbollah or showing that Olmert knows how to pull the trigger.
Another well respected and very serious national security public intellectual in the nation wrote this when I shared this thesis that Israeli actions were ultimately aimed at clipping American wings in the region. His response:
the thesis of your paper is right-on. whether intentional or coincidental, that is what is being done right now.
I share these other views only to establish the fact that there is not a consensus either in support of or opposed to Israeli action -- but some are beginning to scrutinize what Israel is seeking to achieve with such flamboyant displays of power that are antagonizing whole societies on their borders.
Keeping America from cutting new deals in the region -- which many in the national security establishment thinks are vital -- may actually be what is going on, and the smarter-than-average analysts are beginning to see that. To take one moment though and argue a counter-point to this, one serious analyst I spoke to this morning who stopped by to talk after attending synagogue raised a good point. He said that he thought that Olmert's insecurity about military management was driving the over-reaction.
But he also said that the QUALITY of the attacks against Israel were freaking out the Israeli military and intelligence leaders. Complex incursions that included abductions along with a successful attack on an Israeli gunship show that the enemy is no longer an unimpressive, rag-tag lot. Training and armaments have been improved, and Israel is scrambling to figure out how this happened.
For the right wind scare-your-shit view, try the Weekly Standard. They have been pining away on this for a long time, and now it looks like they are going to get their wishes fulfilled...
Combining anti-semitic generalizations and anti-Palestinian hate speech, the remarkably ugly: "When Will They Ever Learn... Why do so many American Jews hate the president who stands by Israel? by David Gelernter from the American Enterprise Institute. Concludes:
One thing is certain: Palestinians and left-wing American Jews would understand each other beautifully if they ever got together for a conference on refusing to face reality.
For more wigging out, see Hezbollah's Arsenal and worst of all, Bill Kristol's It's Our War:
For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak.
The right response is renewed strength--in supporting the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan, in standing with Israel, and in pursuing regime change in Syria and Iran. For that matter, we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait? Does anyone think a nuclear Iran can be contained? That the current regime will negotiate in good faith? It would be easier to act sooner rather than later. Yes, there would be repercussions--and they would be healthy ones, showing a strong America that has rejected further appeasement.
But such a military strike would take a while to organize. In the meantime, perhaps President Bush can fly from the silly G8 summit in St. Petersburg--a summit that will most likely convey a message of moral confusion and political indecision--to Jerusalem, the capital of a nation that stands with us, and is willing to fight with us, against our common enemies. This is our war, too.
Holy shit, we're fucked! Too bad this genius helped start the war in Iraq that handed Mesopotamia over to Iran. Small irony, that one. Since of course, the goal was perpetual warfare... Another step closer.
Pre-1982 war ethnic layout of Lebanon: What could go wrong?
(Via the sweet UTexas map collection)
There is a sense that this is finally the Clean Break scenario happening, but there is one more problem yet to be un-tethered from order into chaos. What happens when the chaos spills into Syria? As Stratfor notes, the Israelis are 'terrified' of any regime after Bashar Assad, since it would be made of A) rebellious Kurds - who are somewhat friendly, if not allied, to Israel. B) Sunni tribes branching down into Iraq, into Anbar province and beyond, deep into the Iraqi insurgency. C) Small religious minorities like Alawites, Christians, Druze and Armenians D) A pretty good number of Palestinians. That is not a good situation for Israel, and they probably won't try to topple Assad's government. But someone else might. (Kurdish map from here, the Vladimir-Kurdistan blog)
A couple bits from Stratfor to post. They don't want people reposting their special report alerts, so I will make do with excerpts. They have a pretty close view of what the thinking is inside the Israeli military.
Basically, Stratfor makes it clear that their view is that Hezbollah's strategy is to fight until the bitter end, trapping Israel in a very high-intensity occupation and 'counter insurgency' situation, but Hezbollah has the kind of advanced anti-ship, surface-to-surface, anti-tank and anti-personnel missiles (from Iran, who knows where else? China? Russians?) to make the Israeli mission an impossible weight, far beyond what the Palestinian militant groups could achieve on their own.
So Stratfor has a pretty intricate description of what the Israelis think they can accomplish. However, if I were playing this situation in a video game like, say "Command and Conquer: Generals", the Bekaa Valley with hundreds, if not thousands, of hidden Hezbollah rockets is the last place anyone sane would want to go.
The neo-cons often harbor fantasies about breaking up ethnically diverse states like Iran and Syria, then attempting to create dominating power relationships with the US and Israel at the top, and the various bickering ethnic groups below, set against each other in high British colonial style. The Baluchis and Azeris are two that neocons are known to court in Iran, and look what has happened in Iraq. Anyone who tries to stop them is another 'terrorist,' usually a 'fascist' to boot.
This is like what Ariel Sharon thought he could engineer in Lebanon in 1982, putting the Christian Phalangists on top in a bloody civil war, crushing the Shia and other sects supported by Syria and Iran, as well as the PLO. While occupying Lebanon, Israel managed to kick the PLO out to Tunisia, which bought more time to throw settlement colonies into the West Bank. As the occupation dragged on, the Iranians helped band the Shia in southern Lebanon together under Hezbollah, and they organized a guerrilla war of attrition to force Israel to withdraw in 2000. This was a prime example of 'fourth-generation warfare,' and it now appears that the 'warfare' part of that equation is back in full force again.
Yet absorbing more of the West Bank is clearly where Israel's real interests lie: (wikipedia)
Epoch Times: Israeli acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (Center-L), his Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz (2nd-R) and former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres (R) gather together in front of a map as they visit March 14, 2006 the Israeli west bank town of Ariel. (Pavel Wolberg-Pool/Getty Images)
Apart from the sheer bloodiness and hellish horror of such an 'ethnic re-engineering', which disgusts me deeply, setting that aside, the strategy doesn't fucking work. The basic concept in Revisionist Zionism – and now, obviously the Bush doctrine – that more bombs will inspire surrender and obedience has failed every time. Hezbollah is well-prepped for the current Israeli strategy – they know how the airstrikes work, they know from experience how Israeli intelligence has tried to catch them in this area. Most of all, they know they won straight up last time, and this time, the Israelis have better technology, but Hezbollah sure does too. They can keep falling back farther north, while still tossing long-range rockets into Haifa, and resisting all the Israelis' brutal methods by folding the organization into thousands of unstoppable, independent, rocket-bearing cells, or teams of about three, surrounded by a radicalized populace. Far better terrain for the guerrilla than the occupier, in 4GW terms.
Another point is that Israel and the United States (who obviously planned this all in tandem - hence, more U.S.-manufactured bombs on their way today to Israeli planes, Lebanese craters and Arab blood generally) have grossly underestimated the quality of Hezbollah's arsenal. This was a classic, grievous mistake on the order of Israel's foolish idea in 1973 that the Arabs were far too weak to attack – then came the Yom Kippur war.
Believing your enemies too weak and too strong, simultaneously, is a key marker of Fascist thinking.
Listen carefully to what Stratfor is saying: you can sense a waning confidence that Hezbollah could be 'eliminated' tactically, no matter how many bombs are dropped. Also, note the lack of brakes on the situation: Israel doesn't want Syria's government to fall, even while attacking the nearby Bekaa Valley. However, if, say, Al Qaeda or the Muslim Brotherhood happened to have a little luck with assassinations, anarchy across the Levant, all the way to Iran, Afghanistan, would be certain. That would not be in the interests of Israel, the United States, Iran, the EU, Turkey (especially!) or any other states.
It would be just another winning round for Al Qaeda, whose record so far in 'sharpening contradictions,' erasing stability to create 'the base', seems to be on a winning tack. The vast numbers of refugees generated in the last few days (hours!) will also help Al Qaeda style militants find converts among South Lebanon's "New Palestinians" of the 21st century. Another well thought out strategy from Washington.
Also note in particular the loss of Israeli initiative. From Sun Tzu to Clausewitz, a key aspect of warfare, especially 4GW, is retaining the initiative (PDF) – staying on the move, massing up & picking battles – but Hezbollah's dispersed, long-range nature has taken Israel's initiative apart. Israel will fight where and when Hezbollah wants them to, in a sense. Yesterday at noon from Stratfor I got:
Red Alert: The Battle Joined
The ground war has begun. Several Israeli brigades now appear to be operating between the Lebanese border and the Litani River. According to reports, Hezbollah forces are dispersed in multiple bunker complexes and are launching rockets from these and other locations.
Hezbollah's strategy appears to be threefold. First, force Israel into costly attacks against prepared fortifications. Second, draw Israeli troops as deeply into Lebanon as possible, forcing them to fight on extended supply lines. Third, move into an Iraqi-style insurgency from which Israel -- out of fear of a resumption of rocket attacks -- cannot withdraw, but which the Israelis also cannot endure because of extended long-term casualties. This appears to have been a carefully planned strategy, built around a threat to Israeli cities that Israel can't afford. The war has begun at Hezbollah's time and choosing.
Israel is caught between three strategic imperatives. First, it must end the threat to Israeli cities, which must involve the destruction of Hezbollah's launch capabilities south of the Litani River. Second, it must try to destroy Hezbollah's infrastructure, which means it must move into the Bekaa Valley and as far as the southern suburbs of Beirut. Third, it must do so in such a way that it is not dragged into a long-term, unsustainable occupation against a capable insurgency.
Hezbollah has implemented its strategy by turning southern Lebanon into a military stronghold, consisting of well-designed bunkers that serve both as fire bases and launch facilities for rockets. The militants appear to be armed with anti-tank weapons and probably anti-aircraft weapons, some of which appear to be of American origin, raising the question of how they were acquired. Hezbollah wants to draw Israel into protracted fighting in this area in order to inflict maximum casualties and to change the psychological equation for both military and political reasons.
Israelis historically do not like to fight positional warfare. Their tendency has been to bypass fortified areas, pushing the fight to the rear in order to disrupt logistics, isolate fortifications and wait for capitulation. This has worked in the past. It is not clear that it will work here. The great unknown is the resilience of Hezbollah's fighters. To this point, there is no reason to doubt it. Israel could be fighting the most resilient and well-motivated opposition force in its history. But the truth is that neither Israel nor Hezbollah really knows what performance will be like under pressure.
Simply occupying the border-Litani area will not achieve any of Israel's strategic goals. Hezbollah still would be able to use rockets against Israel. And even if, for Hezbollah, this area is lost, its capabilities in the Bekaa Valley and southern Beirut will remain intact. Therefore, a battle that focuses solely on the south is not an option for Israel, unless the Israelis feel a defeat here will sap Hezbollah's will to resist. We doubt this to be the case.
The key to the campaign is to understand that Hezbollah has made its strategic decisions. It will not be fighting a mobile war. Israel has lost the strategic initiative: It must fight when Hezbollah has chosen and deal with Hezbollah's challenge. However, given this, Israel does have an operational choice. It can move in a sequential fashion, dealing first with southern Lebanon and then with other issues. It can bypass southern Lebanon and move into the rear areas, returning to southern Lebanon when it is ready. It can attempt to deal with southern Lebanon in detail, while mounting mobile operations in the Bekaa Valley, in the coastal regions and toward south Beirut, or both at the same time.
There are resource and logistical issues involved. Moving simultaneously on all three fronts will put substantial strains on Israel's logistical capability. An encirclement westward on the north side of the Litani, followed by a move toward Beirut while the southern side of the Litani is not secured, poses a serious challenge in re-supply. Moving into the Bekaa means leaving a flank open to the Syrians. We doubt Syria will hit that flank, but then, we don't have to live with the consequences of an intelligence failure. Israel will be sending a lot of force on that line if it chooses that method. Again, since many roads in south Lebanon will not be secure, that limits logistics. [Get ready for this one, it's been key in Iraq -Dan]
Israel is caught on the horns of a dilemma. Hezbollah has created a situation in which Israel must fight the kind of war it likes the least -- attritional, tactical operations against prepared forces -- or go to the war it prefers, mobile operations, with logistical constraints that make these operations more difficult and dangerous. Moreover, if it does this, it increases the time during which Israeli cities remain under threat. Given clear failures in appreciating Hezbollah's capabilities, Israel must take seriously the possibility that Hezbollah has longer-ranged, anti-personnel rockets that it will use while under attack.
Israel has been trying to break the back of Hezbollah resistance in the south through air attack, special operations and probing attacks. This clearly hasn't worked thus far. That does not mean it won't work, as Israel applies more force to the problem and starts to master the architecture of Hezbollah's tactical and operational structure; however, Israel can't count on a rapid resolution of that problem.
........
An extended engagement in southern Lebanon is the least likely path, in our opinion. More likely -- and this is a guess -- is a five-part strategy:
1. Insert airmobile and airborne forces north of the Litani to seal the rear of Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon. Apply air power and engineering forces to reduce the fortifications, and infantry to attack forces not in fortified positions. Bottle them up, and systematically reduce the force with limited exposure to the attackers.
2. Secure roads along the eastern flank for an armored thrust deep into the Bekaa Valley to engage the main Hezbollah force and infrastructure there. This would involve a move from Qiryat Shimona north into the Bekaa, bypassing the Litani to the west, and would probably require sending airmobile and special forces to secure the high ground. It also would leave the right flank exposed to Syria.
3. Use air power and special forces to undermine Hezbollah capabilities in the southern Beirut area. The Israelis would consider a move into this area after roads through southern Lebanon are cleared and Bekaa relatively secured, moving into the area, only if absolutely necessary, on two axes of attack.
4. Having defeated Hezbollah in detail, withdraw under a political settlement shifting defense responsibility to the Lebanese government.
5. Do all of this while the United States is still able to provide top cover against diplomatic initiatives that will create an increasingly difficult international environment.
In my view, this is the part where Israel is "proper fucked." Maybe only one of these will actually work, at best:
There can be many variations on this theme, but these elements are inevitable:
1. Hezbollah cannot be defeated without entering the Bekaa Valley, at the very least.
2. At some point, resistance in southern Lebanon must be dealt with, regardless of the cost.
3. Rocket attacks against northern Israel and even Tel Aviv must be accepted while the campaign unfolds.
4. The real challenge will come when Israel tries to withdraw.
No. 4 is the real challenge. Destruction of Hezbollah's infrastructure does not mean annihilation of the force. If Israel withdraws, Hezbollah or a successor organization will regroup. If Israel remains, it can wind up in the position the United States is in Iraq. This is exactly what Hezbollah wants. So, Israel can buy time, or Israel can occupy and pay the cost. One or the other.
[..........]
Hezbollah has dealt Israel a difficult hand. It has thought through the battle problem as well as the political dimension carefully. Somewhere in this, there has been either an Israeli intelligence failure or a political failure to listen to intelligence. Hezbollah's capabilities have posed a problem for Israel that allowed Hezbollah to start a war at a time and in a way of its choosing. The inquest will come later in Israel. And Hezbollah will likely be shattered regardless of its planning. The correlation of forces does not favor it. But if it forces Israel not only to defeat its main force but also to occupy, Hezbollah will have achieved its goals.
Sounds like Israel has blundered into a pretty ugly situation, if not an outright trap. Apart from the moral horror of injecting Israel into a giant war, killing hundreds of civilians, there is the more cold horror that it's not even going to fulfill the outwardly proclaimed goals.
Unless the goal is simply to escalate the region into a huge war, causing panicked Americans to rally round the flag again.
The problem is that once Israel has a really bad stalemate on its hands, the neo-cons will 'flight forward' from the crisis, escalating like Nazis going into Russia. And that means a war with Iran. In all likelihood, we will soon see all the theatrical staged shit like WMDs in Iran, and perhaps some false flag terror attacks will drive things into a frenzy, apart from the brinkmanship of guys like Iran's Ahmedinejad. I can't believe I'm saying this kind of shit these days, but hey, look where we are.
Unless, of course, more sane elements in the U.S. and elsewhere can intervene.
This, by the way, is the basic shape of your "October Surprise" intended to get people to vote Republican this fall. There will be plenty of well-packaged sequels until November, but we can basically see now that Clean Break is the 2006 Congressional Campaign Roadmap, and the Democrats ought to fucking act to put the brakes on and articulate an alternative, NOW.
I just noted how the neoconservative Clean Break strategy appears to have been put into action. It offered a plan for Israel to "roll back" Syria with a massive war in Lebanon, theoretically giving the Israelis hegemony and an ability to dictate terms to the Arabs. The problem is that it's a dumb plan that won't fucking work, but they are going to kill hundreds (thousands?) more to keep trying it. Also word comes that Michael Ledeen is prepping the Iran war in a hardcore kind of way right now while trumpeting "World War IV."
Now that arch "conspiracy theorist" Wayne Madsen is saying that Ledeen is preparing to help Iranian dissidents plant WMDs inside Iran, to provide a staged "discovery" soon, thus providing a pretext for the U.S. to attack Iran. Once upon a time, of course, I met the man, and I wrote in the Mac Weekly:
I asked why the Iranians would bomb Jerusalem if it would kill so many Muslims. He said that the Iranians murderously hate Arabs and kill them all the time. In fact, he said, the Iranians are killing “hundreds” of Arabs in Iraq today, sending in money and munitions.
His scheme to free Iran was to supply the opposition with the tools to destabilize the regime, “but not a single bullet.” I have a hard time believing he could resist arming the Iranian opposition. In fact, many say that the Pentagon, administered by Ledeen’s allies, has courted a weird, cultish anti-regime Iranian guerilla group based in eastern Iraq called the Mujahideen al-Khalq. If Bush wins, it’s quite unlikely that the neo-cons will be able to resist using forces like these to harass Tehran, but we have no idea what sort of reaction this would provoke from the highly mobilized, nationalist Iranians.
And this appears to be exactly what is happening now. The odd thing about the following clips from Madsen's site is that these are exactly what we would have expected to hear a few years ago - that is, the old-school Neo-con conspiracy for middle eastern war is still unfolding, exactly like we feared it would. Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo now pretty much proved to be accurate in this school of thinking.
So consider the following - and as always, take Madsen with a grain of salt. But consider how closely this follows what you expected the neo-cons to be doing:
July 21, 2006 -- Informed sources have told WMR that arch-neocon Michael Ledeen, who acts as an unofficial foreign policy adviser to Karl Rove, was at the White House yesterday with a group of Iranian opposition figures. Among the topics discussed was a promised $25 million grant by the Bush administration to the Iranian insurgents. The money is to be used to plant Desert Storm-vintage biological and chemical weapons shells, confiscated by U.S. forces in Iraq, on the Iranian side of the Iraqi border. The weapons will be used as "proof" of Iran's plan to "attack" U.S. troops in Iraq. That will be used to justify, ex post facto, the coming U.S. attack on Iran. Our sources report that George W. Bush dropped by the White House meeting to offer his support to the Iranian opposition operatives.
Pretext for war with Iran: White House plans to move chem-bio weapons from Iraq into Iranian side of this desolate border.
*********
July 21, 2006 -- The current Israeli assault on Lebanon was stage-managed between the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and neocons in the Bush administration, according to well-connected sources in the nation's capital. The Bush administration had prior knowledge of and supported Israel's planned attacks on Gaza and Lebanon, the sources have revealed. In addition, there was no move by the Bush administration to warn Americans in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or Lebanon to leave the areas before the Israeli invasions. No travel warnings were issued to U.S. citizens in an attempt to mask Israeli attack plans, an action that resulted in last-minute Dunkirk-like sea evacuations of foreigners from Lebanon.
The first indication that Israel pre-planned its assault on the Palestinians came early this month when the Israelis began denying entry to the West Bank to Palestinians holding U.S. passports. The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv and the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem refused to intervene with Israel, claiming it was the decision of a sovereign nation. The denial of entry to Palestinian-Americans was a violation of the Oslo Accords and the Geneva Conventions. The United States does not officially recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
Washington insiders report that the Bush administration's coordination with Israel in the attacks on Hamas and Hezbollah involve the official adoption of the white paper, "A Clean Break: New Strategies for Securing the Realm," as U.S. policy. The "Clean Break" document, authored in 1996 by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other neocon operatives, was written at the same time the program for the invasion and occupation of Iraq was drawn up by the same neocon players.
The current U.S.-Israeli strategy of bombing and invading Lebanon is a follow-up to four years of covert activities by the Pentagon, White House, and Mossad in Lebanon that involved the car bombing assassinations of top Lebanese officials in order to clear out Syrian forces from Lebanon. The assassinations of Elie Hobeika, George Hawi, and Rafik Hariri were all carried out to destabilize Lebanon and force the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon. Syria was blamed by the Bush administration for all the car bombing assassinations in Lebanon.
Israel's border exercise that saw the capture by Hezbollah of two Israeli soldiers on the Lebanese side of the border and the contingency plans involving the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Hamas in Israel, near the Israeli-Gazan border, provided a pre-text for the Israeli attack on Gaza and Lebanon. Similar plans have been drawn up to respond to a Syrian "capture" of Israeli troops in Lebanon near the Syrian border or from the Golan Heights. That will be used to justify a joint Israeli and American attack on Syria, with Israel entering from Lebanon and the U.S. entering from Iraq.
The carrying out of the joint Israeli-U.S. attack plan for Lebanon, Syria (and eventually, Iran) is the reason why the United States has stymied UN attempts to seek an immediate cease-fire. The intent of the Bush administration is to see a widening of the conflict. Unconfirmed UN ambassador to the UN John Bolton, appearing on Fox News, laid out the future blueprint for the joint U.S.-Israeli regionalization of the war in the Middle East when he stated, "I think that if you look at the support that Iran and Syria have given groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad that really the reckoning we need here is a reckoning, not just with the terrorist groups, but with the states that finance them."
WMR has also learned that top Israeli and U.S. military officers are adamantly opposed to the Clean Break policy. Many Israeli generals, remembering Israel's bloody occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s, favored negotiating a prisoner swap with Hezbollah. The Olmert government is purging the last remnants of the Yitzhak Rabin elements who favored negotiations from the Israeli military and intelligence agencies much in the same way that opponents of the Bush regime have been purged from the U.S. military, CIA, and State Department.
********
July 21, 2006 -- The son of David Gribben, Vice President Dick Cheney's boyhood friend and his chief of staff at the Pentagon and Vice President for Corporate Affairs at Halliburton, has reportedly joined Cheney's White House staff as an assistant. The elder Gribben is an active player in the corporate-religious tax dodge known as The Fellowship, an Arlington, Virginia-based contrivance that uses religious tax-exempt status to lobby the U.S. and foreign governments on behalf of the military-industrial complex. With the carrying out of the Clean Break by Israel and the United States, profits for companies like Halliburton are bound to skyrocket. The Israeli attack on Lebanon is already estimated to have resulted in $2 billion in damage to Lebanon's infrastructure. WMR previously reported that Jacobs/Sverdrup has been promised a lucrative Pentagon contract to build a large U.S. airbase in northern Lebanon.
************
July 20, 2006 -- WMR reported that the Israeli military was using poison gas on villages in south Lebanon. According to a former U.S. weapons expert who served in Iraq, the artillery shell in a photo taken in Lebanon (below) is a chemical weapon delivery device. It is being handled by an Israeli Defense Force soldier and Hebrew lettering can be clearly seen on the armored vehicle. Another chemical weapons shell of the same type can be seen lying on the ground to the right. It is not known what type of chemical is in the chemical canister, however, gas dropped by the Israelis in villages in southern Lebanon has resulted in severe vomiting among the civilian population.
Media commentators have scoffed that Israel, with its relatively unique history, would ever use chemical weapons or poison gas in any war. It is precisely because of that perception that they are using such weapons. The deniability factor prevents the media from taking seriously the credible reports of banned weapons being used by the Israelis.
Alright, that's the maximum neo-con conspiracy theory case. But go back and read the Clean Break again, and maybe you'll finally fucking get it, if you don't already.
Ahh, Haaretz - you indefatigable old center-left Israeli paper whose words for peace are far more valuable than America's right-wing garbage
Today's explosive escalation is deeply tied to the situation in the Palestinian occupied territories. Make no mistake, the 1982 invasion of Lebanon was all about determining the fate of the West Bank: Israel was under pressure to negotiate with the PLO then, and this would have meant a peace deal for the West Bank. Instead, Ariel Sharon abruptly decided to invade Lebanon and try to obliterate the PLO, which created a bloody stalemate and a pointless occupation, and that, in turn, generated Hezbollah as a powerful occupation resistance / terrorist / [other word] organization.
However it bought some time to fill the West Bank with more settlements. And here we are today, via the indispensable Foundation for Middle East Peace:
Now you must ask yourself: What is this? Do I say "Yummy Land!" Do I ask, "Why haven't I seen this kind of map anywhere else?" Do I say, "This is a really poor use of American tax dollars." Do I wonder, "Does such a plan court the apocalypse while making the Arabs angry and paranoid about American purposes?"
More precisely, are the West Bank settlement colonies the insane, unspeakable elephant in the room, the central contradiction around which the clouds of war are building higher and higher? Is this really what Bush wants to see? His apocalyptic Christian Rapture groupies?
The lines are being drawn all over right now - and the violently shifting lines in the West Bank are among the most important of them all. Democrats can't say shit about this; Republicans vaguely imply that they are morally constructive. American Jews are split, but Evangelicals are fanatically excited about it for all the wrong reasons. And 1/3 of the Jewish settlers would leave tomorrow, if their home mortgages hadn't trapped them in this limbo of eschatological construction, urban violence, and sprawling guerrilla war zone that composes the neo-conservatively managed West Bank. This is apparently what Douglas Feith wanted to see, given what is posted below.
The complexity of this layer is simply pouring out into Lebanon, with bloody and destabilizing results. Given the circumstances of what appears to be about 4 km short of bombing Syria, I will put up the following documents in the complete, unabridged forms, adding emphasis to some segments. I say give it the complete read.
Jabotinsky was one of the founders of Revisionist Zionism, and the Herut Party which later became the Likud Party. He is considered to be an iconic founder of the Likud Party - which is why his stern visage was mounted behind Ariel Sharon at some event. His essential view of imposing a surrender on the Arabs through violence - and rejecting negotiations at all costs - runs to the core of Israeli policy today, as well as the Bush Administration's fanatical refusal to talk to people like Iran, Iraqi insurgents, Syria, Hezbollah, Palestinian militants, or much anyone else, instead telling America that "shock and awe" style tactics shall bring compliance and peace.
Revisionist Zionism's obsession with the demonstrative power of Force has definitely found a new incarnation in Bush Administration policies, I think the following documents demonstrate well.
Vladimir Jabotinsky: The Iron Wall (We and the Arabs) - 1923
First published in Russian under the title O Zheleznoi Stene in Rassvyet, 4 November 1923.
Published in English in Jewish Herald (South Africa), 26 November 1937.
Transcribed & revised by Lenni Brenner.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for REDS – Die Roten.
Contrary to the excellent rule of getting to the point immediately, I must begin this article with a personal introduction. The author of these lines is considered to be an enemy of the Arabs, a proponent of their expulsion, etc. This is not true. My emotional relationship to the Arabs is the same as it is to all other peoples – polite indifference. My political relationship is characterized by two principles. First: the expulsion of the Arabs from Palestine is absolutely impossible in any form. There will always be two nations in Palestine – which is good enough for me, provided the Jews become the majority. Second: I am proud to have been a member of that group which formulated the Helsingfors Program. We formulated it, not only for Jews, but for all peoples, and its basis is the equality of all nations. I am prepared to swear, for us and our descendants, that we will never destroy this equality and we will never attempt to expel or oppress the Arabs. Our credo, as the reader can see, is completely peaceful. But it is absolutely another matter if it will be possible to achieve our peaceful aims through peaceful means. This depends, not on our relationship with the Arabs, but exclusively on the Arabs’ relationship to Zionism.
After this introduction I can now get to the point. That the Arabs of the Land of Israel should willingly come to an agreement with us is beyond all hopes and dreams at present, and in the foreseeable future. This inner conviction of mine I express so categorically not because of any wish to dismay the moderate faction in the Zionist camp but, on the contrary, because I wish to save them from such dismay. Apart from those who have been virtually “blind” since childhood, all the other moderate Zionists have long since understood that there is not even the slightest hope of ever obtaining the agreement of the Arabs of the Land of Israel to “Palestine” becoming a country with a Jewish majority.
Every reader has some idea of the early history of other countries which have been settled. I suggest that he recall all known instances. If he should attempt to seek but one instance of a country settled with the consent of those born there he will not succeed. The inhabitants (no matter whether they are civilized or savages) have always put up a stubborn fight. Furthermore, how the settler acted had no effect whatsoever. The Spaniards who conquered Mexico and Peru, or our own ancestors in the days of Joshua ben Nun behaved, one might say, like plunderers. But those “great explorers,” the English, Scots and Dutch who were the first real pioneers of North America were people possessed of a very high ethical standard; people who not only wished to leave the redskins at peace but could also pity a fly; people who in all sincerity and innocence believed that in those virgin forests and vast plains ample space was available for both the white and red man. But the native resisted both barbarian and civilized settler with the same degree of cruelty.
Another point which had no effect at all was whether or not there existed a suspicion that the settler wished to remove the inhabitant from his land. The vast areas of the U.S. never contained more than one or two million Indians. The inhabitants fought the white settlers not out of fear that they might be expropriated, but simply because there has never been an indigenous inhabitant anywhere or at any time who has ever accepted the settlement of others in his country. Any native people – its all the same whether they are civilized or savage – views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. They will not voluntarily allow, not only a new master, but even a new partner. And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs. Culturally they are 500 years behind us, spiritually they do not have our endurance or our strength of will, but this exhausts all of the internal differences. We can talk as much as we want about our good intentions; but they understand as well as we what is not good for them. They look upon Palestine with the same instinctive love and true fervor that any Aztec looked upon his Mexico or any Sioux looked upon his prairie. To think that the Arabs will voluntarily consent to the realization of Zionism in return for the cultural and economic benefits we can bestow on them is infantile. This childish fantasy of our “Arabo-philes” comes from some kind of contempt for the Arab people, of some kind of unfounded view of this race as a rabble ready to be bribed in order to sell out their homeland for a railroad network.
This view is absolutely groundless. Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.
That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of “Palestine” into the “Land of Israel”.
Some of us imagined that a misunderstanding had occurred, that because the Arabs did not understand our intentions, they opposed us, but, if we were to make clear to them how modest and limited our aspirations are, they would then stretch out their arms in peace. This too is a fallacy that has been proved so time and again. I need recall only one incident. Three years ago, during a visit here, Sokolow delivered a great speech about this very “misunderstanding,” employing trenchant language to prove how grossly mistaken the Arabs were in supposing that we intended to take away their property or expel them from the country, or to suppress them. This was definitely not so. Nor did we even want a Jewish state. All we wanted was a regime representative of the League of Nations. A reply to this speech was published in the Arab paper Al Carmel in an article whose content I give here from memory, but I am sure it is a faithful account.
Our Zionist grandees are unnecessarily perturbed, its author wrote. There is no misunderstanding. What Sokolow claims on behalf of Zionism is true. But the Arabs already know this. Obviously, Zionists today cannot dream of expelling or suppressing the Arabs, or even of setting up a Jewish state. Clearly, in this period they are interested in only one thing – that the Arabs not interfere with Jewish immigration. Further, the Zionists have pledged to control immigration in accordance with the country's absorptive economic capacity. But the Arabs have no illusions, since no other conditions permit the possibility of immigration.
The editor of the paper is even willing to believe that the absorptive capacity of Eretz Israel is very great, and that it is possible to settle many Jews without affecting one Arab. “Just that is what the Zionists want, and what the Arabs do not want. In this way the Jews will, little by little, become a majority and, ipso facto, a Jewish state will be formed and the fate of the Arab minority will depend on the goodwill of the Jews. But was it not the Jews themselves who told us how ‘ pleasant’ being a minority was? No misunderstanding exists. Zionists desire one thing – freedom of immigration – and it is Jewish immigration that we do not want.”
The logic employed by this editor is so simple and clear that it should be learned by heart and be an essential part of our notion of the Arab question. It is of no importance whether we quote Herzl or Herbert Samuel to justify our activities. Colonization itself has its own explanation, integral and inescapable, and understood by every Arab and every Jew with his wits about him. Colonization can have only one goal. For the Palestinian Arabs this goal is inadmissible. This is in the nature of things. To change that nature is impossible.
A plan that seems to attract many Zionists goes like this: If it is impossible to get an endorsement of Zionism by Palestine's Arabs, then it must be obtained from the Arabs of Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and perhaps of Egypt. Even if this were possible, it would not change the basic situation. It would not change the attitude of the Arabs in the Land of Israel towards us. Seventy years ago, the unification of Italy was achieved, with the retention by Austria of Trent and Trieste. However, the inhabitants of those towns not only refused to accept the situation, but they struggled against Austria with redoubled vigor. If it were possible (and I doubt this) to discuss Palestine with the Arabs of Baghdad and Mecca as if it were some kind of small, immaterial borderland, then Palestine would still remain for the Palestinians not a borderland, but their birthplace, the center and basis of their own national existence. Therefore it would be necessary to carry on colonization against the will of the Palestinian Arabs, which is the same condition that exists now.
But an agreement with Arabs outside the Land of Israel is also a delusion. For nationalists in Baghdad, Mecca and Damascus to agree to such an expensive contribution (agreeing to forego preservation of the Arab character of a country located in the center of their future “federation”) we would have to offer them something just as valuable. We can offer only two things: either money or political assistance or both. But we can offer neither. Concerning money, it is ludicrous to think we could finance the development of Iraq or Saudi Arabia, when we do not have enough for the Land of Israel. Ten times more illusionary is political assistance for Arab political aspirations. Arab nationalism sets itself the same aims as those set by Italian nationalism before 1870 and Polish nationalism before 1918: unity and independence. These aspirations mean the eradication of every trace of British influence in Egypt and Iraq, the expulsion of the Italians from Libya, the removal of French domination from Syria, Tunis, Algiers and Morocco. For us to support such a movement would be suicide and treachery. If we disregard the fact that the Balfour Declaration was signed by Britain, we cannot forget that France and Italy also signed it. We cannot intrigue about removing Britain from the Suez Canal and the Persian Gulf and the elimination of French and Italian colonial rule over Arab territory. Such a double game cannot be considered on any account.
Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.
Not only must this be so, it is so whether we admit it or not. What does the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate mean for us? It is the fact that a disinterested power committed itself to create such security conditions that the local population would be deterred from interfering with our efforts.
All of us, without exception, are constantly demanding that this power strictly fulfill its obligations. In this sense, there are no meaningful differences between our “militarists” and our “vegetarians.” One prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of British bayonets, the third proposes an agreement with Baghdad, and appears to be satisfied with Baghdad’s bayonets – a strange and somewhat risky taste’ but we all applaud, day and night, the iron wall. We would destroy our cause if we proclaimed the necessity of an agreement, and fill the minds of the Mandatory with the belief that we do not need an iron wall, but rather endless talks. Such a proclamation can only harm us. Therefore it is our sacred duty to expose such talk and prove that it is a snare and a delusion.
Two brief remarks: In the first place, if anyone objects that this point of view is immoral, I answer: It is not true; either Zionism is moral and just or it is immoral and unjust. But that is a question that we should have settled before we became Zionists. Actually we have settled that question, and in the affirmative.
We hold that Zionism is moral and just. And since it is moral and just, justice must be done, no matter whether Joseph or Simon or Ivan or Achmet agree with it or not.
There is no other morality.
All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. And only then will moderates offer suggestions for compromise on practical questions like a guarantee against expulsion, or equality and national autonomy.
I am optimistic that they will indeed be granted satisfactory assurances and that both peoples, like good neighbors, can then live in peace. But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.
The other document worth considering is the widely famous "Clean Break" document, a 1996 policy paper by noted neoconservatives, including Richard Perle and Douglas Feith. Perle has since denied that he had a role in the final piece, produced from some kind of brainstorming session. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" seems to form an eerie preface to today's situation, as Justin Raimondo on antiwar.com observes.
In the context of the escalating war, it's now worth reading for its broad prescription of a massive war in Lebanon, and in turn, east into Syria and the Levant. Long ago I posted The Clean Break to Everything2 where it was popular. I inserted lots of links to other E2 pages to add a sense of the surreal.
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A Clean Break:
A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
(original source)
Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies' "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser participated. The report, entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," is the framework for a series of follow-up reports on strategy.
Israel has a large problem. Labor Zionism, which for 70 years has dominated the Zionist movement, has generated a stalled and shackled economy. Efforts to salvage Israel's socialist institutions-which include pursuing supranational over national sovereignty and pursuing a peace process that embraces the slogan, "New Middle East"--undermine the legitimacy of the nation and lead Israel into strategic paralysis and the previous government's "peace process." That peace process obscured the evidence of eroding national critical mass- including a palpable sense of national exhaustion-and forfeited strategic initiative. The loss of national critical mass was illustrated best by Israel's efforts to draw in the United States to sell unpopular policies domestically, to agree to negotiate sovereignty over its capital, and to respond with resignation to a spate of terror so intense and tragic that it deterred Israelis from engaging in normal daily functions, such as commuting to work in buses.
Benjamin Netanyahu's government comes in with a new set of ideas. While there are those who will counsel continuity, Israel has the opportunity to make a clean break; it can forge a peace process and strategy based on an entirely new intellectual foundation, one that restores strategic initiative and provides the nation the room to engage every possible energy on rebuilding Zionism, the starting point of which must be economic reform. To secure the nation's streets and borders in the immediate future, Israel can:
This report is written with key passages of a possible speech marked TEXT, that highlight the clean break which the new government has an opportunity to make. The body of the report is the commentary explaining the purpose and laying out the strategic context of the passages.
A New Approach to Peace
Early adoption of a bold, new perspective on peace and security is imperative for the new prime minister. While the previous government, and many abroad, may emphasize "land for peace"- which placed Israel in the position of cultural, economic, political, diplomatic, and military retreat - the new government can promote Western values and traditions. Such an approach, which will be well received in the United States, includes "peace for peace," "peace through strength" and self reliance: the balance of power.
A new strategy to seize the initiative can be introduced:
TEXT:
We have for four years pursued peace based on a New Middle East. We in Israel cannot play innocents abroad in a world that is not innocent. Peace depends on the character and behavior of our foes. We live in a dangerous neighborhood, with fragile states and bitter rivalries. Displaying moral ambivalence between the effort to build a Jewish state and the desire to annihilate it by trading "land for peace" will not secure "peace now." Our claim to the land -to which we have clung for hope for 2000 years--is legitimate and noble. It is not within our own power, no matter how much we concede, to make peace unilaterally. Only the unconditional acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial dimension, "peace for peace," is a solid basis for the future.
Israel's quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals. The Jewish people's hunger for human rights - burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land - informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition. Israel can now embrace negotiations, but as means, not ends, to pursue those ideals and demonstrate national steadfastness. It can challenge police states; enforce compliance of agreements; and insist on minimal standards of accountability.
Securing the Northern Border
Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:
Israel also can take this opportunity to remind the world of the nature of the Syrian regime. Syria repeatedly breaks its word. It violated numerous agreements with the Turks, and has betrayed the United States by continuing to occupy Lebanon in violation of the Taef agreement in 1989. Instead, Syria staged a sham election, installed a quisling regime, and forced Lebanon to sign a "Brotherhood Agreement" in 1991, that terminated Lebanese sovereignty. And Syria has begun colonizing Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of Syrians, while killing tens of thousands of its own citizens at a time, as it did in only three days in 1983 in Hama.
Under Syrian tutelage, the Lebanese drug trade, for which local Syrian military officers receive protection payments, flourishes. Syria's regime supports the terrorist groups operationally and financially in Lebanon and on its soil. Indeed, the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley in Lebanon has become for terror what the Silicon Valley has become for computers. The Bekaa Valley has become one of the main distribution sources, if not production points, of the "supernote" - counterfeit US currency so well done that it is impossible to detect.
Text:
Negotiations with repressive regimes like Syria's require cautious realism. One cannot sensibly assume the other side's good faith. It is dangerous for Israel to deal naively with a regime murderous of its own people, openly aggressive toward its neighbors, criminally involved with international drug traffickers and counterfeiters, and supportive of the most deadly terrorist organizations.
Given the nature of the regime in Damascus, it is both natural and moral that Israel abandon the slogan "comprehensive peace" and move to contain Syria, drawing attention to its weapons of mass destruction program, and rejecting "land for peace" deals on the Golan Heights.
Moving to a Traditional Balance of Power Strategy
TEXT:
We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship.
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq - an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right - as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions. Jordan has challenged Syria's regional ambitions recently by suggesting the restoration of the Hashemites in Iraq. This has triggered a Jordanian-Syrian rivalry to which Asad has responded by stepping up efforts to destabilize the Hashemite Kingdom, including using infiltrations. Syria recently signaled that it and Iran might prefer a weak, but barely surviving Saddam, if only to undermine and humiliate Jordan in its efforts to remove Saddam.
But Syria enters this conflict with potential weaknesses: Damascus is too preoccupied with dealing with the threatened new regional equation to permit distractions of the Lebanese flank. And Damascus fears that the 'natural axis' with Israel on one side, central Iraq and Turkey on the other, and Jordan, in the center would squeeze and detach Syria from the Saudi Peninsula. For Syria, this could be the prelude to a redrawing of the map of the Middle East which would threaten Syria's territorial integrity.
Since Iraq's future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq, including such measures as: visiting Jordan as the first official state visit, even before a visit to the United States, of the new Netanyahu government; supporting King Hussein by providing him with some tangible security measures to protect his regime against Syrian subversion; encouraging - through influence in the U.S. business community - investment in Jordan to structurally shift Jordan's economy away from dependence on Iraq; and diverting Syria's attention by using Lebanese opposition elements to destabilize Syrian control of Lebanon.
Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey's and Jordan's actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite.
King Hussein may have ideas for Israel in bringing its Lebanon problem under control. The predominantly Shia population of southern Lebanon has been tied for centuries to the Shia leadership in Najf, Iraq rather than Iran. Were the Hashemites to control Iraq, they could use their influence over Najf to help Israel wean the south Lebanese Shia away from Hizballah, Iran, and Syria. Shia retain strong ties to the Hashemites: the Shia venerate foremost the Prophet's family, the direct descendants of which - and in whose veins the blood of the Prophet flows - is King Hussein.
Changing the Nature of Relations with the Palestinians
Israel has a chance to forge a new relationship between itself and the Palestinians. First and foremost, Israel's efforts to secure its streets may require hot pursuit into Palestinian-controlled areas, a justifiable practice with which Americans can sympathize.
A key element of peace is compliance with agreements already signed. Therefore, Israel has the right to insist on compliance, including closing Orient House and disbanding Jibril Rujoub's operatives in Jerusalem. Moreover, Israel and the United States can establish a Joint Compliance Monitoring Committee to study periodically whether the PLO meets minimum standards of compliance, authority and responsibility, human rights, and judicial and fiduciary accountability.
TEXT:
We believe that the Palestinian Authority must be held to the same minimal standards of accountability as other recipients of U.S. foreign aid. A firm peace cannot tolerate repression and injustice. A regime that cannot fulfill the most rudimentary obligations to its own people cannot be counted upon to fulfill its obligations to its neighbors.
Israel has no obligations under the Oslo agreements if the PLO does not fulfill its obligations. If the PLO cannot comply with these minimal standards, then it can be neither a hope for the future nor a proper interlocutor for present. To prepare for this, Israel may want to cultivate alternatives to Arafat's base of power. Jordan has ideas on this.
To emphasize the point that Israel regards the actions of the PLO problematic, but not the Arab people, Israel might want to consider making a special effort to reward friends and advance human rights among Arabs. Many Arabs are willing to work with Israel; identifying and helping them are important. Israel may also find that many of her neighbors, such as Jordan, have problems with Arafat and may want to cooperate. Israel may also want to better integrate its own Arabs.
Forging A New U.S.-Israeli Relationship
In recent years, Israel invited active U.S. intervention in Israel's domestic and foreign policy for two reasons: to overcome domestic opposition to "land for peace" concessions the Israeli public could not digest, and to lure Arabs - through money, forgiveness of past sins, and access to U.S. weapons - to negotiate. This strategy, which required funneling American money to repressive and aggressive regimes, was risky, expensive, and very costly for both the U.S. and Israel, and placed the United States in roles it should neither have nor want.
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality - not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel's new strategy - based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength - reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.
To reinforce this point, the Prime Minister can use his forthcoming visit to announce that Israel is now mature enough to cut itself free immediately from at least U.S. economic aid and loan guarantees at least, which prevent economic reform. (Military aid is separated for the moment until adequate arrangements can be made to ensure that Israel will not encounter supply problems in the means to defend itself). As outlined in another Institute report, Israel can become self-reliant only by, in a bold stroke rather than in increments, liberalizing its economy, cutting taxes, relegislating a free-processing zone, and selling-off public lands and enterprises - moves which will electrify and find support from a broad bipartisan spectrum of key pro-Israeli Congressional leaders, including Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.
Israel can under these conditions better cooperate with the U.S. to counter real threats to the region and the West's security. Mr. Netanyahu can highlight his desire to cooperate more closely with the United States on anti-missile defense in order to remove the threat of blackmail which even a weak and distant army can pose to either state. Not only would such cooperation on missile defense counter a tangible physical threat to Israel's survival, but it would broaden Israel's base of support among many in the United States Congress who may know little about Israel, but care very much about missile defense. Such broad support could be helpful in the effort to move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel. If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time to do so is before November, 1996.
Conclusions: Transcending the Arab-Israeli Conflict
TEXT: Israel will not only contain its foes; it will transcend them.
Notable Arab intellectuals have written extensively on their perception of Israel's floundering and loss of national identity. This perception has invited attack, blocked Israel from achieving true peace, and offered hope for those who would destroy Israel. The previous strategy, therefore, was leading the Middle East toward another Arab-Israeli war. Israel's new agenda can signal a clean break by abandoning a policy which assumed exhaustion and allowed strategic retreat by reestablishing the principle of preemption, rather than retaliation alone and by ceasing to absorb blows to the nation without response.
Israel's new strategic agenda can shape the regional environment in ways that grant Israel the room to refocus its energies back to where they are most needed: to rejuvenate its national idea, which can only come through replacing Israel's socialist foundations with a more sound footing; and to overcome its "exhaustion," which threatens the survival of the nation.
Ultimately, Israel can do more than simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict though war. No amount of weapons or victories will grant Israel the peace it seeks. When Israel is on a sound economic footing, and is free, powerful, and healthy internally, it will no longer simply manage the Arab-Israeli conflict; it will transcend it. As a senior Iraqi opposition leader said recently: "Israel must rejuvenate and revitalize its moral and intellectual leadership. It is an important -- if not the most important--element in the history of the Middle East." Israel - proud, wealthy, solid, and strong - would be the basis of a truly new and peaceful Middle East.
Participants in the Study Group on "A New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000:"
Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader
James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs
Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS
Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates
Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy
David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University
#########
All right, wasn't that fun? I'm going to throw a third one in. This was a piece that Douglas Feith wrote in the Washington Times around the same time... It's ten years and one month old, but combined with the Clean Break, the picture of neoconservatives close to Israel starting a huge war in Lebanon and Syria in order to protect their 'Reaganesque' West Bank settlements becomes a bit more obvious.
This piece is archived on the Center for Security Policy's website, a hardcore neocon thinktank organization run by Frank Gaffney that is extremely supportive of Israel's right wing. Nasty characters like Max Boot, James Woolsey, and Charles Krauthammer are tied into this place, whose site is mocking the 'peace' movement, among other angles of a place promoting Peace through Strength. They gave a "Freedom Flame" award to Richard Perle, which pretty much sums it up.
About as radical as the Reaganites: by Douglas J. Feith: The Washington Times, June 18, 1996
Not since Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 has an election triggered such consternation from commentators anxious about peace. Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister-elect, is being depicted as a radical right-winger, planter of settlements and opponent of peace. In fact, his Likud party is in general about as radical as our Republican Party. Mr. Netanyahu favors diplomatic, defense and economic policies for Israel similar in principle to the kind of policies that Reaganites favored (and favor) for the United States.
Though Mr. Reagan rejected his predecessor's "arms control process," symbolized by the hug Mr. Carter gave Leonid Brezhnev when they signed SALT II, Mr. Reagan did not reject diplomacy. He approached the negotiating table, however, with a frame of mind different from that of Mr. Carter. Mr. Netanyahu,too, inevitably, will continue diplomacy, but not the particular approach to the "peace process" symbolized by Shimon Peres' embracing Yasser Arafat and declaring, as Mr. Carter did with Mr. Brezhnev, that the two men actually share a vision of peace.
Due to the crappiness of MovableType this post has been split into two, please keep reading for the goods!
Massive 5 ton cocaine bust tied to Bush cronies?: Yummy stuff. This weird company called SkyWay Aircraft, which claimed to sell security products to the Department of Homeland Security, got busted with a huge amount of cocaine from Mexico, and both Mexican and American authorities are being curiously silent about it. The Mexican press, on the other hand, has been speculating that high-ranking members of Vincente Fox's government are involved. Of course, SkyWay is based in Venice, Florida, right by where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained.
MadCowProd.com is offering the goods in this case. They conclude:
DC9’s cost money. But the twin airliners weren’t being used to demonstrate SkyWay’s products, for the simple reason that the company never had a product to demonstrate. The fact is both inescapable and mind-boggling at the same time. Two DC9’s painted to impersonate U.S. Government planes were being used for an as-yet unknown purpose… for almost two years.
Like the FAA, the attitude of the DEA toward a drug trafficking case involving 5.5 tons of cocaine seems remarkably laissez faire. A call to the DEA to inquire whether the Agency had mounted an investigation of an American-owned airliner busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine elicited a terse “no comment.”
The duty officer at the Tampa Office of the Drug Enforcement Administration revealed no indication that the DEA has taken any interest in the case. Two days of phone calls to the Agency’s Public Information Officer in Miami yielded nothing but busy signals.
.........The answer, both here in the U.S. as well as in Mexico, appears to be: Damage Control, for what clearly appears to have been officially-sanctioned drug trafficking. The silence in the U.S. and Mexico is a tell-tale sign of clandestine activity gone horribly awry. The bust was a mistake.
Once again, low-level personnel just hadn't been "clued-in" to the protected nature of the trade. Because of the sensitivity, everything is on a need to know basis. This creates a continuing problem.
You can't tell just anyone.
Cheney seems to be investing in securities that favor a weak dollar: That's pretty fucked up, observed at Attu Sees All and dissected on Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine.
Are they going to gut the Freedom of Information Act under the mask of 'counter-terrorism'? (via The Agonist)
The Mexican election is starting to look pretty ugly. How could there possibly be voting fraud south of the US?? More here.
UK Times: Leftist calls supporters onto streets in Mexican crisis
Mexico's electoral crisis deepened today after a recount separated the two leading candidates by less than 0.5 per cent of the vote and the leftist, Andres Manuel López Obrador, called his supporters onto the streets to protest against the result.
With 99.48 per cent of the vote reviewed by election officials, Felipe Calderon, a pro-business former energy secretary, led Señor López Obrador, a former mayor of Mexico City, by 0.41 per cent, or just 170,000 of the 41 million votes cast on Sunday.
Señor Calderon appeared relaxed at a party in the headquarters of the ruling National Action Party (PAN), saying: "Now is the hour for unity and agreements between Mexicans."
But Señor López Obrador said he would challenge the result in Mexico's highest electoral court, the Federal Electoral Tribunal. He asked his supporters to rally in Mexico City's huge Zócalo square on Saturday afternoon.
"We have taken the decision to challenge the electoral process," he told a press conference. "We cannot recognize or accept these results. There are lots of irregularities."
......
Señor López Obrador, whose Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was founded by a populist famously cheated of the presidency in a rigged election in 1988, has alleged throughout the week that PAN activists had counted votes twice in some districts and ignored votes in others.
Today he said that a case before the Federal Electoral Tribunal would expose the "lack of transparency, the lack of independence of the electoral body".
"We have triumphed and this is what we will demonstrate to the tribunal," he said.
Aryan Nations & other hate groups infiltrating the US Army: An army desperate for recruits might be handing guns to unsavory criminal lunatics: NY Times:
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
.......
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator, saying, "Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don't remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military," he said, "because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they'll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr. McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for participating in neo-Nazi activities.
.......
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units. The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the alliance's "military unit coordinator." "Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house, neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers, you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen, you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
Holy shit. And let's not forget about Gulf War vet Timothy McVeigh.
The twisted Internal Disinformation of the Bush Regime:
I thought this was pretty nuts. Ron Suskind's new "One Percent Doctrine" is selling pretty well, and the
review in the NY Times was disturbing, for it paints a portrait of a president protectively misinformed in order to defend the illogical madness of the war. This is madness:
During a November 2001 session with the president, Mr. Suskind recounts, a C.I.A. briefer realized that the Pentagon had not told Mr. Bush of the C.I.A.'s urgent concern that Osama bin Laden might escape from the Tora Bora area of Afghanistan (as he indeed later did) if United States reinforcements were not promptly sent in. And several months later, he says, attendees at a meeting between Mr. Bush and the Saudis discovered after the fact that an important packet laying out the Saudis' views about the Israeli-Palestinian situation had been diverted to the vice president's office and never reached the president.
Keeping information away from the president, Mr. Suskind argues, was a calculated White House strategy that gave Mr. Bush ''plausible deniability'' from Mr. Cheney's point of view, and that perfectly meshed with the commander in chief's own impatience with policy details. Suggesting that Mr. Bush deliberately did not read the full National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which was delivered to the White House in the fall of 2002, Mr. Suskind writes: ''Keeping certain knowledge from Bush -- much of it shrouded, as well, by classification -- meant that the president, whose each word circles the globe, could advance various strategies by saying whatever was needed. He could essentially be 'deniable' about his own statements.''
''Whether Cheney's innovations were tailored to match Bush's inclinations, or vice versa, is almost immaterial,'' Mr. Suskind continues. ''It was a firm fit. Under this strategic model, reading the entire N.I.E. would be problematic for Bush: it could hem in the president's rhetoric, a key weapon in the march to war. He would know too much.''
Plainly nuts.
The situation in Gaza is pretty ugly right now. On the one hand, the Israeli strategy is brutal, but even worse, it's pointless. HAMAS has offered a prisoner swap, like the old days with Hezbollah. Check out "The Ideology of Occupation, Revisited" from Israeli peacenik Ran HaCohen. James Zogby observes the Deadly Silence over the matter. I haven't said much about it, but this piece pretty much sums up the problem.
Captive in Gaza: Israel has several objectives in Gaza -- all mutually exclusive, writes Graham Usher
There are four aims behind operation "Summer Rain", the Israeli army's latest invasion of Gaza, according to ministers, officers and analysts. The first is to free "unconditionally" Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian guerrillas just outside the Strip on 25 June. The second is to end Palestinian "rocket fire" that, in the last month, has peppered Sederot and other Israeli areas on the Gaza border, so far without serious injury.The third aim -- undeclared but acknowledged -- is to force the Palestinian government from office via a rising curve of pre-emptive strikes. So far this has included tightened economic and political blockades, destruction of civilian power plants and bridges, military re-occupation, rocket attacks on the prime and interior ministers' offices and the wholesale arrest of Hamas ministers, members of parliament and local authority officers.
The ouster has little to do with the government's refusal to recognise the legitimacy of the Jewish state -- a rejection that suits Israel since it frees it from having to deal with an elected Palestinian Authority. It has more to do with Hamas's success not only in surviving the siege but in enshrining resistance as a central policy in its and any future National Unity Palestinian government, courtesy of the recently agreed Prisoners' Document.
The fourth aim is to repair the battered status of Israel's "deterrence". It is now clear to most Israelis that the relative quiet they enjoyed for the last year or so was not due to their army's military prowess. It was due to the Palestinian ceasefire, observed above all by Hamas's military arm, Izzeddin El-Qassam (IQ). Since it was renounced, 200 mortars have been fired into Israel, four soldier abductions have been attempted or carried out and two soldiers and one settler have been killed.
Threats Hamas may now take the fight "deep into Israel" reminds most Israelis of the bloodiest days of the Intifada. It destroys the illusion that the Gaza disengagement was somehow a military success. And it casts Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's project to determine unilaterally Israel's eastern border as absolute folly.
Vanity Fair had a lengthy feature on the Duke Cunningham/hookergate scandal and here's a summary.
Italian intrigues: In a small tidbit perhaps related to the Valerie Plame scandal, some of the top-ranking guys in Italy's SISMI intelligence service were arrested, as noted in the Italian media and the AP. This probably has more to do with furious Italian judges going after SISMI and CIA agents who helped get some terror suspect abducted.
.....the Italian military intelligence organization's deputy director and director of the first "foreign" or counterintelligence division Marco Mancini has been arrested in Italy, allegedly for his role in the CIA extraordinary rendition of Egyptian cleric Abu Omar from Milan in 2003. When I was in Rome on a few recent reporting trips, Mancini was the guy who everybody was literally frightened of even saying his name. I mean literally, people just referred to him as Marco. He was highly involved in Sismi's Middle East affairs, as well, apparently, I am hearing from Rome, in several recent cases of illegal wiretapping and illegal domestic spying in Italy. Arrest warrants have apparently been issued in the same Abu Omar case for four more CIA officials as well, including for the former CIA station chief in Rome.
In fact, on Sismi's behalf, Farina and Libero led the bogus charge that France was responsible for the Niger forgeries. Farina was also the beneficiary of illegal wiretaps seemingly conducted by friends of Sismi. Interesting times indeed.
From my brief exposure to politics there, I would say Mancini is far more comparable to a Lewis Libby figure than to his ex-CIA deputy director counterpart John McLaughlin, far more wired into the Byzantine politics of the Berlusconi project than a straight intel professional. Although this arrest would seem to be lapping pretty high on the ankles of the ex-Berlusconi administration itself, a friend in Rome writes that it may not go any further, and Prodi is giving indications he may not wish it to, especially as far as Sismi is concerned.
.......
Update: A reader in Rome writes that Libero's Farina is "under investigation not for his articles but because he has allegedly been identified as a Sismi source code-named 'Betulla.' ... [Sismi's] Mancini and Pignero are suspected of having studied Abu Omar’s habits and having prepared an initial plan for his abduction which would have the airport of Ghedi as the first destination of Abu Omar after his kidnapping. The plan went otherwise, as Aviano was opted for. They are also accused of spying on Repubblica's Giuseppe D’Avanzo as of May 12th..."
If I understand this and other recent Italian news reports correctly, Mancini was allegedly a liaison to several private Italian dirty tricks intelligence operations.
Ann Coulter's plagarism situation seems not that serious, but here's the comprehensive index. Xenu, the Scientology warlord, is involved.
The LA Times tries to claim that anti-Lieberman-ism is a "purge" of the Democratic Party by antiwar fanatics, while in fact it's more of a reaction to the fact that Lieberman is a crappy senator all around.
Around the paranoid side: I was advised to check out "The Resistance" on MySpace. As always PrisonPlanet will fill your daily conspiratoria quotient. Some Montana guy that sold (legal) gun kits was raided by the FBI, ATF and Canadian law enforcement for handing out 'subversive' Alex Jones material, according to... Alex Jones. In a crossposted story from the Sacramento Bee, Homeland Security denies tracking political activity after the state office got word of a peace rally on April 18. There was a new al-Qaeda video released to mark the 7/7 London bombings, and PrisonPlanet asks a bunch of questions about 7/7 anomalies, suggesting as they have from the beginning it was staged by the UK government.
The guy who invented Ren & Stimpy (a particularly raunchy but funny one that never went on TV is here) is in a battle with Warner Bros. because he's been posting their really good but forgotten cartoons on YouTube as Examples of the Art.
Worse than a Star Trek 'red shirt': 10 worst jobs to have in the action film universe.
Well that should tide folks over for a bit of the weekend here...
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?
"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.
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 am going up to Hibbing to see my aunt's Dylan documentary until Saturday afternoon and probably won't have time to post until Sunday.
A tantalizing nugget: my friend's dad stumbled across a massive embezzlement scheme in the Chicago branch of the Head Start education program. This is only now coming into public view and I will try to get something real on it later.
So the Administration wants to eat reporters who spill classified information. This lends itself to a new strategy: classify everything embarrassing and evil. Now that's your tax dollars at work!
Wednesday night I was hanging out with some folks soon parting ways with Minnesota, and it was a good time. In exchange for a nice old hat, various objects were offered for barter, including a Krazy Kat book. Krazy Kat was a weird old comic from the 1920s that has reached a kind of Major Art status, while really it's just pretty weird. I noticed that Itchy & Scratchy seems to be kind of based on it, including the cat's androgynous quality. Anyway.
Finally a Democrat in the House is getting busted for a scandal. Poor Jefferson was caught taking major cash in a pretty blunt kind of way and they're saying indictments next month, yet there is a big ruckus from Republicans after the FBI searched his Congressional office and took boxes of documents. Due to the bipartisan uproar, Bush has sealed the docs from the FBI, at least temporarily.
It's an interesting case. I feel that Republicans are a bit terrified that a potential future Democratic president could find evidence of all kinds of illegal stuff in their offices. For the whole history of this country, the executive hasn't been able to storm these places (or had the guts to). I tend to think that this is appropriate, that there ought to be a sphere of immunity of some sort to protect Congress from the executive. On the other hand, I would like to see Hastert, DeLay and all the other homies get nailed for all their Abramoff corruption. Just because you're in Congress doesn't mean you're above the law. Laura Rozen asks, is it panic?
But, what if (and certainly this has happened), member X has lots of evidence proving that Gonzales is a lawbreaker himself, that Rummy is a psychopath who permits war crimes, that Cheney helped channel Halliburton contracts and Porter Goss partied with hookers at the Watergate for a decade? In other words, what if I had Sen. Carl Levin's file cabinet? Well, that file cabinet would serve as a crucial check in the pretty corrupt system we've got now, and it seems clear that the founders intended to privilege stuff like that file cabinet. I also think that it should be impossible to charge Rep. Cynthia McKinney for slapping that Capitol police officer (in particular since it's been said that the Capitol police corps have been taken over by southern GOP good-ol-boy sheriff types).
We should note that the great Joseph McCarthy could not be sued for all the crazy slanderous and libelous garbage he puked onto the floor of the Senate during the 1950s, because, well, it was his constitutional right as a Senator to say plainly false and libelous things there. If the legislative branch gets under that kind of pressure, well, they will be 'chilled' in the legal speech sense, and it's curtains for that supposedly equal branch of the government. Never forget that people with their hands on executive power don't necessarily care about the truth, but they'll try to silence those who get in their way. McKinney has been a pretty vocal anti-imperialist (not to mention 9/11 skeptic), despite her silly style, and that whole thing reeks of an effort to kill the messenger. Movin' on.
Al Gore stares into the distance: From New York magazine, via the Brad Blog:
Does he, like many Democrats, think the election was stolen?
Gore pauses a long time and stares into the middle distance. "There may come a time when I speak on that,” Gore says, "but it’s not now; I need more time to frame it carefully if I do.” Gore sighs. "In our system, there’s no intermediate step between a definitive Supreme Court decision and violent revolution."
Later, I put the question of Gore’s views on the matter to David Boies, his lawyer in the Florida-recount battle. "He thought the court’s ruling was wrong and obviously political," Boies says. So he considers the election stolen? "I think he does—and he’s right."
Brad Blog was a leading place for tracking the election fraud in Ohio, and while I don't read regularly, it's well done.
Check out Wot is it Good 4 by Lukery, which has especially followed the case of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds - with its bizarre stories of drug money laundering, 9/11 links, FBI corruption, the whole bit. Sibel herself (official site), under many federal gag orders, has said that Lukery has been able to digest the known facts of the case better than anyone else. There's fresh stuff on a daily basis. For example, if you want to get waist-deep in some weird defense contractor shit, connected laterally with Manucher Ghorbanifar, Rep. Curt Weldon (of Able Danger fame), plus Edmonds' belief that Weldon has been kind of duped about some of the fake Iraq intelligence, well this story is what you need, and this one about some kind of corrupt link between neoconservatives, Turkey and military-industrial defense contractors, which Edmonds is also tied up in, another good one. Read this and trip out: Bing Bang Boom Shazam. The Edmonds case is way under the radar, extremely weird, but it seems to connect to the AIPAC scandal, Chalabi and the fake Iraq intelligence, some kind of secret 9/11 financing arrangements, drug money laundering, Turkish spies, and perhaps illegal money in the campaign coffers of people like Rep. Dennis Hastert. Or maybe not (Hastert is getting sucked into the Abramoff scandal, either way). I think at some point, Sibel Edmonds will finally break out into a major scandal and I'd like to say that we got a bit of the early word out here. SourceWatch on Sibel Edmonds too. (tiny side note: Lukery suggests this woman's skillful negotiation sites)
But who are Sibel Edmonds, Curt Weldon, Able Danger and what do these have to do with 9/11?? Fortunately in the expanding field of 9/11 conspiracy videos, a new one introduces these issues in an accessible way. Check out Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometime. I thought it was better than Loose Change, in terms of consisting of actual information and loose ends. However it doesn't have as many fun video clips. It has a pretty good introduction to the Able Danger, the pre-9/11 military intelligence project that apparently pinpointed some of the hijackers, and then was abruptly shut down with its terabytes of records vaporized. But ironically the problem perhaps might have been that it was based on illegal data mining?
Chinese spy update: Pretty cool stuff on the next hurrah about Katrina Leung, a pro-Republican Chinese spy who is basically getting let off by the Justice Department. She admitted tipping off the Chinese to the identities of FBI agents investigating nuclear sales to China (which mighta been tied to Iran-contra - whew). Evidently, she fed disinformation to the FBI to go after the unfortunate scientist Wen Ho Lee.
OS X operating system design: Check out this Flash animation if you want to know how OS X is structured internally. This guy's book will kick ass if you are into kernel hacking.
Israel claims Iran gets nukes in "months": My Ass. Antiwar.com's Raimondo, in a column bitching about the Iran badge story, the peripheral Israeli connections to the fake Iraq intelligence, and new and shiny paranoia from Israel about Iran, notes that well, Israel is definitely going to jerk the U.S. down this path.
AIPAC notes: I thought this was a good writeup about the power of the Israel lobby from Stephen Zunes: FPIF Special Report: The Israel Lobby: How Powerful is it Really? He points out an interesting example of a Congressman, who, when challenged about his heavily anti-Palestinian votes, basically says that the Jews made him do it for fear of losing fundraising, but even after he announces he won't run again, he still votes against Palestinians. The Jews are just - wait for it - a scapegoat for his actual anti-Arab bias. And of course there's the basic fact that Bush depends a lot more on the hardcore rightwing (and often apocalyptic) Christian Zionists that Jewish ones.
Misc notes: Watch Lazy Ramadi, a video from some troops with a video camera. You won't regret it.
Sidney Blumenthal notes Iraq is doomed. Of course, it has literally the most corrupt government ever created (although maybe DC actually wins that right now). Duly noted by the brave Patrick Cockburn:
Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold:
Across central Iraq, there is an exodus of people fleeing for their lives as sectarian assassins and death squads hunt them down. At ground level, Iraq is disintegrating as ethnic cleansing takes hold on a massive scale.
By Patrick Cockburn in Khanaqin, North-East Iraq (20 May)
The state of Iraq now resembles Bosnia at the height of the fighting in the 1990s when each community fled to places where its members were a majority and were able to defend themselves. "Be gone by evening prayers or we will kill you," warned one of four men who called at the house of Leila Mohammed, a pregnant mother of three children in the city of Baquba, in Diyala province north-east of Baghdad. He offered chocolate to one of her children to try to find out the names of the men in the family.
Mrs Mohammed is a Kurd and a Shia in Baquba, which has a majority of Sunni Arabs. Her husband, Ahmed, who traded fruit in the local market, said: " They threatened the Kurds and the Shia and told them to get out. Later I went back to try to get our furniture but there was too much shooting and I was trapped in our house. I came away with nothing." He and his wife now live with nine other relatives in a three-room hovel in Khanaqin.
The same pattern of intimidation, flight and death is being repeated in mixed provinces all over Iraq. By now Iraqis do not have to be reminded of the consequences of ignoring threats.
I liked this list from Juan Cole:
There are now four distinct wars going on in Iraq simultaneously
1) The Sunni Arab guerrilla war to expel US troops from the Sunni heartland
2) The militant Shiite guerrilla war to expel the British from the south
3) The Sunni-Shiite civil war
4) The Kurdish war against Arabs and Turkmen in Kirkuk province, and the Arab and Turkmen guerrilla struggle against the encroaching Peshmerga (the Kurdish militia).
The struggle of the Turkmen is starting to branch out into Turkey. Note how Turkey is now red on the lovely Reuters map, seems ominous:
Kurds say Turkish shells land in Iraq, Turkey denies: By Sherko Raouf
SULAIMANIYA, Iraq, May 17 (Reuters) - The government of Iraq's autonomous Kurdistan region accused Turkish forces of shelling an area inside northern Iraq on Wednesday.
A Turkish government official dismissed the accusation as "total fabrication."
Ankara traditionally launches a spring offensive against Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerrillas in southeastern Turkey, an area which borders Iraq.
Earlier this month, villagers in Iraq's Kurdistan accused neighbouring Iran of hitting targets inside Iraq, a charge Tehran denied.
Khaled Salih, a senior official of the Kurdish regional government in Arbil, said by telephone that no one was hurt when three shells slammed into a mountainous area close to the town of Kani Masi a few km (miles) inside Iraq.
"A village ... has been bombarded from the Turkish side. There were no casualties, but there was material damage," Salih told Reuters. "This is the second time in a week villages have been bombarded in the north."
"We will report this to the government in Baghdad so that they can contact the Turkish government and ask for an explanation," he said.
Salih said there were no PKK fighters in the area where the shells landed. NATO member Turkey has stationed some 1,500 troops stationed inside northern Iraq since the late 1990s when it launched regular raids into the region to hunt PKK fighters.
In Turkey, a government official told Reuters: "This is not true ... All the measures are on our side of the border." Turkey has sent 40,000 troops to its own Kurdish areas to reinforce the 220,000 already there, the biggest build-up in years after an increase in PKK attacks.
The PKK, seeking a Kurdish homeland including southeastern Turkey, accuses Ankara and Tehran of mounting coordinated operations against the group and its Iranian wing, PJAK.
NSA Total My Phone Bill Awareness: Crusty CIA veteran Ray McGovern rails against NSA monitoring of Americans. Sy Hersh with a few bits and pieces on the NSA situation. Congressional Quarterly reports on mysterious data links between Homeland Security and the NSA. TPMM observes how DOJ sends out TONS of subpoenas for data daily, apparently outside of judicial oversight. National Security Letters. Someday, the Letter will come for you (or more likely, me). TPMM also looks at how there is a cottage industry of companies that handle all our phone records, passing them from the telcos to the government, allowing AT&T to claim that they aren't giving Big Brother the records directly. Check this: Fuck NeuStar, the "scapegoat" for hire.
Billmon hung out in Egypt for some conference. Egypt is autocratic, the Teflon pharaoh. I like that phrase.
As always, Prof. Cole is the go-to man for direct analysis of the situation and Arab media. He also follows up further on the fake Iran Jew Badge story. Firedoglake traces back the root of the fake Badge story. The National Post had to retract the story:
Last Friday, the National Post ran a story prominently on the front page alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law that, if enacted, would require Jews and other religious minorities in Iran to wear badges that would identify them as such in public. It is now clear the story is not true. Given the seriousness of the error, I felt it necessary to explain to our readers how this happened.
Then, of course, the bastards require you to register to read the rest. Fuck! (this early, erroneous bit on the badge story struck me for its interesting historical content, but also classic pompous ignorati*-style writing)[ * "Ignorati" has been trademarked by Mordred]
We noted earlier a report about 200,000 AK-47s from Bosnia, that were purchased by the US for the Iraqi security forces, but now there are more reports that the AKs basically vanished and are now in the hands of insurgents because of - you guessed it - private defense contractors!! BBC reports on how the guns that ruined Yugoslavia are getting dumped straight into the Iraqi civil war.
Ah, the irony of how shitty neoconservatism worked out to be.
Murray Waas reports that Rove and Novak may have hatched a conspiracy to cover up the Valerie Plame leak (via TPMM):
On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men. . . .
Rove and Novak, investigators suspect, might have devised a cover story to protect Rove because the grand jury testimony of both men appears to support Rove's contentions about how he learned about Plame.
Chinese PCs feared to be bugged: There's always time for Sinophobia.
Blockquotes are plagarism?! Plagarism Today (what a name for a site) talks about how the practice of blockquoting from other sources is really the new plagarism. I think that's a bit retarded since if you're naming your source, it's not plagarism at all. However, there are sites that exclusively skim off content and pass it as their own for spamming purposes. There are actually Hongpong.com fragments on spam sites out there. We blockquote a lot here, but damn, no one can read the whole damn Internet themselves! It seems like a silly argument, but on the other hand, the game ought to be about original content. However, I like to put lots of sources in here, since, well, you gotta at least weigh their credibility apart from mine in order for my arguments to sink in. Anyway, slashdot reacts.
Long ass random post. However more than enough stuff to keep anyone busy for a while. True?
This is the second time,
we will not fall in line,
No you can’t stop this exodus
No you won’t stop this exodus.
--Anti-Flag, Emigre (For Blood and Empire, 2006)
Canada's National Post newspaper published a story last Friday, A colour code for Iran's 'infidels', by Amir Taheri, which described a law passed by the Iranian Majlis (Parliament) requiring religious minorities such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians to wear colored clothing to signify them in public:
That sector [not headed for recession] is the garment industry and the reason for hopefulness is a law passed by the Islamic Majlis (parliament) on Monday.
The law mandates the government to make sure that all Iranians wear "standard Islamic garments" designed to remove ethnic and class distinctions reflected in clothing, and to eliminate "the influence of the infidel" on the way Iranians, especially, the young dress. It also envisages separate dress codes for religious minorities, Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, who will have to adopt distinct colour schemes to make them identifiable in public. The new codes would enable Muslims to easily recognize non-Muslims so that they can avoid shaking hands with them by mistake, and thus becoming najis (unclean).
The new law, drafted during the presidency of Muhammad Khatami in 2004, had been blocked within the Majlis. That blockage, however, has been removed under pressure from Khatami's successor, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
This, of course, echoes the Nazi policy of marking Jews and others, part of the psychological preparation to cleave them from German society, and subsequently exterminate them. The story resonates with the emerging storyline that "Ahmedinejad == Hitler!!", because as we all know, everyone from Daniel Ortega to Vladimir Putin to Hugo Chavez is in fact the reincarnation of that weird fey Austrian guy.
(The National Post is the Fox News of Canadian papers: as Wikipedia notes, discredited corrupt media mogul Conrad Black started it to counteract "over-liberalizing" Canadian papers)
The problem with Taheri's story is that it's fucking fake, a fabrication. For example, this quote appears to have materialized from nowhere, as its speaker does not exist:
"Iranians have always worn trousers," says Mostafa Pourhardani, Minister of Islamic Orientation. "Even when the ancient Greeks wore woman-style dresses with skirts, the Persians had trousers. We are not going to force Iranian men to do away with trousers although they predate Islam."
The story was quickly propagated in the right-wing media. I first heard of it from my roommate, who said there was a headline on Drudge when he was at work on Friday, yet when he tried to find it around 6 PM, it was already gone. To my credit, I immediately suggested it sounded cartoonishly evil and too good to be true. And of course, it bounced through the right wing blogosphere quite thoroughly.
The story was in turn picked up by that bastion of accuracy, the Murdoch-owned New York Post. So in keeping with our mission to comment on "information operations," and with a touch of dark irony, I have developed badges that will be attached to news stories determined to be fabrications designed to manipulate the public's perceptions of foreign devils and others. Henceforth a blue PSY OPS starburst will be affixed to such things so no one's brains are contaminated by lies!
How do we know that this is a fabrication? Wikipedia already has a major page for the event: 2006 Iranian sumptuary law controversy with many details and links. A blog called Lenin's Tomb summarized the situation and Taheri's spot in the neo-con media heirarchy quite effectively:
Amir Taheri, of course, is a dubious figure. He is a sublunary of the Benador Associates, a right-wing PR firm that supplies conservative speakers for all sorts of occasions. He specialises in producing bilge about Iran, interpreting Ahmadinejad's letter to Bush as an attempt to provoke a clash of civilizations so that the Hidden Imam will return, while asserting not only that Iran wants a nuclear bomb, but that it wants one to - well, hasten a clash of civilizations so that the Hidden Imam will return. He has claimed that attacks on London and New York were inspired by a desire by some Muslims to exert total dictatorial control over what you eat for breakfast (which is cartoonish nonsense), referred to Tariq Ramadan as a Muslim Brotherhood militant (which is flatly false), smeared antiwar protesters as defenders of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, and asserted that Israel must claim victory over Palestine. As an "Iranian-born analyst" (they never forget to mention this), he is the neoconservative's favourite 'native informant' about Islam, the Middle East and how well various imperialist adventures are going. Commentary Magazine loves him, the Wall Street Journal loves him, the Telegraph loves him, the National Review loves him - to put it mildly, his brand of 'insight' is very popular with that baroque sodality of reactionary imperialists. Noteworthy that, after the story has already been rebutted, Amir Tehari has gone and retold the story to the New York Post with the headline 'Iran OKs "Nazi" Social Fabric'.
But what is more interesting than Tehari's corroborative role is that this utterly false and utterly implausible story was first published by the National Post and then taken up by newspapers and television stations across America and the West, and even a supposedly leftish site called Truthdig. The report cited no solid sources, merely adducing unnamed "human rights groups" were were "raising alarms" and unnamed "Iranian expatriates" who "confirmed reports". Well, I say 'unnamed' - one Iranian expatriate is named, some geezer called 'Ali Behroozian'. Quite how he was able to 'confirm' this claim, what qualified him in other words, is a mystery. Googling yields nothing about him, so either he's a private citizen, in which case the question about his qualifications to confirm anything for the National Post is repeated, or the name is all made up, in which case other questions come to mind. Possibly, these human rights groups and expatriates are of the same character as the Iraqi exiles who obligingly told Bush what he wanted to hear - or what he wanted others to hear - so that he could invade Iraq. Or one could equally suspect the hand of such PR groups as Hill & Knowlton, who famously manufactured a story about Iraqi soldiers ripping babies from incubators and leaving them to die on the floor. But what is clear, abundantly clear, is that any news reporter worth his or her salt would have spotted that this set of claims had fuck all to it. Hardly any sources, obtuse style, vagueness of details, nothing but colourful, arresting and emotionally involving claims and expostulations that divert one from analysis. As Alexandra Kitty explains in her useful book on lies becoming news, those are the absolutely standard tell-tale signs of a hoax. CBS boasts that it did not publish the story because "there were too many red flags" and not enough concrete information. Yet Fox News, MSNBC the New York Post, the New York Sun, the Washington Times, the American Jewish Congress, the Jerusalem Post and any number of wingnut sites and of course our progressive friend Truthdig all repeated these outrageous, obvious lies as if they were fact. Most, including our progressive friend Truthdig, followed the National Post's lead by illustrating their coverage with artefacts or photos from Nazi Germany.
I'll also note Juan Cole's thorough debunking of the matter: Another Fraud on Iran: No Legislation on Dress of Religious Minorities:
The National Post was founded by Conrad Black and has been owned by CanWest since 2003,* is not a repository of expertise about Iran. It is typical of black psychological operations campaigns that they begin with a plant in an out of the way* newspaper that is then picked up by the mainstream press. Once the Jerusalem Post picks it up, then reporters can source it there, even though the Post has done no original reporting and has just depended on the National Post article, which is extremely vague in its own sourcing (to "human rights groups").
The actual legislation passed by the Iranian parliament regulates women's fashion, and urges the establishment of a national fashion house that would make Islamically appropriate clothing. There is a vogue for "Islamic chic" among many middle class Iranian women that involves, for instance, wearing expensive boots that cover the legs and so, it is argued, are permitted under Iranian law. The scruffy, puritanical Ahmadinejad and his backers among the hardliners in parliament are waging a new and probably doomed struggle against the young Iranian fashionistas. (The Khomeinists give the phrase "fashion police" a whole new meaning).
There is nothing in this legislation that prescribes a dress code or badges for Iranian religious minorities, and Maurice Motamed was present during its drafting and says nothing like that was even discussed.
The whole thing is a steaming crock.
In fact, Iranian Jewish expatriates themselves have come out against a bombing campaign by the US or Israel against Iran. There are still tens of thousands of Jews in Iran, and expatriate Iranian Jews most often identify as Iranians and express Iranian patriotism. I was in Los Angeles when tens of thousands of Iranians immigrated, fleeing the Khomeini regime. I still remember Jewish Iranian families who suffered a year or two in what they thought of as the sterile social atmosphere of LA, and who shrugged and moved right back to Iran, where they said they felt more comfortable.
This affair is similar to the attribution to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of the statement that "Israel must be wiped off the map." No such idiom exists in Persian, and Ahmadinejad actually just quoted an old speech of Khomeini in which he said "The occupation regime over Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Of course Ahamdinejad does wish Israel would disappear, but he is not commander of the armed forces and could not attack it even if he wanted to, which he denies.
The Palestinian advocacy website Electronic Intifada notes that an editor of a CanWest paper said "We do not run in our newspaper Op Ed pieces that express criticism of Israel".
Here is background from SourceWatch on Benador Associates - basically a PR firm for neo-con hawks. And a Kos writer adds:
Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neoconservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months. Also found among her client list are other major war-boosters, including former New York Times executive editor and now New York Daily News columnist, A. M. Rosenthal; Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer; the Council on Foreign Relations' resident imperialist Max Boot; and Victor Davis Hanson, a blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite dinner guests.
In other words, practically the whole gang! There's plenty of commentary around this flap, such as this columnist in the Toronto Star, Canadian Cynic, Taylor Marsh, Unqualified Offerings, and plenty more if you care to search.
Besides all that, um, check out Thomas Lippman and Juan Cole's basic explanation of why Iran is not really a military threat to Israel.
Get ready for more of these. They are definitely coming, but it would appear that lots of people are already wary of the Persian version of Aluminum Tubes©®.
Technorati Tags: PSYOPS
Anonymous CIA guy on "Dusty" Foggo, in an email to ex-CIA dude Larry Johnson:
"Guys who hate him pretty much do so because they wish they had the moxie to get as much poontang as they think he is getting."
It is pretty satisfying when five days after I introduced our dear readers to the Hookergate/Watergate scandal and posted a Porter Goss pimp image I whipped up, Goss abruptly resigned as CIA director and his #3, Foggo, goes under criminal investigation for shady Duke-related contracts. The timing is just too damn good, and by all indications this mess is sprawling out into a sizable summer scandal. Therefore we are issuing an updated image of Mr. Goss.
More and more of this story has come out in the press & various websites last week. Obviously, there are a lot of rumors and speculation, which have only grown since Goss abruptly resigned last Friday afternoon. Here is a darn good summary of the main rumors about why Goss resigned, from Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly blog Political Animal: Why did Goss Go?
We're gonna riff through the material available right now, but first, it's going to take a special chart to get the general outline of this scandal out there. Time to illuminate the cast of characters: "Dusty" Foggo, Duke, Brent Wilkes, and the rest of the gang. Enjoy!
Hope that helps. I think this is a basically accurate outline of the scandal's major components, though of course it could turn out wrong.
Goss as the Neo-Con Stalinist: Keep in mind that Porter Goss tried to purge rebellious Democrats from the CIA, as he (and his deputies) saw them. As the LA Times put it, Goss Leaves a Weakened CIA, Agency Officials Say:
Four former deputy directors of operations once tried to offer Goss advice about changing the clandestine service without setting off a rebellion, but Goss declined to speak to any of them, said former CIA officials who are aware of the communications. The perception that Goss was conducting a partisan witch hunt grew, too, as staffers asked about the party affiliation of officers who sent in cables or analyses on Iraq that contradicted the Defense Department's more optimistic scenarios.
"Unfortunately, Goss is going to be seen as the guy who oversaw the agency victimized by politics," said Tyler Drumheller, a former chief of the European division. "His tenure saw the greatest loss of operational experience" in the operations division since congressional hearings on CIA domestic spying plunged the agency into crisis, he said.
The media's main Goss storyline has nothing to do with Hookergate: he allegedly just quit because National Intelligence Director John Negroponte had taken too much of his power away, and it pissed Goss off. Certainly, as Time reported, the CIA is getting gutted, with many analysts moving into Negroponte's new ODNI entity created by the recent "intelligence reforms". However, this process could go all wrong, as the CIA could be shredded and the ODNI becoming some sort of weird & monstrous new bureaucracy. This is a separate issue, but important to the whole country. The CIA's Existential Crisis on POGOblog (from the Project on Gov't Oversight) has a really good explanation of how the intelligence bureaucracy is being restructured.
It's too damn weird to see the CIA director quit right as stories about a pretty massive sex scandal are looming. Every reporter in town is all over it. Here is Josh Marshall's basic backstory explanation of how Goss, Foggo, Wilkes and Cunningham fit together, from a TPM post last Friday afternoon:
The hookers in Hookergate are, of course, the sizzle. But there's a bigger story. It stems directly from the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal, which many had figured was over. But it's not. You may have noticed that while Duke Cunningham is already in jail and Mitchell Wade has already pled guilty to multiple charges, Brent Wilkes has never been touched. Wilkes is the ur-briber at the heart of the Cunningham scandal, you can see pretty clearly by reading the other indictments and plea agreements. Wade was Wilkes' protege. Now, on the surface one might surmise that the prosecutors are just taking their time, putting together their best case. I hear different.
Wilkes has deep ties into the CIA. The focal point of those ties is to Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, the man Porter Goss appointed to the #3 position at CIA when he took over the Agency last year. Remember, Wilkes' scam was getting corrupt contracts deep in the 'black' world of intelligence and defense appropriations, where there's little or no oversight. Foggo was in the contracting and procurement field at the CIA. So you can see how he and Wilkes, who have been friends since high school, had plenty to talk about.
The CIA wasn't the only place Wilkes and his protege Wade plied their corrupt trade. There were also in the mix contracting on the Bush Pentagon's extra-constitutional spying operations. And I am told that senior appointees at the DOD knew about their corruption but overlooked it.
Now, since the Cunningham scandal got under, and particularly of late, there's been a big tug of war between federal law enforcement and the CIA over whether to really go after Wilkes. Probably a little more specificity is in order there, folks at CIA in the orbit of Foggo and presumably Goss.
Now, how does Goss know Foggo? That's how we get into the other part of this story -- those 'hospitality suites', that moveable feast of food, poker and love, Brent Wilkes ran in Washington for maybe fifteen years. We hear that's how Goss got to be friends with Foggo, whom he later promoted to executive director of the CIA, the number 3 post at the Agency.
Now, last week, Goss denied he had attended any of Wilkes' parties, in answer to a question from TPMmuckraker. Foggo admitted attending the parties but claimed he'd never seen the hookers.
Now, corrupt contractors saucing up Agency officials and members of Congress to get contracts and free money. Hospitality suites where the saucing takes place. Hookers in the mix. It's going on for more than a decade, various members of the key committees in the mix. Goss, former member of one of those committees, appoints one of the key players in all this mess as the number three guy at CIA? The feds leaning hard on the limo company owner who probably knows all the details and already has a long rap sheet and can't afford another conviction?
Walter Shapiro in Salon summarized the case:
Porter Goss' spooky demise: For those practiced in connecting the dots, little artistic training is needed to speculatively link Goss' here's-your-hat-what's-your-hurry departure with the bribery scandal surrounding jailed former GOP Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham. NBC News reported Thursday night that the CIA is investigating whether a top agency official, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, improperly steered a $2.4 million contract to his close college friend Brent Wilkes, a defense contractor implicated in the Cunningham case. Wilkes reportedly supplied prostitutes to Cunningham at poker parties that Foggo also attended, though the CIA official denies seeing the female entertainment.
There is no obvious connection between Goss and Cunningham, aside from their having served together in the House for 13 years. But the real mystery is how Foggo became the CIA's executive director, the official in charge of day-to-day operations at the entire agency: He was a midlevel field officer with a procurement background when Goss appointed him in 2004. A CIA spokeswoman, who did not want her name used, said Thursday that the two men met when Foggo testified before the House Intelligence Committee, which Goss chaired from 1997 until 2004, when Bush made him the CIA director. No date was provided for Foggo's testimony before Goss' committee.
Of course, the Foggo-Wilkes connection may have nothing to do with the sudden change in Goss' career arc. Daalder posed the speculative question, "Was there an intelligence blunder that we don't know about -- and that we may never know about?"
The shady intelligence contracts and their security consequences: Laura Rozen in January wrote “Duke” of Deception: The overlooked security implications of the Cunningham scandal for the American Prospect magazine.
Viewed as a corruption case, the Cunningham matter has an arc that suggests the possibility of more high-profile indictments to come. But looked at from a counterintelligence angle, it is even more disturbing. The case is still more worrying if it is turned around, and focused not only on the congressman for sale, but on the defense contractors and foreign-linked financiers who cultivated Cunningham -- and potentially other lawmakers -- precisely because of their position on the Intelligence and Appropriations Committees.
Cunningham has admitted taking $2.4 million in bribes from two men who sought and received not only U.S. government contracts, but particular types of contracts. They were awarded defense and intelligence contracts, including counterintelligence and counterterrorism programs so sensitive their precise details are confined to those with security clearances. As Cunningham himself bragged in a February 8, 2001, letter to defense contractor executives after he was appointed to the Intelligence Committee, “I feel fortunate to represent the nation’s top technological talent in the ‘black’ world,” the San Diego Union Tribune first reported.
Lots more gory details in there, and another story back in December too. Cunningham set up a lot of contracts that infest the whole system: the Pentagon's "newest and fastest-growing intelligence agency", the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) agency had major contracts with MZM set up by Cunningham. WaPo reported in March, 'Pentagon Agency's Contracts Reviewed':
...[Cunningham] prosecutors said that in fiscal 2003 legislation, Cunningham set aside, or earmarked, $6.3 million for work to be done "to benefit" CIFA shortly after the agency was created. The contract went to MZM Inc., a company run by Mitchell J. Wade, who recently pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe Cunningham.... CIFA, whose exact size and budget remain secret, was established in September 2002 to coordinate policy and oversee the counterintelligence activities of units within the military services and Pentagon agencies. In the past three years, it has grown to become an analytic and operational organization with nine directorates and widening authority focused primarily on protecting defense facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks. The agency was criticized after it was revealed in December that a database it managed held information on Americans who were peacefully protesting the war in Iraq at defense facilities and recruiting offices.
So this is one of those Pentagon agencies that spies on America. Hi, guys.
The San Diego Union-Tribune has pushed along the Cunningham story from the beginning. This story about Wilkes from last December, Contractor 'knew how to grease the wheels', has the goods about his payoffs to DeLay, how ACDS got government contracts, and it had the earliest hints about Wilkes running a "hospitality suite, with several bedrooms, in Washington – first in the Watergate Hotel and then in the Westin Grand near Capitol Hill." (Photo from the Muckers, who reported the Watergate has been subpoenaed)
House Intel Committee Chair "Not Surprised" Duke Slept with Hookers.
The American Progress Action Fund Progress Report (a liberal organization obviously) had a really good summary of the whole case on May 4 (also posted on Alternet). Go check that out for lots more material on Wilkes, the poker parties, Foggo's involvment there, Goss, the Limo service and the "Defense Appropriations Committee 'Cabal'." It ends with:
Wilkes was reportedly set to receive a contract to "create and run a secret plane network" for the CIA before his links to Cunningham were made public. The roots of this scandal may be as much in profiteering as they are in "this club's conviction that the law is an impediment to the national security cause, that the way to run things is through these informal networks."
Who was Nine Fingers? There is some CIA agent in the poker party mix nicknamed "Nine Fingers", whose role may become clearer, as Newsweek identified him as Brant Bassett, an agent in Operations Directorate. TPMMuckrakers on the case:
"Another player was a CIA agent known as 'Nine Fingers,' so named because he lost one of his digits while on assignment," the San Diego Union-Tribune reported over a week ago in what appeared to be an almost throwaway bit of color.
The Mafia-esque moniker has attracted attention and jokes -- but little new information, until now: Newsweek magazine is the first to identify Nine Fingers as Brant Bassett, whom they also say is "a former Goss aide." He may be a more central character in our story than the SDUT made him out to be.
Bassett is reported to have been a case officer with the CIA's Directorate of Operations, where Foggo worked. Their paths crossed a number of times over the years and they became friendly, I'm told, which isn't a stretch, given that two publications now put Bassett in poker games with Foggo and Wilkes.
An enduring mystery to this fiasco is why Porter Goss promoted "Dusty" Foggo to the very top of the CIA. Now, informed sources are speculating that Bassett may be the link that explains that mystery, at least in part. Bassett, a counsel and staff director for the Human Intelligence panel of Goss' House Intelligence Committee, had ample opportunity to introduce Goss and his close aide Patrick Murray to Foggo. Did he?
Justin Rood and the Talking Points Memo Muckrakers have been all over Hookergate from the beginning - and isn't it nice that the Internet lets this things get legs so fast now? Hit their Hookergate archives for more, including investigations about the corrupt Shirlington Limousine service that moved the prostitutes around, while under a privileged Homeland Security contract. The NY Times reports that Homeland Security doesn't even do background checks on its contractors.
Maverick / weird DC reporter Wayne Madsen has been covering this and his site had some goodies on it early (he is very anti-Hayden too, so check that out). He said May 6:
Although the White House spun Goss' departure as expected following some sort of "transition," it was clear that what WMR has been reporting for some time -- that Goss and his closest advisers, all GOP political operatives and hacks -- had been implicated in the contractor scandals surrounding Goss' Executive Director Kyle "Dusty" Foggo and ADCS head Brent Wilkes. The scandal involved poker parties at the Watergate Hotel and Westin Grand that reportedly featured prostitutes of both sexes, limousines, and situations in which CIA officials could be subject to potential blackmail. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte became so concerned about the CIA scandal, he told Goss that it was time for him to go. it is now expected that other members of the Goss team -- including Foggo, chief of staff Patrick Murray, Michael Kostiw (who left the CIA under a cloud in the early 1980s after being arrested for shoplifting a package of bacon from a McLean, Virginia supermarket), Jennifer Millerwise Dyck, and others who Goss brought with him from Capitol Hill -- will be shown the door.
What does Larry Johnson's anonymous CIA friend say happened? Larry is one of the "pissed off CIA dudes" on the Hongpong.com sidebar now. He posted a very interesting email from one of his buddies who used to be in there:
If you want to know, the way these things worked were that once or twice a week, Dusty would host a poker game either at his house in Vienna or Brent’s place at the Watergate, later the Westin. These things went on from the mid 1990’s until Dusty went to Frankfurt in the early 2000’s. Basically, Dusty used these games to take his mind off of his feud with Buzzy Krongaard, which was a minor thing to Buzzy, but weighed pretty heavily on Dusty’s mind. When at Dusty’s place, they were pretty much all Agency guys, except for Brent. Dusty’s wife laid out the food and drink. When downtown, Brent would invite Duke and some other denizens from the Hill, but the majority were always Dusty’s Agency poker buddies. Brent would pop for the drinks and snacks downtown, and the ambiance was kind of like the poker game on The Sopranos. At either location, Dusty was the center of attraction and kind of the host. There was always a lot of bitching about Buzzy, even in front of the Hill guys. These were always all guy things, their weren’t any women there. Dusty is a big cigar aficionado, in fact, he used to have the license plate CIGRMAN on his car. The room was always filled with smoke.
Downtown, it wasn’t unusual for guys to crash in the bedrooms or on the couch before going home at dawn to catch a shower and go in to work. It would not surprise me if Brent used the same rooms at the Watergate and Westin for subsidized Congressional encounters with hookers, but I don’t know this to be the case. If Brent did, I doubt that he would’ve said anything to Dusty about it, because, for all of his judgmental shortcomings, Dusty has enough of a political antenna to realize that he shouldn’t be playing poker in the same room where Duke was availing himself of free hookers. As you probably know, Dusty is the type of guy who people either love or hate. In my experience, women who hate him do so because he is an unabashed chauvinist of the old school. Guys who hate him pretty much do so because they wish they had the moxie to get as much poontang as they think he is getting. So there you have it, at least my take.
Who else to check out? Reporter Laura Rozen has been on the Cunningham case for a long time. The new Washington Babylon blog at Harpers by Ken Silverstein broke some of the limo stuff.
What else? Duke is gay? Uhm, well, there was this one story (noted here): "Duke’s House of cards" Washington Blade By CHRIS CRAIN Dec. 02, 2005. Would be funny, wouldn't it?
What you won’t read about in these mainstream press accounts is the other double life led by the closet case, Duke, the anti-gay conservative. Cunningham, who is married with grown children, has admitted to romantic, loving relationships with men, both during his Vietnam military service and as a civilian. That was the remarkable story that this publication reported two years ago, when Elizabeth Birch, the former Human Rights Campaign leader, inadvertently outed Cunningham at a gay rights forum.
Birch never mentioned Cunningham’s name, but she talked about a rabidly anti-gay congressman who asked to meet privately with her in the midst of a controversy over his use in a speech on the floor of the House the term “homos” to describe gays who have served in the military. Alone with Birch and an HRC staffer, the unnamed congressman shared that he had loved men during his life. In telling the story, Birch offered up a few too many details about the closeted congressman.
CIA Director replacement Hayden is sketchy: This has already gotten overly long, so I will let the Hayden stuff go for now. In the meantime, just ponder, do these fuckers ever actually get around to protecting America?!
First I will add my own original contribution to this rehash of the most goddamned annoying day in the history of the world. When I was at the Kos appearance here in Minneapolis a couple days ago, Coleen Rowley (of FBI whistleblower fame) showed up to make the liberal scene, and since Zacharias Moussaoui was all over the news, I had to ask her something, because she was at that damn Minneapolis field office when they caught the bastard in August 2001. Could 9/11 have been prevented, I asked her, given that you guys had Moussaoui? I'm imperfectly paraphrasing here, but she shot back, Yes. The reports about terrorists at flight schools got stopped up in the FBI, but those reports got to George Tenet, the chief of Central Intelligence. And all they really had to do was put bolts on the cockpit doors. It's too bad I don't have a recording so I can't quote it perfectly.
But damn, to have been in that situation, to have been an FBI agent who sensed the bigger pilot conspiracy, and to get shut down in August 2001. What a shitty thing. (Michael Ruppert blames an FBI guy named Frasca for orchestrating the Minneapolis FBI "suppression" - more here and here - just trying to cover my basic illuminati-isms). Anyway:
Somehow, quite a few of my friends have become 9/11 conspiracy buffs, as a particular film has persuaded them something just ain't right with everyone's favorite glimpse into the Abyss. Nowadays "Vigilant Guardian" and "controlled demolition" are code words we chuckle at. Well, that's a bit much, but they are among those who have had their perceptions altered by a surprisingly popular film currently passed around the Internet and on DVD. It's called Loose Change: 2nd Edition (here's the official blog), which was made by some young guys for less than $10,000. You can watch the whole thing in high-quality video through Google Video here.
Still not explained: "Is this real world or an exercise?" (source)
I haven't mentioned Loose Change to people much at all (OK, I did a couple times, and via Google Video I got the Video iPod version). Rather, they keep telling me about this exciting video that fucked with their heads. And then they usually show it to their parents, who get terribly annoyed at such silly nonsense. It is getting some play in the mainstream media, as USA Today recently ran a pretty negative article about the "conspiracy film."
USA Today, APRIL 28, 2006: Conspiracy Film Rewrites Sept. 11
Called Loose Change, it is being downloaded from the Internet and shown in small screenings here and overseas. It is not alone in the genre, and it is not unusual in American history either to offer simplistic explanations or demonize opponents. Presidents from Andrew Jackson to Lyndon Johnson were accused by their contemporaries of massive government conspiracies.
The film appears especially popular among young people immersed in a Web culture brimming with sites that question the credibility of government. They see 9/11 as the defining moment of their lives. "This is our generation's Vietnam, our generation's Kennedy assassination," says Korey Rowe, 23, the film's producer.
Professors and researchers of film and politics say the Internet is making it far easier to spread such theories because the traditional media are losing their hold on the news. The immense coverage of controversies and accusations surrounding the war on terror has created fertile ground for people who assign their own interpretations to photos, footage, eyewitnesses, investigations and newspaper accounts of what happened, they say. [w00000p w000p I know they must be talking about me! -dan]
"The information revolution now gives us access to too much information," says Jonathan Taplin, who teaches at the Annenberg School for Communications at the University of Southern California. "Our problems are that we're just overwhelmed, so in some sense we just basically don't even know where to turn."
True enough, in a sense. The hypersaturation of information has caused a breakdown in the way that we structure the authority to process that information. In other words, there's so much damn noise that you don't know how to trust. Compounding this problem is the obvious fact that no one trusts the White House at all any more, and no one with any wits should trust the mainstream media, after all their well-documented fuckups. And after Colbert's performance, we can tell they're all pretty much scared shitless.
So then, what fills the gap? Stuff like this, for better or worse. Loose Change packs an effective punch for such a small production. But they really don't want you to take what they say as gospel – and the axis of the film is really just the creepy contrast between the Official Narrative supported or enforced today (i.e. the sanctimonious retrospective "Flight 93" flick type stuff), versus the on-site media and first responder reactions that day, and they just don't fit together at all. The Loose Change website's evidence section cites pretty much every bit of the film back to some report or another, and they deserve to be quoted:
The information in Loose Change 2nd Edition is widely available to the public.
We have done nothing extraordinary in terms of research. We also do not take credit for these people's hard work.
Also, take nothing we say at face value.
We highly encourage you to research this information yourselves and come to your own conclusions.
That's what's so interesting. Aside from those nagging hypothetical questions they pose, almost every bit of the movie is based on either direct, original interviews (a flight school guy and a WTC staffer, both interesting), media clips from the day itself, mainstream media press reports, and government documents. In the site's evidence section you can find links to all of these things.
On the other hand, there are press reports that I would basically dismiss. A glaring one is the Guardian report that Osama bin Laden was hospitalized in Dubai on September 10 and met with a local CIA station chief. That story was itself based on one in the French media that was based on anonymous French intelligence sources. Make your own judgments on that, but Loose Change fails to explain the source of that particular story.
It opens with a brilliant Hunter Thompson interview about the supine, "flag sucking" media. Loose Change deploys all the video and audio clips that just don't fit with the official explanations – the suppressed odds and ends of the immediate 9/11 situation, all the weird immediate eyewitness reports. My favorite is when CNN's Jamie McIntyre, live at the Pentagon, says he just doesn't see any damn evidence the plane crashed "anywhere near the Pentagon." All the clips of doomed firefighters talking about secondary WTC explosions was also interesting.
My favorite parts of the movie: the introduction featuring the Operation Northwoods case, which proves that in 1962, the military openly drafted plans to execute fake Communist Cuban terrorist attacks, intended to justify military action against Cuba. This sets a high bar for devious thinking. Then, there is the Pentagon segment, wherein the weird anomaly of how that hole in the Pentagon was not shaped like a plane at all is offered with an excellent animation. The key is that there aren't any holes matching the impact point of multiple-ton jet engines. Looking at the "controlled demolition" WTC theory, the video shows, in brackets, exploding points on the building that – with a bit of imagination – could appear to be charges blowing apart the structure.
Personally, I really can't swallow the full body of 9/11 conspiracies that are out there. I don't believe in the "controlled demolition", but I just can't refute the fact that the God damned hole in the Pentagon is not shaped right at all. And if there were Pentagon defense drills called "Vigilant Guardian," "Northern Vigilance" and others, these placed America's air defenses in all the wrong places, by evil design or really unlucky accident. But, above all, why were the War Games not documented in the 9/11 Commission's final report? The audio clip where the air traffic controller says "Is this real world or exercise?" is deployed for in a disconcerting and brutal effect. (Check the Alex Jones PrisonPlanet archives for War Games details galore, not to mention a quite exhaustive set of 9/11 conspiracy stories from everywhere)
The music is fucking awesome, especially during the Pentagon-hole part and the popping rhythms of the "controlled demolition" segment, perhaps the most surreal sequence. I think they should release a soundtrack.
So we can make one firm conclusion: It's crazy crazy crazy to think there is anything anomalous about 9/11. Or else, it is crazy crazy crazy to believe in one film's version of the events because it features the wrong conspiracy. There are people on the pro-conspiracy side that think that Avery's film is crude, misleading, and full of the red herrings like the explosive 'pods' on the WTC planes, all diversions planted by the government to divide and confuse the 9/11 Truth Movement, deemed Trojan Horses.
911research.com, a pro-conspiracy site, featured the following flyer which summarized their favorite parts and drawbacks to Loose Change:
Strong evidence – irrefutable inside job
+ “WTC7 fell straight down, into a convenient little pile, in 6 seconds.”
+ “The Twin Towers came down in nearly free fall speed.”
+ “The [WTC] remains [were shipped] off to recycling yards overseas before investigators could even examine them.”
+ “And is it merely coincidence that the Pentagon was hit in the only section that was recently being reinforced to withstand that very same kind of attack?”
+ “So four different black boxes, made from the most resiliant materials known to man, were destroyed.”
+ “And for some reason, the last three minutes of the [Ft 93] tape was unaccounted for. The FBI had no explanation for the discrepancy.”
+ “Newsweek reports that a number of top Pentagon brass cancel their flight plans for the next morning.”
+ “On September 11th, 2001, NORAD is in the middle of a number of [up to 5] military exercises . . . leaving 14 fighter jets to protect the entire US.”
+ “It was a psychological attack on the American People, and it was pulled off with military precision.”
Pseudo evidence – traps to distract and discredit the 9/11 truth movement: pods, missiles, drones . . .
+ “It would seem that an entire plane disappeared upon impact.” [Answer – Many many documented plane crash sites leave virtually no debris.]
+ “So what could blow a 16 foot hole in the outer ring of the Pentagon . . . A cruise missile.” [Answer – Wrong. A Boeing 757 could.]
+ “Why is the damage to the Pentagon completely inconsistent with a Boeing 757?” [Answer - It’s not, the first floor hole is over 90’ wide.]
+ “So if Flight 93 didn’t go down in Shanksville, then where? You ready for this? Cleveland.” [Answer – Flt 93 was most likely shot down.]
+ “Flight 93 passengers were taken to an empty NASA research center.” [This is pure speculation mixed with information from a real flight which landed, Delta 1989.]
+ “If different planes were used, what happened to the original ones?” [Answer- There is no evidence that anything but the real planes were used in any the attacks.]
+ “None of those calls [from the flights] could have possibly taken place.” [Answer – there is no clear evidence for the calls being fake or impossible.]
+ “So what happened in the North Tower? Ask Willie Rodriguez. . . . explosions coming from the basement . . .” [Answer – even though were some explosions in the basement and lobby, we know the towers collapsed from the top down.]
Some [9/11 truth movement/conspiracy theorist/planted disinformation cut-out/guy in his basement] Michael Green, offered the following analysis of Loose Change, though I think it is based on the First Edition, not second. "Loose Change" An analysis:
If a film-maker or live lecturer has the good fortune of having the attention of someone like this, or good solid middle-Americans, for an hour-long DVD, or for a 2-3 hour live presentation, he had better use clear hard facts for persuasion, and not iffy, vaguely or ambiguously supported possibilities. The intelligence agencies that do the crimes try to control the counter-community's response by infiltrating moles that infect it with large falsehoods and impossible-to-prove technical questions (micro-analysis). The large falsehoods are designed to prove the community wrong and nuts if the need arises. The microanalysis into pointless or unanswerable questions, or into just plain dumb ones, is to divert its energies from using the clear hard facts to tell the story simply and clearly.
The DVD "Loose Change" by rising media artist Dylan Avery has been touted by some members of the 911-truth community as the best presentation yet, as the "best evidence" (a reference to David Lifton’s book, "Best Evidence" on the JFK assassination). This review will show that the DVD is anything but that; if it is not naive, foolish, uninformed and ignorant, then it is the work of a calculating mole or at best a naïf who has been used by such.
...........Mr. Avery then says to “forget the debris. The 767’s that hit the WTC left a very distinct outline of a commercial airliner. Therefore we should expect something similar at the Pentagon.” The film then flashes to the famous photo of the smoky Pentagon that shows the entry hole before the outer wall collapsed. Avery remarks, “The only damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole approximately 16’ in diameter.” COMMENT: First, Avery advances a bad argument because whether or not the Pentagon should show the outline of an airliner in the same way depends on whether it is constructed of the same material as the WTC, and if not, upon the structural differences. Since the outer wall of the Pentagon reportedly was 18” of steel reinforced concrete and reportedly had many of its windows replaced with bomb-resistant 2,500-pound windows in the renovation process that was not yet completed, there is no reason to expect the same pattern.[5] Indeed Mr. Avery’s short attention span shows when he asks the relevant question at 21:35 “And is it merely a coincidence that the Pentagon was hit in the only section that was renovated to withstand that kind of attack?” Second, the area of damage caused by the wings to the Pentagon does in fact fit its outlines well. The photo that Avery mistakenly says shows just a small hole in fact shows massive damage to the façade where the right wing hit; the left side is totally obscured by black smoke. Other photos of the left area show a very close correlation to the angled wingspan of a 767. See “Revelations 911,” [site link busted -Dan].
So that's an attack from the more paranoid side. I'm sure you can find an equally forceful one from the Offical Reality side of the media world.
Here are some more sources for 9/11 conspiracy/truth material. Take it as you will: Question911.com links, WhatReallyHappened.com and another video: Painful Deceptions. Project Censored's unanswered questions of 9/11, the staggeringly complex CooperativeResearch.org's Complete 9/11 Timeline including military exercises. This Serendipity.li essay hits all the cornerstones of this type of story. I could go on and on... but oh well. You can use Google your own damn self.
This is where I am supposed to make some grand conclusion. I dunno....
It is so irritating that this whole era revolves around your supposed emotional reaction to a big-ass terrorist attack that turned out to justify invading half the Middle East and bombing the rest. Our society relentlessly frames and reframes that point in history, with either an angle to Prove the Face of the Enemy (and take your kids to see United 93 so they turn into bloodthirsty cretins!!) or else to prove this government is even more diabolical than when Reagan's boys ran drugs for arms for hostages for Iran. In the process of rationalizing its messy history, the 9/11 Commission invented its own damn timeline that seemed shaped to take the pressure off of NORAD for their weirdly sluggish response to the whole thing, and only poor Mark Dayton had the brass to object to this spinning. At the minimum, "they" were disingenuous after the fact, as bureaucracies usually are, in order to shift the blame around. Of that much, I think we can be certain.
Let's round this out, since of course the back of the dollar bill and that creepy fucking pyramid has been at the root of this the whole time. Why not? The 9/11 folding bill conspiracy? From Armageddon Online: 911 and Currency Conspiracy. Pretty funny.
Either way, enjoy United 93. Your fucking popcorn flavoring will kill you before THE ENEMY does: ABC News: Fatal Disease From Flavoring Raises Flags. Good times. 3 AM is a perfect time to post something like this.
Technorati Tags: 11, cia, conspiracy, loose change, propaganda, war
Foreign Policy magazine has a blog, with an interesting bit about the Maoist threat...to India, part of their Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2005:
Consistently outwitting and overwhelming Indian police forces, Indian Maoists, also known as Naxalites, have taken control of large chunks of territory in several eastern and southern Indian states, such as Orissa and Andhra Pradesh.
They add:
Many Indian analysts have long been distressed by the central government's indifference to the problem, leaving it to the ill-armed and corrupt state police forces. But New Delhi, now led by Manmohan Singh's government can no longer ignore the insurgency that is growing in strength. Combined with Kashmir and sporadic sectarian violence between Hindus and Muslims, the internal security problem is really serious.
This is interesting because it shows how less-than-unitary such a huge place as India can be – and it shows that a more complex model than traditional International Relations unitary state "Realism" is necessary to look at these things. It also reminds me of a certain stubborn Tamil nationalist who would remind us all where things really stood between Indian ethnicities... Photo from the Wikipedia entry on Naxalites.
The IMF is supposed to fix major trade imbalances now.
AIPAC case: Condi Rice denies that she leaked the same variety of classified information to AIPAC lobbyists as Larry Franklin. They are trying to get people to believe that "everyone does it", trading secret government deliberations among the right-wing foreign lobbies in DC. I wish I was a powerful rightwing foreign lobby, then everyone would kiss my ass!!
Not international but fun! Joementum evaporating: more and more people are pissed at Joe Lieberman for fucking over the Democrats constantly. His indicators are falling among independents, as well. It is entirely possible that Lamont will steal the Democratic primary nomination from him, which is basically unheard of. Hit up the Lamont Blog for more on the insurgency against this p0nk.
William Arkin at the Washington Post blog Early Warning is coming up with a lot of goods on upcoming Iran madness, but he thinks its kinda funny how he has personally been pegged as a conspirator for Global Zionism, the left, right, neocons, who knows what. He's got some cool stuff about how some damn defense contractor is going to be paid to cough up terror warnings because the government is pathologically retarded:
The database is produced by IntelCenter, one of a cottage industry that has sprung up since the early 1990's to feed at the counter-terrorism trough. According to the group's website, the IntelCenter's "primary client base is comprised of military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the US and other allied countries around the world."
Space Command wants to obtain 20 licenses to the IntelCenter's U.S. Government Terrorism Threat Intelligence Package ($1650.00 per license according to the IntelCenter website).
This database, according to Space Command, includes "weekly and or real time email notifications of all significant terrorist, rebel group and other related activity, including bombings, assassinations, kidnappings, significant dates, threats and organizational changes within groups." IntelCenter will also provide warnings relating to "developments concerning intelligence agencies around the world including operational issues, organizational developments, new initiatives, espionage trials, new technologies and other related issues." And finally, IntelCenter will receive "real-time dissemination of raw statements, fatwas, announcements, and other messages directly from terrorist, rebel, extremist, and other organizations themselves."
The immediate question is: isn't this what all of these new "long war" commands and reorganized and beefed-up intelligence agencies with all of their new databases and data mining and authorities supposed to do? Okay, by government standards, $32,000 annually is petty cash. But there must be dozens of additional agencies and commands buying the IntelCenter product and hundreds if not thousands of licenses paid for with your and my tax dollars.
Everyone senses that we have a contractor crisis in our national security community, too many contractors acting like wild west prospectors in Iraq and the Middle East, contractors doing what we used to think of as "mission essential" jobs in headquarters and agencies.
Right on dude, right on.
Special Operations command, SOCOM, is apparently the new heart of the "war on terror" and there are all kinds of plans getting put together to shift intelligence and shadowy combat type stuff into SOCOM - and also, a decisive shift to allow military operations without an ambassador's approval. Are they also coordinating Psychological Operations such as Zarqawi "letters?" (More on that in a bit, we do have a couple goodies...)
WaPo: New Plans Foresee Fighting Terrorism Beyond War Zones
Pentagon to Rely on Special Operations By Ann Scott Tyson Sunday, April 23, 2006; Page A01
Details of the plans are secret, but in general they envision a significantly expanded role for the military -- and, in particular, a growing force of elite Special Operations troops -- in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Developed over about three years by the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, the plans reflect a beefing up of the Pentagon's involvement in domains traditionally handled by the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department.
For example, SOCOM has dispatched small teams of Army Green Berets and other Special Operations troops to U.S. embassies in about 20 countries in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America, where they do operational planning and intelligence gathering to enhance the ability to conduct military operations where the United States is not at war. [orwellian phrase of the day]
And in a subtle but important shift contained in a classified order last year, the Pentagon gained the leeway to inform -- rather than gain the approval of -- the U.S. ambassador before conducting military operations in a foreign country, according to several administration officials. "We do not need ambassador-level approval," said one defense official familiar with the order.
This plan details "what terrorists or bad guys we would hit if the gloves came off. The gloves are not off," said one official, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject..... Special Operations Command, led by Gen. Doug Brown, has been building up its headquarters and writing the plans since 2003, when Rumsfeld first designated it as the lead command for the war on terrorism. Its budget has grown 60 percent since 2003 to $8 billion in fiscal 2007. President Bush empowered the 53,000-strong command with coordinating the entire military's efforts in counterterrorism in 2004.
"SOCOM is, in fact, in charge of the global war on terror," Brown said in testimony before the House last month. In this role, SOCOM directs and coordinates actions by the military's regional combatant commands. SOCOM, if directed, can also command its own counterterrorist operations -- such as when a threat spans regional boundaries or the mission is highly sensitive -- but it has not done so yet...
Stratfor: US is planning post-Musharraf Pakistan: Arkin has some goods on a planned spring offensive against Taliban-style guys in Pakistan, but alarmingly, The Pakistan Daily Times reports:
April 21, 2006: US now viewing Pakistan without Musharraf: Stratfor | By Khalid Hasan
There are indications that the Bush administration is now imagining a Pakistan without Gen Pervez Musharraf, according to Stratfor, an American news and analysis service.
In two commentaries in the wake of Richard Boucher’s April 5 statement in Islamabad about America wishing to see the ascendancy of civilian rule in Pakistan, Stratfor says this shift in Washington’s thinking will create further domestic problems for the Pakistani leader, since his political opponents view the US statements as a signal to intensify their efforts to oust him. The analysis also noted US National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley’s comment that the Bush administration will work with Musharraf to ensure that Pakistan’s 2007 elections are “ free and fair,” as well as Condoleezza Rice’s congressional testimony earlier this month.
“These statements from the highest echelons of the Bush administration illustrate that the United States is no longer fixated on supporting Musharraf,” says Stratfor. “This is probably because Musharraf’s usefulness to the United States is fast becoming negligible. The principal reason the Bush administration supported the Musharraf regime was due to Pakistan’s critical role in the US-jihadist war. It would appear Washington believes it does not need Musharraf at the helm for the United States to continue to prosecute its struggle against militant Islamism, and no longer believes the Pakistani state would collapse without Musharraf. Moreover, the Bush administration likely feels Musharraf is no longer able to keep domestic affairs in order, and sees pinning Washington’s entire Pakistan policy on one individual as a liability. Thus, Washington has decided to put some distance between itself and the Pakistani president.”
The analysis cautioned that this does not mean that Washington would like to see Musharraf ousted. Instead, it reflects a decision to initiate a contingency plan to avoid being caught off guard in light of political instability in Pakistan in the months ahead. Not supporting Musharraf the way it has before will allow Washington to ascertain potential alternative political players capable of stepping in and filling the void in the event Musharraf is no longer able to maintain his position.
On the other hand, if they bomb Iran, well Pakistan will probably get all fucked up, and we better rationalize that chaos now, hadn't we?
Want to see what Iranians are saying about the whole situation? Check out the Iran Defence Forum. With such speculation as will the usa use ground forces in war against iran? Check out, if you will, the thread about "the true iran and its people," a collection of snapshots of what looks like a frickin sweet civilization with lots of beautiful women.
Note that they wear funny hats in their legislature. The "hat problem" has been the secret root of a great many conflicts.
Alright, I think we can all pretty much agree that Tehran is the Central Asian version of Manhattan + Paris. That's all for now.......
Few parts of Iraq are stable, report finds
By Eric Schmitt and Edward Wong
The New York Times (April 9)
WASHINGTON — An internal staff report by the U.S. Embassy and military command in Baghdad provides a snapshot of Iraq's political, economic and security situation in each of the 18 provinces, rating overall stability of six provinces "serious," one as "critical" and only three as "stable."
As everyone knows there has been a burst of rebellion among the retired generals' ranks, as lots of them have suddenly spilled out to criticize the staggering incompetence of dear Rummy. NY Times: As Policy Decisions Loom, a Code of Silence is Broken. While this seems to be a good airing of serious grievances that could finally kill the old snake, one DKos contributor suggests that a more outspoken military officer corps could, in the end, jeopardize civilian control.
Retired CIA dude (and Valerie Plame/Joe Wilson ally) Larry Johnson says on his blog No Quarter: Throwing Rummy from the Train:
Don Rumsfeld may want to stick it out, but stick a fork in him. His goose is cooked and his reign will soon be over.
Johnson also offers A) a fresh timeline of the Valerie Plame scandal; B) Tommy Franks apparently no longer believes Douglas Feith is the "fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth", but that's not too relevant right now.
Patrick Cockburn bravely reports from Iraq that the "Situation in Iraq could not be worse". The ugly predictions of a Saudi minister on how Iraq would spin apart have grimly come true, BBC reports.
Insurgents in Ramadi are clever. Huge surprise:
Ramadi Insurgents Develop Clever Tactics
By TODD PITMAN - The Associated Press
Sunday, April 9, 2006; 4:34 PM
RAMADI, Iraq -- On an eerie, battle-scarred street in this blown-out urban war zone, a mannequin with painted black hair stares silently at U.S. Marines hunkered down in sandbagged observation posts atop buildings a few blocks away.
....Insurgents in Ramadi recently have flown kites over U.S. troops to align mortar-fire, released pigeons to give away U.S. troop movements and staged attacks at fake funeral processions complete with rocket-stuffed coffins, U.S. forces deployed here say.
That apparently bore true one day last week, when an assault on Government Center - two mortars, two RPG rounds and some small arms fire - was preceded by a funeral announcement broadcast from minarets.
Goetz said insurgents in Ramadi have held full-blown funeral processions carrying a coffin through the streets. They set the coffin down behind a wall, whipped out assault rifles and rocket-launchers and began attacking U.S. positions, Goetz said.
Associated Press points out that perhaps American arms for Iraqi security orgs implicated in human rights violations might be illegal:
U.S. officials are doling out millions of dollars of arms and ammunition to Iraqi police units without safeguards required to ensure they are complying with American laws that ban taxpayer-financed assistance for foreign security forces engaged in human-rights violations, according to an internal State Department review.
The previously undisclosed review shows that officials failed to take steps to comply with the laws over the past two years, amid mounting reports of torture and murder by Shiite-dominated Iraqi security forces. The review comes at a time when the U.S. military emphasis in Iraq has switched to training and equipping Iraqi forces to replace U.S. troops.
As Iraq slides deeper into sectarian violence, the performance of U.S.-supported Iraqi units could be crucial, because some are infiltrated by militias believed responsible for much of the current strife.
The laws in question are called the Leahy Amendments for their author, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. Unless the administration reports to Congress that "effective measures" are being taken to bring abusers to justice, it is supposed to cut off support for any unit in a foreign security force whose members commit serious human-rights violations. Units also are supposed to be vetted before receiving assistance.
Nir Rosen is an extremely brave independent reporter who has been kicking around Iraq for a while. "On the Ground in Iraq: The roots of sectarian violence" is a very lengthy article that describes as well as anyone could the degenerating sectarian violence, the various political leaders that don't trust each other, a civilization shaking itself to pieces. I had trouble finding a quote to pull out, but this letter he got from a friend sums it pretty well:
I’m living here in the middle of shit, a civil war will happen I’m sure of it. People became more aggressive, in the way they talk, before they would care a little bit about Shia or Sunni, but now it is like you can’t be comfortable talking with a man until you know if he was Shia or Sunni, the situation is like this, and beside what do you need to start a civil war? Religious difference (Shia, Sunni), Weapons, Militias, Politicians don’t trust each other, People don’t trust each other, Seeking Revenge, Weak government, Separate regions for the opponents, some mixed regions from both with a lot of problems inside, Tribal feelings and loyalty. To be clear, now Shia are Iranians for the Sunni, and Sunni are Salafi terrorists for the Shia. We have a civil war here; it is only a matter of time, and some peppers to provoke it.
As always, Prof. Juan Cole's Informed Comment is the essential source for what is happening with the fucked-up attempts to generate a new Iraqi government. His stuff on the Valerie Plame scandal, including the recent Bush-classified-leak-thing is also helpful. Cole's little picture-based explanation of the flow of Niger forgeries is also really pretty nice. Cole advises that Muqtada al-Sadr is a "key to success in Iraq" and I would generally agree. Cole also had some sweet insights on the Zarqawi Pentagon propaganda scheme - I have to admit that my thinking on this has long been colored by his:
The over-emphasis on the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the US and even Iraqi press is the direct result of a concerted Department of Defense propaganda campaign, according to the Washington Post. Military correspondent Thomas Ricks writes, "Some senior intelligence officers believe Zarqawi's role may have been overemphasized by the propaganda campaign, which has included leaflets, radio and television broadcasts, Internet postings and at least one leak to an American journalist."
Long-time readers know that I have long railed against the "Zarqawi myth." (Click on the Billmon link for more). Mostly the US has been fighting Iraqi guerrillas, especially those with a background in the Fedayee Saddam, military intelligence, and the officer corps. Contrary to the fevered fantasies of VP Richard Bruce Cheney, the Baath regime was afraid of Zarqawi and once put out an APB on him when they thought he might have come into Iraq. Another piece of proof that propaganda usually betrays itself.
Ex-CIA analyst Mike Scheuer says Pakistan is being pushed to the brink: Don’t push Islamabad too far, ex-CIA official tells govt:
WASHINGTON, April 7: A former head of CIA’s Al Qaeda unit, and now a political analyst, has warned the Bush administration not to push Pakistan too much to do things that are against its national interests as it can lead to the collapse of a major US ally in South Asia.
In a hard-hitting opinion piece published in the Washington Times on Friday, Michael F. Scheuer, a 22-year CIA veteran, describes Pakistan as an ally that did far more and took more lethal risks to accomplish America’s ‘dirty work’ than any other of its allies, including all of Nato, in the war against al Qaedaism.
Mr Scheuer, who created and served as CIA’s Osama bin Laden unit head, says that while Pakistan’s internal political contradictions, economic problems and the Homeric venality of its politicians have (also) long caused a steady downward spiral, America’s shabby treatment of this close ally also had done a great harm. “US officials believe they can add untold pressures to the Pakistani leader’s burden and still find him eager to do America’s most important dirty work: Killing Osama bin Laden. Well, think again,” warns Mr Scheuer.
....“To date, Pakistan has lost more soldiers killed and wounded than the US-led coalition in Afghanistan. More dangerously, the offensives … are stoking the fires of a potential civil war between Islamabad and the Pashtun tribes that dominate much of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.”
That's all for now. Coming soon, a Big Lebowski-tinted explanation of what the fuck is happening with Iran. Walter is definitely agitated.
I got a raise at my other part-time job yesterday - while driving down Nicollet with A. Cheng, who returned from China for a few days to deal with immigration matters (such timing). Anyhow this is good news but it means I have stuff to do right now.
I am listening to Unknown Prophets' latest CD, 'The road less traveled'. There is a lot of weird stuff going on right now. HAMAS and the Fatah/Old Guard Palestinian factions are locked in a weird conflict as Abbas tries to set up 'parallel structures', according to a HAMAS guy. Bush authorized Libby to leak, Homeland Security guys are internet child molesting freaks, Carl Pohlad is at CostCo.
MPR had a really good lineup today. Religion, oil, debt and American politics was the subject of a recorded talk from Kevin Phillips (author of American Theocracy and the author of 1969's Emerging Republican Majority) at the Edina Barnes & Noble. He took head-on the financial-services-debt complex, the moral delusions of empire across history, the estimated 55% of Bush voters that believe in the apocalypse, and the weird sense that God speaks through Bush doesn't bother these people (idolators?!). Also mentioned how more extremist Jewish sects like the Lubovitch folks are voting for Republicans - and this is intertwined with Christian apocalyptic views of the West Bank. Reminded us that the Southern Baptists refused to reunify after the Civil War, but have since then taken over Union southern states like Missouri. He talks about the symbolic antichrist and how the Antichrist in Pop Apocalyptica (Left Behind especially) ties into Iraq and oil, thus providing a 'message problem' between the wartime White House, pursuing the oil, and the base, who needed to hear a quasi-apocalyptic or near-eschatological kind of message to rationalize the war.
Which is what we've been saying out here on the internet for a while now... But Phillips really brings it together. With a broad historical scope of the patterns of declining empires, crossing lots of really excellent currents, and a cynicism towards religion that I found extra nice, this one was damn sweet. (RealPlayer stream here)
Midmorning had a segment on the hip-hop nation I heard part of. And of course they were all over the Libby thing today. Thumbs up for another fine day for Minnesota Public Radio.
Lastly the Book of Judas - a testament discovered on papyrus in Middle Egypt - is apparently out and about, turning a good chunk of Christianity sideways. Should he be the most revered disciple because he set the spirit free from the body (which is apparently in this text)??
Oh yeah, Apple is releasing a system called Boot Camp ("enter the Alt Reality" they say) that allows people to boot between OS X and Windows on Intel-based Macs. Suddenly the Windows foundation is missing a pillar. Apple:
More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.
As elegant as it gets
Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows.(1) Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don't have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.
Ah I gotta take care of stuff now. We'll get some more substantive goodies up sooner, rather than later. :-/
I am going to be in Arizona until April 2. Until then I don't know if anyone is going to post or what, although I'll try to put up some photos and stuff. In the meantime, enjoy a retro-cold war disinformation conspiracy theory... Why not?
March 24: Pentagon report says Russia gave Iraq intelligence (Reuters)
Russia provided intelligence to Iraq's government on U.S. military movements in the opening days of the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, a Pentagon report released on Friday said.
The report said an April 2, 2003, document from the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs to President Saddam Hussein stated that Russian intelligence had reported information on American troops plans to the Iraqis through the Russian ambassador.
....Army Brig. Gen. Anthony Cucolo of U.S. Joint Forces Command told a briefing he viewed Russia's decision to give intelligence to Saddam's government as "driven by economic interests." The report noted Russian business interests in Iraqi oil.
Let us take a gander at those oil contracts, via the famous Cheney Energy Task Force Iraq document collection from Judicial Watch (PDF of this page):
And I am putting up this classic Cheney Energy Task Force map (PDF) because it says way more than a thousand words (remember, this is older than 9/11 - March 2001, to be exact). I have fast hosting now and I just love this damn map and its "exploration blocks" that need to get taken away from the damn Russians. With guns. Classic imperialism. Ok, that's old news.
Ok ok, we know about the map, but what does this have to do with these new claims about Russian intelligence in the war? The Russians played some role giving Iraq military goods, including, it has been said, tactical training for soldiers and night vision gear, right up until the low-grade bombing war (10+ years) upgraded to a full invasion in March 2003.
So now the line out of the Pentagon is that the Russians were actively supplying tactical combat intelligence of sorts to Saddam Hussein, and there's some rumor of Russian moles in Qatar or something. It would be interesting if it were true, but I wouldn't really be angry with the Russians because there is no law from God that they couldn't tell Saddam jack shit (and what they did tell, wasn't really helpful, if its true).
However, what we should consider is
A) is this a propaganda front designed to reactivate the classic American hatred of Russians?
B) is this designed to prepare the American public for the dozens of Russian scientists that would be killed if the U.S. or Israel attacks Iran?
C) is this yet another example of some bastards in Washington using petty forgeries (see the Niger Uranium classics) to control perceptions, creating an atmosphere of fear and instability, and in turn offering the ruling party as the solution to the public's constructed fears? (thanks Anti-Flag - the new album fucking rules by the way)
Well, of course Wayne Madsen has a comprehensive claim that this is all a propaganda front from the usual DC bastards that brought us all the original fake Iraq intelligence in the first place. Basically, since the days of Team B scaring everyone about the Russians, they have made a 30-year career of scaring the shit out of people.
Even if this information about the Russians is true, this is exactly the kind of electoral engineering of perception that we have to expect before the election. They call it the October Surprise for a reason!!
Wayne Madsen Report, March 25 2006. Take it for what you will:
The Pentagon's role as a source of media disinformation. First it was the Office of Northern Gulf Affairs, which morphed into the Office of Special Plans. Both served as conduits for neo-con propaganda spewed forth by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Heritage Foundation, Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the Hudson Institute, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), among others prior to the invasion of Iraq.
Now the Pentagon has issued an "unclassified report" stating that in the lead up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Russia obtained war plans and planned U.S. troop movements from “inside the American Central Command.” The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) denied the charge, stating that "similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia’s intelligence have been made more than once."
The Pentagon cited as its source two captured Iraqi documents that describe Russian penetration of the US Central Command in Qatar. However, the Pentagon's story later changed. The revised story stated the Russian obtained the war plans from signals intelligence intercepts of pre-war U.S. military communications. In either case, the citing of "captured" Iraqi documents has been used in the past to falsely implicate various anti-war international politicians with being in league with Saddam's "Oil for Food" program. Many of these "captured" documents were forgeries emanating from notorious Iraqi con man Ahmad Chalabi. Bogus Niger government documents were forged by a neo-con cabal based in Rome, Washington, and Jerusalem to justify an attack on Iraq based on non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
The information contained in the two "secret" Iraqi documents could have been obtained from any number of open sources, including Jane's Defence Weekly. The "sic" appearing next to "special forces unit 'Papa'" in the purported Iraqi documents is a clue to a forgery. The standard NATO/DoD phonetic code for the letter "P" is "Papa." Why the authors would indicate a possible misspelling of Papa in the document is curious unless its because the real authors include some of our most noted neo-con draft dodgers who are unfamiliar with U.S. and NATO military nomenclatures. The two secret Iraqi documents are handwritten and contain no official government seal or stamps, another clear indication of a forgery. Update: The memo dated March 25, 2003 is also a likely forgery because of the use of the Western calendar and not the lunar Muslim Hijri calendar used in many Arab and other predominantly Muslim countries. The Muslim date would have been 16 Muharram 1424.
The neo-con stranglehold on the Pentagon continues to permit this cabal of provocateurs and dual loyalists to pump out false charges in an attempt to damage relations with Russia and President Vladimir Putin as Russia continues to push for negotiations with Iran and lay the possible groundwork for Russian casualties at Iranian nuclear facilities in the event of war with Iran. Neo-cons would argue that such casualties were legitimate considering previous Russian support for Saddam against the United States.
In fact, the Pentagon neo-cons now have more power than ever considering the current presence of anti-Russian neo-con-influenced governments in Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia. Polish Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, an AEI alum and colleague of Richard Perle and Michael Ledeen, is married to the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum. All four are virulently anti-Putin, especially since Putin began cracking down on the Russian oligarchs who looted the USSR's treasury and resources and made themselves instant billionaires, at the expense of the peoples of the former Soviet Union.
Over 70 percent of Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs carry Israeli passports. Ukraine President Viktor Yuschenko's wife, Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko, is an American citizen and held positions in the Reagan White House that were directed against "the evil empire." She was, and remains, close to the leading neo-con war hawks of the Reagan years, including Perle, Ledeen, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Ken Adelman. Georgia's President, Mikhail Saakashvili, in an anti-Putin U.S.-trained lawyer who ousted his predecessor in a U.S.-financed and supported coup backed by oil companies like Halliburton and Exxon Mobil. In addition to the offices of AEI, AIPAC, Hudson, WINEP, and Heritage, in addition to the Pentagon, the embassies of Poland, Ukraine, and Georgia in Washington have become virtual neo-con nesting places, working overtime to formulate all sorts of anti-Russian propaganda aimed at destabilizing Russia and toppling Putin. They are assisted in these efforts by the US Mission to the United Nations, which under arch neo-con John Bolton, has become a favorite off-site meeting place for Washington-based neo-cons right in the middle of Manhattan.
If it's all true, it's one hell of a problem. How do we, as sane Americans and non-Americans, deal with a Pentagon that is attempting to manipulate all these public perceptions? What is the appropriate response to this problem? Maybe this is all too wild. But I just loved how the whole thing was framed by the usual dickheads in DC thinktanks, in this article in the LA Times:
Russians Told Iraqi Regime of U.S. Troop Movements By Peter Spiegel and Greg Miller: March 25, 2006
....But the documents, made public in a study of the Iraqi military's decision-making, are the first to assert that Russia actively passed sensitive military intelligence to Baghdad during the war.
"This is one step short of firing upon us themselves with Russian equipment," said Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution. "It's actively aiding and abetting the enemy tactically. It's hard to get more unfriendly than that."
Kevin Wood, a retired Army officer who served as the senior researcher and chief author of the study, said he was surprised when he learned of the Russian actions...... But Frederick Kagan, a Russia and defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, said the actions would not be out of keeping with other efforts by Moscow to advance Iraq's cause internationally.
"We knew the Russians were opposed to the sanctions; we knew they opposed the war," Kagan said. "I'm not terribly surprised." Analysts also said it would be important to learn whether upper levels of the Russian government were involved, adding that the signals were more likely to have come from diplomatic and intelligence agents in the region rather than from Moscow.
It also was unclear how much of the information was genuine intelligence and how much was educated guesswork.
Regardless, the revelations could undermine efforts to forge a united front against Iran's nuclear program.
"I think we have to assume that we can't trust the Russians to be impartial or even honest with us," Kagan said. "The Russians have ties with the Iranians that are also very worrying."
So Kagan is demanding that you personally should start to hate the Russians on his behalf at the end there. Shocking. Time will tell, if this just fades away, if it is proven to be true. We'll keep an eye on this one. By the way, here is a clip of O'Hanlon saying a crock of shit on CNN in 2003 about Saddam's weapons.
On random yet interesting notes: Global Guerrillas: STARTING AN OPEN SOURCE WAR. This was buzzwordy but interesting. Papers Show Split in Nixon-Iraq Policy
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Nixon administration was split over whether to try to improve relations with Saddam Hussein's Soviet-allied Baathists in Iraq, State Department documents released Thursday show.
Who is Satan? No one trusts the atheists these days. It must be a carryover from the Cold war. I feel like a Russkie!
March 20: CLEVELAND, United States (AFP) - US President George W. Bush said he hoped to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran with diplomacy, but warned Tehran he would "use military might" if necessary to defend Israel.
AIPAC Offensive: Ah what a sublime concept. "Defense". On the same day, news spread of a report by two high-octane professors of international studies criticizing the United States' alliance with Israel, and a detailed dissection of how AIPAC intimidates all opposition to Israeli government policies on Capitol Hill. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt are big wheels in the international politics arena, and not doctrinaire liberals, nor terrorists. Of course Justin Raimondo at Antiwar has his take on this.
This is a pretty big ol' bombshell to put in the beginning: "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," (PDF, 70+ pages)
"The U.S. national interest should be the primary object of American foreign policy. For the past several decades, however, and especially since the Six Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of U.S. Middle East policy has been its relationship with Israel. The combination of unwavering U.S. support for Israel and the related effort to spread democracy throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized U.S. security. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the United States been willing to set aside its own security in order to advance the interests of another state?"
I won't spend any more time on that now. But it's a certainly a big deal, and we will stick around the AIPAC case to see what turns up. Also worth considering: WHY IRAN WANTS THE BOMB.
Corporate media sucks: 1) Chris Matthews is taking corporate cash to speak places. Wow, big surprise that MSNBC is in awash in corporate cash. 2) The WaPo really uses sloppy terms a lot, such as:
For months the Democrats have resisted calls from their liberal base to more aggressively challenge President Bush.
...as a way to defuse what Feingold is saying and discredit the majority of the country that doesn't believe in White House policies. And to suck at the Teat. At least the Christian Broadcasting Network has the guts to go with their fanaticism properly.
The WaPo gave this young rightwing RedState jackass a blog on their site. Some negative reactions from the liberal side, since this guy is apparently allowed to pretty much make shit up all day long.
From the sphere of friends with websites: PBG has some new stuff up at InfantFoundation.com. I liked this photo. Something about those gay atheist liberals, via the Norman.
For the occasion of the Fourth Year of the war, it is good to look back and remember the insane propaganda we lived in, that sparked the whole fucking mess in the first place. Fortunately, Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting pulled together: "The Final Word Is Hooray!" Remembering the Iraq War's Pollyanna pundits:
"Tommy Franks and the coalition forces have demonstrated the old axiom that boldness on the battlefield produces swift and relatively bloodless victory. The three-week swing through Iraq has utterly shattered skeptics' complaints."
(Fox News Channel's Tony Snow, 4/27/03)
"The only people who think this wasn't a victory are Upper Westside liberals, and a few people here in Washington."
(Charles Krauthammer, Inside Washington, WUSA-TV, 4/19/03)
"We had controversial wars that divided the country. This war united the country and brought the military back."
(Newsweek's Howard Fineman--MSNBC, 5/7/03)
"We're all neo-cons now."
(MSNBC's Chris Matthews, 4/9/03)
And it goes on and on. And for reasons that escape me, these people still control the fucking debate. DAMN IT.
Some random bits: well, conservatives are skittish right now. Duh. Pundits suck. Duh. In an interview, ABC Nightline refuses to acknowledge that Billy Graham's son Franklin is a fanatical hater of Islam.
Antiwar.com, some goodies: How to fix the intelligence process by Charles Peña. Also "Why Libertarians Should be Critical of War," Raimondo: "American Megalomania"; TomDispatch: "Reprogramming the Infinite Loop: The NSA Spying Debate", Solomon: "War-Loving Pundits".
Check out the DailyKos straw poll of 2008 presidential candidates. Feingold's kickin ass!!
It's not impossible: Jim Webb, a conservative Democrat running for Congress, says: “The Reagan Democrats” – and how to get them back. A general criticizes Rummy's total incompetence.
Points in Case: Ten things to believe in. Way to go, Keith Olbermann.
Nasty neocon Max Boot suggests that George Clooney has been pimping the neo-con line throughout his career, noting that Three Kings provides a neocon-certified Moral Basis for attacking Iraq in 2003 (not really true but it reads well), and The Peacemaker alerted people to the hazards of WMD attacks and such.
Bush White House overdoes 'manliness'. But the problem is that they are sort of gay, but weird about it.
Something called the Iraq Study Group has been set up, with a bunch of mostly shady Washington insiders and defense contractors, etc., who are probably going to attempt to whitewash aspects of the war policy, and perhaps some fake intelligence after lunch and tea. And for some of them, keep selling lots of weapons to the government.
Helen Thomas on the Lap Dogs of the Press. Her recent press conference moment with Bush was pretty badass.
Even more random: Top 10 weirdest animals.
A Franz Ferdinand kinda place? Milosevic's death has afforded hawks an opportunity to reminisce about how warm and fuzzy it made them feel to bomb Serbia and stop the ethnic cleansing, although oddly, it seems that the mass graves in Kosovo never really turned up in the kinds of numbers we were led to believe at the time.
Of course, the Kosovo intervention was mainly about gaining more American control over the oil and gas energy pathways leading west from the Black Sea (and the surrounding political structures). The AMBO pipeline (Albania-Macedonia-Bulgaria) and the massive Camp Bondsteel in Southern Kosovo were the two major products of the war in Kosovo. Aside from these goodies the US doesn't much care what happens over there.
Israel Goodies: "Settlers, you have failed" by Aluf Benn. Good to hear. Guess what? Israel has its own dickhead spoiler politician named Lieberman, and better yet, Avigdor Lieberman is a fanatical settler and is the leader of the far-right Yisrael Beiteinu Party. Apparently National Union, pretty much a fascist party that essentially supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, once had a coalition with Yisrael Beiteinu, but they split up a while ago. They are messing around with Netanyahu and maneuvering to his right. "Right-wing parties mull ways to contend with rise of Lieberman". Joe and Avigdor are apparently distant cousins.
Also "Of love and anger" as young Israelis, some of them born and raised ex-Gaza settlers, raise doubts about whether or not the IDF can still be an instrument to bring about the return of the messiah.
Here is a funny story that indicates that "Syria was ready for peace" in the mid-1990s. Bishara acted as Syria-Israel mediator in 1990s talks. Also funny: Saddam Hussein maintained pretense of chemical arms to prevent Israeli attack. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Netanyahu says the next Israeli election will be a kind of referendum on the whole damn mess. "A referendum indeed" by Uzi Benziman. and The cynicism of Olmert and Lieberman By Israel Harel. Nerds for Netanyahu? Augh.
On the left side of the spectrum, see the interview with Meretz leader Yossi Beilin in "'Not afraid of 'autonomy' By Nurit Wurgaft." (there's a bit about Lieberman's ethnic cleansing plans at the end) And don't forget the Israeli Arabs! Not pawns on the board By Nurit Wurgaft.
Some cool thoughts on Islamic Archaism from one of Islam's best writers. I lost the link to a Haaretz story about Lafif Lakdar, but check out: Why the Reversion to Islamic Archaism? (also featured here), and The modern schizophrenia of Islamic integralism. On AnarchistNews.org see the links to "Islam and (communist) Anarchism" as they term it, (far be it from me to try to control their semiotics). And InfoShop.org's page on Iran.
Well that was some stuff I had piled up. Sorry, no pictures. You can enjoy that for the weekend, I think I just want to go watch movies the whole time.
Juan Cole catches a bitter Muqtada al-Sadr: (UPI)
Young Shiite nationalist leader Muqtada al-Sadr said Monday that Iraq is in a state of civil war. He responded to guerrilla provocations against Sadr City, with bombings and mortars having killed over 50 persons there Sunday, by ordering his Mahdi Militia not to engage in reprisals.
Like many Iraqi and Arab observers, Muqtada was shocked when US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said last week that the US military would not intervene in an Iraqi civil war, leaving that to Iraqi forces.
' "May God damn you," Sadr said of Rumsfeld. "You said in the past that civil war would break out if you were to withdraw, and now you say that in case of civil war you won't interfere." '
The Machine Rages On: Raimondo: Another War for Israel: The amen corner howls for war with Iran, The Shame and the Sorrow. UK Independent: Iraq: The reckoning. (photo via KarbalaNews.net)
Welcome to the Long War: We are moving from the War on Terror®© to the Long War©, a hellish state of perpetual warfare forever, but it will be totally badass according to the Quadrennial Defense Review, a Pentagon planning document prepared every four years. It's called the Long War, and most of the stuff in this article is apocalyptically gloomy and depressing. And they are going to take your money to pay for it too.
On a note that I hope is totally unrelated, from the Antiwar blog, Why are Marines Training in US Neighborhoods? as reported in the Toledo Blade. Let me fetch my tinfoil.
Blunt Honesty Dept: The State Department informs us in "Country Reports on Human Rights Practices" of Iraq's many human rights shortcomings: "The following human rights problems were reported:
Other than that, it's peachy. There's a ton of stuff in there, worth glancing at. I like how 'Impunity' has its own bullet.
REALLY, IT'S GOOD: CounterPunch: Neocon Advocates Civil War in Iraq as "Strategic" Policy; Daniel Pipes Finds Comfort in Muslims Killing Muslims:
"The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq's plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition's responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi'ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one." .... The fact is that the neocons who control U.S. strategy have no interest in preventing a civil war but only in inciting one. Sectarian tensions were virtually unknown in Iraq before the U.S. invasion. And in fact the Iraqi Shia fought loyally as Iraqis against Iranian Shia in the disastrous Iran-Iraq war. So to avoid an Iraqi civil war, the most important step is to get all the U.S. troops home and thus to terminate U.S. provocations. For it is now crystal clear that the neocon strategy is one of civil war to divide and destroy Iraq; and such a strategy amounts to a crime against humanity.
Which will really be a funny notion when the oil ports in eastern (the suppressed Shiite part of) Saudi Arabia get bombed. A real thigh-slapper.
JPost: India is not Iran. But they are Asians with Nukes, which counts for -10,000 points these days.
Fourth Generation Warfare: I have been saying that this is probably the best model to understand America's current strategic and especially tactical situation. It's gaining more notice now. They even care about the concept in Grand Forks. This long essay by Michael Mazarr, a professor at the U.S. National War College, details a crucial problem with the body of 4GW theory so far: it explains the modes of conflict, but not the underlying causes and motivations.
Libertarian critique of war and socialism: Iraq and the Democratic Empire by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
The US spends money, invades countries, sheds blood, and becomes ever more powerful at home and unpopular abroad. In the end, no matter how powerful its weapons or how determined its leaders, it loses. It loses because people resist empire. It loses for the same reasons that socialism and its central plans always fail. Large-scale attempts to force people into predetermined molds founder on the inability of the state to allocate resources rationally and to anticipate change, as well as the ubiquitous and pesky phenomenon called human volition. Mankind was not meant to live in cages.
Why did the US win wars in the past? Because it fought far poorer governments. Today it loses because it fights populations – people acting on their own, forming their own associations, using their brains to outwit bureaucrats, and cobbling together resources from underground markets. The market always outruns the planners for the same reason that guerilla armies usually win over regular armies. Decentralized and spontaneous associations of dedicated individuals are smarter and wiser and more committed than centralized and planned bureaucrats who follow their rule books.
.....Therefore, [Mises] said, war and socialism are both part of the same ideological apparatus. They both presume the primacy of power over property. In the same way, peace and free enterprise are cut from the same cloth. They are the result of a society with a regime that respects the privacy, property, associations, and wishes of the population. The liberal society trades with foreign countries rather than waging war on them. It respects the free movement of peoples. It does not intervene in the religious affairs of people but rather adopts a rule of perfect tolerance.
I'm sorry, this caught my eye and made me laugh:
Former Teacher Surrenders at French School: Armed Ex-Teacher Holds 23 Hostages, Mostly Students, at French School Before Surrendering:
Vilpail had taught at the Colbert de Torcy High School until two years ago, school officials said. He was armed with a gun that fires rubber bullets, police said, adding that the weapon was nevertheless dangerous. He surrendered after hours of negotiations, said Jean-Luc Prigent, a top aide in the local administration.
Even their crazies surrender!! All right, that's a little crass. But it speaks to a certain less-than-subtle difference in the American character. Our paranoid edge goes all the way to the bitter end -- see Falling Down, Fight Club, Glory, Bonnie & Clyde, Thelma & Louise. That key part of the American narrative where the suggestion of violent subversion is transformed into The Real. It is part of our national psychology. We are proud of it: any proper story tends to go this way. Otherwise it seems half-finished.
In this case, well, the French guy wanted to make a symbolic gesture without quite crossing over into the Real. It appears that he wanted to take a little swipe and then step back like a reasonable European. This is part of the reason that the various apocalyptic segments of the population voted for Bush in droves. It's who we are. No surrender.
Pissed off CIA dudes are cool: I still dig Larry Johnson's No Quarter blog, as well as Pat Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis. Johnson is on point with tidbits about the Plame case, the 'victory' strategy, Libby's legal tactics, etc.
Misc file: Isaac Hayes quits 'South Park'. Hopefully Chef will have a funny death scene. Top 10 strangest Lego creations. Radiohead's 'Just' video brought to life via London graffiti (QT). This is really pretty sweet.
DC Democrats are Bastards & Chickenshits®™: Greenwald lays it out (via Kos - more here):
With very few exceptions, national Democrats in Washington see the blogosphere as composed of uninformed, ranting, dirty masses who need to be kept as far away as possible. While they are willing to take your money, many of the Beltway Democrats see the vibrant activism in the blogosphere as some sort of an embarrassment, while others see it as a threat to their feifdoms.
Here's a tip for DC: Your methods suck. Your fiefdoms are powerless. You guys have no guts (except Feingold). No one better deserves to put up with Howard Dean than you fuckwits that have absolutely no idea how to tread water, let alone win. Go cry with Joe Lieberman about how no one likes you anymore. Go straight to Hell, do not pass Go.
This was in the context of a NY Times review of "Crashing the Gate", a new book from Jerome Armstrong of MyDD.com and Markos Zuniga of DailyKos. It details how the Netroots can revolutionize the power structure in America and DC, and how it makes the Confused DLC Douche-bag Consultant Class (or whatever you care to call them) a little hot under the collar. Order it here
For his part, Kos has some really good wisdom today on how blogs can generate fundraising seed money for candidates, as well as more on the book & tour.
Oops, I guess [legal] abortion is doomed: "They Mean It" by digby, worth checking.
I'm going to toss in some brief bits, but first I have to tell about the recent dicey situation over here by Loring Park. Last week, as many students were milling around the Minneapolis Community / Technical College across the street, some people in a red compact rolled up off Hennepin. According to one anonymous local known as Papa Smurf who witnessed the event, suddenly a number of guys jumped out and started shooting at a group of people on the south end of the parking lot, as portrayed in a somewhat garish way here, from my living room window:
The targets took cover behind cars in the lot (there were more at the time), and the assassins sped off east down Spruce, towards Loring Park. If only I hadn't been working in St. Paul, I might have seen it from my window.
Papa Smurf said that one person was left limping around with an apparent gunshot to the leg, while most everyone else hid until the police showed up less than 5 minutes later. It was not featured on the news.
I told this to a friend, expecting some sort of 'oh wow.' Instead she was like, "Well they shot up the Tires Plus next to my house last night." You just can't impress some people.
Jane Cat, by the way, is fine now. The right ear healed up quite nicely.
On with the miscellaneous: DailySixer presents a sweet Reservoir Dogs poster and a Live Action Simpsons intro.
Alison and I got back to our East Metro roots at White Bear Lake's BearTown Lounge on Highway 61 for some really good cheeseburgers and $1 second beers in Happy Hour. The place is full of sculpted polar bears. This is exactly why East Metro beats the tar out of Edina and the West Metro.
Mordred sent over rrrrrrrrrrrrrnnnnnnnnnnhhhh.blogspot.com, which is a Chewbacca spoof blog, inserting Chewy into such internet pop culture icons as the famous Gary Busey mugshot. Also has a myspace profile. Kind of a sublime exercise in whatever art form this is.
Chewy has a link to mchammer.blogspot.com, wherein MC Hammer has apparently learned how to upload low-quality photos from his Sidekick camera-phone. It seems this is authentic, it looks like him. And, I can't believe I am saying this, MC Hammer is audio blogging.
The Agonist has a really sweet new website now geared up. For organized international news it really rocks. The new NewsWire thing is sweet. Right now, top story is NeoCon allies desert Bush over Iraq, such as William Buckley, Francis Fukuyama, Richard Perle, Andrew Sullivan, George Will. Well fuck you guys. Thanks for joining the regularly scheduled disaster. I hope you hate yourselves.
Sketchy Narcotics conspiracies: NarcoNews.com is featuring, as always, lots of controversial stuff on the drug war. Today we find some of the corrupt Democrat flip side. As with most things of this nature, take it with your grains of salt. Catherine Austin Fitts is someone I would classify as from the same general sector of the infowars as Michael Ruppert (they're tight). So check out Dillon, Read & Co. Inc. and the Aristocracy of Prison Profits: Part IV: The Clinton Years: Progressives for Private Prisons, HUD’s Corrupt Role in Centralizing Debt and Corporate Dirty Tricks.
Scooter your ass to jail:
Along the same lines as attempted homicides outside, the Scooter Libby Legal Defense Trust is pretty fucking great. Because nothing says freedom like outing a CIA agent, to intimidate the Washington bureaucracy into silence over the fake intelligence. Good times. And thanks for providing a list of evildoers such as Francis Fukuyama, Steve Forbes and Evil Emperor James Woolsey. And also apparently Dennis Ross. When the revolution comes, your crew will be first against the wall.
Quick batch of commentary & headlines: U.S. stuck with few options in Iraq. Preventing Iraq's disintegration. Outlook worsens in Afghanistan.
PENTAGON DISMISSES US TROOP POLL Thursday, March 02, 2006 - FreeMarketNews.com
The Pentagon has dismissed a poll's finding that 72 per cent of United States troops in Iraq believe the US should pull out within a year or less. "It shouldn't surprise anybody that a deployed soldier would rather be at home than deployed, even when they believe what they are doing is important and vital work," Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said. The poll by Le Moyne College and Zogby International found that only 23 per cent believed US troops should stay in Iraq "as long as it takes," as US President George W. Bush has insisted.
As If There Were No Tomorrow: Sunnis Leaving Iraq by the adventuresome and indefatigable Iraqi journalist/blogger Khalid Jarrar. Juan Cole: Iraq's worst week -- and Bush's. Deep troubles as Iraq tries to form a new government. Al Ahram: The myth of civil war.
Subtle Irony Department: [via This Modern World and Under the Same Sun]: CommonDreams:
Two Iraqi women whose husbands and children were killed by US troops during the Iraq war have been refused entry into the United States for a speaking tour. The women were invited to the US for peace events surrounding international women’s by the human rights group Global Exchange and the women’s peace group CODEPINK.
In a piece of painful irony, the reason given for the rejection was that the women don’t have enough family in Iraq to prove that they’ll return to the country.
DKos: White House hunting down truth-tellers.
This is what happens when you pay too much of your credit card bill: Pay too much and you could raise the alarm:
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn't move until the threat alert is lifted.
Nothing left to say.
Intellectually Upstaged but not Down For the Count
Vanilla Gorilla's emergence in our steamy little web-jungle is welcome, not least of all because he is a very serious and astute student of global policy and politicking. While I look forward to more posts from him, I also hope that he can lay a little of his less serious side on these pages, too, because he happens to also have a much quicker wit and droller delivery than almost anyone I know.
I, on the other hand, am a complete ass. Loud, vain and with permanent earplugs, I have little to offer in the way of serious exegesis on the state of the world. However, I spend a lot of time on the internet, have a rather remarkable capacity for useless fact retention and a lot of free time on my hands. Therefore, I am going to take a different tack and dole out large helpings of some of the topics du jour on the American media scene. So, without further ado,
Cartoons, Gay Cowboys and... Human/Deity Hybrids!
Cartoons: By all we know of the deadly rioting in the Muslim world surrounding a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed wearing a bomb in place of a turban. This cartoon, though first published literally months ago, has recently been used by a number of self-interested parties in the Mohammed-loving regions of the world (read: places we bomb) to whip the citizenry into a frenzy and cause fatal riots and the destruction of much life, limb, property, etc., etc. Many high- and low-minded ideals, from freedom of speech to the maintenance of the status quo, have been furthered in attack and defense of these cartoons, with most Westerners siding with their publishing on the grounds of the cartoonist's right to free expression.
Though I am sure the cartoonist cares more for the stopping capabilities of different kevlar vests at the moments than his own ability to freely communicate his racist beliefs, freedom of the press is a sacred cow of the West for good reason, and standing firm in the face of these riots is the necessary measure. The management of the French papers have, as is the habit in their country, capitulated and fired the editors who decided to run the cartoon, but the Danish government, the leaders of the country that first ran the piece, have stuck to their guns. Hurrah for them, but in the ensuing debate the stench of fetid hypocrisy is the overbearing odor in the room.
Before we go any further, let's take a look at the offending image. [I have officially 'gone French' regarding posting this image on my site. I promise to explain fully. --Dan]
My first thought upon seeing the actual image was "European political cartoonists suck at their job." See, the political cartoon is not the venerable art form that it is in America. There are fewer of them in the pages of their papers, and they are remarkable predominantly for their toothlessness in comparison with their American counterparts. While this piece is uninspiring as an art object, it certainly doesn't disappoint in the provocation department. Problem is, and this is not the cartoonist's fault, but it merely offered up an opportunity for both sides to engage in the very behavior that created the stereotypes that make up this piece in the first place.
In order to protest their stereotyping as violent religious extremists, Muslims across the world ripped up their cities, setting consulates and embassies alight while clashing amongst themselves in clashes that eventually claimed lives in several countries. In turn, the Western countries were given an opportunity to point out this very fact in a sort of "well, ain't cha?" manner that only served to further enrage the enraged, as evidenced by the fact that the riots are still ongoing. Americans and Europeans smugly declared how sacrosanct the freedom of speech and expression was to their way of life, and how the cartoon spat was simply unavoidable given the inevitable outcome of the societal rights?
Is this sounding reasonable so far to you? We have a free press, they can publish what they want, right?
Only if it offensive to some, it would seem. You see, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently protested a cartoon by Tom Toles in the Washington Post, claiming it was improperly making light of the plight of American soldiers who are injured in battle.
Clearly, the cartoon was criticizing Massa Rummy's use of language at a congressional hearing when he chose to describe the overburdened American occupational force in Iraq as 'battle-hardened' rather than "spread thin", as had been suggested to him. The Post is sticking by their man, and both the article and the cartoon can be seen here.
I'll let you decide, but not really, because the right answer is that it is almost impossible to hear over the dissonant noise between the response to the Mohammed cartoon and the Rummy cartoon. The same knee-jerk neocons who were first in line to support the rights of the Danish cartoonist whose piece was, in fact, rather needlessly inflammatory, with the American cartoonist who was criticizing the Secretary of Defense over wartime policy using his own words. While the Danish cartoon isn't really anything more than an stereotype rendered in watercolor, Tom Toles had a point.
Now, I would point out here that I am an avid reader of political cartoons. I think that they are one art form that is truly unique to America and that can, when properly rendered, walk the thin line between giving offense and commenting acerbically on the political process. Some of the best American cartoonists even have weekly columns to accompany their cartoons, an acknowledgment on the part of their publishers that they are opinion columnists with pens. Pat Oliphant (who was actually Hunter Thompson's first choice as the illustrator for his magazine articles, a job that eventually went to Ralph Steadman, of course) is a TV commentator, a cartoonist AND an opinion columnist, on top of being, as my girlfriend says, "the most adorable man in the world."
The best response to these cartoon rows has really been from cartoonists- I suggest Tom Tomorrow's cartoon in Salon this week.
Of course, on a certain base level, 'The West' is really 'In the Right' on this one- this is a bloody cartoon, fer chrissakes, and it would not have hurt anyone were people to ignore it. As for the religious issue, it is hard to believe something so mild as Jesus lobbing a bomb would spark off riots. In fact, Jesus has probably appeared in thousands of offensive cartoons, with nary a riot in protest, a record of restraint that is admirable considering the dingbats in this country. To demonstrate my point, I want to show you a Jesus parody that I am personally quite taken with:
Gay Cowboys- Just as a parting shot, I would like to plug Willie Nelson's new song, "Cowboys are often secretly fond of each other". He debuted it on a (confusing, I'm sure) Howard Stern show today. Willie said this song has been sitting in the closet, in the literal sense, since 1981, when he received it from the songwriter, one Mr. Ned Sublette. This would be unremarkable were Ned Sublette not a frequent contributor to BoingBoing and the brother of my boss, a Mr. Mark Sublette, owner of Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson, AZ. Ned is now an expert on Afro-Caribbean music and a fine photographer. His photography can be seen at the Medicine Man site.
...I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in...
My condition is: Lots of Wisdom Tooth Vicodin + I hate Valentines Day.I have been laying low and taking Vicodin after my wisdom teeth operation on Wednesday. That's five straight days of codeine, and my moods are kind of weird and raw by this point.
Introducing:
From the depths of the Intarweb comes a shadowy character known only as Pixeldusted. S/He works in the shadows, interacting with the most arcane and mysterious parts of a vast and sprawling industrial complex.
Well sort of. I'll leave it to Dusty to explain. Pixeldusted is not a fictional character, though of course, in the current climate of Information Operations, a reader cannot assume such things.
So currently our stable of contributors includes:
And that's about it. Any of our regular visitors (and irregular confused lookers-on) are invited to contact me at NOdan.feidtSPAM@gmail.com if they would like to get an account here. I am trying to expand the operation a bit here. I have the inklings of long-term plan to design a better site. I would like to get friends contributing. There are no real hard and fast rules about it, because I don't really care that much. But I know a lot of smart people that could add some stuff.
So along with this polite general invitation to the visiting public, please keep my heavy recent course of painkillers in mind when reading the rest of this post.
Because yes, the structure of the site is antiquated and needs to be replaced. The HongWiki is probably not long for this world -- I look towards a better Content Management System setup like WordPress. In my day job, I am designing a new site for Politics in Minnesota's campaign coverage. Once that is done, I will actually have a very useful template for a new HongPong.com. Sweet.
*******
I looked at my web server logs for the first time in a while, and it turns out that well, things are going pretty well on the site. We are averaging 744 visits a day in February, of which I would estimate that 30% are spammers and 30% are search engines, but that's a rough estimate.
Here are the most popular search phrases of the last 13 days: (hits, then percentages)
And i don't even have the damn cartoons. Or a Mamoon falafel. Last month's search phrases were sort of funny:
"Amadeus Pegasus Watchtower" being the supposed three names of the CIA programs bringing cocaine into the United States, which Ruppert claimed to uncover (as we noted earlier). HongPong.com is now like #5 for that on Google.
U.S. Concludes 'Cyber Storm' Mock Attacks By TED BRIDIS
The Associated Press / Friday, February 10, 2006; 8:37 PM
WASHINGTON -- The government concluded its "Cyber Storm" wargame Friday, its biggest-ever exercise to test how it would respond to devastating attacks over the Internet from anti-globalization activists, underground hackers and bloggers.
Bloggers?
Participants confirmed parts of the worldwide simulation challenged government officials and industry executives to respond to deliberate misinformation campaigns and activist calls by Internet bloggers, online diarists whose "Web logs" include political rantings and musings about current events.[......]
There was no impact on the real Internet during the weeklong exercise. Government officials from the United States, Canada, Australia and England and executives from Microsoft, Cisco, Verisign and others said they were careful to simulate attacks only using isolated computers, working from basement offices at the Secret Services headquarters in downtown Washington.
[.....]Homeland Security coordinated the exercise. More than 115 government agencies, companies and organizations participated. They included the White House National Security Council, Justice Department, Defense Department, State Department, National Security Agency and CIA, which conducted its own cybersecurity exercise called "Silent Horizon" last May.
An earlier cyberterrorism exercise called "Livewire" for Homeland Security and other federal agencies concluded there were serious questions over government's role during a cyberattack depending on who was identified as the culprit _ terrorists, a foreign government or bored teenagers.
It also questioned whether the U.S. government would be able to detect the early stages of such an attack without significant help from private technology companies. [I sense a Blackwater Offensive Hacking contract in the works -Dan]
Please recall the "Fight the Net" Defense Department concept in the "Information Operations Roadmap" (PDF) from earlier. Let's add a bit from the BBC:
A newly declassified document gives a fascinating glimpse into the US military's plans for "information operations" - from psychological operations, to attacks on hostile computer networks.
Bloggers beware.
As the world turns networked, the Pentagon is calculating the military opportunities that computer networks, wireless technologies and the modern media offer. From influencing public opinion through new media to designing "computer network attack" weapons, the US military is learning to fight an electronic war.
[.......]
The operations described in the document include a surprising range of military activities: public affairs officers who brief journalists, psychological operations troops who try to manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of an enemy, computer network attack specialists who seek to destroy enemy networks.
All these are engaged in information operations.
Perhaps the most startling aspect of the roadmap is its acknowledgement that information put out as part of the military's psychological operations, or Psyops, is finding its way onto the computer and television screens of ordinary Americans.
"Information intended for foreign audiences, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience," it reads. "Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American public," it goes on.
The document's authors acknowledge that American news media should not unwittingly broadcast military propaganda. "Specific boundaries should be established," they write. But they don't seem to explain how.
"In this day and age it is impossible to prevent stories that are fed abroad as part of psychological operations propaganda from blowing back into the United States - even though they were directed abroad," says Kristin Adair of the National Security Archive.
So your own [American] brain is a target of military spending.
Accidentally.
Tax dollars >> Military-engineered thoughts.
Now that's what I call a feedback loop of sinister proportions. As for this site, well, it got 57 hits from the military just so far this month.
Jane Cat had surgery to repair his hematoma on the same day as my Wisdom Teeth, and the feline is now kinda tired, and pretty dusty. Tragic that a cat gets dusty when it can't groom its face.
Here, through my hydrocodone haze, Jane Cat is grabbing onto "Crossing the Rubicon" by Michael Ruppert, the conspiratorial work of parapolitical mega-non-fiction leading up to "Cheney did 9/11". I had pulled out this weird book because an old high school friend randomly stopped by today, and we talked about the likelihood that Wellstone was assassinated.
Could he have been Done In?
"People have been killed for less," I said. And Ruppert has an extended conspiracy theory about the subject, included in his book and featured on FromTheWilderness.com (and a followup). I tend to favor the electromagnetic pulse weapon theory – which explains the cell phone anomalies in northern Minnesota that day.
(My photo from a peace march in St. Paul on March 23, 2003)
The leading book on the Wellstone assassination theory, though, is apparently American Assassination by Don Jacobs and Jim Fetzer, a U of M professor. From a review:
Since becoming active in this issue, local residents have contacted Dr. Fetzer and related strange electronic interference in the area at the time of the crash. One experienced an odd cell-phone phenomenon with a form of noise unlike any he had heard before.
Its auditory pattern appears consistent with the use of "electro-magnetic" (EM) weapons developed by the Pentagon to take out computerized systems and wreak harm on human targets. It was part of the plan to bring down the plane using kinds of weapons of which most Americans are unaware.
These weapons can disable radio communications, stall warning systems, course deviation indicator, and electrical switches controlling the pitch of the props, causing substantial loss of control. They can render persons unconscious, incapable of muscle control, or even bring about their death.
In the wake of the crash, 69% of Minnesotans blamed a "GOP conspiracy" for Wellstone’s death.
I want to know where that statistic came from.
I got an oil change today and the mechanic noted my Wellstone bumper sticker. "We were just talking the other day about how great he was," she said. "It's always brought me good luck," I said. "Never been pulled over as long as its been on there."
And it is worth noting again that Wellstone was the only Democratic Senator to vote against the war who faced election that November. His political "survival" — assured in polls just before the election – posed a grave threat to the rationale for war - the rational public of Minnesota threatened to upset the spectacle.
And then there was all that damn bad weather (or not). Wellstone was afraid of planes, that's why he had the bus. And he was once sprayed with coca defoliant in Colombia. Tangle with the Establishment's cocaine friends in the Global South, who even knows what trouble you'd get into...
Amadeus, Pegasus, Watchtower. Information Operations.
The Vice President shoots a man, and they cover it up for 22 hours just for shits and giggles.
Time for another Vicodin. Official candy of Valentine's Day 2006.
Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
By Murray Waas, National Journal
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.
Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.
As we say on the Internet, LOL. Atrios notes it's slightly hypocritical. Another CIA official has come out of the woodwork to accuse the Bush Administration of cherrypicking Iraq intelligence – and guess what, Robert Novak hated him too! Paul R. Pillar, thanks for being a patriot. We need guys like you. WaPo: "Ex-CIA Official Faults Use of Data on Iraq":
The former CIA official who coordinated U.S. intelligence on the Middle East until last year has accused the Bush administration of "cherry-picking" intelligence on Iraq to justify a decision it had already reached to go to war, and of ignoring warnings that the country could easily fall into violence and chaos after an invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
"It has become clear that official intelligence was not relied on in making even the most significant national security decisions, that intelligence was misused publicly to justify decisions already made, that damaging ill will developed between [Bush] policymakers and intelligence officers, and that the intelligence community's own work was politicized," Pillar wrote.
......Pillar was identified in a column by Robert D. Novak as having prepared the assessment and having given a speech critical of Bush's Iraq policy at a private dinner in California. The column fed the White House's view that the CIA was in effect working against the Bush administration, and that Pillar was part of that. A columnist in the Washington Times in October 2004 called him "a longstanding intellectual opponent of the policy options chosen by President Bush to fight terrorism."
Add these two bits together, and boom, there you go, they smoked Valerie Plame in an attempt to protect all their fake intelligence and swat at the CIA. But why the hell do I bother repeating myself for the 124,639th time?
Fair and Balanced Editing of Applause: Fox "Memory Hole" News edited out anti-Bush applause at the Coretta Scott King funeral, then Morty Kondracke said that the audience obviously didn't like the partisanship. Now that's a reality distortion field. MSNBC was caught in a Harry Reid-Abramoff headline changing dodge. More on yesterday's Reid smear below.
<woozy> What's going on everyone? After my wisdom teeth were yanked, I have been popping Vicodin like candy for the last couple days, but everything seems to be going pretty well so far. No dry sockets yet. I had never been under general anesthesia before, so I was a little nervous because it can supposedly kill you. But it was plainly awesome to wake up with all my wisdom teeth yanked, loaded up with drogas.
Hilarious stuff from Mordred. Well done. </woozy>
ADVISE is the New Total Information Awareness: Yes, this "Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement" program will know your favorite soda and pornography. Of course they will be totally responsible when drunk on Ultimate Power. CSM: "US plans massive data sweep: Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?" More here.
The CounterTerrorism Blog looks good. They are skeptical of Bush's latest West Coast marquee terrorist conspiracy. So a good place to start.
Israeli Shin Bet director says Israel 'may rue Saddam overthrow' to young Israeli settlers: You can't make this shit up:
The head of Israel's domestic security agency, Shin Bet, has said his country may come to regret the overthrow of former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. Yuval Diskin said a strong dictatorship would be preferable to the present "chaos" in Iraq, in a speech to teenage Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
He also said the Israeli security services and judiciary treated Arabs and Jewish suspects differently.
.....His speech to the students at the Eli settlement as they prepared for military service was secretly recorded and broadcast on Israeli TV.
When asked about the growing destabilisation of Iraq, Mr Diskin said Israel might come to rue its decision to support the US-led invasion in 2003. "When you dismantle a system in which there is a despot who controls his people by force, you have chaos," he said. "I'm not sure we won't miss Saddam."
This goes into my theory that Shin Bet directors are actually quite sane, and are in fact opposed to neo-con bullshit because they can understand that widespread chaos is not really in Israel's interests at all. 1995-2000 Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon was not the only one to speak against this garbage. Also, from the New Yorker, a cynical old Israeli intelligence operator who wasn't surprised that about HAMAS' victory and rising fundamentalism all over the place. Just wait until this gets to Syria and Jordan.
Cryptome.org spills secrets: Cryptome is a totally sweet site and I'd like to throw out a few goodies. One: the somewhat suppressed Official CIA History of the Bay of Pigs Operation. Plausible Deniability. The introduction on Cryptome's front page, and the official history is here. Two: all kinds of weird stuff like this list of MI6 officers that has attracted the attention of FBI Counterintelligence.
Three: famed national security writer James Bamford writes about his involvement with the NSA lawsuit. Talks about Nixon's illegal Operation Minaret, which sounds pretty similar to things these days. Four: Also consider the Pentagon's declassified "Information Operations Roadmap" they published:
We Must Fight the Net. DoD is building an information-centric force. Networks are increasingly the operational center of gravity, and the Department must be prepared to "fight the net." [1 line redacted.] but be fully prepare to ensure critical warfighting network functionality and to [1 line redacted].
.....In particular, PSYOP must be refocused on adversary decision-making, planning well in advance for aggressive behavior modification during times of conflict. PSYOP products must be based on in-depth knowledge of the audience's decision~making processes and the factors influencing his decisions, produced rapidly at the highest quality standards, and powerfully disseminated directly to targeted audiences throughout the area of operations.
....We Must Improve Network and Electro-Magnetic Attack Capability. To prevail in an information-centric fight, it is increasingly important that our forces dominate the electromagnetic spectrum with attack capabilities.
I'll drink to that. Actually, I think I'll drink a lot to that. Five: Cryptome.cn publishes information censored by the Chinese government, as well. This is really what the Internet is all about.
OSS.Net: Way too cryptic: "Commercial Open Source Intelligence, Risk Mitigation, and Security for the Seven Tribes. Global, New Craft, Tribal & Sub-State, in 29 Languages with Integrated IT and Underlying Geospatial." Whatever that means, I want to get a job there.
Tabs on John Bolton: Check BoltonWatch at the TPMCafe. All right. Clemons is on point here too.
The latest smear on Harry Reid doesn't really have anything behind it: Trying to tie him to the Abramoff mess, but there's no there there.
Another reason to slash PBS funding: Evidence of a "hoax" & "cabal": on NOW with David Brancaccio, they did an excellent job explaining the shady mysteries of Iraq pre-war intelligence and interviewing Lawrence Wilkerson. Brancaccio was gutsy and far more accurate than any cable news garbage. It was a great primer to Intel-gate for the un-initiated. It must make Bush's skin crawl to realize that government cash is being used to shatter their grand tale:
DAVID BRANCACCIO: We've been talking grand policy. The then director of the CIA, George Tenet, Vice President Cheney's deputy Libby, told you that the intelligence that was the basis of going to war was rock solid. Given what you now know, how does that make you feel?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: It makes me feel terrible. I've said in other places that it was-- constitutes the lowest point in my professional life. My participation in that presentation at the UN constitutes the lowest point in my professional life.
I participated in a hoax on the American people, the international community and the United Nations Security Council. How do you think that makes me feel? Thirty-one years in the United States Army and I more or less end my career with that kind of a blot on my record? That's not a very comforting thing.
DAVID BRANCACCIO: A hoax? That's quite a word.
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, let's face it, it was. It was not a hoax that the Secretary [Powell] in any way was complicit in. In fact he did his best-- I watched him work. Two AM in the morning on the DCI and the Deputy DCI, John McLaughlin.
And to try and hone the presentation down to what was, in the DCI's own words, a slam dunk. Firm. Iron clad. We threw many things out. We threw the script that Scooter Libby had given the-- Secretary of State. Forty-eight page script on WMD. We threw that out the first day.
And we turned to the National Intelligence estimate as part of the recommendation of George Tenent and my agreement with. But even that turned out to be, in its substantive parts-- that is stockpiles of chemicals, biologicals and production capability that was hot and so forth, and an active nuclear program. The three most essential parts of that presentation turned out to be absolutely false.......
DAVID BRANCACCIO: ....You've said that Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld somehow managed to hijack the intelligence decision making process. You called it a cabal. And said that it was done in a way that makes you think it was more akin to something you'd see in a dictatorship rather than a democracy. Now those are strong words. Why a cabal?
LAWRENCE WILKERSON: Well, the two decisions that I had the most profound insights into and which I have spoken to are the decision to depart from the Geneva Conventions and to depart from international law with regard to treatment of detainees by the Armed Forces in particular. But by the entire US establishment, now including the CIA and contractors in general.
And the post-invasion Iraq-- planning, which was as inept and incompetent as any planning I've witnessed in some 30-plus years in public service. Those two decisions were clearly-- made in the statutory process, the legal process, in one way and made underneath that process in another way. And that's what I've labeled secret and cabal-like.
Nice.
War is a Racket: I found Major General Smedley Butler's classic Anti-war, anti-imperialist screed, War is a Racket, on the Veterans for Peace website. (interestingly, Butler also testified about a secret fascist conspiracy to overthrow FDR). This was his classic statement, which was not part of War is a Racket:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested.
Nothing Works: It is really funny that the White House set up this grand website, expectmore.gov, to provide an evaluation of all the federal government's programs. Among the list of programs that are apparently busted (via first-draft.com):
Dept of Defense-- Military Defense Communications Infrastructure
Dept of Homeland Security Border Patrol
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Aids to Navigation
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Drug Interdiction
Dept of Homeland Security Coast Guard: Search and Rescue
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Air Cargo Security Programs
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Aviation Regulation and Enforcement
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Baggage Screening Technology
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Federal Air Marshal Service
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Flight Crew Training
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Passenger Screening Technology
Dept of Homeland Security Transportation Security Administration: Screener Workforce
Federal Election Commission Federal Election Laws - Compliance and Enforcement
Office of Natl Drug Control Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign
Department of Energy National Nuclear Infrastructure
To make a long story short via AmericaBlog: Wash Times: 1) Bush is spying on American-American phone calls IN THE US; 2) Known Al Qaeda agents are running free inside US; 3) Spy program useless. Der WaPo says:
"Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use ... Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well. That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause."
And by the way, FISA Court really streamlined after 9/11 so why no warrants? Gonzales: NSA may tap 'ordinary' Americans' e-mail.
BitTorrent evolves to avoid packet shaping: Internet service providers are apparently starting to try to filter down BitTorrent. So the BT developers are implementing encryption so they can't see Torrent traffic. leet.
Nazi mysteries: Some of the weird esoteric stuff within Nazism. Includes really disturbing stuff about Nazi research scientists and their "Holy Grail" style hunts for items of folklore and mystic significance... Somehow our cartoonish enemies these days just can't quite measure up to the Teutonic standard.
Funny t-shirts. Will they never end?
HAMAS Charter, Article 17:
Therefore, you can see [the Zionists] making consistent efforts [in that direction] by way of publicity and movies, curricula of education and culture, using as their intermediaries their craftsmen who are part of the various Zionist Organizations which take on all sorts of names and shapes such as: the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, gangs of spies and the like. All of them are nests of saboteurs and sabotage. Those Zionist organizations control vast material resources, which enable them to fulfill their mission amidst societies, with a view of implementing Zionist goals and sowing the concepts that can be of use to the enemy. Those organizations operate [in a situation] where Islam is absent from the arena and alienated from its people. Thus, the Muslims must fulfill their duty in confronting the schemes of those saboteurs. When Islam will retake possession of [the means to] guide the life [of the Muslims], it will wipe out those organizations which are the enemy of humanity and Islam.
Another fine mess we're in today. Rotary Clubs are marked for death. The Palestinian militant organization HAMAS unexpectedly finds itself in command of the Palestinian Authority, whatever that means these days. Meanwhile, Ariel Sharon lies in a vegetative state, and Israel's Kadima Party is essentially a political platform without any organization behind it.
So within the space of a few weeks, the leading political formations have shifted from Likud + Labor vs. Fatah, to a likely Kadima vs. HAMAS arrangement. No one saw this coming, from the Israeli intelligence services to the high officials of the Terrorist Organizations in Damascus. Only this act of supreme petulance from the Palestinian public could make everyone else look so stupid.
HAMAS was expecting to play the minority spoiler to Fatah. Instead, it's very much like in 1977, when the Likud Party unexpectedly took Israel, even though Likud seemed like an unsavory band with a history of armed gangsterism, and a maximalist view of controlling the Holy Land, as this brilliant piece from Haaretz, "Introducing HAMAS - the New Likud" clearly explains. (In less than a year, Likud PM Menachem Begin cut a Peace Treaty with Egypt and got out of the Sinai. So hardliners can be flexible, let's please remember).
Let us also remember that Israel actually helped build up HAMAS as an anti-Marxist, anti-PLO alternative within the territories in the 1980s. Talk about your golems run amok. In 1978, Begin approved Sheik Yassin's charter that started the HAMAS seed organization Mujama. Raimondo reflects on the irony of this. Robert Dreyfuss explains in this Podcast, as well as Richard Sale in UPI:
"Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel 'aided Hamas directly – the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),' said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies. Israel's support for Hamas 'was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,' said a former senior CIA official."
[.....]
Israel was certainly funding the group at that time [in the 1980s]. One U.S. intelligence source who asked not to be named said that not only was Hamas being funded as a "counterweight" to the PLO, Israeli aid had another purpose: "To help identify and channel towards Israeli agents Hamas members who were dangerous terrorists."
[.....]
Violent acts of terrorism became the central tenet, and Hamas, unlike the PLO, was unwilling to compromise in any way with Israel, refusing to acquiesce in its very existence.
But even then, some in Israel saw some benefits to be had in trying to continue to give Hamas support: "The thinking on the part of some of the right-wing Israeli establishment was that Hamas and the others, if they gained control, would refuse to have any part of the peace process and would torpedo any agreements put in place," said a U.S. government official who asked not to be named.
(Does this remind anyone of the CIA-ISI-Taliban connection? Oh wait, it's immoral and paranoid to suggest that intelligence agencies set up Islamic militant organizations. Sorry.)
Well, thanks a lot, George W. Bush. You thought that you could ignore the substance of the Palestinians' calls for a real state in the West Bank and Gaza, you thought that when the United States officially approved of "Israeli population centers" in the West Bank, it was a really fucking shrewd move.
Here's some advice, Mr. President. Fire your advisers. They're all a bunch of fucking morons who have turned most of the world against you. I don't know how much of this is really your fault, but I know that so many of our problems come from their staggering incompetence, and fanatical, ignorant and militant racism towards so much of the world (especially Arabs).
And now, it turns out to be a huge surprise that people in the Middle East will vote for well-organized hard-core theocrats when they get the chance. That's Democracy for you. The Muslim Brotherhood, the root organization from which HAMAS sprang, is now the most powerful opposition in Egypt (with 88 of 454 Parliament seats - and the potential for many more). Hezbollah is decidedly successful in Lebanon.
Lo and behold, in Iraq, the Shiite fundamentalists turned out to be the best organized. Who would have thought that groups like SCIRI and the Dawa Party would be able to marginalize everyone else, and seize control of Iraq's security ministries? Now southern Iraq will effectively be a satellite state of Iran. It was so goddamn predictable that this would happen, and now it has.
But I respect the Israeli public right now. After the madness of the last few years, they are feeling pretty damn raw about life, but according to the polls, they actually seem a lot more sane than the Cheney Administration. Right now, it appears that Kadima would get about 44 seats in the Knesset, Labor about 21, and Netanyahu's Likud around 13. This shows that Netanyahu's dangerous fanaticism has been discredited in Israel, and that's great news. On the other hand, here in the U.S., Netanyahu gets to pimp his racial chauvinism, on, for example, MSNBC's Hardball, saying disgusting things about his future plans:
If we make additional unilateral retreats, they'll simply fire rockets into our airports and Khassam projectiles into our cities and so on. So I think we have to establish a security belt around the Palestinian areas. This doesn't annex any population [LAND?! -Dan], it doesn't do anything except provide for stability and security, which is the first foundation of peace.
...... [MATTHEWS:] And then [Sharon] said the demographic situation, whereby there's so many more Arab people living within the territory under Israeli control that Israel had to avoid becoming a colonizer by stepping back and only claiming land that it where the Jewish people were in the majority. How's your view different?
NETANYAHU: Well no, we didn't disagree on that and I don't want to go back into the Palestinian towns, I don't want to go back to Gaza and I certainly don't want to go back into the Palestinian cities in the West Bank.
I have no intention whatsoever—we won't do that. But the territories that are in dispute are largely empty of Palestinians, or anybody, for that matter. [WHAT A SON OF A BITCH -Dan] Yet they could be used as launching ground for more Hamas terrorist attacks against us.
So I say first of all, provide a security cordon of these largely empty territories. Don't annex and don't re-enter the Palestinian-populated areas. Leave that to the Palestinians.
But build, if you will, a real defensive perimeter around the Palestinians. Tell them that they will be rewarded for peace-making and they will be punished for terror-making. I think that's a pretty sound policy. I practice it as prime minister and I brought terror to its lowest level in the last decade. It wasn't because the Hamas and Arafat became Zionists, believe me, Chris. It was because this policy of strength and deterrence works to restore hope and peace.
Madness. In Israel they don't buy his bullshit anymore, but on American cable news, he's a goddamned patriot. Insane. And of course Matthews doesn't call him on it. Netanyahu has to sell it here because the rest of Israel doesn't trust his shady ass one bit.
"Strength and Deterrence" is pretty much equal to the old neoconservative advice for Netanyahu, telling America that "peace through strength" is the way to victory, as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser advised Netanyahu in the famous 1996 neo-con manifesto, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm", which suddenly seems more relevant than ever. Oh, by the way, let me put what Feith wrote in June 1996, according to the "Peace through Strength" Neo-con Center for Security Policy:
Likud's position on settlements reflects the peace-through-strength principle. The diplomacy of Israel's outgoing Labor Party government confirmed a lesson with long roots in Zionist history: Israel is unlikely over time to retain control over pieces of territory unless its people actually live there. Supporters of settlements reason: If Israelis do not settle an area in the territories, Israel will eventually be forced to relinquish it. If it relinquishes the territories generally, its security will be undermined and peace will therefore not be possible.
(So that was the intellectual foundation of the key architect of the Iraq war. Feith also made lots of money as a lawyer for Israeli arms dealers with his settler/partner Marc Zell, but that's a tangent. The Occupation is profitable for some interests — a crucial point always missed)
I find it amazing that now Bush says he won't talk to the Palestinians until they swear off violence. We should say that we won't talk to the French until they ban croissants, won't talk to the Afghans until they swear off narcotics, won't talk to Wisconsin until they destroy the cheese, won't talk to the Pentagon until it swears off corrupt contracts, won't talk to the Chinese until they quit trading goods, won't talk to Iran until they stop being Iran, won't talk to the Israelis until they swear off building their FUCKING INSANE settlements. Sorry, why the fuck don't people get it?
George W. Bush, you need to actually be a Man for once in your life, and go talk to these people personally. Get everyone in a tent in the desert, lock it down and give everyone tea until there's a peace deal. Why the fuck is it considered so brave to refuse to talk to people, like some pissy teenager?
I would like to throw in an additional FUCK YOU to Bob Shrum, who bears a lot of personal responsibility for this disaster. On the same Hardball episode, Shrum, who was John Kerry's senior campaign director, offered the following enlightened bit:
Well I think we have to be realists about this. I mean, democracy has led in the Palestinian territories now to the rise of Hamas. And I thought Benjamin Netanyahu, who was on your show just a few minutes ago, did a very good job of giving his basic stump speech, which is “I told you so, I told you so, I told you so.”
I think you're going to see the Kadima party of Sharon move to the right, there's a very real prospect that Netanyahu is going to win [wrong yet again, you idiot. -Dan] because Israelis are going to say, “Why in the world should we negotiate with or make any kind of settlement with people who only want to negotiate our destruction? Why should we turn over territory to people who are going to let Hamas use it as a base from which to launch terrorist attacks?”
I will always bitterly remember the day in 2004 that Bush declared that "Israeli population centers" in the West Bank were a fabulous fucking idea. My bitterness doubled when the Kerry campaign chimed in, "Oh yeah, that's a great fucking idea," because Bob Shrum is too much of a racist to understand that the settlements are a principal source of hatred towards America in the Middle East. And too much of a coward to even dare trying to have Kerry explain this to the American people.
And so now the flyers of the green flags have seized the territories through legitimate democratic methods.
Way to go, you geopolitical geniuses, you guys are so fucking smart. We invaded Iraq to make Iran more powerful, we paid Israel to build settlements to make apocalyptic American Christian Zionist fundamentalists and their fanatical Likud friends happy. Now we are broke, the U.S. Army is wedged between Kurds, Sunnis and Shi'a as low-level ethnic cleansing breaks out, the Iranians are happily building the Bomb, our Afghan allies are pumping out most of the world's heroin, and everyone in the world hates us.
Thanks, Washington. Obviously no one is as smart as the War Party.
Antiwar.com's blog returns to the story of former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, (her official site) a strange post-9/11 shadow case that Ashcroft helped gag. Her case involves, at the least, illegal cash getting moved around and Turkish spies. Edmonds, trying to act as a whistleblower, still can't speak freely about what she wants to say; however, what she has said is bombshell, decidedly off-the-charts paranoid intrigue.
Maybe she's a disinformation agent, but more likely she's another random person dragged into a shadowy geopolitical nightmare. I've previously posted about her here and here, wherein she alleged that Dennis Hastert was getting secret cash from Turks.
So consider the post 'sibel edmonds, brewster jennings, edelman and grossman' on the blog 'wot is it good 4' that pulls together the rich-sounding threads of this tale. Take it as you will, with as many grains of salt as needed (posted about on DailyKos):
Sibel makes 2 specific related claims
a) Sibel claims that she has information which proves that senior officials knew that there were plans to attack America months before 9/11.
Specifically:
"There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."
and
"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September," she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away."
b) Sibel claims that she has evidence of a global multi-billion dollar smuggling/dealing network of weapons and drug which is hidden in plain view. Of course, there is also the requisite money-laundering infrastructure. She claims that the network comprises senior american government officials, terrorists, and 'unsavoury regimes.'
and they merge, giving us:
“drug trafficking, money laundering, foreign names and American names directly involved in the financing of the 9-11 attacks on WTC (World Trade Center) and the Pentagon.”
But also consider this good caveat from xymphora:
"Edmonds sometimes makes me a bit nervous as she seems overly adept with the terms and arguments of conspiracy theory for someone who is supposed to have been a lowly FBI translator (it's like she's been reading Peter Dale Scott!). Is she part of the battle in Washington between the Bush Administration enablers involved in the drugs/arms business who don't mind directly or indirectly supporting al Qaeda if it is good for business, and those old-fashioned types who still consider that dealing with American enemies is treason?"
And here is her Grand Conspiracy of Everything, salacious!!
SIBEL: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it.
But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It's massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.
CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SIBEL: That's the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.
There is a lot more exciting stuff. I am assuming every American arms contractor and high-ranking person at State Department will have to be arrested. Marc Grossman and Eric Edelman are two guys the blog suggests have played a role in illegal activities in "the 'Stans" of Central Asia, WMD trafficking with Islamic militants, and anything else we could think of.
My intuition tells me that the scope of this tale perfectly fits a 'negative narrative,' i.e. the exact inverse of what we are 'supposed to believe', so it is designed to be an attractive view for anti-Bush folks. In other words, it has the markers of a 'decoy conspiracy theory,' or one of those 'information operations' we've heard so much about.
On the other hand, it seems an obvious geopolitical necessity that all that heroin getting created by the Tajik and Uzbek 'Northern Alliance' warlords now running Afghanistan must be getting moved somewhere through the 'Stans of Central Asia & Pakistan, and probably some very clever guys from the State Department have been dealing with it. And in all probability, it was old hands that knew the major regional hustlers during Clinton's term -- such as Marc Grossman and Eric Edelman.
Edelman, for his part, has now replaced Douglas Feith as Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, a high honorary post for fucking maniacs. In a fine look at many of the background neo-cons, Chris Deliso noted in 'Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame',
Although Grossman "has not been as high profile in the press" FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds cryptically told me the other day, "don't overlook him – he is very important." She was not speaking about the Plame affair, though Grossman did indeed have a key role there, as we will see.
According to her, Grossman was one of three officials – the other two, she says, are Richard Perle and Douglas Feith – who had been watched by both Valerie Plame's Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA team, and by the major FBI investigation of organized crime and governmental corruption on which she herself was working until being terminated in April 2002.
Marc Grossman has served in a number of interesting countries and positions over the past 29 years. From 1976-1983, at a pivotal point in the Cold War, he was employed at the U.S. embassy in Pakistan – America's key regional ally, through which millions of dollars in weapons and other "aid" were delivered by Pakistan's ISI intelligence service to the mujahedin following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
Yow!!! Talk about your heroin-connected State Department guys!! In a final twist for Grossman, he happened to meet up with Pakistani ISI director General Mahmoud Ahmed just before September 11 — and Ahmed has been linked to sending cash to lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta. Wot is it good 4 adds a few more bits in a handy bio:
Edelman left Libby's [employ] on June 6, 2003 "'to begin language training in preparation for a posting as ambassador to Turkey." This is a week after 'Libby asks Bolton, and Grossman for information about news report about CIA's secret envoy to Africa in 2002"
According to Fitzgerald, 2 weeks later (June 19, 2003, before Wilson's NYT op-ed), Edelman "asked LIBBY whether information about Wilson's trip could be shared with the press to rebut the allegations that the VP had sent Wilson. LIBBY responded that there would be complications at the CIA in disclosing that information publicly, and that he could not discuss the matter on a non-secure phone line."
In Central Asia, Everything is Permissible: The plain truth is that, especially out in Central Asia, the concept of 'corruption' does not exist, and there is no real barrier between the legitimate economy and the 'shadow economy' of weapons, drugs and other contraband. Controlling your turf means controlling the passage of all goods, especially the really good goods. And that's how it's been for centuries.
So perhaps Edmonds represents a kind of domestic blowback against this staggering corruption of American institutions and secretive misuse of executive power. Although, maybe it is all purely symbolic. With a little luck, this weird case will finally get the top-level media attention it deserves, perhaps as Libby's court date approaches...
Douglas Feith: His Business is the Turks: wot is it good 4 also informs that Richard Perle used to consult for some shadowy Turkish concerns, and Douglas Feith, of all people, was a registered foreign agent of Turkey from 1989-1994!! This certainly adds a shade to the whole Turkey/neo-con model - and Grossman was recently ambassador to Turkey.
This seems to tie into the Valerie Plame matter, somehow: As long as we are fishing in these murky waters, Sibel Edmonds has implied that her case is closely tied to the Plame affair and the American Turkish Council. there has been some speculation that Valerie Plame was actually burned by Libby and the neo-cons not because of Wilson's Op-Ed, but because her CIA front company, Brewster Jennings, may have been getting 'too close' to exposing illegal WMD activities that someone like Libby might have been tied up in.
Perhaps even Libby's longtime former client, billionaire fugitive Marc Rich, is involved. Rich's partner in intrigue, Russian mogul Boris Berezovsky, has been tied up in some exotic deals, including nuclear trafficking with the Chechens.
Secret Office of Special Plans units going around in Iraq to fabricate WMD?! On a parallel track, here is a story from Larisa Alexandrovna in RawStory which details apparent secret military units dispatched under the authority of Feith and the Office of Special Plans, with the apparent intent of coming up with some WMDs in Iraq, faking their origin if necessary. However it failed, if the story is to be believed. "Secretive military unit sought to solve political WMD concerns prior to securing Iraq, intelligence sources say":
Sources say the Office of Special Plans deployed several extra-legal and unapproved task force missions prior to and after combat operations began. Under the supervision of Doug Feith, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, the OSP ran largely unsupervised and operated in secrecy. According to those familiar with the plans, the off-book missions were approved by Feith -- himself currently under investigation by the FBI for allegations of passing US secrets to Israel and Iran -- Cambone and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley.
[......]
One intelligence source says the Office of Special Plans’ off-book team was using [missing US pilot] Speicher and WMD as a pretext for whatever their real objective may have been.
[.....]
This smaller unnamed team was tasked with interviewing former Iraqi intelligence officers in hopes of securing help with a “political WMD” problem, a source close to the UN Security Council says.
During the summer of 2003 through the fall of 2003, the team, whose members who were not named by sources, is said to have interviewed many Iraqi intelligence and former intelligence officers. The UN source says that the political problem discussed had more to do with solving the lack of WMD than anything else.
Ok, then. Grains of salt etc.
Brewster Jennings and the Planted WMD: I will add one more bit to this mix of really quite paranoid stuff: Maverick/'highly untrustworthy' internet journalist Wayne Madsen raised the possibility that Brewster Jennings and Valerie Plame got burned because they intercepted a WMD that some in Turkey were trying to sneak into Iraq — but the twist is that neoconservatives were trying to get the weaponry into Iraq, because they wanted to stage its exciting discovery there, thus providing the casus belli to drive the American public into a belligerent, fearful frenzy. A fun theory...
Since we are really out on a kick here, why not add what Madsen put out on Nov. 11 (again, many grains of lysergic acid salt recommended):
"According to U.S. intelligence sources, the White House exposure of Valerie Plame and her Brewster Jennings & Associates was intended to retaliate against the CIA's work in limiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. WMR has reported in the past on this aspect of the scandal. In addition to identifying the involvement of individuals in the White House who were close to key players in nuclear proliferation, the CIA Counter-Proliferation Division prevented the shipment of binary VX nerve gas from Turkey into Iraq in November 2002. The Brewster Jennings network in Turkey was able to intercept this shipment which was intended to be hidden in Iraq and later used as evidence that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction. U.S. intelligence sources revealed that this was a major reason the Bush White House targeted Plame and her network."
So, under possible motives to out Plame, we can tentatively consider that her CIA team wouldn't help stage WMD in Iraq to justify a war. Again, this sounds much too delicious to be true, but if it were true, it would help make some sense of Libby's motive. (Madsen also posted some other stuff about Brewster Jennings going after Libby, nuke traffickers and the Russian mob on Oct. 25 - again, many salt grains)
There's plenty of speculation here, and I don't want to make conclusions yet. Except for one: It's nobody's business but the Turks!!
These days many of us (ok, me in particular) think about dark currents in the body politic which might rise up and topple whatever remains of this country's best traditions. And in the 21st century, xenophobia is hardly dead. While 'immigration reform' seems a benign label for a huge and messy set of issues, some quasi-mainstream politicians of the right-wing are cutting to the bone and forming coalitions among the far right, white supremacist and militia movements.
Tom Tancredo is one of these, evidently. The International Relations Center puts out material that I find often aligns with my concerns, and they do a good job of stressing how the left really needs to put together a focused policy before all these think-tank trolls eat us. IRC's Right Web, in particular, puts out useful policy papers and excellent profile pages of many in the constellation of neo-cons and shady establishment operators who otherwise can't easily be pinned down. It also lists their many corporate and think-tank ties.
This helps make more sense of the conflicts of interest, of, for example, James "World War IV" Woolsey, former CIA director, a leading war propagandist and neo-conservative of sorts who said about 345,000 times on network TV in 2002 that Mohammed Atta had been spotted with an Iraqi agent in Prague — thus unifying the perceived enemy images of the Baath government and the 9/11 conspirators. But Woolsey also is an executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, which despite the crunked name, is a huge and shady defense contractor that makes millions whenever the U.S. gets tied up forcing its will somewhere. More wars == more cash for this niche industry, and without Right Web it's hard to decipher. (Booz was contracted to get $62 million for helping designing the not-so-dead Total Information Awareness program, according to DoD. Booz defense revenues alone totaled $536,641,000 in 2004 - the #10 federal contractor! Yes, Virginia, war ==> cash. )
Without Right Web, no one would even know what David "Clean Break" Wurmser, of Office of Special Plans fame looks like (high in the pantheon of defense bureaucrats who helped start the war with manipulated WMD intel). Right Web's explanation of the Office of Special Plans is really pretty good:
In the days after September 11 terrorist attacks, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith started cooking intelligence to meet the needs of the radically new foreign and military policy that included regime change in Iraq as its top priority.
To bolster the Iraq war party, they needed intelligence that would persuade the U.S. public and policymakers that Saddam Hussein’s regime should be one of the first targets of the war on terrorism. Convinced that the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and the State Department would not provide them with type of alarmist threat assessments necessary to justify a preventive war, they created their own tightly controlled intelligence operation at the top levels of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
The day after the September 11 attacks Wolfowitz authorized the creation of an informal team focused on ferreting out damaging intelligence about Iraq. This loosely organized team soon became the Office of Special Plans (OSP) directed by Abram Shulsky, formerly of RAND and the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC). The objective of this closet intelligence team, according to Rumsfeld, was to “search for information on Iraq’s hostile intentions or links to terrorists.” OSP’s mission was to create intelligence that the Pentagon and vice president could use to press their case for an Iraq invasion with the president and Congress.
The OSP played a key role in providing Rumseld, Cheney, and the president himself with the intelligence frequently cited to justify the March 2003 invasion. By late 2003 the OSP was closed down, having accomplished its mission of providing the strategic intelligence cited by the administration in the build-up to the invasion. OSP’s staff and operations were folded back into the normal operations of the NESA and into its Office of Northern Gulf Affairs.
Like some sleazy Georgetown party, in the circles of power, Frank Carlucci, Ahmed Chalabi, John Bolton, Gary Bauer, Natan Sharansky are all lurking. All of these sorts of cats are better understood with Right Web.
I should add something classic that Noam Chomsky said about all these goofy committees and seemingly conspiratorial little foundations and groups. I think it's an excellent point. Chomsky:
"It's the same with the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations, all these other things the people are racing around searching for conspiracy theories about—they're 'nothing' organizations. Of course they're there, obviously rich people get together and talk to each other, and play golf with one another, and plan together—that's not a big surprise. But these conspiracy theories people are putting their energies into have virtually nothing to do with the way the institutions actually function."
(Understanding Power, 348)
(This has infuriated many conspiracy theorists) The point is not tracking this or that secret committee, it's recognizing that many have a shared world-view we should oppose. I would add that they are trying to monopolize and privatize the defense and intelligence decision-making processes while getting rich.
But let's get back to xenophobic (and highly organized) reactionaries, who paint Mexican infiltration as the Clash of Civilizations. Essentially they project flaws outward. Now that the ever-malleable symbol of 'The Jew' is not available as a rhetorical target, the General Other has gotten top billing from the latest demogogues.
Tom Tancredo: Leader of the Anti-Immigrant Populist Revolt
By Tom Barry | December 30, 2005
IRC Right Web
Rep. Tom Tancredo, who has represented Colorado's Sixth District since 1999, has in the last six years succeeded in rallying an anti-immigrant populist revolt that brings together the nativists, religious right, cultural supremacists, militia movement, and anti-immigration policy institutes with a new anti-immigration wing of the Republican Party.
[.....]
Describing himself as a “devotee” of Samuel Huntington and the thesis of his Clash of Civilizations treatise, Tancredo like many on the right—from social conservatives to neoconservatives—base their restrictionism less on economic reasons than on cultural and racial ones. “I believe that what we are fighting here is not just a small group of people who have hijacked a religion, but it is a civilization bent on destroying us.”
[.....]
“The threat to the United States comes from two things: the act of immigration combined with the cult of multiculturalism,” argues Tancredo. “We will never be able to win in the clash of civilizations if we don't know who we are. If Western civilization succumbs to the siren song of multiculturalism, I believe we are finished.”
Like many other Republicans in the West, Tancredo takes a hard line toward China , and is a strong supporter of Taiwan. Linking China and immigration, Tancredo told a crowd of immigration restrictionists that the Chinese government is “trying to export people” as a “way of extending their hegemony.”
Concerning Iran, Tancredo advocates U.S. support for the Mujahedin-e Kalq (MEK), the armed wing of the National Council of Resistance. Although identified as a terrorist organization by the State Department, Tancredo says “we should be aiding them, instead of restricting their activities. We can use the MEK, they are in fact warriors. Where we need to use that kind of force, we can use them.”
Funny, I always believed that multiculturalism and the act of immigration were two fundamentally American gestures that once helped us become the strongest and richest country in the world. How naïve.
White cultural purity and Iranian zealots (more MEK here and here). Is this really conservatism?
1UP for Russ: Russ Feingold is chilling around the Internet while fighting the renewed Patriot Act. Now that's class. Also he speaks in favor of withdrawing from Iraq. So Quadruple Infinity Bonus Points -- he's trying to kill Bowser and save the Princess. The Odds are Slim but entirely worth it.
While Iraq prepares for another round of 'something', (and election irregularities around Mosul are apparently expected) a memo (PDF) from the Department of Justice indicated that career Justice lawyers believed that redistricting Texas would illegally marginalize minorities. Meanwhile a Crips co-founder is going to get injected. And who says minorities are oppressed in this free country?
(fortunately the DOJ's new policy has "barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics." - thx Marshall.)
Charting sleaze: This big ass Abramoff chart is almost big enough to encompass the mega-scandal. Marshall on this as well. There are quite a few Democrats on there. Where are the House ethics complaints anyway? Polls show that corruption is a leading concern in America nowadays.
Secret laws? The Bush Administration apparently claims that secret regulations require people to present IDs at the airport. Why secret? Secret courts, secret evidence, secret prisons. Laws too? And they call us on the Internet obsessed with conspiracies! :-D (via Kevin Drum)
It's a really big information war: I don't feel like putting a lot more words in. But this NY Times article, "Military's Information War is Vast and Often Secretive," reaches into great detail about psychological operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although really, I have to think that most of the locals see right through this stuff and scoff at it. Even if it's supposedly hidden through private contractors, I suspect they aren't really taken in that easily.
It also makes me wonder about psy ops dimensions to such things as "Shootout! Battlecry Iraq: Ramadi" coming Dec. 14 to the History Channel.
Meanwhile dead US soldiers apparently back come as commercial freight. So much for honoring the heroes. If it were my kin, I would be crushed.
Juan Cole reflects on Iraq in our Strib. Background on activities of the Badr Corps, now the de facto Inner Militia of the Interior Ministry. Tactics seem to escalate in Afghanistan, no matter how many radio stations we control. Damn. Juan Cole's site will be a good spot to follow the election results, and i think this bit pretty much sums up the evolving problem:
Al-Zaman/ AFP: Muntadhar al-Samarra'i, the former commander of the Iraqi special forces, said Sunday that the Minister of Interior, Bayan Jabr Sulagh, appointed 17,000 fighters from the Badr Militia as police officers in his ministry at a time when they still receive their salaries from Iran. Al-Samarra'i accused the Badr Corps [the paramilitary of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq] of employing torture on detainees in prison. He showed AFP a film he himself had shot of torture in Iraqi prisons. He said all of the high officials in the Ministry of the Interior are from the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and Dawa (Shiite parties), whereas the detainees are Sunni Arabs. Al-Samarra'i also said that the special police speak Persian with one another (the Badr Corps fighters had been expatriates in Iran). He spoke of several secret prisons, some with as many as 600 inmates, and said there were also jails for women.
An interview with Sy Hersh, if you want more gory details. He puts in this fun bit about rigging the last Iraqi election:
...the three provinces that – according to the actual rules, the three provinces voted against the constitution – you had to have a two-thirds majority against it – it was defeated, and there is no question that in two of them this happened, and the third, Mosul province, the amount of fraud and jiggering of election ballots and manipulation was just outlandish. I do know, at least I have been told that, before the… if you remember the election day, I think it was initially supposed to be August 15th. The election day…
Horton: October 15th, I think, right?
Hersh: Right, right, October 15th. It was extremely quiet, and it's my understanding that the resistance actually had been talking to the UN – the UN had an advisory role in the election process, which it still has – and they had made it quiet not because intimidation of coalition forces and the American government but because they decided, they said, "The UN will do it straight. Because if it's a straight, honorable election, you won't get your constitution through. We'll defeat you in three provinces." There was a great, a great deal of agitation among the Sunni resistance about the fraud that was involved. I don't know what's going to happen. Nobody knows. I think the Sunnis… I think the election will take place. That won't be spoiled by rioting and distress and disturbances, but I think afterwards – I think the Ba'athists are sort of curious, the Sunnis, to see what happens – but afterwards, I think we could even see a significant escalation, already, of the kind of damage we're having.
So Talabani will probably play the Katherine Harris role in the coming production. All right. Hersh also has lots of info about the insanity of the air war ramping up -- as airstrikes replace American soldiers, and no one's around to film all the civilian casualties.
You are looking, if you break it down, to, oh, roughly 100 bombs being dropped an hour. Twenty four hours a day for the last 15, 16 months. That's a hell of a lot of bombs.
Indeed. And that's only estimated from one section of the airborne military forces. And also this: after the election,
we could end up with Iranian operatives helping to guide and direct American bombs against targets that are against our interests. This is all in the realm of possibility. Yes.
Oh yah, also this:
The Israelis are investing in their good partners the Kurds, they support an independent Kurdistan, or at least a strong Kurdistan. And for sure, there are operations going on, Israeli-led operations are going on inside Kurdistan into Iran, Syria, absolutely. The Israelis have a platform there.
Not terribly shocking. But I'm sure it will work itself out. A final bit, on dear Michael Ledeen and the Niger forgeries:
The one thing that makes me a little skeptical is Michael Ledeen is certainly, really smart, I disagree with everything, you know, he and I are on the other ends of the world, but it is such a bad forgery, I mean, it is such a bad forgery.
Well that's true. We ought to expect more finesse from him. Anyhow, lots of quotes, but Hersh is still the Dude on these matters.
Syria talks tough: I missed this one. About a month ago Assad said that Syrians had to stick together and fight, as the US has a plan to crush the Arab nations. It was basically a pretty hard statement from a country that the US has been openly belligerent towards for years now. But it suggests that Assad is not going to fold... With a little luck the neo-cons will fall in Washington before they can generate a Tonkin Gulf incident in the Syrian desert, as Raimondo put it. Syria accuses US of launching lethal raids over its borders.
The National Security Agency reflects on Tonkin Gulf: they put together a nice website with lots of original documents on the incident that got spun up to spark the Vietnam war, in an attempt to provide clarity. Good for them.
Venezuela and USAID operations against Chavez: This bit by Tom Barry from the International Relations Center talks about USAID and its various means of influencing politics in Venezuela. Part of the shadow boxing between Chavez and Washington. Also the ever-altruistic National Endowment for Democracy pops up as supporting 'democratic organizations.' Mysterious.
Former CBS producer stands by Texas National Guard documents: Right wing bloggers rode Dan Rather's battered remains to glory last year, but it might turn out that (surprise!) they're full of it. Mary Mapes, the producer supposedly responsible for acting as a Kerry henchwoman, has returned to tell the tale of the National Guard documents. Lo and behold she found that many Guard docs have the same features that everyone said made Bush's docs forgeries. She wrote a book "Truth and Duty" about it. There was a good interview with her on DailyKos exploring all this stuff. Here's the documents she dug up.
Florida logic: Robert Novak says that Florida Republicans are trying to get Katherine Harris to duck out of the Senate race. Also interesting stuff about how in Florida the Dems are starting over from scratch, all over.
To Live and Die in CA: They say that the man from the Crips, Stanley 'Tookie' Williams, is getting executed about now. I oppose the death penalty for anyone (including hapless Iraqi soldiers), and in this particular case, it strikes me as especially harmful to kill a figure who has managed to find a peaceful political strategy to defuse violent gang conflicts. (Possibilities of rioting. Only a massive LA riot could round out this ridiculous year.)
When steroid-sodden leaders, with quite soft support of their own, need to shore up that sense of solidarity among the Base, well why not get rid of a 'lead gangster'? Perhaps that's not fair because clemency ought to rest on the case itself. But I heard the same tone when a radio talk show host on CNN suggested that even if more than a hundred innocent people have been let off death row, it's still better to kill because they are plotting to kill more people in prison. Why not just shoot everyone? Horrible.
Drunk Trashy White Power, Mate: Elsewhere, in Australia there's been riots after some Lebanese immigrants were accused of assaulting a lifeguard. Naturally the Australian far-right has apparently latched onto the situation as an opportunity to demonize immigrants. Mean right wing lady Lucianne Goldberg said "Finally, a WASP riot as beer soaked beefy Aussies bash Muslims at beach" (via nomoremisterniceblog). Something to be proud of when neo-Nazis are circulating videos about 'the Battle for Cronulla'. Even more horrible. 12thharmonic is following this. Radio host Alan Jones is whipping things along:
The riot was still three days away and Sydney’s highest-rating breakfast radio host had a heap of anonymous emails to whip his 2GB listeners along.
"Alan, it’s not just a few Middle Eastern bastards at the weekend, it’s thousands. Cronulla is a very long beach and it’s been taken over by this scum. It’s not a few causing trouble. It’s all of them."
Froomkin's getting Posted: I think everyone knows how lame the Washington Post usually is these days. Somehow they seem to be getting upset about how all over the Internet people spit at them. Now one of their better writers, Dan Froomkin, is getting a bunch of crap from the WaPo editors because his column, the "White House Briefing", is perceived as too liberal, and by too liberal, they mean it is not always buried in the torrent of spin and propaganda masquerading as 'balance'.
Political Editor John Harris is a jackass here. Marshall and Firedoglake with more on it. Since Froomkin might go down over this, lets give him a couple paragraphs to explain himself:
Regular readers know that my column is first and foremost a daily anthology of works by other journalists and bloggers. When my voice emerges, it is often to provide context for those writings and spot emerging themes. Sometimes I do some original reporting, and sometimes I share my insights. The omnipresent links make it easy for readers to assess my credibility.
There is undeniably a certain irreverence to the column. But I do not advocate policy, liberal or otherwise. My agenda, such as it is, is accountability and transparency. I believe that the president of the United States, no matter what his party, should be subject to the most intense journalistic scrutiny imaginable. And he should be able to easily withstand that scrutiny. I was prepared to take the same approach with John Kerry, had he become president.
This column’s advocacy is in defense of the public’s right to know what its leader is doing and why. To that end, it calls attention to times when reasonable, important questions are ducked; when disingenuous talking points are substituted for honest explanations; and when the president won’t confront his critics -- or their criticisms -- head on.
The journalists who cover Washington and the White House should be holding the president accountable. When they do, I bear witness to their work. And the answer is for more of them to do so -- not for me to be dismissed as highly opinionated and liberal because I do.
Cheers dude, cheers. How the hell did you ever get that column anyway? Perhaps I'm not being totally fair with the Post. They did hook us up with the Abramoff chart and DeLay memo above. But why are they still such punks?
Viveca Novak twist in the Plame scandal: Weird. Digby if you want the ugly details. NextHurrah, E&P, Atrios, needlenose, Talkleft, & the firedoglake again for more. Apparently VandeHei suddenly said that Hadley was Rove's source on Hardball (a slight bombshell) and no one even noticed, probably because they have all gotten aneurisms by now. She tries to explain herself but its shady. Eccch whatever.
Hong Kong activists ask for quiet at WTO: According to the Guardian, the stalwart crew of rebels against the Communist order in those parts distributed notices:
In what passes for Hong Kong's alternative press, a cut-out-and-keep rioters' guide to Hong Kong was hardly a call to arms. Under R for Rioters, it said: "This is a peaceful place and your shenanigans will only make it harder for us once you leave, so leave the rocks at home." G for Globalisation noted: "While we are on the topic, what is your beef anyway?"
Could be some of that neo-Communist Propaganda though.
Wikipedia hoaxer apologises. The guy says it was a workplace prank. Old story about a Mac SE 30 made into a bong. The worst video game art ever. Hilarious.
Clinton messed with Bush at the global warming thing in Montreal. It is actually really good Clinton is wielding his residual 'soft power' to pressure the US on global warming, while saving a tiny bit of dignity for Sane America with the rest of the world.
Wake Up Neo, the screensaver. When you are listening to Massive Attack's Dissolved Girl and your mescaline-toting hipster friends show up for warez, you know you need to follow the white rabbit.
Star and stripe resign: A spoof. Rove's on the case. The little dog is a nice touch.
Al Qaeda Santa Connection - via elf torture: Sam Seder and Bob Knight from Air America's Majority Report point out the value of a war on Christmas (video here):
SEDER: Listen, as far as the war on Christmas goes, I feel like we should be waging a war on Christmas. I mean, I believe that Christmas, it's almost proven that Christmas has nuclear weapons, can be an imminent threat to this country, that they have operative ties with terrorists and I believe that we should sacrifice thousands of American lives in pursuit of this war on Christmas. And hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money.
PHILLIPS: Is it a war on Christmas, a war Christians, a war on over-political correctness or just a lot of people with way too much time on their hands?
SEDER: I would say probably, if I was to be serious about it, too much time on their hands, but I'd like to get back to the operational ties between Santa Claus and al Qaeda.
PHILLIPS: I don't think that exists. Bob? Help me out here.
SEDER: We have intelligence, we have intelligence.
PHILLIPS: You have intel. Where exactly does your intel come from?
SEDER: Well, we have tortured an elf and it's actually how we got the same information from Al Libbi. It's exactly the same way the Bush administration got this info about the operational ties between al Qaeda and Saddam.
... Yes, well, Kyra, I mean, listen, I would like Bob to tell me who is the person who has been offended by someone saying Merry Christmas to them? I've never met that person. I don't celebrate Christmas. But if someone says "Merry Christmas" to me, I either think, well, it's a little bit odd, it's like me saying happy birthday to you on my birthday, but no one cares.
But I will tell you this, as we wage the war on the war on the war on the war on Christmas on our radio show. News Corp., Fox News, those people who have started this entire war on Christmas mean, fake war, they're having a holiday party.
President Bush saying "Happy Holidays." Tokyo Rose, Laura Bush, saying "Happy Holidays" to her dogs in the video, I'm sure you've seen it. I mean, these are the things that we should be talking about when we are waging this war in Iraq, we should be equating it to the war on Christmas.
Posted at the DailyKos. I wonder if it will get any bounce, or just slide through the torrent of diaries...
Wayne Madsen (maverick/somewhat conspiratorial) DC journalist, reports that a major meeting of defense and intelligence personnel, including John McCain, are quietly meeting later today to come up with some kind of answer on the torture problem. This in turn has sparked investigation from the Pentagon, according to Madsen.
Retired generals and admirals subject to special investigation by Pentagon surveillance/ intelligence team. Retired top U.S. generals and admirals planning to attend a December 7 meeting at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, an office and hotel complex next to the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, have drawn the interest of a special investigation by special agents of the Department of Defense. According to informed sources, the meeting, described as a "retreat," is to be attended by a number of former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former heads of intelligence agencies, and key members of the U.S. Congress, including Sen. John McCain...
I offer this with some caveats, below....
The generic subject of the meeting is torture and detaining of prisoners. The meeting is strictly a "no media" event, according to individuals familiar with its planning. Pentagon agents have called individuals who have been invited to the meeting and inquired about details and the involvement of active duty officers. One agent, Special Agent Fred Shaw, said to be with Defense Department security and coordinating his activities with Pentagon Inspector General Steve Anthony, also made contact with local police departments asking for assistance in tracking the movements of some of the invited attendees. The Rumsfeld Pentagon is clearly interested in the meeting and the identities of the some 40 invited attendees.
Personally, I always take his stuff with a grain of salt, but I think this guy has kicked around long enough to come up with some weird and deep sources. He has been around for a while.
Supposedly, diaries involving Madsen stuff have been banned because they are unreasonably conspiratorial -- and he's vented a bit at the DailyKos community. Is this true? What does this say about DailyKos faith in the 'marketplace of ideas'? Indeed, such pieces as "Texas to Florida: White House-linked clandestine operation paid for "vote switching" software" are difficult for anyone to believe, but we live in really weird times.
I would say that when the Pentagon has totally been exposed attempting to run psychological operations against the Iraqi public, and in turn Americans, then at the least we ought to give a moment's more thought to the weird world of intelligence disinformation and info warfare. I'm genuinely interested if anyone can tell me how to really prove that someone like Madsen is just not worth paying any attention to.
In this case, well someone should get digging and see if this secret meeting checks out -- and see if the Pentagon routinely spies on high officials.
Finally, I'll add that he's published a number of pieces about hard-working Americans in the intelligence community that have been squashed -- in a sense he is charting the slow purging of intelligence professionals by neo-cons and other nasty types; for example, the Porter Goss CIA purges. There is also an interesting story (Dec. 3) about how MZM (the Cunningham bribers) were tampering with databases at the NSA to exaggerate threats, including the famous Aluminum Tubes.
Even if he is fabricating a lot of stuff, I can't help but feel that the general direction of his reporting reflects something real. Can we please dig into this and find out?
MediaMatters redesigned their excellent website and now it's still excellent. If 'the good guys' are ever going to get a grip on the spin cycle, sites that apply Fair Use to capture and reapply video clips are crucial.
In this case, they caught NY Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller informing Chris Matthews that she was 'here' to let him know that Bush actually skims newspapers. In any other country the host might scoff about that.
We have a lot of catching up to do before the Kool Kids get it. WaPo's Dana Milbank spoke in Minnesota the other day, and it was rebroadcast on MPR today. The audience questioned Milbank about how long she thought it would take before people fully understood how this war started. Milbank responded that she still hadn't seen anything that indicated they had manipulated intelligence -- most of The Mistake was already clearly understood. Besides, she said, this Office of Special Plans thing was sooo small, how could it have manipulated the Big American Government (and the infallible Dinner Party Junta that runs the country)?
She claimed that the CIA's National Intelligence Estimate to Congress proved it was mainly the Agency's fault for hyping the intel (which they only hyped because they low-balled Iraq's WMD in the 1990s).
Again, whenever these establishment types refer to the Silberman Report or the Senate Intel Committee Report, they are making a basic 'appeal to authority' argument that absolves everyone in the Bush Administration from how they systematically, mendaciously exaggerated the Saddam Threat. Likewise, the NIE sort of pins the blame on the CIA, but in reality the NIE was but one slice of the broad War Selling effort.
So there are two main, competing narratives: the "war intel was spoofed mainly by Iraqi exiles and neo-cons" narrative that I've tried to illustrate on this site, and DC's shiny answer, "the CIA was a little bit stoned, and then we invaded. Oops," narrative.
The problem is that over the past couple months, the whole 'innocent mistake' narrative has been dissolving, and the 'war intel was spoofed' narrative is now much stronger. Scooter Libby's indictment was fallout from the 'dirty fight' that the neo-cons and the war's partisans fought in 2002 and 2003, the somewhat esoteric 'information war' that Rove, Cheney, Libby, the 'White House Iraq Group,' Woolsey, Perle, Feith & the Office of Special Plans, and media pawns like Robert Novak fought to defend the old "Saddam == Al Qaeda == Teh Satan!! OMG!!" narrative.
More later...
This was an excellent holiday weekend for me, caught up with lots of people, found out who is far-flung and to where. I will not gossip about the details, but I feel like I'm properly in touch with most of my circles of friends nowadays, which makes me feel much more comfortable in my skin.
Drunk fun with the office copy machine -- who has to fix it afterwards?
NATIONAL JOURNAL: Key Bush Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel
Ten days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President Bush was told in a highly classified briefing that the U.S. intelligence community had no evidence linking the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein to the attacks and that there was scant credible evidence that Iraq had any significant collaborative ties with Al Qaeda, according to government records and current and former officials with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The hit parade continues. More via Booman Tribune and DKos. The details are ugly and incriminating.
Tony Blair is going to pieces.
Smokin in the coal mine: Peter Gartrell wrote a story carried in quite a few papers about a program to get coal miners to quit smoking. Their lungs must be in terrible shape anyway...
Air Power in Iraq: Sudden talk that the US will withdraw ground forces and perhaps grant Iraqis the power to call in airstrikes, as Sy Hersh put in the New Yorker put it (as covered by the Guardian, Stygius, DailyKos - with terrifying bits from a CNN Hersh interview, and as always Juan Cole). Bush is having some messianic visions again, but hey, at least Ahmadi-Nejad is too.
More headline chunks: US says Iraq insurgents can be 'part of solution': US 're-evaluates' its position after initially expressed dissatisfaction with Cairo meeting statement 'right of people to resistance'. Juan Cole talks about what the insurgents told the CIA in Cairo.
In the broader context, Bush really did want al-Jazeera gone when he purportedly suggested bombing it. Crazed old neo-con Frank Gaffney approves of bombing al Jazeera. And Michael Jackson blames the Jews for his money woes.
Interesting site: DefenseTech. With regards to the Syria thing, UN chief: Arab leaders worried Syria could become the next Iraq. 19 different UAVs operate in Iraq, but how many can solve the situation? On the plus side, a UAV to deliver medical supplies has been invented.
Zarqawi-Goldstein, part 239: the great terrorist is a cartoon character. It was doubted last year. And Marshall puts a bit in on that. Less skeptical, the Zarqawi dilemma.
The Pentagon said that White Phosphorus was a chemical weapon, when Saddam was using it. How ironic. (this is the declassified doc) JawaReport on Iraq Gun Porn: Which Guns Suck, Which Guns Rock. The Rummy-Blitzer exchange is amazing.
This is sort of funny. The Weekly Standard is going to save the day and prove that Saddam had WMDs and was in fact, Osama's boyfriend. Good work. Daou gives us the ten major pro-war fallacies in case we forgot.
For the obsessively detail oriented, Lesser Neocons of L'Affaire Plame (featuring our man 'Clean Break' Wurmser). Fortunately I merely skimmed it. Raimondo cackles about the Feast of Scandal for Thanksgiving.
Raimondo also pokes around the waters of anti-Semitism that apparently are now getting somehow spun towards Chris Matthews -- as an excuse for Scooter leaking him Valerie Plame's name. I am not sure this makes sense. However, Raimondo adds that Wilson once said the following:
"The real agenda in all of this of course, was to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Now that is code, whether you like it or not, but it is code for putting into place the strategy memorandum that was done by Richard Perle and his study group in the mid-90's which was called, 'A Clean Break: A New Strategy for the Realm.' And what it is – cut to the quick – is if you take out some of these countries, some of these governments that are antagonistic to Israel then you provide the Israeli government with greater wherewithal to impose its terms and conditions upon the Palestinian people – whatever those terms and conditions might be. In other words, the road to peace in the Middle East goes through Baghdad and Damascus. Maybe Tehran. And maybe Cairo and maybe Tripoli if these guys actually have their way. Rather than going through Jerusalem."
So the anti-Clean Break Conspiracy was also anti-Semitic, which legitimatized leaking Plame's name?
Crazed Mercenaries and their video cameras: There is apparently some creepy video of Iraqi civilian cars getting blown up by the good folks at Aegis Defence Services, a privatized military firm set up Lt Col Tim Spicer -- the former director of Sandline International, a defunct company that used to sell arms to the guys in Sierra Leone, along the shadier side of geopolitics. AegisIraq.co.uk was the site the video was on. (CSM on the story)
There is of course pretty much no congressional oversight of the vast mercenary army in Iraq. (more on Aegis, Sandline and Executive Outcomes - here's even more!) The more one thinks about private armies, the more it seems like an amazingly self-reinforcing arrangement. Capitalism-squared, you might say.
Kurt Vonnegut said that terrorist die for their own self-respect. That is fairly insightful, but of course draws flack from much wiser keyboard commandos.
"What George Bush and his gang did not realise was that people fight back. Peace wasn't restored in Vietnam until we got kicked out. Everything's quiet there now."
There's a long pause before Vonnegut speaks again: "It is sweet and noble - sweet and honourable I guess it is - to die for what you believe in."
....I ask one more question: "But terrorists believe in twisted religious things, don't they? So surely that can't be right?"
"Well, they're dying for their own self-respect," Vonnegut fires back. "It's a terrible thing to deprive someone of their self-respect. It's [like] your culture is nothing, your race is nothing, you're nothing."
There's another long pause and Vonnegut's eyes suggest his mind has wandered off somewhere. Then, suddenly, he turns back to me and says: "It must be an amazing high."
The CIA wants Dr. Phil's tactics for Guantanamo. Well, maybe it's an improvement.
The UK Ministry of Defense complains that farmers are shining lights at their Apache helicopters around Dorset -- and they think this could could cause a crash. Huh.
Iran Spring?? (Foreign Policy) Realists Tighten Grip as Talks Open with Iran by Jim Lobe. Why bother getting into the gory details? But I will say that Lobe is really an excellent source on this stuff & the neo-cons. Basically the point is that the neo-cons have been discredited, and the 'realists' are getting the upper hand finally.
Washington's growing reliance on and support for regional diplomacy marks a serious setback to neo-conservatives who, long before the Iraq war, had championed the unilateral imposition of a Pax Americana in the Middle East that would put an end to what in their view constituted the chief threats to Israel's security -- Arab nationalism and Iranian theocracy.
Now, two and a half years after invading Iraq to put that peace into place, the administration finds itself seeking the support of both forces, just as the realists had warned.
Check out this huge statement that Iran purchased in the NY Times. In particular that they haven't started a war of aggression against their neighbors in 250 years. I think that the way that various parties have managed the ethnic groups on the periphery was not exactly polite over that time... either way the demonization will continue.
BBC: Doubts grow over US Afghan strategy.
Internet hug transmission: Scientists in Singapore are developing a way to 'transmit hugs' over the Internet through vibrating jackets.
The Drunkard's Guide to Poker. What if hackers ruled the world? New Firefox. Something in the ocean goes Boing.
Big Bang in Israel: It's very big news that Sharon has decided to quit the Likud Party and go for elections. Alongside this, there is a younger leftist in charge of the Labor Party now, so suddenly the meanest part of the Israeli right-wing -- the faction that opposed even the Gaza pullout -- will likely find itself without any power in the next Israeli government.
Let me press all these Haaretz headlines together into one mush. 11 Israelis injured, at least 4 Hezbollah gunmen killed in failed kidnap attempt. Hezbollah releases video footage of [last] Monday's fighting. PM to offer PA independence for security. Eyeing Likud leadership, Mofaz, Shalom lambaste Netanyahu. Israel maintains its strategic advantage, says Jaffee Center. Poll: 25% of settlers east of fence prepared to leave homes.
Oh Sharon: graphic from excellent Haartez article. "Sharon knows the Likud was not a done deal." Palestinians hopeful after political volcano. Analysis / Where politics and security meet: A very interesting bit about when Israeli internal politics and the Hezbollah thing collide in real-time. Sharon aides: PM planning far-reaching diplomatic initiatives. Ariel Sharon's new faction is a one-term party.
Settlers throw stones at Palestinian homes in Hebron. Palestinians reported that settlers cut down 200 olive trees near Nablus. Nothing quite like olive tree-based warfare.
In Israel, it's the end of the Ashkenazi era? Peretz is a Sephardi. But this I thought most interesting:
At the same time, will the end of the era of generals arrive, as well? Will the time come when the top political rank does not originate in the security forces? If the conflict with the Palestinians were to end, the entire agenda would change, and the relative advantage of the generals would be eliminated. Generals would no longer be able to move so easily between the highest echelons of the army, Mossad and Shin Bet, to the political leadership.
This is one of the reasons why the generals are in no rush to end the conflict. They know that one of the most powerful factors influencing the voters is fear. Which is why they try to frighten, to pump up the volume on threats, to brandish the Iranian missiles, to carry out targeted assassinations and to always, but always, keep the finger close to the trigger. Conversely, a civilian leader does not view the other side through the gunsight, and his chances of resolving the conflict are therefore better.
Private prisons are coming to Israel. What could go wrong? The article notes that private prisons are second only to America's high tech sector as a growth industry. A parallel thought:
"Private prisons are not the only reason for this increase, but there is no doubt that their lobbying activity is one of the reasons for the increasing stringency of punishment and the increase in the number of prisoners," says attorney Aviv Wasserman, the head of the human rights division at the Academic College of Law in Ramat Gan, whose petition to the High Court of Justice against the decision to establish a private prison here is still pending.
The UK's Foreign Office and the EU leaked a document harshly critical of expanding Jewish settlements in the Jerusalem area. The EU heads of mission around there believe that all these settlements could radicalize local Palestinians, and indeed likely cause more terrorism to occur. Yet another logical reason that settlements are totally insane. Israel calls the Foreign Office 'unrelentingly pro-Palestinian.' The document, which reflects the views of many European diplomats, specifically bears a lot on the E1 Ma'ale Adumim settlement that I detailed here a while ago.
Russian missiles: You have to love the Russians and their missiles. They have made a new one that can change around in midflight and deploy decoys. Nice.
Wow, Cunningham really knew how to take bribes with gusto. Lots of spreading probes.
Banning foreigners that the Bush Administration doesn't like: Believe it or not, a huge proportion of America's most valuable inhabitants were not born here, nor did they march in an acceptably quiet lock-step with the Nixon, Ford or Reagan Administrations when they got here.
Indeed, a common theme of American history has been blaming foreigners for their weird and subversive politics poisoning our fair landscape, so now we must understand why it was a terrible idea to let the Jews, Italians and Irish in here in the first place.
Nowadays, the Muslims threaten to pray at weird times of day here, and lecture university students on ancient battles and esoteric organizations like the Cult of the Assassins. THIS SHALL NOT STAND. And when the Irish, Hebrews, Muslims, Italians, Chinese and the Cajun French and the Koreans and the Mexicans are all finally gone, we will look around at a desolate land and wonder where all the good restaurants went.
So I heartily approve that the US is banning academics and accusing them of supporting terrorism. If we do not maintain the purity of our precious bodily fluids, then the terrorists win.
(here's a link purporting an Assassin-Al Qaeda conspiracy link, at Rotten.com of all places! Ha! Oh wait, the Assassins were Shi'a, so it's nonsense - but the structure of the secret society is interesting. Nothing's True, everything is permitted :-) )
Josh Marshall asks the million dollar question:
This is one of those media questions for which there is no real way to provide a concrete answer. But it is at least worth asking: How many of the stories coming out now under the very broad heading of botched or manipulated intelligence could have been reported and written at more or less any time over the last two years? I suspect the answer is, the great majority of them.
They're getting written now because the president's poor poll numbers make him a readier target.
I know I'm not saying anything most of you don't know. And better late than never, of course. But all working reporters and editors should consider what that says about the profession.
Damn media. More tomorrow.
A major day in American history. Well there's been a lot of those lately. For the first time in decades, the Senate was abruptly shifted into a closed session. Unfortunately I have a bunch of stuff to deal with tonight so I'm not sure how much I can post. So why not cut to the chase with an article from the American Conservative by ex-CIA officer Philip Giraldi, detailing how Michael Ledeen, SISMI (the Italian military intelligence agency), and the Office of Special Plans worked to help channel that spoofed intelligence, including the Niger forgeries so ardently defended by Libby, Rove et. al.
This was posted on ex-CIA officer Larry Johnson's website, No Quarter. Johnson is a strong supporter of Joe Wilson. This was posted in the morning. I wonder if it came up in the Senate.
Forging the Case for War
Who was behind the Niger uranium documents?
by Philip Giraldi
From the beginning, there has been little doubt in the intelligence community that the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame was part of a bigger story. That she was exposed in an attempt to discredit her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, is clear, but the drive to demonize Wilson cannot reasonably be attributed only to revenge. Rather, her identification likely grew out of an attempt to cover up the forging of documents alleging that Iraq attempted to buy yellowcake uranium from Niger.
What took place and why will not be known with any certainty until the details of the Fitzgerald investigation are revealed. (As we go to press, Fitzgerald has made no public statement.) But recent revelations in the Italian press, most notably in the pages of La Repubblica, along with information already on the public record, suggest a plausible scenario for the evolution of Plamegate.
Information developed by Italian investigators indicates that the documents were produced in Italy with the connivance of the Italian intelligence service. It also reveals that the introduction of the documents into the American intelligence stream was facilitated by Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a parallel intelligence center set up in the Pentagon to develop alternative sources of information in support of war against Iraq.
The first suggestion that Iraq was seeking yellowcake uranium to construct a nuclear weapon came on Oct. 15, 2001, shortly after 9/11, when Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his newly appointed chief of the Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI), Nicolo Pollari, made an official visit to Washington. Berlusconi was eager to make a good impression and signaled his willingness to support the American effort to implicate Saddam Hussein in 9/11. Pollari, in his position for less than three weeks, was likewise keen to establish himself with his American counterparts and was under pressure from Berlusconi to present the U.S. with information that would be vital to the rapidly accelerating War on Terror. Well aware of the Bush administration’s obsession with Iraq, Pollari used his meeting with top CIA officials to provide a SISMI dossier indicating that Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The same intelligence was passed simultaneously to Britain’s MI-6.
But the Italian information was inconclusive and old, some of it dating from the 1980s. The British, the CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research analyzed the intelligence and declared that it was “lacking in detail” and “very limited” in scope.
In February 2002, Pollari and Berlusconi resubmitted their report to Washington with some embellishments, resulting in Joe Wilson’s trip to Niger. Wilson visited Niamey in February 2002 and subsequently reported to the CIA that the information could not be confirmed.
Enter Michael Ledeen, the Office of Special Plans’ man in Rome. Ledeen was paid $30,000 by the Italian Ministry of the Interior in 1978 for a report on terrorism and was well known to senior SISMI officials. Italian sources indicate that Pollari was eager to engage with the Pentagon hardliners, knowing they were at odds with the CIA and the State Department officials who had slighted him. He turned to Ledeen, who quickly established himself as the liaison between SISMI and Feith’s OSP, where he was a consultant. Ledeen, who had personal access to the National Security Council’s Condoleezza Rice and Stephen Hadley and was also a confidant of Vice President Cheney, was well placed to circumvent the obstruction coming from the CIA and State.
The timing, August 2002, was also propitious as the administration was intensifying its efforts to make the case for war. In the same month, the White House Iraq Group (WHIG) was set up to market the war by providing information to friends in the media. It has subsequently been alleged that false information generated by Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress was given to Judith Miller and other journalists through WHIG.
On Sept. 9, 2002, Ledeen set up a secret meeting between Pollari and Deputy National Security Adviser Hadley. Two weeks before the meeting, a group of documents had been offered to journalist Elisabetta Burba of the Italian magazine Panorama for $10,000, but the demand for money was soon dropped and the papers were handed over. The man offering the documents was Rocco Martino, a former SISMI officer who delivered the first WMD dossier to London in October 2002. That Martino quickly dropped his request for money suggests that the approach was a set-up primarily intended to surface the documents.
Panorama, perhaps not coincidentally, is owned by Prime Minister Berlusconi. On Oct. 9, the documents were taken from the magazine to the U.S. Embassy, where they were apparently expected. Instead of going to the CIA Station, which would have been the normal procedure, they were sent straight to Washington where they bypassed the agency’s analysts and went directly to the NSC and the Vice President’s Office.
On Jan. 28, 2003, over the objections of the CIA and State, the famous 16 words about Niger’s uranium were used in President Bush’s State of the Union address justifying an attack on Iraq: “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” Both the British and American governments had actually obtained the report from the Italians, who had asked that they not be identified as the source. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency also looked at the documents shortly after Bush spoke and pronounced them crude forgeries.
President Bush soon stopped referring to the Niger uranium, but Vice President Cheney continued to insist that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
The question remains: who forged the documents? The available evidence suggests that two candidates had access and motive: SISMI and the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
In January 2001, there was a break-in at the Niger Embassy in Rome. Documents were stolen but no valuables. The break-in was subsequently connected to, among others, Rocco Martino, who later provided the dossier to Panorama. Italian investigators now believe that Martino, with SISMI acquiescence, originally created a Niger dossier in an attempt to sell it to the French, who were managing the uranium concession in Niger and were concerned about unauthorized mining. Martino has since admitted to the Financial Times that both the Italian and American governments were behind the eventual forgery of the full Niger dossier as part of a disinformation operation. The authentic documents that were stolen were bunched with the Niger uranium forgeries, using authentic letterhead and Niger Embassy stamps. By mixing the papers, the stolen documents were intended to establish the authenticity of the forgeries.
At this point, any American connection to the actual forgeries remains unsubstantiated, though the OSP at a minimum connived to circumvent established procedures to present the information directly to receptive policy makers in the White House. But if the OSP is more deeply involved, Michael Ledeen, who denies any connection with the Niger documents, would have been a logical intermediary in co-ordinating the falsification of the documents and their surfacing, as he was both a Pentagon contractor and was frequently in Italy. He could have easily been assisted by ex-CIA friends from Iran-Contra days, including a former Chief of Station from Rome, who, like Ledeen, was also a consultant for the Pentagon and the Iraqi National Congress.
It would have been extremely convenient for the administration, struggling to explain why Iraq was a threat, to be able to produce information from an unimpeachable “foreign intelligence source” to confirm the Iraqi worst-case.
The possible forgery of the information by Defense Department employees would explain the viciousness of the attack on Valerie Plame and her husband. Wilson, when he denounced the forgeries in the New York Times in July 2003, turned an issue in which there was little public interest into something much bigger. The investigation continues, but the campaign against this lone detractor suggests that the administration was concerned about something far weightier than his critical op-ed.
Developing!!! What nice days...
Hey all, I sent out this email to some people about the ongoing Senior Week legal case. I had to go down to court on Monday but nothing happened. Suffice it to say, this is a big pain in the arse:
From: Dan Feidt <dan.feidt@gmail.com>
Date: October 31, 2005 2:46:38 PM CST
To: everyone
Subject: Bounced to another judge
So I get down there and asked where Judge Ostby is hearing cases today. The woman at the desk said that Judge Ostby isn't hearing any cases today. What?! Apparently she has rotated from misdemeanors to felonies and she ditched this case like the rotten fish it is. So we got reassigned to November 8 with Judge Gearin.
Also, the city attorney is angry that the previous plea bargains for the other guys failed to include an apology, so they may try to 'undo' the plea bargains in order to try to secure an apology.
While they said that we had been sent notices that the court date had changed, neither I nor Gary Wood got one so it was totally a surprise. What an excellent bureaucracy. A little Kafkaesque.
Today I am working on Politics in MN stuff as well as Computer Zone things. There's obviously a lot to say about TraitorGate - I mean the Plame scandal. I promise there will be more. In the meantime go see Firedoglake.
Libby got indicted. Tomorrow is another day. In the low light & very low shutter speed my camera made some weird effects. From the peace vigil on the Lake Street bridge last night:
"Miami: Emergency Supplies Are Dwindling" / "Aide to Cheney Appears Likely to Be Indicted; Rove Under Scrutiny"
I feel that life will never have such interesting sets of headlines simultaneously.
Well hey, it was already pretty much Bush's worst week ever, and now Fitzmas is upon us! Pat Fitzgerald has his own website. Expect indictment PDFs for Libby soon. Raw Story said that some indictments have already been secured. Antiwar.com has even more bits about it. More fake documents suddenly come spilling out of the woodwork. As they note, get this, the myth of Zarqawi was peddled to American intelligence agents and Washington lapped it up! UK Telegraph reported last year (via Antiwar):
US military intelligence agents in Iraq have revealed a series of botched and often tawdry dealings with unreliable sources who, in the words of one source, "told us what we wanted to hear".
"We were basically paying up to $10,000 a time to opportunists, criminals and chancers who passed off fiction and supposition about Zarqawi as cast-iron fact, making him out as the linchpin of just about every attack in Iraq," the agent said.
"Back home this stuff was gratefully received and formed the basis of policy decisions. We needed a villain, someone identifiable for the public to latch on to, and we got one."
The sprawling US intelligence community is in a state of open political warfare amid conflicting pressures from election-year politics, military combat and intelligence analysis. The Bush administration has seized on Zarqawi as the principal leader of the insurgency, mastermind of the country's worst suicide bombings and the man behind the abduction of foreign hostages. He is held up as the most tangible link to Osama bin Laden and proof of the claim that the former Iraqi regime had links to al-Qa'eda.
However, fresh intelligence emerging from around Fallujah, the rebel-held city that is at the heart of the insurgency, suggests that, despite a high degree of fragmentation, the insurgency is led and dominated not by Arab foreigners but by members of Iraq's Sunni minority.
Clemons floats a rumor that John Bolton's former Chief of Staff Fred Fleitz might be a hidden link in the Plame case, perhaps the source of the leak itself. But it's just a rumor. Tomorrow will tell!! The world according to former Powell aide Col. Lawrence Wilkerson. I linked this before but I like it a lot. And his bit in the LA Times. Clemons also had excerpts from a new New Yorker article interviewing Scowcroft, publicly leveling on how he's been exiled from this Administration and how nasty they've been.
The Indian Techie flamewar. Excellent. Some people are suing because they don't like that you can scratch an iPod nano.
Iranians not happy about a computer simulation of American war on Iran.
Good news for the Weed, Man! "Pot not a major cancer risk: report". "Study says high doses of marijuana stimulate brain cell growth:"
"Dr. Zhang commented on the chronic use of Marijuana based on the results of their research saying, "Chronic use of marijuana may actually improve learning memory when the new neurons in the hippocampus can mature in two or three months."
Spark it, yo.
Wal-Mart is some evil shit! Labor blog:
To discourage unhealthy job applicants, [the memo] suggests that Wal-Mart arrange for "all jobs to include some physical activity (e.g., all cashiers do some cart-gathering)."...
"It will be far easier to attract and retain a healthier work force than it will be to change behavior in an existing one," the memo said. "These moves would also dissuade unhealthy people from coming to work at Wal-Mart."
Read the whole thing (PDF) - thanks, NY Times.
Former CIA dude Pat Lang had an couple photos showing how fast Dubai is growing. His site, Sic Semper Tyrannis, has a lot of interesting bits on the Plame scandal, and whatever else suits an old spook.
Part III of the translated La Repubblica Niger-yellowcake investigation. More fun stuff filling in the timeline with SISMI chief Niccolo Pollari passing the forgeries to Stephen Hadley on Sept. 9, 2002. DC-area reporter Laura Rozen has been following this mess as well. As she summarizes:
You have an ex-Sismi agent (Rocco Martino), a current Sismi vice captain (Antonio Nucera), and a long-time Sismi mole in the Niger embassy Rome involved in assembling the Niger forgeries. You have a former Sismi agent (Rocco Martino) trying to selling them, to the French, to the British, to an Italian journalist. Sismi itself issued reports to the CIA and MI6 with the information on Iraq supposedly contracting to purchase 500 tons of yellowcake from Niger that turned up in the forgeries. You have the head of Sismi Nicolo Pollari admitting to Repubblica in an interview published Monday that Sismi knew what Rocco Martino was up to in 2001 and offering to show them a photo of Martino passing the dossier to British intelligence. I am not sure how the Berlusconi government can plausibly deny that Sismi didn't have a direct role in the Niger yellowcake claims to western intelligence, and a very cozily indirect role to the forgeries themselves. Unless it's the kind of denial that Rove and Libby meant when they told the grand jury that they hadn't told journalists about Wilson's wife or her place of employment.
She also tells us that Ahmed Chalabi will make a triumphant return to Washington to meet with Hadley in November. Perhaps they shall arrest him for espionage as well.
Murray Waas in National Journal reporting on Libby and Cheney suppressing info to the Senate, which subsequently whitewashed their manipulation of Iraq intelligence and blamed it on the CIA. Let's get into the details of the spoofed intel and the Cover Up:
Vice President Cheney and his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, overruling advice from some White House political staffers and lawyers, decided to withhold crucial documents from the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 when the panel was investigating the use of pre-war intelligence that erroneously concluded Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, according to Bush administration and congressional sources.
Cheney had been the foremost administration advocate for war with Iraq, and Libby played a central staff role in coordinating the sale of the war to both the public and Congress.
Among the White House materials withheld from the committee were Libby-authored passages in drafts of a speech that then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell delivered to the United Nations in February 2003 to argue the Bush administration's case for war with Iraq, according to congressional and administration sources. The withheld documents also included intelligence data that Cheney's office -- and Libby in particular -- pushed to be included in Powell's speech, the sources said.
The new information that Cheney and Libby blocked information to the Senate Intelligence Committee further underscores the central role played by the vice president's office in trying to blunt criticism that the Bush administration exaggerated intelligence data to make the case to go to war.
[.......]
The Intelligence Committee at the time was trying to determine whether the CIA and other intelligence agencies provided faulty or erroneous intelligence on Iraq to President Bush and other government officials. But the committee deferred the much more politically sensitive issue as to whether the president and the vice president themselves, or other administration officials, misrepresented intelligence information to bolster the case to go to war. An Intelligence Committee spokesperson says the panel is still working on this second phase of the investigation.
Had the withheld information been turned over, according to administration and congressional sources, it likely would have shifted a portion of the blame away from the intelligence agencies to the Bush administration as to who was responsible for the erroneous information being presented to the American public, Congress, and the international community.
In April 2004, the Intelligence Committee released a report that concluded that "much of the information provided or cleared by the Central Intelligence Agency for inclusion in Secretary Powell's [United Nation's] speech was overstated, misleading, or incorrect."
Both Republicans and Democrats on the committee say that their investigation was hampered by the refusal of the White House to turn over key documents, although Republicans said the documents were not as central to the investigation.
In addition to withholding drafts of Powell's speech -- which included passages written by Libby -- the administration also refused to turn over to the committee contents of the president's morning intelligence briefings on Iraq, sources say. These documents, known as the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, are a written summary of intelligence information and analysis provided by the CIA to the president.
One congressional source said, for example, that senators wanted to review the PDBs to determine whether dissenting views from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Department of Energy, and other agencies that often disagreed with the CIA on the question of Iraq's programs to develop weapons of mass destruction were being presented to the president.
[......]
A former senior administration official familiar with the discussions on whether to turn over the materials said there was a "political element" in the matter. This official said the White House did not want to turn over records during an election year that could used by critics to argue that the administration used incomplete or faulty intelligence to go to war with Iraq. "Nobody wants something like this dissected or coming out in an election year," the former official said.
[......]
Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to Powell as Secretary of State, charged in a recent speech that there was a "cabal between Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense [Donald L.] Rumsfeld on critical decisions that the bureaucracy did not know was being made."
In interagency meetings in preparation for Powell's U.N. address, Wilkerson, Powell, and senior CIA officials argued that evidence Libby wanted to include as part of Powell's presentation was exaggerated or unreliable. Cheney, too, became involved in those discussions, sources said, when he believed that Powell and others were not taking Libby's suggestions seriously.
Wilkerson has said that he ordered "whole reams of paper" of intelligence information excluded from Libby's draft of Powell's speech. Another official recalled that Libby was pushing so hard to include certain intelligence information in the speech that Libby lobbied Powell for last minute changes in a phone call to Powell's suite at the Waldorf Astoria hotel the night before the speech. Libby's suggestions were dismissed by Powell and his staff.
John E. McLaughlin, then-deputy director of the CIA, has testified to Congress that "much of our time in the run-up to the speech was spent taking out material... that we and the secretary's staff judged to have been unreliable."
All right, good stuff. Let's go on. According to the Nelson Report via Agonist:
[T]his may be obsolete before you read it, but as of late this afternoon, the rumor hot line had achieved a consensus that indictments have been approved against the right-hand men of both President Bush and Vice President Cheney...White House political chief Karl Rove, and VP chief of staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby. But where this reaches historic proportions...rumors that a "Constitutional officer is an unindicted co-conspirator". That is, Cheney himself.
Seeya Miers: Billmon, in a fine post rehashing the late great Miers nomination, notes the idea of 'critical legal studies.' I'd never heard of that but I should have assumed it's out there. This Hotline roundup of why it collapsed is funny.
Paul Begala visits TPMcafe to relate what it's like to be in a White House under siege. Awesome comic. TIME's Mike Allen said that there were likely plea offers from Fitz. Hotline hints that there the grand jury won't get extended.
Someone named DC Insider on the rightwing RedState.org said that indictments are probably coming for Wilson and Plame. Hilarious! Bill O'Reilly's Coward list. Also funny.
The DLC sucks. Hardcore. They keep giving this Peter Beinart guy way too much space. I hate their nasty anti-anti-war vibe. They have done nothing but screw things up.
Biological electricity and hurricanes. This writeup by a watcher of the weather about the electrical dynamics of hurricanes was a bit mysterious and interesting - via Slashdot:
"In a story at the new Open Source Energy Network site, Paul Noel says: "Energetically speaking, the vortex that forms in these storms is also a natural particle accelerator, and a massive capacitor bank. As the harmonic circuit develops, it resonates acoustically and functions as a capacitor, extracting the heat from the storm and transmitting it away. Without this electrical circuit, the storm would fail almost instantly due to the accumulation of heat from condensation of water." He also asserts that understanding these phenomena better could help us harness the power of nature, seen and unseen."
Meanwhile Norm Coleman continues his groundbreaking work at the Senate Un-American Activities and Scapegoating Committee.
More coming........
I'll try to make it out to the peace vigil on the Lake Street bridge, tonight at 7 PM. This seems like a gratifying moment to the anti-war, anti-Bush set, but it's no so fucking pleasant if your family or friends are over there, or injured, or dead. This is a hell of a lot worse than Watergate.
LibertyThink (because who else will encourage cognitive liberty in an age of statist propaganda?):
On the 12th day of Fitzmas Fitzgerald gave to me...
Twelve traitors hanging, eleven warrants serving, ten resignations, nine Bushbots spinning, eight gays a-outing, seven rats a-squealing, six spooks a-spying, five indictments, four neo-cons, three high crimes, two Plame leaks and one heroic grand jury
CBS’ JOHN ROBERTS: Lawyers familiar with the case think Wednesday is when special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald will make known his decision, and that there will be indictments. Supporters say Rove and the vice president’s chief of staff, Scooter Libby, are in legal jeopardy. But they insisted today the two are secondary players, that it was an unidentified Mr. X who actually gave the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to reporters. Fitzgerald knows who Mr. X is, they say, and if he isn’t indicted, there’s no way Rove or Libby should be. But charges may not focus on the leak at all. Obstruction of justice or perjury are real possibilities. Did Rove or Libby change statements made under oath? Did they deliberately leave critical facts out of their testimony or did they honestly forget? Some Republicans urged Rove to step down if indicted. Not a happy prospect for president Bush.
Any guesses on the identity of Mr. X?
UPDATE: This bit from the CBS segment is also interesting –
SCHIEFFER: John, I am very interested in Mr. X. Is there any clue or hint as to whether he be - maybe someone who outranks Libby and Rove or would he be a lower-ranking official?
ROBERTS: The best guess is that Mr. X, even though his name is not known and some people are just speculating on who he might be or she might be, is somebody who is actually outside the White House, and in that case would be of a lower rank that both Rove and Libby.
It has been a long time coming to this point -- a great many people have been waiting to see if all the efforts to expose this monstrous thing will pay off. It gets down to that murky intersection of policy, politics and intelligence work. I'm a young guy so I haven't seen that many scandals go down in Washington, but this one has had all the elements slowly cooking for a long time. I don't really know what I can add to the cacophony of leaks and counterleaks, artfully constructed blogger timelines, posturing Washington establishment liberals and shrieking neo-cons, bemoaning this sad, sad 'criminalization of politics.' But I'll probably try. Even Alec Baldwin is on the train these days.
Well guys, you shouldn't have invaded that country based on fake intelligence, and you shouldn't have broken the law to crush honest people that tried to stand against the lies. And also you shouldn't have let Ahmed Chalabi get away with selling so many national secrets to Iran.
Paralleling the politicial scandal, corruption runs throughout the military system now. The Abu Ghraib Brigadier General Janis Karpinski gave a weird interview with Alex Jones in which she alleged that orders for torture came down from the top, with teams of private contractors working under their own command in Abu Ghraib. She believes that she's been made the Fall Guy in the scandal, and she doesn't intend to shut up about it.
Such a situation illustrates why the Bush Administration was never able to purge any of these incompetent neo-cons, despite their continuous and ever-expanding mistakes about the war. To cast any of them out (say, Wurmser or Hannah, for example), they would publicly turn on the Administration, exposing the whole rotten core, the once-esoteric truth that this war was sold on nothing but a bunch of hustled lies. If they were to sing about the Office of Special Plans and the White House Iraq Group, like Karpinsky wants to sing about super-torture now, it would have shattered the whole artificial mythos of the war.
Fortunately, we happened to get a special prosecutor willing to shake them loose by force.
It's widely expected that Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald will issue indictments for Scooter Libby and Karl Rove, at a minimum, for their roles in the Valerie Plame case and subsequent shady cover-up. The LA Times reported that he is still sifting through Rove's role in this. But the Italians are definitely getting tangled up now, as well:
As anticipation swirled in Washington of potential indictments — and what it would mean for a Bush administration already beset by low approval ratings, the Iraq war and an embattled Supreme Court nomination — a related controversy was brewing in Italy over how the Niger allegations made their way into the intelligence stream.
Italian parliamentary officials announced Tuesday that the head of Italy's military secret service, the SISMI intelligence agency, would be questioned next month over allegations that his agency gave the disputed documents to the United States and Britain, according to an Associated Press report. A spokeswoman said Nicolo Pollari, the agency director, asked to be questioned after reports this week in Italy's La Republica newspaper claiming that SISMI sent the CIA and U.S. and British officials information that it knew to be forged.
The newspaper reported that Pollari met at the White House on Sept. 9, 2002 with then-Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley. The Niger claims surfaced shortly thereafter. A spokesman for Hadley, now the national security advisor, confirmed that the meeting took place, but declined to say what was discussed.
For more on the Italian angle coming out yesterday, see these English translations, which talk about the Office of Special Plans, Michael Ledeen and the whole bit! (Parts 1 and 2) (some more fun background on Michael Ledeen from DailyKos diarist Pen)
But if the case branches further into the actual forgeries themselves, it's possible that an entire pillar of pro-war ideology will be vaporized as the American public learns what some of us sensed a long time ago -- that the war was fundamentally a fraud perpetrated on the American public, using the most shameless methods of disinformation and propaganda -- psychological warfare, of a sort -- against our country. Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com said that someone from the CIA let him know that Fitzgerald was on the Italian track:
Even as the FBI was following the trail of the forgers, the Italians were looking into the matter from their end. A parliamentary committee was charged with investigating, and they issued a heavily redacted report: now, I am told by a former CIA operations officer, the report has aroused some interest on this side of the Atlantic. According to a source in the Italian embassy, Patrick J. "Bulldog" Fitzgerald asked for and "has finally been given a full copy of the Italian parliamentary oversight report on the forged Niger uranium document," the former CIA officer tells me:
"Previous versions of the report were redacted and had all the names removed, though it was possible to guess who was involved. This version names Michael Ledeen as the conduit for the report and indicates that former CIA officers Duane Clarridge and Alan Wolf were the principal forgers. All three had business interests with Chalabi."
... my source tells me that "Fitzgerald asked the Italians if he could share the report with Paul McNulty," the prosecutor in the AIPAC case.
.... Before Fitzgerald is done, we'll see the warlords of Washington hauled before a court of the people. We'll hear the whole sordid story of how a band of exiles, at least two foreign intelligence agencies, and a cabal of neoconservatives inside the Pentagon and the vice president's office bamboozled Congress and the American people into going to war. As the indictments come down, so will the elaborate narrative so carefully constructed by the War Party in the run-up to war be exposed as a tissue of fabrication, forgery, and fraud.
Cheney was certainly at the core of it, and the Times article on Tuesday, "Cheney Told Aide of CIA Officer, Lawyers Report," certainly has damaged him (lots of commentary on this -- although why was he told in the first place?). Cheney's actions to prop up the constructed nuclear threat have been well-documented by now (I'd recommend IPS's Jim Lobe's work on the Cheney Nuclear Drumbeat as a good place to start). He has certainly now been caught in lies about whether he knew Wilson at all.
KRT: "CIA leak illustrates selective use of intelligence on Iraq". Newsweek: "Prelude to a leak." The Raw Story | Cheney aide passed Plame's name to Libby, Hadley, those close to leak investigation say.
A roundup: There is pretty much an infinite vortex of noise right now, so much spin that the world is getting wobbly. Or maybe they're just all on acid. Either way, here I will put some bits that reflect a certain angle of things. Eh. Who even knows where the bar is anymore?
Arianna summarizes how it's a worse Gate than Watergate. Her little icon pisses me off.
Indictments Coming Tomorrow; Targets Received Letters Today
An uber-insider source has just reported the following to TWN (since confirmed by another independent source):
1. 1-5 indictments are being issued. The source feels that it will be towards the higher end.
2. The targets of indictment have already received their letters.
3. The indictments will be sealed indictments and "filed" tomorrow.
4. A press conference is being scheduled for Thursday.
The shoe is dropping.
There were very harsh words from one of Colin Powell's former aides at the State Department, Lawrence Wilkerson, who finally came around to call out what he called the 'cabal':
In President Bush's first term, some of the most important decisions about U.S. national security -- including vital decisions about postwar Iraq -- were made by a secretive, little-known cabal. It was made up of a very small group of people led by Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
When I first discussed this group in a speech last week at the New America Foundation in Washington, my comments caused a significant stir because I had been chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell between 2002 and 2005.
But it's absolutely true. I believe that the decisions of this cabal were sometimes made with the full and witting support of the president and sometimes with something less. More often than not, then-national security advisor Condoleezza Rice was simply steamrolled by this cabal.
Its insular and secret workings were efficient and swift — not unlike the decision-making one would associate more with a dictatorship than a democracy. This furtive process was camouflaged neatly by the dysfunction and inefficiency of the formal decision-making process, where decisions, if they were reached at all, had to wend their way through the bureaucracy, with its dissenters, obstructionists and "guardians of the turf."
But the secret process was ultimately a failure. It produced a series of disastrous decisions and virtually ensured that the agencies charged with implementing them would not or could not execute them well.
Although of course others say "where the hell were you guys like a year ago?!" There has been a back-and-forth between Miller and Keller. Niall Ferguson comments that it's going to be a Hurricane in DC. Newsweek has finally gotten around to telling its part of the real story.
Firedoglake is just having a hell of a time. Let's note the classic Mother Jones piece "The Lie Factory" from January 2004. Turns out they were pretty much right. This graphic was sweet too.
Combat boots Miller. What a strange figure.
Well I've got my popcorn and my Summit Oktoberfest. Come tomorrow, we shall toast the Beginning of the End of the Empire. And for that, I can finally sleep soundly, because we might just finally turn the corner.
I would be more amused by all these breaking scandals if not for the essential context. They started a war, and honest American soldiers and Marines have paid the price in blood. Losing them to the Mess was reified into this kind of great sacrifice for freedom and apple pie. But we're going to find that the purposes of our leaders was far more sordid.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 23 (UPI) -- The CIA leak inquiry that threatens senior White House aides has now widened to include the forgery of documents on African uranium that started the investigation, according to NAT0 intelligence sources.
This suggests the inquiry by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald into the leaking of the identity of undercover CIA officer Valerie Plame has now widened to embrace part of the broader question about the way the Iraq war was justified by the Bush administration.
...Fitzgerald's team has been given the full, and as yet unpublished report of the Italian parliamentary inquiry into the affair, which started when an Italian journalist obtained documents that appeared to show officials of the government of Niger helping to supply the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein with Yellowcake uranium. This claim, which made its way into President Bush's State of the Union address in January, 2003, was based on falsified documents from Niger and was later withdrawn by the White House.
This opens the door to what has always been the most serious implication of the CIA leak case, that the Bush administration could face a brutally damaging and public inquiry into the case for war against Iraq being false or artificially exaggerated. This was the same charge that imperiled the government of Bush's closest ally, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, after a BBC Radio program claimed Blair's aides has "sexed up" the evidence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
There can be few more serious charges against a government than going to war on false pretences, or having deliberately inflated or suppressed the evidence that justified the war.
I've got a lot of stuff stashed on the computer here that I think pulls the case together. Tomorrow will probably be a major day in this country's history - the day we'll come face to face with
The busted server gave me a few days to look at the ups and downs of this media spinstorm, as leaks and counterleaks have been placed in the media, some to paint Libby as the demon, perhaps to help protect the others.
For example, Josh Marshall cited this LA Times story as an example of a demonize-Libby-to-inoculate-the-rest strategy: "Bush Critic Became Target of Libby, Former Aides Say."
Now, I don't doubt that there's a good deal of truth in this story. Indeed, the point in what I'm about to say is not to cast doubt on the accuracy of anything in it. But if you read the LAT story closely you see that the authors were able to interview multiple White House staffers (seemingly all or most former ones) and were apparently provided with a sheaf of documents illustrating Libby's near-obsessive Wilson-monitoring.
If I read the article right it seems they were provided with a copy of this dossier ...
The result was a packet that included excerpts from press clips and television transcripts of Wilson's statements that were divided into categories, such as "political ties" or "WMD."
The compendium used boldfaced type to call attention to certain comments by Wilson, such as one in the Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa student newspaper, in which Wilson was quoted as calling Cheney "a lying son of a bitch." It also highlighted Wilson's answers to questions from television journalists about his work with Sen. John F. Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee.
The intensity with which Libby reacted to Wilson had many senior White House staffers puzzled, and few agreed with his counterattack plan or its rationale, former aides said.
So, a lot of access to former White House staffers in on key meetings and actual documentary evidence of what Scooter was up to, what his efforts produced. That sort of access ain't easy to come by and it's seldom accidental.
This certainly seems like an attempt to pin this whole thing on Libby.
Leaks like that won't affect Fitzgerald; they're not intended to. They're aimed at shaping perceptions of indictments if they come down. If Libby and Rove are indicted, then, yes Rove got caught up in it. And it shouldn't have happened. But the whole unfortunate mess was spawned by the bitter Libby-Wilson antagonsim. It wasn't something that involved the whole White House team, not something characteristic of how it functions.
That would be the argument.
And it's one everyone should have their eyes out for, since the key players in the White House appear to have decided that Libby is already a fatality in this battle.
SO WHAT ABOUT THE FORGERY ITSELF?
Two Josh Marshall tidbits tied to this UPI article about cross-connections between the Plame and AIPAC cases. Marshall and Laura Rozen did an article, "Iran Contra II?" about secret meetings with Michael Ledeen, Iranian arms dealer Ghorbanifar, the chief of Italian military intelligence service SISMI, Rhode and Larry Franklin. Walker's UPI article had a number of interesting bits about the sources of the Niger forgeries. I loved this paragraph:
In July 2003, [Wilson] wrote an article for The New York Times making his mission -- and his disbelief -- public.
But by then Elisabetta Burba, a journalist for the Italian magazine Panorama (owned by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi) had been contacted by a "security consultant" named Rocco Martoni, offering to sell documents that "proved" Iraq was obtaining uranium in Niger for $10,000. Rather than pay the money, Burba's editor passed photocopies of the documents to the U.S. Embassy, which forwarded them to Washington, where the forgery was later detected. Signatures were false, and the government ministers and officials who had signed them were no longer in office on the dates on which the documents were supposedly written.
Nonetheless, the forged documents appeared, on the face of it, to shore up the case for war, and to discredit Wilson. The origin of the forgeries is therefore of real importance, and any link between the forgeries and Bush administration aides would be highly damaging and almost certainly criminal.
The letterheads and official seals that appeared to authenticate the documents apparently came from a burglary at the Niger Embassy in Rome in 2001. At this point, the facts start dribbling away into conspiracy theories that involve membership of shadowy Masonic lodges, Iranian go-betweens, right-wing cabals inside Italian Intelligence and so on. It is not yet known how far Fitzgerald, in his two years of inquiries, has fished in these murky waters.
There is one line of inquiry with an American connection that Fitzgerald would have found it difficult to ignore. This is the claim that a mid-ranking Pentagon official, Larry Franklin, held talks with some Italian intelligence and defense officials in Rome in late 2001. Franklin has since been arrested on charges of passing classified information to staff of the pro-Israel lobby group, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. Franklin has reportedly reached a plea bargain with his prosecutor, Paul McNulty, and it would be odd if McNulty and Fitzgerald had not conferred to see if their inquiries connected.
Where all this leads will not be clear until Fitzgerald breaks his silence, widely expected to occur this week when the term of his grand jury expires.
If Fitzgerald issues indictments, then the hounds that are currently baying across the blogosphere will leap into the mainstream media and whole affair, Iranian go-betweens and Rome burglaries included, will come into the mainstream of the mass media and network news where Mr. and Mrs. America can see it.
The Italian newspaper La Repubblica had a major (Italian only!) article about the activities of the Italians. To put it succinctly, at the very time that war propaganda was heating up, the chief of SISMI was meeting with Stephen Hadley, probably in an effort to persuade him to use the Niger forgeries.
As I have noted in quite a few posts, well-known neoconservative scholar Michael Ledeen has been cited by a number of government officials as the key forgery connection. So he might get indicted tomorrow too. More later. I feel a little bad that I haven't given out some more info... It's coming along, oh it's coming.
Looks like tomorrow will likely be Fitzmas. I have my Summit Oktoberfest and microwave popcorn at the ready.
Ugh. The site went down for a couple days after I installed the Linux 'udev' module which happened to be totally worthless. When I had to reboot the machine, it would not start back up because it couldn't find the filesystems. Really bad.
Then I had to patch some changes into Apache, and for the last few days I haven't wanted to bother with this crap, despite all the fun scandals we're hearing about.
Upcoming Indictment Day will be known as Fitzmas. Presents and drinking as the Empire goes down in flames. Nice.
This was a set of stuff which I should have posted like a week ago. Well, enjoy. :-/
Some Minnesota blogs: I do not usually pay enough attention to blogs around the Twin Cities although it's a rich territory these days. City Pages big index. I think Kennedy vs. the Machine is amusing because, well, it just is. Anything idolizing Mark Kennedy is sort of like praising ketchup for daring to be different than mustard. Freedom Dogs is another right wing local one.
Then there are a couple college guys running MN Publius, which is pretty good. They are watching the upcoming election from afar. MN Lefty Liberal holding it down.
Secret Phone Numbers: escape the Labyrinth. Dial up real humans in corporate voice mail hell! This has the secret customer service numbers for many corps, including Amazon, which I used today.
Example of media manipulation & gullibility. FOX blimp tricks WCCO into covering it.
Scott McClellan Says Helen Thomas Opposes 'War on Terrorism' (featured on CrooksAndLiars). Har har har!!
[Helen Thomas]: What does the President mean by "total victory" -- that we will never leave Iraq until we have "total victory"? What does that mean?
[......]
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, Helen, the President recognizes that we are engaged in a global war on terrorism. And when you're engaged in a war, it's not always pleasant, and it's certainly a last resort. But when you engage in a war, you take the fight to the enemy, you go on the offense. And that's exactly what we are doing. We are fighting them there so that we don't have to fight them here. September 11th taught us --
Q It has nothing to do with -- Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, you have a very different view of the war on terrorism, and I'm sure you're opposed to the broader war on terrorism. The President recognizes this requires a comprehensive strategy, and that this is a broad war, that it is not a law enforcement matter.
Terry.
Q On what basis do you say Helen is opposed to the broader war on terrorism?
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, she certainly expressed her concerns about Afghanistan and Iraq and going into those two countries. I think I can go back and pull up her comments over the course of the past couple of years.
Q And speak for her, which is odd.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, I said she may be, because certainly if you look at her comments over the course of the past couple of years, she's expressed her concerns --
Q I'm opposed to preemptive war, unprovoked preemptive war.
MR. McCLELLAN: -- she's expressed her concerns.
Who knew the CIA had a journal? Studies in Intelligence: VOL. 49, NO. 2, 2005 featuring Understanding Terror Networks and The Intelligence Officer's Bookshelf. Nice. Interestingly, the CIA defends itself from charges that they gave bad intelligence by an article published in this declassified journal. Here is an article about Goss crushing CIA analysts under political pressure.
Israel, Iran and nuclear war. Unpleasant thoughts that make me want to play computer games instead. WOPR knows you can't win Global Thermonuclear War anyway. But this article about how the US is prepping for the attack is spooky. US selling Bunker Bombs to Israel. They got some sweet jets too. Bush: "America would back Israel attack on Iran." Good old Cheney:
"Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first, and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," Cheney said. In 1981, Israel sent warplanes to destroy Iraq's nuclear reactor.
More on this later. Gotta love Threat Construction in the mideast.
Global: What is China Up to in the Western Hemisphere? Big things!
"Former U.S. ambassador in Bolivia Manuel Rocha recently remarked, 'Your children may have to start learning Mandarin ... if you wish to see them involved in business in the Americas.'"
UNPO: I like the idea of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, which is set up for the various smaller ethnic groups (From the Lakota Nation to Georgian Abkhazia, the Assyrians of Iraq and the Levant - who do not support the new constitution. Sweet flag too! - and the formerly independent Arabic Ahwaz people of southwestern Iran)
Talk about some pandemic. Personal Pandemic Preparedness Plan. "ASSUME FOOD AND SUPPLIES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE". Here is yr bird flu map over time. Uh oh! Rich people should be saved in disasters first, says yr typical rightwing idiot.
Syria under pressure, ringed by an Iron Wall. More details on this later.
New Service to Coordinate US Overseas Espionage. Oh good, more for Goss, less for Negroponte. Or not. Dammit!
Rebels in Russia! They are getting serious out in those quiet Caucasus areas. Also covered here but these sites may be some rightwing gibberish. Well DEBKA should bring an air of Sanity to the affair. (they say it was mostly locals, shocking). The choice quote:
Most of the province’s inhabitants are ethnic Circassian Muslims. The unrecorded chapter of the Chechen intelligence war of the 1990s relates how the Circassian community of Jordan, which was the security buttress of the Hashemite throne, was used by US, British and French intelligence as a pipeline into the Chechen breakaway movement for close surveillance of its conflict with Russia. Al Qaeda, which tracks and meets every American intelligence move connected with the global war on terror, countered by going into the remote and relatively affluent Kabardino-Balkaria to quietly acquire its own Circassian asset.
Iraq Boom. Bush is really alone. It would be funny if it wasn't such a horrible and devastating problem. 'The worst possible policy for Iraq'. The good news: perhaps Iraq's violence not yet civil war. Journalist Chris Albritton has the latest on the election results and suspicious indicators of electoral fraud in Nineveh province. Here comes sectarian warfare. Ah, Bush's staged Potemkin army.
Great moments in strategy, revisited: Vanquished Iraqi military disbanded; U.S. occupying force to set up new army. What a classic. How did that turn out?
Terror Letters O Love: We got this exciting Zawahiri letter. Jazeera: Al Qaeda claims US faked Zawahiri letter.
Condi still has some fucked up spin:
The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.
Vikings. Ouch. Talk about bumblefucking your way out of a new stadium, and then getting crushed by the Bears. Bitter Reusse:
As to what action Wilf should take in the wake of this aquatic Sodom and Gomorrah, the most popular suggestion has been to fire Tice now, rather than at season's end.
That's an idea worth serious consideration, but until nightfall today, Zygi has a higher priority:
Repenting for using the family fortune to buy this no-class operation.
Plame Flood [week-oldd news - sorry]! Plenty of news on this in the last couple days. I am glad it's become a major scandal again. Judith Miller certainly played things the nasty, dishonest and venal way she's handled them so far. No real admission from her great tell-all in the Times about how Libby mercilessly spun the war against intelligence community - with the Plame scandal as only a branch of the fallout. (AIPAC/WINEP and Chalabi being two other major branches yet to break off the tree)
But the tone of media coverage still doesn't fully link the fake intelligence with the attack that Libby et al. tried against Wilson. Miller's particular role in that fake intelligence, I would say, means that she was probably protecting Chalabi's people, "defending her other sources" ± as she seemed to put it in her article. But lets get to the Main Story, as the "other" Roger Ailes puts:
In today's column, Howie Kurtz illustrates what's wrong with most of the newspaper and television coverage of the New York Times' role in Traitorgate, including Kurtz's:
"Leave aside the criticisms of her WMD reporting."
The newspaper's purported coverage of WMD and Miller's relationship with the White House are inextricably intertwined. Miller's dealings with the White House and her agenda cannot be separated.
Howie can't seem to understand why the Times' reporting on its own reporter is so weak. He mentions the obvious conflict of interest, but doesn't address the equally obvious fact -- that the paper knew how corrupt Miller was and ran her articles anyway.
The paper either knew Miller's unnamed sources in the Administration and the INC, and published her articles anyway, or it published Miller's propaganda without knowing. In either case, the paper knowingly permitted Miller to lie to its readers. And that's why the paper's coverage of Traitorgate is not only weak -- it's non-existent. The paper can't publish the truth about Traitorgate without exposing its own role in the scandal and the parallel scandal of its own reporting on Iraq. It can't report the truth of Traitorgate and simulataneously maintain the fiction -- illustrated in the article quoted below -- that it was misled by the Administration and self-interested Iraqis and therefore can't really be faulted for its faulty reporting.
And that's why you can't "leave aside" Miller's WMD reporting when you consider the Times current coverage of Traitorgate. Howie is smart enough to understand this -- why he doesn't credit his readers with the same intelligence is an interesting question.
Ailes also has a good timeline of the various NY Times stories that Miller spewed forth for the trusting American public.
Ok there are a ton of links. Arianna (again and again). Judy made some obvious mistakes in her notes about Plame's role. The AntiWar blog is jolly these days. E&P are pissed. "The Law is on the Side of Valerie Plame," by pissed off ex-CIA dude Larry Johnson. Johnson also has some pieces about SISMI, the apparent original entry point of the forgeries into western intelligence communities. He alleges a prominent neo-con (Michael Ledeen in all but name) concocted the damn things. Nice! (also, why Fitz gets it) Pat Lang pissed off at that horrible Cohen column (as is Atrios and everyone else).
"My money is on the company, Pt. II". Victoria Plame? A fine reference to the whole case via the Left Coaster. Time for the Frog March? The Times newsroom has been tense. Fire Miller, dammit!
AIPAC still simmers: Raimondo considers the possibility that Israeli ambassador Danny Ayalon is one of the parties of espionage in the AIPAC indictments.
Texas two step: These guys have been making a Ronnie Earle documentary. Interesting.
GOP dissolves? Sure why not?
(this fun animated GIF via aethlos.com - why is that blog's author in jail? He doesn't explain..)
Spotted an interesting story on the Agonist about the future of Canada (apparently secession moves in Quebec and Alberta may come to the fore - in particular because of Alberta's rich energy reserves). Anyway, Kurdish joke on someone's .sig: "Our past is full of horror, our present is miserable, fortunately, we have no future." I like it.
When you need an Apocalypse: Left Behind III: World at War is coming out in Churches Nationwide around October 21st. Lots of them in Minnesota. Fortunately the previous Left Behinds are available via BitTorrent - send yourself to hell while finding out How it will Happen! A Double Devil Deal! On the other hand, energy policy seems to be enough to freak everyone out -- this DKos diary about Playing Chicken with the Apocalypse, about the dwindling energy resources leading to Chaos. It's ugly. For some terrible reason ever since I was little I would worry about this, so I guess you could say this problem is deeply built into my weltanschauung.
Rove might be going down over the CIA leak case. There is a lot of chatter among the rightwing guerrilla networks about indictments coming along in the next couple weeks - my guess would be Libby and Rove might get nailed for conspiracy or perjury. Bill Kristol, of all people, said this on Fox News Sunday:
Criminal defense lawyers I’ve spoken to who are friendly to the administration are very worried that there will be one or more indictments in the next three weeks of senior administration officials, just looking at what Fitzgerald is doing and taking him at his word, you know, being a serious prosecutor here. And I think it’s going to be bad for the Bush administration.
Rove is definitely sweating hard right now. He promised Bush that he hadn't spilled anything about Plame, but it seems that he neglected to mention his conversation with TIME Magazine's Cooper to Bush -- and it had to be added to his grand jury testimony in a new session. Murray Waas on the story for National Journal:
In his own interview with prosecutors on June 24, 2004, Bush testified that Rove assured him he had not disclosed Plame as a CIA employee and had said nothing to the press to discredit Wilson, according to sources familiar with the president's interview. Bush said that Rove never mentioned the conversation with Cooper. James E. Sharp, Bush's private attorney, who was present at the president's interview with prosecutors, declined to comment for this story.
Sources close to the leak investigation being run by Special Prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald say it was the discovery of one of Rove's White House e-mails-in which the senior Bush adviser referred to his July 2003 conversation with Cooper-that prompted Rove to contact prosecutors and to revise his account to include the Cooper conversation.
......
Rove on Thursday agreed to appear a fourth time before the federal grand jury, as federal prosecutors warned him that they could not guarantee that he would not be criminally charged, according to sources familiar with the investigation.
According to outside legal experts, it is rare for prosecutors to seek to question a witness before the grand jury so late in the course of a high-profile investigation and after the witness has already testified three times, unless criminal charges are being considered.
As Steve Clemons observes, Judith Miller was decidedly a huckster and a war-profiteer, (maybe worse for the Times than Jayson Blair). Clemons' saying:
As has been widely reported, she seems to have unnecessarily gone off to jail as she was protecting a source who never wanted protection. . .or she strong-armed a deal with Prosecutor Fitzgerald in which she didn't have to tell anything beyond her interactions with Vice President Cheney's Chief-of-Staff Scooter Libby.
That is, perhaps she sat in jail to protect either Ahmed Chalabi, or perhaps people around Chalabi that were channeling the fake WMD/Al Qaeda intelligence - in other words, Miller's actions might have everything to do with the dark, conspiratorial lies that got the war rolling (which Miller marketed to the American public). It seems that Judy Miller "found" some notes about early conversations with Libby - before Wilson's column seemed to trigger the Grand Plot. Lawrence O'Donnell had a couple things to say about Rove going to the grand jury again (across two posts):
What this means is Rove's lawyer, Bob Luskin, believes his client is defintely going to be indicted.
So, Luskin is sending Rove back into the grand jury to try to get around the prosecutor and sell his innocence directly to the grand jurors. Legal defense work doesn't get more desperate than this. The prosecutor is happy to let Rove go under oath again--without his lawyer in the room--and try to wiggle out of the case. The prosecutor has every right to expect that Rove's final under-oath grilling will either add a count or two to the indictment or force Rove to flip and testify against someone else.
.....
Prediction: at least three high level Bush Administration personnel indicted and possibly one or more very high level unindicted co-conspirators.
w00p w00p!!! Billmon is cackling about the possibilities of Espionage indictments.
There's a whole mesh of people that might go down over this - parts of the neo-con "core" around John Bolton, the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and the Office of the Vice President - in other words the core of people that sold the War Lies. John Hannah, a Cheney/Bolton aide, has been under pressure and might have been flipped by the FBI. As Juan Cole put it:
Libby and Hannah form part of a 13-man vice presidential advisory team, sort of a veep NSC, which helps underpin Cheney's dominance in the US foreign policy area. Hannah is a neoconservative and old cold warrior who is really more of a Soviet expert than a Middle East expert. But in the 90s he for a while headed up the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a think tank that represents the interests of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC). Hannah is said to have been behind Cheney's and consequently Bush's support for refusing to deal with Yasser Arafat. But he was also deeply involved in getting up the Iraq war.
So there is your hypothetical Plame-to-AIPAC-via-WINEP scandal link. Nice!
Let's have Joe Wilson and Joe Conason bring the Office of Special Plans into the affair. (even Clean Break author David Wurmser comes into this!) Wurmser and Hannah worked for John Bolton - what if they all got indicted? From Wilson's interview this summer in Salon (via Raimondo):
[Wilson:] "Gleaned from all those crosscurrents of information, the most plausible scenario, and the one that I've heard most frequently from different sources, has been that there was a meeting in the middle of March 2003, chaired by either [Cheney's chief of staff] Scooter Libby or the vice president – but more frequently I've heard chaired by Scooter – at which a decision was made to get a 'work-up' on me. That meant getting as much information about me as they could: about my past, about my life, about my family. This, in and of itself, is abominable. Then that information was passed at the appropriate time to the White House Communications Office, and at some point a decision was made to go ahead and start to smear me, after my opinion piece appeared in the New York Times."
"Salon: You mention two other names: John Hannah, who works in the Office of the Vice President, and David Wurmser, who is a special assistant to John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and national security. Last Wednesday, their names both appeared on a chart that accompanied an article in the New York Times about the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans and the war cabal within the Bush administration. Did these people run an intelligence operation against you?"
"Wilson: I don't know if it's the same unit, but it's very clear, from what I've heard, that the meeting in March 2003 led to an intelligence operation against my family and me. That's what a work-up is – to try to find everything you can about an American citizen."
Hoax Hax0rs Subway Security - for Bush PR needs?: The recent terror alert in New York City was a hoax and NYC officials have to try spinning it. This of course is sparking a lot of cynical conspiracy-theorizing that the Bush Regime is yet again manipulating the level of fear in the public for political purposes. Those level-headed guys at Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet note an article from Capitol Hill Blue that suggests terrorism alerts are based more on political need than fact, according to the ever-popular Disgruntled Insiders. Fear's Empire is an interesting thing like that. Also reported here.
Some more espionage in the White House. Aside from AIPAC excitement and the Plame case, there was a guy on Cheney's staff spying for the Philippine opposition political figures:
Officials say the classified material, which Aragoncillo stole from the vice president's office, included damaging dossiers on the president of the Philippines. He then passed those on to opposition politicians planning a coup in the Pacific nation.
DeLay has a lasting impact on Washington: Vast networks of influence peddlers and patronage distribution systems built over the better part of a decade don't blow away overnight. DeLay Inc. still has a lot of keys to the palace. There is a KStreetProject.com that seems to be part of the DeLay machine, but I'm not sure... It claims to be nonpartisan.
Bush can get testy with uppity reporters: There was an interesting column by WaPo's Froomkin about Bush getting hassled by NBC's Matt Lauer about photo-ops, while appearing at some kind of home rebuilding photo-op. Also he had an interesting followup about "plucky" Irish TV reporter Carole Coleman, who had a really funny interview. Coleman had a column in the UK Times about it. "I wanted to slap him," a great headline. Excellent:
“You were given an opportunity to interview the leader of the free world and you blew it,” she began.
I was beginning to feel as if I might be dreaming. I had naively believed the American president was referred to as the “leader of the free world” only in an unofficial tongue-in-cheek sort of way by outsiders, and not among his closest staff.
“You were more vicious than any of the White House press corps or even some of them up on Capitol Hill . . .The president leads the interview,” she said.
“I don’t agree,” I replied, my initial worry now turning to frustration. “It’s the journalist’s job to lead the interview.”
It was suggested that perhaps I could edit the tapes to take out the interruptions, but I made it clear that this would not be possible.
As the conversation progressed, I learnt that I might find it difficult to secure further co-operation from the White House. A man’s voice then came on the line. Colby, I assumed. “And, it goes without saying, you can forget about the interview with Laura Bush.”
Miers: The New Cipher: I can't really believe that things are flaking apart so badly on the right-wing side. "As Bush slips, GOP faces major shift in '08 vote". Agonist has a bit of the Nelson Report on Miers:
More pragmatic conservatives read the nomination of the President's personal lawyer, a Texas associate with no judicial experience, as a confession of weakness by a White House political operation which is still floundering in the wake of months of bad news from Iraq, Republican scandals on Capitol Hill, then Katrina, followed by more scandals. Bush can't win a really divisive fight with Congress, this reasoning goes...nor, at this point, does he want one. With three years still to go, he is already at risk of being written-off as a "lame duck" by his own Republicans, most of whom plan to run for reelection.
The Dems definitely smell opportunity come 2006, and you can see a leading indicator...attractive candidates are emerging to challenge Republican incumbents, while presumably strong Republicans are refusing to risk fights to unseat potentially vulnerable Democrats: see prime examples in West Virginia, where the almost 88-year old Sen. Robert Byrd won't face a popular GOP House member, and similarly strong Republicans have been scared-off in North Dakota, Washington, State, Florida, Michigan and Missouri.
Everyone gets apoplectic about these judicial selections but I just can't bring myself to worry about it that much. Let this link to some sort of relaxed reporting from PrisonPlanet indicate how much I care. Anyone who covered up Bush's National Guard behavior is square with me!!
Pentagon domestic spying measures sneak into a bill: Maybe all these visits to my site from the DoD, the CIA and DHS will finally make something happen. Newsweek reports (via WarAndPiece - there's an official PDF report along with it):
...the Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved broad-ranging legislation that gives the Defense Department a long sought and potentially crucial waiver: it would permit its intelligence agents, such as those working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to covertly approach and cultivate “U.S. persons” and even recruit them as informants—without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government. The Senate committee’s action comes as President George W. Bush has talked of expanding military involvement in civil affairs, such as efforts to control pandemic disease outbreaks.
The provision was included in last year’s version of the same bill, but was knocked out after its details were reported by NEWSWEEK and critics charged it could lead to “spying” on U.S. citizens. But late last month, with no public hearings or debate, a similar amendment was put back into the same authorization bill—an annual measure governing U.S. intelligence agencies—at the request of the Pentagon. A copy of the 104-page committee bill, which has yet to be voted on by the full Senate, did not become public until last week.
At the same time, the Senate intelligence panel also included in the bill two other potentially controversial amendments—one that would allow the Pentagon and other U.S. intelligence agencies greater access to federal government databases on U.S. citizens, and another granting the DIA new exemptions from disclosing any “operational files” under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). “What they are doing is expanding the Defense Department’s domestic intelligence activities in secret—with no public discussion,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, a civil-liberties group that is often critical of government actions in the fight against terrorism...
Total dysfunction between DHS and local police? DHS 'hi-jacked' state police intel network? Another bad day for the National Insecurity State. UPI reports that local law enforcement are breaking off their connections from the Department of Homeland Security (via WarAndPiece):
Relations between the Department of Homeland Security and some key big-city and state police forces have sunk to a new low, CQ Weekly reports. The magazine's "Spy Talk" column, says the flow of intelligence data between the department and many local forces has been at a virtual standstill since May.
At the center of the row is a previously undisclosed May 7 letter to the department from Ed Manavian, chairman of the Joint Regional Information Exchange System, or JRIES -- a state and local police intelligence and information-sharing network.
In the letter, addressed to the director of the Homeland Security Operations Center, retired Marine Gen. Matthew Broderick, he called the decision to cut ties "unfortunate."
"[W]e must inform you that the Board unanimously voted to discontinue our relationship with the (Homeland Security Operations Center)," wrote Manavian, who is also chief of the California Department of Justice's Criminal Intelligence Bureau. The letter added it was a "difficult, but necessary, decision."
"The consensus of the Board is that the (Homeland Security Operations Center) has 'hi-jacked' the system and federalized a successful, cooperative, federal, state, and local project," Manavian wrote. "The failures . . . are a direct result of ignoring the concerns expressed by this Board on numerous occasions."
Perpetual Emergency Spending: The Katrina thing just illustrates that the Bush folks label everything as emergency spending to duck pressure about blowing through our cash and writing treasury notes to the Chinese as fast as they can.
Emergency Spending as a Way of Life:
In approving Mr. Bush's request for $51.8 billion in emergency assistance, Congress passed a three-page law with fewer than 700 words.
Here are the details: $1.4 billion would go to the military, $400 million would go to the Army Corps of Engineers and $50 billion would go for anything else tied to what was described only as "disaster relief."
TheBigPicture talks about Federal Off Balance Sheet Funding - it keeps going up and up! Also government oversight functions seem to have deteriorated badly as reflected by Katrina.
Iraq: Democracy == War: "Iraqis' Broken Dreams". "Hiding as police, militias hold the power in Basra." "Constitutional vote could spell the end for Iraq's unpopular premier". I would recommend this talk on CSPAN with Yosri Fouda, Al Jazeera's London Bureau chief (RealPlayer). It is a long one but full of the interesting shades of gray and so forth. Jazeera, by the way, is starting up an English language satellite international news service with the BBC's David Frost. Josh Rushing, the former Marine spokesman as seen in the documentary Control Room, is joining as a reporter. Nice.
LA Times: "A Central Pillar of Iraq Policy Crumbling:"
Senior U.S. officials have begun to question a key presumption of American strategy in Iraq: that establishing democracy there can erode and ultimately eradicate the insurgency gripping the country.
The expectation that political progress would bring stability has been fundamental to the Bush administration's approach to rebuilding Iraq, as well as a central theme of White House rhetoric to convince the American public that its policy in Iraq remains on course.
But within the last two months, U.S. analysts with access to classified intelligence have started to challenge this precept, noting a "significant and disturbing disconnect" between apparent advances on the political front and efforts to reduce insurgent attacks.
Now, with Saturday's constitutional referendum appearing more likely to divide than unify the country, some within the administration have concluded that the quest for democracy in Iraq, at least in its current form, could actually strengthen the insurgency.
Indeed. NewsDay has the sad headline: "Iraq struggling to survive: Doubts about the future of the war-torn country are growing as citizens prepare to vote on a constitution". I am cynical about Mr. Makiya because it seems as if he may have been tied to the INC's fake intelligence (his house was raided when the Pentagon finally turned on Chalabi), but he seems to get it these days:
"Sectarianism and ethnic self-interest" have led to the writing of a document that divides Iraq along ethnic lines, "perhaps even dealing the death blow to the idea of Iraq that had sustained the opposition for so many years," Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis University professor and Iraqi exile, said at a conference in Washington last week.
It was Makiya, a former ally of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, who President George W. Bush chose to join him in the Oval Office to watch as a statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down after the invasion in 2003. Iraq's problems, driven by the relentless insurgency, have produced "so many dashed hopes and fledgling dreams" that they may have destroyed "the very idea and the very possibility of an Iraq," Makiya said.
Rahim, once the public face of the new Iraq in Washington, said at the AEI-sponsored conference that she agrees with Makiya. The new constitution is so full of ambiguities and creates such a weak central government that it may "spin the state out of control," she said.
........
What it does make clear is that a weak central government in Baghdad would have little control over three regions likely to be carved out for Kurds in the north, Shia in the south and leftover Sunnis in the center. This structure is bitterly opposed by the Sunnis, who would be left with no natural resources or means of support, and threatens to drive even moderate Sunnis into the arms of the insurgency, the experts say. The regions would have the power to veto most national laws, and the central government would not have the authority to enforce its own laws or the constitution, according to experts.
Perhaps most importantly, the ambiguity extends to what many experts describe as the most important issue of all: how Iraq's oil riches would be divided. According to some interpretations, current oil reserves would be divided nationally, but newly discovered oil would belong to the regions, likely providing a windfall for the Shia in the south.
.......
Phebe Marr of the U.S. Institute of Peace, considered by many the leading U.S. expert on Iraq, said in an interview that the creation of a "Shiastan" region of the nine provinces in the south could lead to "an arc of instability" through the Sunni center and the eventual dissolution of Iraq.
.......
Despite Pentagon claims of an emerging Iraqi military force that will soon be capable of taking over the nation's defense, "there is no integrated army. What is there is [ethnic] militias," she said.
Marr said many Iraqis believe that Hussein's Baath Party supporters will one day reclaim the Sunni center of the country by promising stability and honest government. "I am frightened to death of this scenario," Marr said.
On the Zarqawi fact v. fiction line, consider this bit of an interview with Iraq's Vice President (via Juan Cole):
[Tu'mah] How do you see the security challenges facing Iraq, and is [Abu-Mus'ab] Al-Zarqawi fact or fiction?
[Abd-al-Mahdi] Al-Zarqawi is not a myth. He is real. This man is wanted first of all by the Jordanian government. He issues statements. He has a known history and his name was used. He is real, and the actions he commits are not fiction: the killings, death and explosions. The security challenge is really great since it has ramifications and complications, foremost among which are the remnants of the former regime who form the basic infrastructure of terror and sabotage, in an attempt to put the clock back and stop the political process by resorting to the methods of the former authorities, terrorizing people and holding them hostage.
One of those things that seems less true the more you hear it. Cole also notes:
Iraq issued indictments against 27 officials of the government of Iyad Allawi, charging them with over $1 billion worth of fraud. The accused include the Minister of Defense, Hazem Shaalan, and 4 other cabinet ministers. Most of these former officials, installed by old-time CIA asset Iyad Allawi when he was shoe-horned in as prime minister by the US and the UN in late June 2004, have fled the country.
In the same post he adds that 59% of the American public wants the troops out as soon as possible.
Jon Stewart mocks the magazine industry while making $150,000 and asking the publisher of Men's Health why his mag is "so gay?" Hahah nice.
Bob Woodward predicts Cheney Vs. Hillary 2008. And that alone is worthy of picking up a serious heroin habit.
'Ashton Kutcher Hacked' Hoax: apparently the recent Ashton Kutcher Hacked incident was as much of a hoax as the latest NYC subway alert. Fortunately the perpetrator (of zug.com) has explained what fun he had in generating a huge media storm, and subsequently planting the widespread rumor that Demi & Ashton were faking their proposed marriage.
ECONOMICS sux0rs! This Delphi bankruptcy thing is sketchy. Some analyst at Banc of America is now saying that there's around a 30% chance that GM will declare bankruptcy within a few years. Steve Clemons notes that top Delphi executives are going to try to make off with lots of Golden Parachute cash while leaving bondholders screwed. Morgan Stanley guy says (via the Agonist):
Delphi's bankruptcy is a big deal. It is emblematic of a new set of pressures bearing down on the US. The global rebalancing framework that I continue to embrace suggests that the world's growth and asset return dynamic has only just begun a major tilt away from the US and dollar-based assets. If that's the case, America will have little to offer in a low-return world for risk-averse and yield-hungry investors. Could Delphi be the long awaited wake-up call that drives this realization home?
We'll have some more econ stuff later...
Total disease paranoia: What would quarantines look like? Enforced by military firebombs a la Outbreak? Times UK notes that the leaked disaster plan indicates that we are DOOMED.
No bid, bitches! Cheney still has some fat stock options with Halliburton - more than 433,000! Nice. He receives more than $200,000 a year in that deferred compensation, and the stock options have increased in value 3,281%, up to $8.17 million. NICE (via Agonist)
That's Fucked Up: The War Porn guy got arrested for distributing obscene material - the dead bodies and so forth. Which begs the question of whether killing those people was in fact, a much worse, criminal obscenity.
It's up to Fitzgerald to now prove that the real criminal obscenity was the war itself, and the way its architects ruthlessly crushed anyone who tried to stop them.
There have been so many scandals breaking this week that I've really got Intrigue Fatigue:
Frank Luntz, who helped develop the "Contract With America" message that swept Republicans to power in 1994, was on the Hill last week warning the party faithful that they could lose both the House and the Senate in next year's congressional elections.
Har har har... Blogs for Bush darkly rambles about Democrats wishing for civil war. Fortunately, I scored a new apartment at the edge of downtown Minneapolis with Colin Kennedy. The apartment windows are just above the street signs in this photo. It's at Apartment 200, 32 Spruce Place, the "Haverhill Apartments", which is around the Laurel Village area. Basically to get there, you drive up Hennepin past the Minneapolis Community & Technical College and take a left onto Harmon Place, then go a block. It is right there on the first corner in. Not bad!
First, the Covert Propaganda. Let's put that in bold. Covert Propaganda. It is not getting much bounce on the TV news because there is too much going on. But I like it. See AFP or NY Times:
Federal auditors said on Friday that the Bush administration violated the law by buying favorable news coverage of President Bush's education policies, by making payments to the conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and by hiring a public relations company to analyze media perceptions of the Republican Party.
In a blistering report, the investigators, from the Government Accountability Office, said the administration had disseminated "covert propaganda" in the United States, in violation of a statutory ban.
Then, Valerie Plame and the War Propaganda. Meanwhile they started a war based on fabricated propaganda. I think I know which is worse. But they didn't like it when uppity ponks like Joe Wilson tried to deflate some of their more outlandish claims, so they smeared him by outing his wife as a CIA operative, which in their demented cocktail-party worldview somehow was thought to be a good idea. But who did this? Michael Ledeen? (well he quite possibly involved with the Yellowcake forgeries themselves, but...) Joe Wilson wasted no time in insinuating that Karl Rove and I. Lewis 'Scooter' Libby were involved, and I had this thing fairly well pegged back in 2003. Nearly two years ago, October 4, 2003, 'Everyone's National Disaster' I said:
The leaker went after Wilson to intimidate anyone else who might attack the Bush folks falsification of war intelligence. Let me offer a prediction about who was probably behind the leak: the Vice President's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. There have been insiders saying that the bad guy works in the Executive Office Building, where Cheney's people are. If I'm right about this, I definitely win a cookie.
(although on antiwar.com they had it pegged back then too - that was certainly one of my sources) I will award myself a cookie now. A fine headline from the WaPo: "Role of Rove, Libby in CIA Leak Case Clearer: Bush and Cheney Aides' Testimony Contradicts Earlier White House Statement". And so now they are saying, let's look at bringing in CONSPIRACY charges. Har har (via a happy Billmon)!
A new theory about Fitzgerald's aim has emerged in recent weeks from two lawyers who have had extensive conversations with the prosecutor while representing witnesses in the case. They surmise that Fitzgerald is considering whether he can bring charges of a criminal conspiracy perpetrated by a group of senior Bush administration officials. Under this legal tactic, Fitzgerald would attempt to establish that at least two or more officials agreed to take affirmative steps to discredit and retaliate against Wilson and leak sensitive government information about his wife. To prove a criminal conspiracy, the actions need not have been criminal, but conspirators must have had a criminal purpose.
Naturally folks are drooling over the opportunity to see who in the White House could actually be indicted. Dkos writer DC Poli Sci outlines how back in the Watergate days, the prosecutors wanted to avoid setting a precedent of indicting the President, so fortunately they had bi-partisan support for impeachment, an option not open these days. A very good place to start looking at the matter. An (actual) psychoanalyst looks at Bush's general destructive tendencies - and how he might lash out if Karl Rove et al. are threatened by Fitzgerald's CIA probe:
Why this matters now is the possible reaction of Bush to Fitzgerald's next serious move. My fear is that the inner emptiness in Bush will respond with absolute panic to the potential loss of Rove and his other pals. Panic in a sadist who believes in the apocalypse is something serious about which we all should be worried.
It would be funny if it weren't so obviously alarming. So would Fitzgerald bring charges against Libby? Froomkin in the WaPo has many bits about Miller's Big Secret.
Haaretz: U.S. officials eye possible Assad successors in Syria:
The sources added that senior American officials, in recent conversations with their Israeli counterparts, have expressed interest in Israel's assessments of Assad's possible successors, asking who Israel thought could replace him and still maintain Syria's stability. American officials said that their impression from these conversations was that Israel would prefer to have a weakened Assad, vulnerable to international pressure, remain in power, and is unenthusiastic about the possibility of a regime change in Syria.
The Israelis' impression was that America's main concern is the flow of terrorists into Iraq via Syria, rather than the threat posed by the Syrian-backed Hezbollah organization in Lebanon. But Washington, like Jerusalem, is eagerly awaiting the results of the Hariri investigation, and will not decide what to do about Syria until the findings have been published.
AIPAC Your ass, bitches!!! Funny stuff. Former Pentagon analyst (under Douglas Feith and the Office of Special Plans, part of the time) Larry Franklin is going to plead guilty to passing classified defense intelligence to AIPAC staffers, who in turn passed it along to Israeli intelligence agents at the embassy in Washington. AP story on it:
Rosen, a top lobbyist for Washington-based AIPAC for more than 20 years, and Weissman, the organization's top Iran expert, allegedly disclosed sensitive information as far back as 1999 on a variety of topics, including al-Qaida, terrorist activities in Central Asia, the bombing of Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia and U.S. policy in Iran, according to the indictment.
Presumably this means that he could really spill some beans on how AIPAC has operated as an agent of a foreign power (and probably as an espionage channel) while lobbying in DC. Justin Raimondo makes the 'maximalist' case that the Israeli government has, to some extent, been manipulating US policy. I think that "Israel's secret war on the US" goes a ways too far, but we are certainly looking at a serious Rabbit Hole of mysterious proportions. Raimondo puts his favorite pieces together in "AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty as Hell":
The chief beneficiaries of the conquest of Iraq, and subsequent threats against both Iran and Syria, have been, in descending order, Israel, Iran, and Osama bin Laden. Al-Qaeda has used the invasion as a recruiting tool and training ground for its global jihad against the United States. Iran has extended its influence deep into southern Iraq and has penetrated the central government in Baghdad. In the long run, however, Israel benefits the most, as a major Middle Eastern Arab country fragments into at least three pieces and the U.S. military is ineluctably drawn into neighboring countries.
While the U.S. imposes an occupation eerily reminiscent of Israel's longstanding occupation of Palestinian lands and prepares to deal with Israel's enemies in the region, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon makes major incursions into the West Bank, even while supposedly "withdrawing" from Gaza. In the meantime, the political and military bonds between the U.S. and Israel are strengthened, as the two allies present an indissoluble united front against the entire Muslim world.
Except the alliance is far from indissoluble, as the AIPAC spy scandal reveals. The U.S.-Israeli relationship, often described as "special," is rather more ambiguous than is generally recognized, both by Israel's staunchest friends and its most implacable enemies. This has come out in Israel's funneling American military technology to China, and the threat of American sanctions, but was also made manifest earlier by indications that Israel was conducting extensive spying operations in the U.S. prior to 9/11 – suspicions that are considerably strengthened by the AIPAC spy brouhaha.
Israel's secret war against America has so far been conducted in the dark, but the Rosen-Weissman trial will expose these night creatures to the light of day. Blinking and cursing, they'll be confronted with their treason, and, even as they whine that "everybody does it," the story of how and why a cabal of foreign agents came to exert so much influence on the shape of U.S. foreign policy will be told.
In the course of bending American policy to the Israelis' will, they had to compromise the national security of the United States – and that's what tripped them up, in the end.
Again, this is not my basic opinion about the situation, but it ought to be considered. On the flip side, Juan Cole reacts to Raimondo by pointing out that in Washington, it is ALL interest group politics, but when there is no wealthy counter-interest group to given foreign countries (like pro-Likud groups or anti-Castro Cubans) then U.S. policy gets incredibly one-sided and stupid. With the memorable headline "A Government of War Criminals, A Press of Agents Provocateurs, A Bureaucracy of Foreign Spies:"
I wish the argument were more nuanced, and there are many things in it with which I disagree (David Satterfield is likely to have been a relatively innocent bystander in this train wreck, e.g.). But because Raimundo pulls no punches, he forces us to consider the degree to which Congressional foreign policy on the Middle East in particular has become virtually captive to the Zionist lobby (just as US policy toward Cuba is captive to the Cuban-American community and its lobby). He clearly goes too far, but how far should an analyst of this case go? Billmon is almost equally scathing.
One thing must be said, which is that there is no sinister cabal, that all this is just single-interest politics. The American system is one of checks and balances, and takes it for granted that there will be lobbies on both sides of an issue. But because there are no wealthy, organized, well-connected lobbies on the other side of AIPAC or the Cuban-American National Foundation (e.g.), US government policy ends up being unbalanced and often irrational on those issues. And, AIPAC functions as a foreign agent in the US without having to register as such, and some of its major officers clearly have been deeply involved in espionage for Israel for years. The last two points are uncontestable. Is this really a situation that serves the American people? Franklin, the "go-to" man at the Pentagon for then Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, was trying to get up a US war against Iran, and was soliciting AIPAC's help. We already know that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has tried as hard as he could to get the US into a war against Tehran. Do the rest of us, who already have one military occupation of a Middle Eastern country we're not comfortable with, have any say at all in this? Don't we need a PAC for Middle East Peace that could begin offsetting AIPAC, the War PAC? If the pro-Israeli lobby or the Israeli prime minister want wars in the Middle East, why don't they fight them themselves? By the way, AIPAC has for several years been attempting to get Congress to pass a law that would put it in charge of the Middle East professors, like myself, and in a position to punish our universities financially if any of us criticize it or Israeli policy. The most dangerous thing about key elements of the Zionist lobby is that they really do want to gut the US First Amendment when it comes to Israeli interests.
I hope everyone who reads this will consider writing their Congressional representatives and senators and asking them to work to see that AIPAC is made to register as the agent of a foreign power, given the repeated pattern whereby it acts as such.
So yeah, Billmon has had a couple things to say about the matter. I also liked this UPI bit "Analysis: Netanyahu: US Opposes? So what?" which talks about Netanyahu's campaign to capture some more settlements as part of his bid to take over the Likud Party. I won't quote it now, but if you want evidence of how an insane racial chauvinist campaigns in favor of territorial expansion, you've got it. On the flip side, reflections about the peace movement in the broader Jewish community.
To hell with Des Moines: Finally the oh so productive 'retail politics' of Iowa and New Hampshire are finished as Dems to Add Contests to 2008 Calendar (via the Kos). So two more states will join IA and NH in the early set of primaries. I hope it's New York and California, or maybe Oregon and Montana. Or Mississippi and Kentucky. Whatever. Anything would be an improvement. Montana governor Brian Schweitzer was named the nation's 2005 "Hot Governor" by Rolling Stone but his story got axed. "'Since Hunter S. Thompson left, Rolling Stone hasn't been worth reading,' Schweitzer said," according to the article.
Able/Danger mystery continues: Newsday writes that the Pentagon had some sorts of leads on lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta before the attack, but the defense intelligence program Able/Danger was shut down and huge amounts of data got deleted. I've got an exciting conspiracy linked below about this, naturally!
Shaffer explained in a telephone interview that although Able/Danger never had knowledge of Atta's whereabouts, it had linked him and several other Al Qaeda suspects to an Egyptian terrorist, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who had been linked to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and later was convicted for conspiring to attack the U.S. Atta arrived in the U.S. some seven years after that bombing. But Shaffer and his attorney, Mark Zaid, emphasize that Able/Danger never knew where Atta was, only that he was connected to Abdel-Rahman and Al Qaeda.
"Not to say they were physically here, but the data led us to believe there was some activity related to the original World Trade Center bombing that these guys were somehow affiliated with," Shaffer said.
...[Senator] Specter sharply criticized the Pentagon for refusing to allow Shaffer, Phillpott, Smith and others who recall seeing the chart to appear and answer the committee's questions. "It looks to me as if it could be obstruction of the committee's activities," the senator said. Specter added that he was especially "dismayed and frustrated" by the committee's inability to hear from Shaffer and Phillpott, whom he described as "two brave military officers [who] have risked their careers to come forward and tell America the truth."
Pentagon to permit testimony: Following the hearing, Specter announced that the Pentagon had agreed to allow Shaffer, Phillpott and three other witnesses to testify in public next month, though a Specter aide said Tuesday that the Pentagon now insisted the hearings be closed.
.....Able/Danger was an experiment in a new kind of warfare, known as "information warfare" or "information dominance." One of the program's missions was to see whether Al Qaeda cells around the world could be identified by sifting huge quantities of publicly available data, a relatively new technique called "data mining."
The data miners used complex software programs, with names like Spire, Parentage and Starlight, that mimic the thought patterns in the human brain while parsing countless bits of information from every available source to find relationships and patterns that otherwise would be invisible.
Weird. Anyway the article also features some classic pre-9/11 bits such as the Phoenix memo and the arrest of Zacharias Mussaoui (so on the day of 9/11, the Minneapolis FBI had Nicholas Berg's email password inside Mussaoui's laptop. Random but interesting......)
War Porn: A very disturbing site called nowthatsfuckedup.com features images sent in by U.S. soldiers of dead people, blown to bits and so forth, from overseas, and this has been characterized as "the new pornography of war" (also The Porn of War at The Nation). Like any incredibly shady site, it's hosted in the Netherlands, so it's unlikely that lawyers can really get to them. It is very disturbing.
It seems like this is part of a very disturbing glorification of violence, using the aesthetic of death to provide meaning -- in other words, a surface manifestation of the inner emotional state that drives wars and murder. In contrast are the (warning: very graphic links) other photo galleries that can be found online that are intended to illustrate the horrors of Iraq, in order to encourage an end to the conflict. And there are those photos of flag-draped coffins coming into Dover Air Force Base in the United States that Bush was always obsessed with hiding from us. (thememoryblog, by the way, is excellent for more news on censored and concealed news like this)
Zarqawi-Goldstein update: I found another story about the ghost-like, eerie quality of how the Abu Musab al Zarqawi figure continues to generate media reports, while everyday Jordanians doubt he's still alive at all. This was by Dahr Jamail, who also has the Iraq casualty photo galleries linked above.
IRAQ MESS - time to grab our marbles and book it: Reuters: "Reuters says US troops obstruct reporting of Iraq." Now they are saying there is ONE fully functional Iraqi battalion. Great. Time to produce some kind of really important strategic benefit by blowing the hell out of some town (Sadah) eight miles from the Syrian border. I'm sure this will produce the same fine effects as the fourth time that the U.S. captured Samarra. Classified documents are talking about withdrawal strategies. "US Generals Now See Virtues of a Smaller Troop Presence in Iraq." as in:
"the generals said the presence of U.S. forces was fueling the insurgency, fostering an undesirable dependency on American troops among the nascent Iraqi armed forces and energizing terrorists across the Middle East."
The WaPo says that well, Bush is under pressure because Iraq is dissolving, and the Saudis are getting more vocal about noting this in public, which is not their usual style at all:
For all the public confidence, however, the Bush administration in private is nervous about this sensitive last stage, which will establish whether Iraq’s disparate religious and ethnic factions can stay together in a single nation — and whether civil war can be avoided, according to U.S. officials and experts on Iraq.
The administration has come under growing pressure at home and abroad over the past two weeks, with dire warnings from Arab allies and a prominent international group about the looming disintegration of Iraq. In an unusual public rebuke of U.S. policy, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister called a news conference in Washington last week to predict Iraq’s dissolution. He said there is no leadership or momentum to pull Iraq’s Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds back together and prevent a civil war. Other countries have expressed similar concerns in private, according to U.S. and Arab diplomats.
IRAQ Withdrawal Options Summary: Retired Lt. General William Odom adds that the Iraq war was "greatest strategic disaster in United States history". I mentioned Odom's analysis of What's really wrong with 'cutting and running' earlier. Michael Schwartz had a widely read reflection on why immediate withdrawal would be the better option now. Juan Cole's list of ten war demands for Congress, Billmon's sullen yet wise perspective and Robert Dreyfuss' view represent an excellent cross-section of thinking about the options for getting the U.S. away from this sorry vortex. Billmon's view of the War Porn site finally pushed him over the edge about the war, giving him the mental picture of growing, incipient Fascist tendencies in this country:
So I've been promising myself for a while now that I would break cover and at least admit that I'm not sure withdrawing from Iraq is the morally right thing to do, and have deep doubts about the arguments in favor of it.
But something happened on my way to a confession: I came across the Nation article on nonwthatsfuckedup.com, which meant I had to take a good, hard look at the psychopathic side of the American spirit, and consider its implications not just for the war on terrorism and the occupation of Iraq, but its role in the emergence of an authentically fascist movement in American politics, one which feeds on violence and the glorification of violence, and which has found an audience not just in the U.S. military (where I think -- or at least hope -- it's still a relatively small fringe) but in the culture as a whole.
I don't have time at the moment to explain fully why and how this peek at the banality of evil changed my thinking, although I'll try to cover it in a future post. Suffice it to say that my visit to nowthatsfuckedup.com was a reminder of the genocidal skeletons hanging in the American closet. It left me with the conviction -- or at least an intuitive premonition -- that an open-ended war in Iraq (or in the broader Islamic world) will bring nothing but misery and death to them, and creeping (or galloping) authoritarianism to us.
Jim Lobe had an excellent article about whether "Can the US Military Presence Avert Civil War?" This article is required reading. (Also it's worth recalling that Niall Ferguson was at my table when I had lunch with Michael Ledeen):
The growing spectre of a full-scale civil war in Iraq -- and the likelihood that such a conflict will draw in neighbouring states -- has intensified a summer-long debate here over whether and how to withdraw U.S. troops. Some analysts believe that an immediate U.S. withdrawal would make an all-out conflict less likely, while others insist that the U.S. military presence at this point is virtually all there is to prevent the current violence from blowing sky-high, destabilising the region, and sending oil prices into the stratosphere.
The Bush administration continues to insist it will "stay the course" until Iraqi security forces can by themselves contain, if not crush, the ongoing insurgency. But an increasing number of analysts, including some who favoured the 2003 invasion, believe Washington will begin drawing down its 140,000 troops beginning in the first half of next year, if for no other reason than the Republican Party needs to show voters a "light at the end of the tunnel" before the November 2006 elections.
.....In fact, some of these analysts believe that a civil war -- pitting Sunnis against the Kurdish and Shia populations -- has already begun. "A year ago, it was possible to write about the potential for civil war in Iraq," wrote Iraq-war booster Niall Ferguson in the Los Angeles Times. "Today that civil war is well underway," he asserted. While that remains a minority view, the likelihood and imminence of civil war in Iraq is no longer questioned by analysts outside the administration.
Ferguson blames the situation on Washington's failure to deploy a sufficient number of troops in Iraq to crush any insurgency. But a report released Monday by the International Crisis Group (ICG) pointed the finger at the U.S.-sponsored constitutional process, which will culminate in a national plebiscite Oct. 15, as having further alienated Sunnis from the two other major sectarian groups. Barring a major U.S. intervention to ensure that Sunni interests are addressed, according to the report, "Unmaking Iraq: A Constitutional Process Gone Awry", "Iraq is likely to slide toward full-scale civil war and the break-up of the country."
......"We created the civil war when we invaded (Iraq); we can't prevent a civil war by staying," Odom wrote last month in an essay entitled "What's Wrong with Cutting and Running?" He and Bacevich both argued that, instead of creating a vacuum in Iraq that would draw in neighbouring powers, Washington's withdrawal would force neighbours and other great powers -- who have been relegated to the sidelines by the Bush administration's high-handedness -- to form a coalition to ensure a conflict would not get out of hand.
Some of the administration's critics, however, argue that an immediate withdrawal will indeed make things far worse, particularly for Iraqis. "I just cannot understand this sort of argument," wrote University of Michigan Middle East expert Juan Cole on his much-read blog (www.juancole.com). "The U.S. military is killing a lot of Iraqis, but whether it is killing more than would die in a civil war would depend on how many died in a civil war," he wrote. "A million or two could die in a civil war, and that's if the war stays limited to Iraq, which is unlikely."
"A U.S. withdrawal would not cause the Sunnis suddenly to want to give up their major demands; indeed, they might well be emboldened to hit the Shiites harder," wrote Cole, who favours both the withdrawal of most U.S. ground troops and, in the absence of NATO or U.N. peacekeepers, the maintenance of Special Forces and U.S. airpower in the region precisely to prevent sectarian forces from escalating the conflict into a conventional civil war, as in Afghanistan.
Bing West reporting from Fallujah for Slate.com talks about the Emerging Iraqi Army and life in Fallujah in a series of articles. He was a Pentagon official, so the tone is towards "Rah-Rah!!" but it's still well-done. Ah, the Berg/Zarqawi story pops up here too. Anyway. 'C', an anonymous officer who served in Afghanistan and Iraq, related to Human Rights Watch how he couldn't get those in the chain of command to do anything about widespread torture practices. This quote says it all:
[At FOB Mercury] they said that they had pictures that were similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib, and because they were so similar to what happened at Abu Ghraib, the soldiers destroyed the pictures. They burned them. The exact quote was, “They [the soldiers at Abu Ghraib] were getting in trouble for the same things we were told to do, so we destroyed the pictures.”
....My company commander said, “I see how you can take it that way, but…” he said something like, “remember the honor of the unit is at stake” or something to that effect and “Don’t expect me to go to bat for you on this issue if you take this up,” something to that effect.
"Officials Fear Chaos if Iraqis Vote Down the Constitution". The suspicious sentiment of the moment:
"Nobody will be surprised to lose Anbar, and maybe one other province," one Pentagon official said. "We're not going to lose three."
Juan Cole reflects on the recent war protests and spineless Democrats. Fred Kaplan in Slate writes that the damned Constitution coming down the line in Iraq will be a disaster, and he hopes it's defeated:
The basic fact about Iraqi geography is that the Kurdish north and Shiite south have lots of oil, while the Sunni center does not. Read in this context, the basic fact about the Iraqi Constitution is that it strengthens the north and south, lets them form semiautonomous regions and expand them into super-regions—in short, it lets them dominate the country's politics and economics—while leaving the Sunnis with nearly nothing. It leaves the very faction that needs to be assimilated, if Iraq is to be a secure and viable nation, unassimilated.
Former Iraqi Army officers sat around and discussed why they wished that the old Army was still in existence, by Patrick Cockburn:
It was meant to be a moment of reconciliation between the old regime and the new, a gathering of nearly 1,000 former Iraqi army officers and tribal leaders in Baghdad to voice their concerns over today's Iraq. But it did not go as planned.
General after general rose to his feet and raised his voice to shout at the way Iraq was being run and to express his fear of escalating war. "They were fools to break up our great army and form an army of thieves and criminals," said one senior officer. "They are traitors," added another.
.....The meeting, in a heavily guarded hall close to the Tigris, was called by General Wafiq al-Sammarai, a former head of Iraqi military intelligence under Saddam who fled Baghdad in 1994 to join the opposition. He is now military adviser to President Jalal Talabani.
His eloquent call for support for the government in his fight against terrorism did not go down well. He sought to reassure his audience that no attack was planned on the Sunni Arab cities of central Iraq such as Baquba, Samarra and Ramadi, as the Iraqi Defence minister had threatened. He said people had been fleeing the cities but "there will be no attack on you, no use of aircraft, no bombardment by the Americans". The audience was having none of it.
......The meeting was important because the officer corps of the old Iraqi army consider themselves as keeper of the flame of Iraqi nationalism. One of them asked General Sammarai to stop using the American word "general" and use the Arabic word lewa'a instead.
In conversation, the officers made clear that they considered armed resistance to the occupation legitimate. General Sammarai told The Independent that he drew a distinction between terrorists blowing up civilians and nationalist militants fighting US troops.
One of the Senior Fuck-Ups, Joint Chiefs Chairman Richard Myers, is finally retiring to somewhere else that he can pointlessly bomb. Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair bitterly lament the spinelessness of Democrats as they "Sink Deeper into the Ooze." A final bit about the AIPAC == War Party meme today:
For those interested in some of the reasons for this incredible abdication [of Democrats avoiding the recent war protest], we can cite former National Security Agency staffer and muckraker Wayne Madsen who reported two days after the rally that "according to Democratic insiders on Capitol Hill AIPAC put out the word that any member of Congress who appeared at the protest, where some speakers were to represent pro-Palestinian views, would face their political wrath."
Madsen wrote that three members of Congress had been scheduled to speak at the rally McKinney, Woolsey and John Conyers. "Word is that AIPAC will direct its massive campaign to Wolsey's neo-con and pro-Iraq war primary challenger, California state assemblyman Joe Nation, who has strong connections to the RAND corporation."
USS Cole-Wayne Madsen conspiracy time: Meanwhile Wayne Madsen has a new really exciting conspiracy theory involving the famous Israeli art students, John O'Neill, September 11, Douglas Feith and Marc Zell, Able/Danger, Islamic militants in Bosnia, Plame's Brewster Jennings front company, Sibel Edmonds, Michael Chertoff, the USS Cole bombing (actually an Israeli missile, according to Madsen's unnamed CIA source) and the rest. Not worth betting the lunch money on, but a very entertaining counter-narrative about the ideologies and paranoia of our times. Time for Deep Politics, Comrade. But Madsen takes heart with all the breaking scandals, as I do on his site:
After almost five years of incessant outrages by the Bush regime, I have never been more optimistic that the tide may be beginning to turn.
UK Times: "Iraq's Relentless March of Death." Via lies.com (love the banner pic) we get a bit about Statements from the Leaders (via Kevin Drum):
Asked whether the insurgency has worsened, Casey said it has not expanded geographically or numerically, “to the extent we can know that.” But he noted that current “levels of violence are above norms,” exceeding 500 attacks a week. “I’ll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success,” he added.
So he is having trouble fully vaulting into lie territory, unlike Rummy. Lies.com also notes that surprisingly, adept liars' brains are built differently - with more white matter and less neurons in the prefrontal cortex.
Boeing and Bell Helicopter have apologized for running an advertisement for the V-22 Osprey aircraft that features soldiers invading a mosque. "It descends from the heavens. Ironically it unleashes hell... Consider it a gift from above." That's pretty fucked up. Apparently the building in the image says "Muhammed Mosque" in Arabic. Wow. Almost as ill-conceived as the boondoggle Osprey itself.
Abu Ghraib Photo Bomb: We are set for another batch of Abu Ghraib media to be released, much to the chagrin of the Pentagon leadership, who prefer to frame the issue as destabilizing and pointlessly inflammatory media. However, it is also excellent evidence for the American people that the Pentagon leadership does not deserve to keep their jobs, which is obviously the most important thing in the fucking world.
Former CIA dude Ray McGovern notes that the chain of command is constantly ducking responsibility for torturing people and all that. Stories of the 'New Boss' Iraqi security agencies are really scary, such as the story from Khalid Jarrar's detainment that I mentioned a while ago. You can almost taste the insanity and paranoia now generating inside those new Iraqi government agency buildings (actually, like Abu Ghraib, they're the same buildings as Saddam's day).
Paul Craig Roberts summarizes your basic reasons that Bush is stirring up some more wars with Iran and North Korea.
The Misc File: "India loses political credibility in anti-Iran vote" (IPS):
India, a country that aspires to be a superpower in Asia, lost its political credibility among the world's developing nations last week when it voted against Iran at a meeting of the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna. The headline in a leading Indian national newspaper said it all: "India's shameful vote against Iran." The criticism kept snowballing, as the media, academics and mainstream and left-wing politicians in New Delhi crucified the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for abandoning one of its longtime political and economic allies in Asia.
Well that's enough fun for today. With a little luck, let this post stand as this website's high water mark of charting the World's Sordid Affairs, the sinister inverse point, the final crest of the high and terrible wave we've been on. The opposite of this:
And that, I think, was the handle - that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting--on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right sort of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark--that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
Time is on our side. I'm moving to Minneapolis.
Yeah, I can't bring myself to write any more about the whole arrest incident. So I won't.
Start with Machiavelli for the Twenty-First Century from New Left Review. I liked this.
It is true that Bush sounds like LBJ in 1967 with staying the course. Tom DeLay got indicted, what fun. They are screaming partisanship but the Democratic Texas prosecutor has hit a lot of Democrats in the past.
In Ohio they are trying to un-gerrymander the legislative districts. Good luck folks.
Robert George, a self described "Catholic, West Indian black Republican" asks himself "Why Am I (Still) A Republican?" Indeed. There is a good deal of gloating on the left-blogosphere these days, as conservatives seem to split in all directions and run for cover. Stygius and Laura Rozen note that such luminaries as Andy Sullivan, Dan Drezner and Robert "the ghoul" Novak are running for cover.
I might have the sniffles. I wonder if it is H5N1 KILLER FLU. Which is spreading rapidly.
Arianna is saying what I said a while ago, that John Bolton is quite likely connected to the Valerie Plame CIA case. (antiwar.com was on it a while ago as Raimondo quickly puts on the comments). For more old bits, consider "They Knew" the intel was spoofed in In These Times, Aug 2004. Oh by the way, HongPong.com has the top Google ranking for "bolton fake intelligence," for the excellent post: "More stories of the fake intelligence and John 'the Moustache' Bolton". Hey, not bad!
The US is really leaving Uzbekistan. I really enjoyed this lengthy New Left Review profile about the history and situation of Chechnya. It very astutely points out that no legitimate Chechen leader has ever agreed with the Russians to be part of Russia or the USSR. Also the article adds that the FSB and Putin were widely suspected of orchestrating the 1999 apartment bombings subsequently blamed on Chechen rebels - terror99.ru is a sweet Russian site elaborating on some "conspiracy theories" about why a beam of shining light like Putin would ever dare do such a thing as bomb some buildings to freak out the Russian public.
Check out Arms Control Wonk. It's just cool. They have good info about North Korea among other things.
Oddly, Arlen Specter accused the Pentagon of blocking an investigation in the pre-9/11 "Able Danger" Pentagon intelligence project that people are now saying somehow identified Mohammed Atta, and other weird stuff. NY Times on it as well as CNN. I will spare you the billions of weird theories that could spring from this. Sorry - use your imagination.
The NY Times Company is cutting out 500 jobs.
An American diplomat characterized the depth of Shiite fundamentalist organizations taking solid control of southern Iraq as "our dirty little secret." If you are looking for a more realistic summary of Islamic militant movements and "the far enemy" check out this review of The Far Enemy on the Agonist. Some are arguing that Iran is not a global threat. Try "Give Iranian Nukes a Chance" by Slavoj Zizek (Aug. 2005), a lot of stuff about how the state projects its threat perceptions onto foreigners, justifying ongoing 'security measures' that are in fact the real threats to Democracy & Freedom. I think the truth lies in between, but it certainly is true that MAD logic may get the Iranians peace in the end - or a large glass parking lot. I hope for peace, and I am not a paranoid racist who thinks that Iranian civilization is totally suicidal and irrational.
Slavoj Zizek also wrote this bit about how the WMDs were MacGuffins in the narrative. Old but funny.
The Afghan heroin kingpins / warlords did quite well in the elections. Juan Cole noted that the British agents captured in Basra were apparently active in trying to intercept arms coming into Iraq from Iran. Basra is wack these days (FT adds to this, and Raimondo remarks that we're on the war road to Damascus and Tehran via Basra). Cole adds:
Among the more powerful Iranian arms merchants is Manucher Ghorbanifar, this one with friends in high places in Washington, who is trying to pull the United States into a war against Iran. War is good for arms merchants.
There is also some info about how much be-Baathification has really happened.
Check out this new film, Occupation Dreamland, about how some US troops handle their situation in Fallujah. There are sweet trailers. It looks amazing. Also check out this story about Turkey and its social conflicts.
Some commentary about Katrina's economic effects. The "Fog of Katrina" is being used to obscure unrelated economic information, they say. MorganStanley economist talking about how and when the global economy will get rebalanced. Richard Cohen at the WaPo says choose, dammit, Guns or Butter.
As always, between Israel and Palestine there is plenty of violence and even more spin. The Israelis got mighty angry when Hamas fired a bunch of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel, which Hamas justified by claiming that Israel blew up a vehicle at a militant rally, killing lots of people. It seems reasonable to me that the vehicle blew up on its own, but it is certainly possible that Israel did it. So Israel attacked Gaza and arrested a bunch of people in the West Bank. The 'militants' supposedly captured in the West Bank were to some extent part of the militant organizations' "political wings" and some of the more moderate elements, including those that favor reconciliation and intend to run in the upcoming Palestinian elections. I found the following on some kind of rightwing Israeli site, unitedjerusalem.org, where the text was loaded into some kind of interactive bias-judging webpage. Weird. But here is the "political" vs "militant wing" bit, which seems to be on Haaretz's print page here but not here or here. Thanks google.
In the largest arrest sweep since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the IDF apprehended 207 leaders of Hamas´ political wing, along with a number of Islamic Jihad activists in the West Bank early yesterday. Most of those arrested are not on the list of wanted men from the two organizations´ military wings, but rather their accomplices or activists in the political and civilian wings.
Palestinian sources said that among those arrested were several local leaders considered key figures in the upcoming third round of municipal elections to take place Thursday in 105 local authorities in the West Bank and in the fourth round of elections scheduled to take place in December, which include the major cities.
Among key activists arrested yesterday were several expected to run on Hamas´ ticket for the Palestinian Legislative Council elections on January 25. Prominent among the detainees is Sheikh Hassan Yusuf, along with his two sons. Yusuf, who was released from prison six months ago, and Muhammad Ghazal, a senior Hamas leader in the Nablus area, is considered a leader of the moderate camp espousing Hamas´ involvement in the political process.
But such a move was probably deemed necessary by Sharon for his own sordid domestic political reasons: On the other side, Sharon narrowly won his battle with Netanyahu over the Likud premiership and primaries, managing to retain the later Likud primary date and blunting Netanyahu's ever-intrigiuing conspiracy to take over the state. In a humorous twist, Sharon couldn't give his speech to the Likud Central Committee because his microphone went dead. This sparked a huge controversy between both sides, with the Netties claiming that Sharon did it himself to posture as a victim. Akiva Eldar always has interesting things to say about "Sharon's Cheerleading Squad", that is, the Israeli Left that now finds themselves in a strange political alliance.
I would like to believe that it was Sharon's idea, but Netanyahu actually approved it, to suit their weird personalities.... Anyway, also Likud members accused each other of ballot manipulation and voting fraud (as has happened in the past).
Israel would like a seat on the UN Security Council. The director of the Shin Bet security service says he expects more attacks from the West Bank now, which seems true as far as it goes tactically, but then again I think we can expect the settlers to Amp their Land Grab up now as well. The settlers are on a mission to persuade Likud Central Committee members of how freakin great they are.
I just found informationwar.org, a UK peace project. Nice name. Did you know that Winston Churchill once praised dropping poison gas on the Kurds? Funny story.
I missed the Green Day concert in St. Paul on Friday. It sounded like a hell of a good time, made particularly special by Billy Joe Armstrong's connections to the area: his wife is from New Brighton, and I have heard on reasonably good authority that he purchased a house on Summit Avenue. Star Tribune reported Saturday:
St. Paul was where he wrote some of the songs for the politically charged "American Idiot," the Grammy-winning album that is the best-selling nonrap CD of the past year, with more than 4 million copies sold. In the summer of 2003, he had walked around the track at Macalester College in St. Paul, writing the songs in his head.
This also tracks with what I've heard, that Armstrong was spotted a few times around the track - a more interesting celebrity sighting than that time Josh Hartnett came into the SuperAmerica and Grand and Cleveland when Alison was working. It would also explain why much of the album has a perfect rhythm for running. This song always made a lot of sense to me - it must have been because I was living down the street when he wrote it! :-)
So what's my real point today? The image of Senior Demon Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is an essential element of the Bush Administration's strategy to manage perceptions of their disastrous war - diverting blame and creating an attractive 'negative image'. Zarqawi is one of the principle Hollow Lies of the war.
Say, Hey!
Hear the sound of the falling rain / Coming down like an Armageddon flame / The shame / The ones who died without a name
Hear the dogs howling out of key / To a hymn called "Faith and Misery" / And bleed / The company lost the war today
I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies / This is the dawning of the rest of our lives / On Holiday
Hear the drum pounding out of time / Another protester has crossed the line / To find / The money's on the other side
Can I get another Amen? / There's a flag wrapped around the score of men / A gag / A plastic bag on a monument
I beg to dream and differ from the hollow lies / This is the dawning of the rest of our lives / On holiday
Meanwhile, in the Information Age of Hysteria, we have perhaps the underlying principle of our government in a nutshell, as Ron Suskind put it before the election:
The [White House] aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Enter the Demon of our Times.
Let me offer a theory: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi may actually exist, but his "existence" in the media is an essential element of the Bush Administration's Public Relations strategy to manage perception of the war. He is a personification of malevolent intent: if he wasn't around, we are told to believe, things would sort themselves out, so our motive has to be to crush him instead of confronting the Pentagon's essentially racist, disastrous policies. The Star Tribune carried a Washington Post/AP story on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's latest pledge to kill all the Shiites. Consider the following:
More bombings push Baghdad deaths near 200: Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post
BAGHDAD -- Insurgents believed to be allied with Al-Qaida in Iraq kept up bombings in the capital on Thursday, launching strikes that brought the two-day death toll close to 200.
The chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, Maj. Gen. Rick Lynch, said the surge in bombings represented the kind of occasional spikes in attacks that the military has been expecting "around certain critical events that highlight the progress of democracy."
In this case, an Oct. 15 referendum on Iraq's new constitution is only a month away.
"Remember, democracy equals failure for the insurgency," Lynch said. "So there has to be heightened awareness now as we work our way toward the referendum."
Police targeted
In the violence Thursday, suicide bombers killed at least 31 people in two attacks about a minute apart that targeted Iraqi police and Interior Ministry commandos, officials said. Insurgents also managed to land a single mortar round inside the Green Zone, the base for U.S. officials and Iraq's government. There were no casualties and only minimal damage, U.S. officials said.
A day earlier, at least 14 car bombs across Baghdad killed 167 people, the majority of them Shiite Muslim civilians -- the highest one-day toll of the war inflicted by insurgent attacks in the capital. Seven of the victims died overnight of their wounds.
An audiotape released on a website linked to Al-Qaida in Iraq after Wednesday's attacks said Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group had opened "all-out war" on Iraq's Shiite majority.
Attacks linked to Al-Qaida also hit the city of Ramadi, capital of the western province of Anbar, a stronghold of foreign-led fighters. Witnesses said Al-Qaida-allied fighters rocketed and shelled two U.S. military installations at Ramadi and traded fire with U.S. patrols in the city. The U.S. military reported one Marine killed and said a would-be car bomber also died. Iraqi emergency medical workers said Marine snipers killed six Al-Qaida fighters.
The two-day barrage of attacks attributed to Al-Qaida in Iraq, and the increasing control of towns in the west along the Euphrates River being asserted by foreign-led insurgents, intensified the U.S. military's focus on Al-Zarqawi.
U.S. commanders often have publicly denigrated his role in the insurgency to little more than that of a media-fostered figurehead. On Thursday, however, Lynch discussed Al-Zarqawi in some of the sharpest terms yet, calling him the Americans' main target and saying the United States was winning the fight against him.
"We believe we are experiencing great success against the most crucial element of the insurgency, which is the terrorists and the foreign fighters. The face of that is Zarqawi and Al-Qaida in Iraq," Lynch said.
"We've got great intelligence which tells us where he's moving to and where he's trying to establish safe havens. As soon as we see him trying to establish a safe haven, we will conduct operations," such as the one underway against northwestern insurgent strongholds in Tal Afar, Lynch said. "We're using all assets under our control in conjunction with the Iraqi security forces to find him and kill him."
Now let us refer to a little bit from Orwell's 1984... As WikiPedia summarizes the teachings of Emmanuel Goldstein:
...the state of war creates a mentality that suits the Party well. A Party member should be "a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war." Though "the entire war is spurious...and waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones", even Inner Party members who potentially could know better passionately believe that the war is real and will "end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world". .... There can never be any large-scale invasion of enemy territory, so that citizens of one superstate would come face to face with citizens of another and discover that conditions there are very much the same as in their own superstate: Even the prevailing ideologies are almost identical. To maintain the image of the enemy as a monster whose ideology is a barbarous outrage on common sense, all sides realize that "the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs"!
Since the war is a sham and each superstate is unconquerable, the ongoing "conflict" has no sobering effect on the oligarchies ruling the three superstates: .... "The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be. They are obliged to prevent their followers from starving to death in numbers large enough to be inconvenient, and they are obliged to remain at the same low level of military technique as their rivals; but once that minimum is achieved, they can twist reality into whatever shape they chose." [Paging Mr Suskind...]
Thus, the war is actually "waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact". As far as the lack of any genuine outside threat is concerned, the superstates might just as well agree to live in permanent peace; then they would still be "freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger" (the kind of danger that might force the rulers to behave somewhat responsibly). This, according to the author, "is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: War is Peace."
While I quietly alluded to this earlier, other people have been making this point for a while, but damn it, even the newspaper admits this "media figurehead" phenomenon is partly true. There's probably a real Zarqawi figure out there, but basically, these days I generally believe he is a media construction designed to provide a narrative that Joe Six Pack can understand. The exciting Zarqawi Chase (with, say, captured laptops and narrow escapes) is the kind of story that the NASCAR dad needs to stave off cognitive dissonance. The insurgency is not a failure of policy, it's not Rummy's and Myers' fuck-ups, it's this damn Zarqawi always trying to throw monkey wrenches in the system AKA "building democracy". Some might say it's a Leo Straussian Noble Lie to provide succor for the Bronze Masses. Let me throw in a Billmon post on this matter from a year ago:
The problem here is not with the Fallujans, the problem here is not with the coalition. The problem here is with foreign fighters, international terrorists, people like Zarqawi, who we believe to be in Fallujah or nearby.
Coalition spokesman Dan Senor: Press Briefing April 13, 2004
The security situation in Fallujah, Iraq, remains stable, and coalition forces there are engaged in a "robust hunt" for al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, believed to be in or near the city, coalition officials said today.
American Forces Information Service: 'Robust' Manhunt for Zarqawi Under Way April 13, 2004
Former regime elements can be former Ba'athists, they can be Iraqi extremists, they can be outside jihadists, they can be Zarqawi network folks as well.
Gen. Dick Myers: Press Briefing April 7, 2004
The terrorists, assassins are threatened by the Iraqi's people's progress toward self-government, because they know that they will have no future in a free Iraq. They know, as al Qaeda associate Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi put it in his letter recently, that we intercepted: "Democracy is coming"...
Donald Rumsfeld: Press Briefing April 7, 2004
A statement circulating in Iraq and signed by anti-U.S. groups last month claimed al-Zarqawi was killed earlier by American bombs in northern Iraq. A senior U.S. official denied the report of al-Zarqawi's death.
Associated Press: Al Qaeda tape takes credit for Iraq attacks April 6, 2004
The programmes of the Two Minutes Hate varied from day to day, but there was none in which Goldstein was not the principal figure. He was the primal traitor, the earliest defiler of the Party's purity. All subsequent crimes against the Party, all treacheries, acts of sabotage, heresies, deviations, sprang directly out of his teaching. Somewhere or other he was still alive and hatching his conspiracies: perhaps somewhere beyond the sea, under the protection of his foreign paymasters, perhaps even -- so it was occasionally rumoured -- in some hiding-place in Oceania itself.
George Orwell: 1984
And let us not forget Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's entry into the universe of the News Cycle came with the notorious Nick Berg decapitation video. This video had a number of strange anomalies in it, and I have suspected for quite a while that it was fake. My favorite alternate explanation was that the video was actually shot by US personnel inside Abu Ghraib prison (aside from the "Lawn Chair from Hell" connection) to distract attention from the exploding torture scandal.
Too conspiratorial? Such a video could never be fake? Then why does the great Zarqawi appear to have Two Legs, not One? Try the WikiPedia Nick Berg conspiracy theories page for even more! This WikiPedia paragraph essentially sums up my point:
There are rumors that Zarqawi is dead because no sightings of him have been confirmed since 2001. In one report, the conservative British newspaper Daily Telegraph described as myth the claim that Zarqawi was the head of the "terrorist network" in Iraq. According to a U.S. military intelligence source, the Zarqawi myth resulted from faulty intelligence obtained by the payment of substantial sums of money to unreliable and dishonest sources. The faulty intelligence was accepted, however, because it suited US government political goals, according to an unnamed intelligence officer.[14] The Zarqawi myth has also been purported to be the product of U.S. war propaganda designed to promote the image of a demonic enemy figure to help justify continued U.S. military operations in Iraq[15], perhaps with the tacit support of terrorist elements wishing to use him as a propaganda tool (a sort of Al-Qaeda Ronald McDonald).
I'm just going to wrap this up with a chunk from iconoclastic researcher Michel Chossudovsky, who wrote "Who is Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi?" at the Centre for Research on Globalisation:
War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, but the Chase keeps it Interesting. Hedges:The US intelligence apparatus has created its own terrorist organizations. And at the same time, it creates its own terrorist warnings concerning the terrorist organizations which it has itself created. In turn, it has developed a cohesive multibillion dollar counterterrorism program "to go after" these terrorist organizations. Counterterrorism and war propaganda are intertwined. The propaganda apparatus feeds disinformation into the news chain. The terror warnings must appear to be "genuine". The objective is to present the terror groups as "enemies of America."
The underlying objective is to galvanize public opinion in support of America's war agenda. The "war on terrorism" requires a humanitarian mandate. The war on terrorism is presented as a "Just War", which is to be fought on moral grounds "to redress a wrong suffered." The Just War theory defines "good" and "evil." It concretely portrays and personifies the terrorist leaders as "evil individuals". .....To reach its foreign policy objectives, the images of terrorism must remain vivid in the minds of the citizens, who are constantly reminded of the terrorist threat. The propaganda campaign presents the portraits of the leaders behind the terror network. In other words, at the level of what constitutes an "advertising" campaign, "it gives a face to terror." The "war on terrorism" rests on the creation of one or more evil bogeymen, the terror leaders, Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, et al, whose names and photos are presented ad nauseam in daily news reports.
.....Al Zarqawi is often described as an "Osama associate", the bogyman, allegedly responsible for numerous terrorist attacks in several countries. In other reports, often emanating from the same sources, it is stated that he has no links to Al Qaeda and operates quite independently. He is often presented as an individual who is challenging the leadership of bin Laden. His name crops up on numerous occasions in press reports and official statements. Since early 2004, he is in the news almost on a daily basis.Osama belongs to the powerful bin Laden family, which historically had business ties to the Bushes and prominent members of the Texas oil establishment. Bin Laden was recruited by the CIA during the Soviet-Afghan war and fought as a Mujahideen. In other words, there is a longstanding documented history of bin Laden-CIA and bin Laden-Bush family links, which are an obvious source of embarrassment to the US government.
In contrast to bin Laden, Al-Zarqawi has no family history. He comes from an impoverished Palestinian family in Jordan. His parents are dead. He emerges out of the blue. He is described by CNN as "a lone wolf" who is said to act quite independently of the Al Qaeda network. Yet surprisingly, this lone wolf is present in several countries, in Iraq, which is now his base, but also in Western Europe. He is also suspected of preparing a terrorist attack on American soil.
.....In Iraq, he is said to be determined to "ignite a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites". But is that not precisely what US intelligence is aiming at ( "divide and rule") as confirmed by several analysts of the US led war? Pitting one group against the other with a view to weakening the resistance movement. (See Michel Collon [1], See also [2] )
......What is the role of this new mastermind in the Pentagon's disinformation campaign, in which CNN seems to be playing a central role? In previous propaganda ploys, the CIA hired PR firms to organize core disinformation campaigns, including the Rendon Group. The latter worked closely with its British partner Hill and Knowlton, which was responsible for the 1990 Kuwaiti incubator media scam, where Kuwaiti babies were allegedly removed from incubators in a totally fabricated news story, which was then used to get Congressional approval for the 1991 Gulf War.
What is the pattern?
Almost immediately in the wake of a terrorist event or warning, CNN announces (in substance): we think this mysterious individual Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi is behind it, invariably without supporting evidence and prior to the conduct of an investigation by the relevant police and intelligence authorities.
In some cases, upon the immediate occurrence of the terrorist event, there is an initial report which mentions Al-Zarqawi as the possible mastermind. The report will often say (in substance): yes we think he did it, but it is not yet confirmed and there is some doubt on the identity of those behind the attack. One or two days later, CNN may come up with a definitive statement, quoting official police, military and/or intelligence sources.
Often the CNN report is based on information published on an Islamic website or a mysterious Video or Audio tape. The authenticity of the website and/or the tapes is not the object of discussion or detailed investigation.
Bear in mind that the news reports never mention that Al Qaeda is a creation of the CIA and that Al Zarqawi had been recruited to fight in the Soviet-Afghan war (This is in fact confirmed by Sec. Colin Powell in his presentation to the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003) (see details below). Both Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi are creations of the US intelligence apparatus. The recruitment of foreign fighters was under the auspices of the CIA.
.......
Colin Powell's Address to the UN Security Council
In the months leading up to the war on Iraq, Al Zarqawi's name reemerges, this time almost on daily basis, with reports focusing on his sinister relationship to Saddam Hussein. A major turning point in the propaganda campaign occurs on February 5, 2003. Al-Zarqawi was in the spotlight following Colin Powell's flopped WMD report to the UN Security Council. Powell's speech presented "documentation" on the ties between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, while focusing on the central role of Al-Zarqawi: (emphasis added):
Our concern is not just about these illicit weapons; it's the way that these illicit weapons can be connected to terrorists and terrorist organizations...
But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially much more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network, headed by Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants.
Zarqawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, fought in the Afghan War more than a decade ago. Returning to Afghanistan in 2000, he oversaw a terrorist training camp. One of his specialties and one of the specialties of this camp is poisons.
When our coalition ousted the Taliban, the Zarqawi network helped establish another poison and explosive training center camp, and this camp is located in Northeastern Iraq. You see a picture of this camp. Graphic, above. [there were no WMDS at this camp according to ABC report, see below]
The network is teaching its operative how to produce ricin and other poisons.... Those helping to run this camp are Zarqawi lieutenants operating in northern Kurdish areas outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq, but Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq. In 2000, this agent offered Al Qaeda safe haven in the region. After we swept Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, some of its members accepted this safe haven. They remain there today.
......
The Nicholas Berg Video
Barely a couple of weeks later (11 May 2004), Al Zarqawi is reported as being the mastermind behind the execution of Nicholas Berg on May 11, 2004. Again perfect timing! The report coincided with calls by US Senators for Defense Sec Donald Rumsfeld to resign over the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. It occurs a few days after President Bush's "apology" for the Abu Ghraib prison "abuses" on May 6. The Nicholas Berg video served to create "a useful wave of indignation" which served to distract and soften up public opinion, following the release of the pictures of torture of Iraqi prisoners. (See the intelligence assumptions underlying Operation Northwoods, a secret Joint Chiefs of Staff plan to kill civilians in the Cuban community in Florida, and blame it on Fidel Castro. (More: [3]))
..........
Extending the War on Terrorism
Are "we winning or losing" the war on terrorism. These statements are used to justify enhanced military operations against this illusive individual, who is confronting US military might, all over the World. Al Zarqawi is used profusely in Bush's press conferences and speeches in an obvious public relations ploy.
You know, I hate to predict violence, but I just understand the nature of the killers. This guy, Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate -- who was in Baghdad, by the way, prior to the removal of Saddam Hussein -- is still at large in Iraq. And as you might remember, part of his operational plan was to sow violence and discord amongst the various groups in Iraq by cold-blooded killing. And we need to help find Zarqawi so that the people of Iraq can have a more bright -- bright future. (Press Conference, 1 June 2004, emphasis added)
We become the embodiment of light and goodness. We become the defenders of civilization, of all that is decent. We are more noble than others. We are braver than others. We are kinder and more compassionate than others -- that the enemy at our gate is perfidious, dark, somewhat inhuman. We turn them into two-dimensional figures. I think that's part of the process of linguistically dehumanizing them. And in wartime, we always turn the other into an object, and often, quite literally, in the form of a corpse.
Colin Kennedy emailed me this excellent Reuters photo. Apparently Bush noted to Condi Rice at the UN World Summit, "I think I may need a bathroom break?" Not exactly decisive sounding leadership for going to the Pot. But either way I think it sets the tone.
"Nightmare is over as study says cheese doesn't cause bad dreams." A weird little Apple story.
HongPong.com enters Google Blog Search, and finds out the site is enmeshed in other people's conspiracy theories... It seems to update pretty quickly too. Oddly enough, the first "hongpong.com" hit turns up a link to a story on freedomforyou.blogspot.com... the paragraph that follows is certainly a weird enough thing to say. Oh the places that link to me...
Israel, Mossad, Iran and a Nuclear False Flag Attack...
...Since the US Army War College already acknowledges that the Mossad "has capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act," it may well be that the FBI has finally realized how dangerous the Israeli Fifth Column is, having begun to tighten the noose around the legendary Israeli spying operation in America by arresting Larry Franklin, Doug Feith's deputy in the Office of Special Plans, origin of the fraudulent Iraqi weapons of mass destruction intelligence. Not yet indicted, but identified as Co-Conspirator 1 and 2 along with Franklin are the two top AIPAC operatives to whom he passed higly classified intel: Steven Rosen, head of Policy and Keith Weissman, Iran specialist. Israeli sources expect Weissman and Rosen to be indicted for espionage in the coming weeks. [<--- that one is my link - Dan ]
Perhaps the two largest factions of the New World Order, Skull and Bones and the Zionists are now going into open warfare, as the Bush Administration attempts to clean out the neoconservatives, discipline the Israeli military and enforce the two state solution.
Uhm, for the record, I really disagree that Skull and Bones and "the Zionists" are the two major factions of anything at all... I keep looking around for this New World Order and all I seem to find are crazy people. Damn! :-) Nonetheless freedomforyou has a fairly classic conspiracy tale about Mohammed Atta, the "Able Danger" intelligence project that supposedly uncovered some of the 9/11 hijackers, and why not, a massive heroin smuggling operation being covered up by the government. Like I said, classic. Keep on going, Starfish Prime!
Katrina klusterfuck: Billmon tries to find enough Pepto-Bismol to swallow the nasty slime of spin and madness. As always Atrios is holding it down on the matter along with Josh Marshall, who is putting together a Katrina Timeline. William Rivers Pitt on "Washing Away the Conservative Movement" is very worth reading. In a nutshell his point is that the Grover Norquist "Starve the Beast" philosophy is dead because the first task of government is to look after the citizens, and it just don't work when you've starved it. Also "Wake of the Flood" is damn good. I liked this bit from Stirling Newberry:
The Days of Death and the Wings of Victory:
Every age buries the last, but the old age digs its own grave. And that is what Bush is doing, digging the grave of the 20th Century. It was a gleaming century that launched itself into space, it was a brutal century that killed millions. It was the century that fed more people, and cured more diseases than all the others. It was a century that saw more die in famines than in all the others.
The waste of that century has killed New Orleans. It is not the flooding, but the toxic wastes of decades that makes it uneconomical to rebuild the shattered streets of the Crescent City. It is not colonialism, but oil that drew us into Iraq. And we need not point out that Saddam came to power because of the Cold War realpolitick. But it is ours to bury the past, not to blame it. There are those who refuse to deal with reality, and think that simply distancing themselves from what was is enough - and there are many millions more who simply do not understand that the era of extraction, the era of oil and the era of a small closed affluent world surrounded by an ocean of dictatorships, deprivation and destitution is over.
........The coming weeks will strain the faith of those who have watched and waited so long. It will seem that so little of what needs to be done will be done. It will seem that the ponderous waith of putainous politics, and apathetic public opinion, will lumber only slowly in the direction of change. But the end is coming, and it will come with that shocking swiftness that the first wave of rain in a thunderstorm.
We should expect over the course of the next year, not a decline, but a crescendo of the corruption and cronyism that has marked this era and marred its politics. The thieves will be intent on throwing the last bags of loot before the robbery is over. Expect that the billions spent on Katrina's aftermath will leave Haliburton above the water, and hundreds of thousands below the poverty line. Piratization is the ethos of these last days of untrammelled and unchecked power.
And it is this that will overthrow them. The naked greed will shock a jaded public, one that will turn elsewhere, any where, for leadership and vision. They will recall in previous, even darker, hours, how the nation came together, and in that unity found achievement. They will ask why this time there was such a failure. They will not blame themselves - for in the minds of the public, they did what they were asked. Instead, they will blame the leadership to whom power was given.
Now, today, this instant, it is time to answer the call to arms. Some will protest, but more important is to contest. In 14 months time America will have a new revolution. Do not waste another minute, lest you be forced to admit that you were not there. The relief effort needs aid and comfort now. Candidates across the country need volunteers now. These two projects - to relieve the suffering and then to end it - must occupy every spare moment and ounce of energy. For it is the will of the people, that drives the wings to victory. And from victory to vindication of that which we have so long believed: that an America reborn, is an America redeemed.
Ah so then a few more links. Katrina, an economic tipping point. Good ideas for Principles of Reconstruction. Why is Blackwater there?! "Blackwater Mercenaries Deploy in New Orleans." The major media picks over the spin between federal and state officials about command of troops and the various chaotic snags. A million dumb things FEMA did. DomeBlog carries the news of evacuees at the Astrodome and George Brown Convention Center. Morgan Stanley on the Shoestring Economy. They seem to be starting to block the media. "The Thin Veneer of Civilization." Disturbing. As noted earlier:
Police in Suburbs Blocked Evacuees, Witnesses Report
By GARDINER HARRIS
Police agencies to the south of New Orleans were so fearful of the crowds trying to leave the city after Hurricane Katrina that they sealed a crucial bridge over the Mississippi River and turned back hundreds of desperate evacuees, two paramedics who were in the crowd said.
The paramedics and two other witnesses said officers sometimes shot guns over the heads of fleeing people, who, instead of complying immediately with orders to leave the bridge, pleaded to be let through, the paramedics and two other witnesses said. The witnesses said they had been told by the New Orleans police to cross that same bridge because buses were waiting for them there.
Instead, a suburban police officer angrily ordered about 200 people to abandon an encampment between the highways near the bridge. The officer then confiscated their food and water, the four witnesses said. The incidents took place in the first days after the storm last week, they said.
"The police kept saying, 'We don't want another Superdome,' and 'This isn't New Orleans,' " said Larry Bradshaw, a San Francisco paramedic who was among those fleeing.
What does an ethnic war in the Middle East look like? "Revenge Killings Fuel Fear of Escalation in Iraq." A relevant question these days. Anthony Shadid of the WaPo has an feature with TPMCafe about his new book on Iraq. The newspaper might tell you that the insurgents in Tal Afar are inscrutable evildoers, but a different moral frame (one where the Shiites and Kurds are not a bunch of Clark Kent do-gooders) suggests that the Tal Afar campaign is merely another episode in the splintering of Iraq. Prof. Juan Cole conceptualizes Tal Afar as Ethnic Civil War:
Much of the American press has reported the Tal Afar campaign as a strike by the new Iraqi Army, supported by US troops, against foreign infiltrators in the largely Turkmen city of 200,000.
As Jonathan Finer makes clear in the Washington Post, however, the operation looks different if we know some details. The "Iraqi Army" leading the assault turns out to be mainly the Peshmerga or Kurdish ethnic militia. Along for the ride are local Turkmen Shiites who are being used as informers and for the purpose of identifying Sunni Turkmen they think are involved in the guerrilla movement (apparently they sometimes make false charges to settle scores). Tal Afar was 70 percent Sunni Turkmen and 30 percent Shiite Turkmen. The Sunni Turkmen had thrown in with Saddam, and some more recently had turned to radical Islam. The Shiite Turkmen lived in fear of their lives.
So Kurds and Shiites are beating up on Sunni Turkmen allies of Sunni Arabs. That is what is really going on. The number of foreign fighters appears to be small, and US troops that had been guarding against infiltration on the Syrian border were actually moved to Tal Afar for this operation. It is mainly about punishing the Sunni Turkmen for allying with the Sunni Arab guerrillas. That the attack came in part in response to the pleas of local Shiite Turkmen helps explain why Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari (Shiite leader of the fundamentalist Dawa Party) authorized it, and went to Tal Afar on Tuesday for a photo op.
The US will never get stability in Iraq if it is merely an adjunct to a Kurdish-Shiite alliance against the Sunni Arabs and their Turkmen supporters.
As far as Iraq breaking into pieces is concerned, well the spooky new Constitution seems to have been finally tacked down, and there are key provisions that allow "super-provinces" to be organized. Probably Kurdistan and Sumer in the south would be organized to have federal-style power over many affairs, possibly including the all-important oil revenues. Again at juancole.com, guest writer Roger Myerson, a professor of economics who analyzes democratic structures interacting with economics, finds that the super-provinces would not help efficiency, but instead increase the likelihood of secession and breakup of Iraq:
Merging provinces into larger regions cannot increase the ability of local governments to adapt to local conditions. In the American federal system with its 50 states, the leaders of southern and northern states already have the ability to adapt their local administrative practices to their local variations of our southern and northern subcultures. Merging our state governments into larger regional mega-states could only decrease local adaptability. But such mergers could also seriously increase the possibility of secession. The leader of a regional mega-state that included a large fraction of America's population and resources would perceive more benefits and fewer risks in contemplating secession from the Union than any state governor would today.
In a well-designed federal system, the existence of small autonomous local governments can improve the performance of national democracy, because politicians in a federal democracy can prove their credentials for national leadership by serving successfully as leaders of autonomous local governments. Americans have regularly found strong candidates for president among our state governors. This effect of federalism on national elections may be particularly important for new democracies, where candidates with good reputations for responsible democratic service are likely to be scarce. For example, the PRI's long grip on national power in Mexico was broken by an independent state governor.
From this perspective, an ideal federal system would grant substantial autonomous power to local governments that are relatively small but are just large enough that successful management of a local government can demonstrate strong qualifications for national leadership. Given provinces that have this minimal size, the effects of merging provinces would be to decrease the number of such independent local leaders and to increase the chances of regional secession. So the principal beneficiaries of such mergers would be the politicians who expect to become leaders of the separate regions.
Israel business: Things are very wrapped up in Gaza and Palestinians are free to wander between Egyptian Rafah and Gazan Rafah (how did the line get down the middle of that city anyway?).
In New York where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said he expected Egypt to bring the Egypt-Gaza border under control. "I imagine the Egyptians will get a grip," he said. "There is heavy American pressure on Egypt and the Palestinians on this issue." Palestinian Foreign Minister Nasser al-Kidwa on Wednesday blamed Israel for chaos at the border, as the frontier remained open for the third consecutive day and hundreds of people streamed freely from one side to the other. Addressing the GA, al-Kidwa said that the situation had been of Israel's making as it had insisted on a unilateral withdrawal from the area. Gaza's future, al-Kidwa added, would be determined by Israel's actions in the West Bank. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Tuesday that the government is going to make investing resources in developing the West Bank settlement blocs a top priority. Israel pulled the last of its troops from Gaza early Monday morning, marking the end of 38 years of miltiary rule in the area. Egypt initially said it was allowing free passage across the border as a humanitarian gesture, and pledged to restore order within days. On Wednesday, however, Hamas members blew a hole in the concrete fence that runs along the border, having cleared the area to prevent casualties. Palestinian police did not intervene. Egypt on Wednesday warned Palestinians crossing the frontier to return by sunset when passport controls were to be reimposed, and said it had found an arms-smuggling tunnel under the border. By nightfall, the border was still wide open.
So the Palestinians came in and whooped it up. There is even a bit of paranoia in Israel that Egypt is perhaps planning another war:
The Philadelphi route and the next war
There are quite a few policy makers in Jerusalem who believe that deploying several hundred Egyptian soldiers along the Philadelphi route is a strategic mistake, which will lead to disaster. .... Even 26 years after the signing of the peace treaty with Egypt, many believe, as does Steinitz, that the peace is temporary, and that Israel must prepare for the next war with Egypt. The strongest proof of Egypt's true intentions is its massive military armament. Why does Egypt need such a large and advanced army, they ask, if it has no intention of fighting Israel in the future? After all, Egypt has no other enemies whose military power justifies such extensive armament. And if Egypt is in fact planning war, why should Israel help it prepare, by allowing the deployment of an Egyptian military force on the border of the Gaza Strip?
......However, the reason for the military strengthening of Egypt is not the desire to wage war on Israel, but rather fear of Israel. It is hard for Israelis to believe that anyone is liable to consider their peace-loving country a military threat. But as is written in the annual report on the balance of power in the Middle East recently published by Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, Egypt sees Israel as a genuine threat, for several reasons.
The first is that the Israel Defense Forces is stronger than Egypt's army. The Egyptian regime sees Israel as an unstable factor, which tends to use force to resolve political problems. Egypt believes that Israel has extremist forces, whose rise to power is liable to lead to belligerence. In Cairo they have not forgotten the declaration by Avigdor Lieberman, who as minister of national infrastructure in 2001 warned that the IDF could destroy the Aswan Dam. Egypt regards the building of a modern military force as a factor that will deter Israel and ensure the stability of the peace treaty.
A third reason involves Egypt's low self-image in relation to Israel. Israeli economic, military, scientific and technological superiority intensifies Egyptian frustration, and this gap spurs Egypt to compete with Israel in the area of arming itself.
The final withdrawal after all these decade prompts some reminiscing from Haaretz about why the hell the Israeli government tried to dominate it in the first place:
The sky did not fall down
By Tom Segev, Haaretz Correspondent
The nearly 40 years of Israeli rule in the Gaza Strip that have now come to an end leave behind a terrible heritage of oppression, bereavement and hostility. The occupation destroyed a number of the fundamental values of Israeli society. The cheap laborers that came from Gaza helped to heap wealth on some of their employers; but from many aspects, they also damaged the Israeli economy.
Many Israelis warned this would happen. Here's a story that requires a psychologist more than a historian.
On the eve of the Six-Day War, Israel Defense Forces officials debated the question of whether or not to conquer the Gaza Strip. Then chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin was opposed to the idea, commenting, "We can forgo the Strip." And then, "There's no point in getting involved with the Strip." At most, Rabin believed that the Strip could be conquered as a bargaining chip, with his idea being that immediately after its occupation, the area would be returned to Egypt in the framework of an agreement that would ensure free sailing in the Tiran Straits, and other terms too perhaps.
A number of the officers who participated in the discussions tried to persuade Rabin "to take" Gaza. "Brigade 60 will not have any trouble with the Strip mission," said then GOC Southern Command Yeshayahu Gavish, while deputy chief of staff at the time, Haim Bar-Lev, promising that "the cleansing" of the Strip would take no more than four hours.
At some stage during the discussions, then newly appointed defense minister Moshe Dayan joined the fray. He opposed occupying the Strip because of the Palestinian refugees who had settled there after fleeing and being evicted from their homes in 1948 and thereafter. According to Dayan, Israel had no interest in taking responsibility for looking after them. "Let others worry about them," he said, deciding that during the first stage of the war, at least, the IDF would not move into Gaza.
However, the minutes of the discussions (kept at the IDF archives) include an argument in favor of occupying the Strip, and it is an eye-opener because of its irrational nature. "It's a shame to forgo the headline: 'Gaza is in our hands,'" was Rehavam Ze'evi's contribution, which expresses the essence of most of the decisions that led to the occupation of the territories in the Six-Day War.
As long as the alternatives facing the state ahead of the Six-Day War were considered in a level-headed manner, most of the decision-makers agreed that most of the territory that Israel was likely to occupy shouldn't be occupied. Nevertheless, the territory was occupied, because when the battles began, the decision-makers acted on gut feelings and from the heart, and not from the head.
Also there was a story about Ehud Barak and the various rumblings of an Israeli Left trying to pull itself together, figure out whether or not is worth supporting Sharon if he leaves another couple West Bank settlements or not. This is the first I've heard in a while of Ami Ayalon, the pro-peace advocate who used to be the director of Israel's Shin Bet internal security service - the only director of a security agency I've ever met, save the time I saw Porter Goss in the Ft. Myers airport.
Along the far edges of Israeli politics, in a side alley far from the central stage, the Israeli left is trying to resurrect itself, to signal that it has not fled, that it still has something to say. In the view of some, this is a heroic struggle; in the view of others, a pathetic attempt. Who's got the strength for all this talk about a permanent settlement, about a Palestinian partner, about a Geneva agreement, about "peace," when everything is focused on Ariel Sharon and his battle for survival against Bibi.
The demonstration scheduled by the left for Saturday night, September 24, the day before the Likud Central Committee convenes, was planned to be the great show of unity of all of the bodies, organizations, and individuals with good intentions. But less than two weeks before the date, first cracks are already showing in the wall. Officials from Ami Ayalon's "People's Voice" announced a few days ago that they were pulling out of the joint committee organizing the demonstration. Its message - a permanent settlement, now - seems wrong to them. Even though the whole essence of the People's Voice is a permanent settlement. People's Voice representatives had other suggestions that were rejected by the Geneva agreement and Peace Now; for instance, declared support for Sharon, a call on Sharon to continue the evacuation of isolated settlements.
There is no way we could accept that, say the Geneva folks; if Sharon evacuates another three settlements in his next term, that is something for which we should support him? Besides which, say Yossi Beilin's people, who decided that the people are against a permanent settlement? As evidence, they present a poll conducted last week by the New Wave polling institute, in which the following question was asked: Are you for or against a permanent settlement between Israel and the Palestinians that would include the evacuation of most of the settlements in Judea and Samaria? Forty-seven percent said they backed the statement, and 42 percent said they were opposed.
It was a disturbing episode to see photographs of torched synagogues in the old Gaza settlements. Historically, no positive situations have followed from torched synagogues, but on the other hand, they were generally ugly, heavy concrete structures designed to withstand mortar attacks, more aesthetically bunkers than temples. it is easy to understand why the Israelis could not bring themselves to destroy the structures, (as the chief rabbi of Moscow reflects) but they really set up the Palestinians, who would obviously want to pick apart every settlement building. And now the Israeli police fear revenge attacks by right-wing Israelis against mosques in Israel.
Severance just messaged me to say hi from London. She added "never buy batteries in shepherd's bush." Not sure why. But there you go.
Randy Kelly got whomped in the St Paul mayoral primary, shocking as it is. They were gloating at the DailyKos about how his Bush endorsement bit him on the ass in a town like this. I added what I know firsthand of Kelly's self-justification for endorsing Bush last year:
Kelly endorsing Bush == Homeland Security cash
Let me relate a funny story about Mayor Randy Kelly. Earlier this year he came to talk to students at Macalester College (where i just graduated from) and there were a lot of annoyed Mac Dems wearing signs that said something like "I support real Democrats". So finally the question came, why the hell did you endorse Bush?
Well he said basically that he did it because he believed it would be the best for St. Paul, apart from his personal preferences. How would it be best? Well, he said, it makes it easier to get things out of Washington. So when the Department of Homeland Security was abruptly going to cut St. Paul out of a whole bunch of funding (it was probably for first responders, as someone noted above), he proudly said that he was able to go to Washington DC and get the money back - in other words, endorsing Bush made it easier to get back the patronage cash that is apparently being funnelled in the most political way possible through the damned Department that is supposed to keep all Americans safe.
I was taken back by the abrupt cynicism of this - it hadn't occurred to me that DHS money was being used to reward local politicians in such a way. Kelly was very matter-of-fact about this. I guess this is what federal-city realpolitik is all about, but his glib and direct statement on it shocked me.
(it is a little reminiscent of how FEMA seems to have been used to funnel cash into Florida in 2004 to warp the election)
This post is hyper long, but why not toss in a bit about "Lost at Tora Bora", published four years after 9/11? A fine account of how we surrounded Bin Laden in the cave complex with 36 Special Forces, and tried to buy off a bunch of goofy heroin-laden warlords without realizing that Bin Laden had paid many off already. I would quote this but really you should read about this critical opening episode of the War on Terror, the whole thing. Tom Watson reflects on it. it's never The End.
I have decided that this post shall look delirious. Sorry.
ACLU: Government documents on torture
http://www.angelfire.com/indie/hairtransplant/
"Up is down"ism as a graphic.
I thought this was fantastic. A nice profile of Douglas Feith and what a horrible role he has played in the health of Zionism and the United States alike, from the Village Voice's Bush Beat. More background on Doug Feith, his role in Iraq and the Office of Special Plans. A really fabulous article by Feith in 1993 in which he highlights his extreme racism and fanatical views of the West Bank settlements (this was written when they were a fraction of current size)
The weaving around the bigshot Democratic centrists regarding Iraq. Why the hell should I care what another internet pundit like Yglesias says? i don't know, this navel gazing is tiresome but at least these guys are trying to get a grip on it. (also via dailykos)
No power, no constitution in Iraq (AP)
Blackouts disrupt oil exports as Iraqi parliament cannot overcome ethnic rivalries. Bush defends war amid Texas protests.
Joe Klein always seems to piss me off, with his holier-than-thou wisdom that has turned out to be worthless time and again. And here it drips with contempt for those who dare to challenge his orthodoxy, while he spins around and admits that it's evaporated, but the 'naive' types somehow don't get it, as always:
Perhaps he feels the pain more intensely than other Presidents, knowing that the real war in Iraq, the one that began after he proclaimed that "major combat operations are over," was not anticipated by his Administration, a colossal failure of planning and execution. It is also possible that there is more than crude political calculation to the President's failure to attend funerals; his refusal to intrude upon the private grief of the families has presidential precedent. But the inability to acknowledge these terrible losses leaves an aching void in the rest of us. It isolates the general public from the suffering that is a dominant reality of life in military communities.
And that is why the awkward anguish of Cindy Sheehan has struck a chord, despite her naive politics and the ideology of some of her supporters. She represents all the tears not shed when the coffins came home without public notice. She is pain made manifest. It is only with a public acknowledgment of the unutterable agony this war has caused that we can begin a serious and long overdue conversation about Iraq, about why this war—which, unlike Vietnam, cannot be abandoned without serious consequences—is still worth fighting and why we should recommit the entire nation to the struggle. This is a failure of leadership, perhaps the signal failure of the Bush presidency.
Sheehan defends herself. Meanwhile, back at the Crazy Ranch: US Christian Broadcaster Calls for Chavez Assassination
Pat Robertson said the United States has the ability to "take out" Mr. Chavez, and said he thinks the time has come to use that ability. Mr. Robertson accused Mr. Chavez of supporting communism and Muslim extremism, and said that killing him would be a "whole lot cheaper" than starting a war.
Chavez Ally: Robertson a 'fascist.' Why Pat Robertson's Statements Help Hugo Chavez. Oh Time. You and your talk of angry neoleftists.
Chavez is no doubt a source of concern for Washington, if only because Venezuela is America's fourth-largest foreign oil supplier. Chavez's erratic and often bellicose anti-U.S. rhetoric—he publicly called Bush an "ass____" in Spanish last year—as well as his desire to sell less oil to the U.S. and more to ideological allies like China, are hardly comforting as gas nears $3 per gallon. But neither is Chavez's embrace of nations like Iran, and nor is the fact that he's leading a politically potent (and, to the Bush Administration, potentially destabilizing) wave of angry neo-leftism in Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico.
But Chavez holds cards that make remarks like Robertson's all the more incendiary on the Latin American street, where language like "U.S. imperialism" suddenly has currency again. One is the past: Latin Americans have too many vivid and bitter memories of U.S. intervention in their countries—operations that sometimes included brazen assassinations —which is why the Bush Administration got burned by accusations it backed a failed coup against Chavez in 2002. Another is democratic legitimacy: Chavez, for all his authoritarian tendencies, is a democratically elected head of state who last year won a national recall referendum approved by international observers.
Venezuela Slams Robertson Over Remarks
Libertarian griping about the War on Terror eroding freedoms. True enough. Bush vs. Benedict: Catholic neoconservatives grapple with their church’s Just War tradition. Another libertarian griping about how our constitution has been hollowed out. Was the Credit too loose?
One war theory: Iraq Was Surviving the Sanctions Why They Wouldn't Wait. A tipping point on Iraq: HAS it been reached? (Jim Lobe)
Stories from the Gaza withdrawal:
Troops, police complete forced evacuations in less than a week.
NY Daily News: Hand-to-hand fight in Gaza. Bush: Next step after pullout is working gov't. in Gaza Strip.
Fascinating tale of the former West Bank civil administrator, who basically made himself an enemy of the settlers.
Bush might just be crazy then:
Is Bush Out of Control?
By DOUG THOMPSON
Aug 15, 2005, 05:46
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Buy beleaguered, overworked White House aides enough drinks and they tell a sordid tale of an administration under siege, beset by bitter staff infighting and led by a man whose mood swings suggest paranoia bordering on schizophrenia.
They describe a President whose public persona masks an angry, obscenity-spouting man who berates staff, unleashes tirades against those who disagree with him and ends meetings in the Oval Office with “get out of here!”
In fact, George W. Bush’s mood swings have become so drastic that White House emails often contain “weather reports” to warn of the President’s demeanor. “Calm seas” means Bush is calm while “tornado alert” is a warning that he is pissed at the world.
Decreasing job approval ratings and increased criticism within his own party drives the President’s paranoia even higher. Bush, in a meeting with senior advisors, called Senator Majority Leader Bill Frist a “god-damned traitor” for opposing him on stem-cell research.
“There’s real concern in the West Wing that the President is losing it,” a high-level aide told me recently.
A year ago, this web site discovered the White House physician prescribed anti-depressants for Bush. The news came after revelations that the President’s wide mood swings led some administration staffers to doubt his sanity.
Although GOP loyalists dismissed the reports an anti-Bush propaganda, the reports were later confirmed by prominent George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank in his book Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. Dr. Frank diagnosed the President as a “paranoid meglomaniac” and “untreated alcoholic” whose “lifelong streak of sadism, ranging from childhood pranks (using firecrackers to explode frogs) to insulting journalists, gloating over state executions and pumping his hand gleefully before the bombing of Baghdad” showcase Bush’s instabilities.
“I was really very unsettled by him and I started watching everything he did and reading what he wrote and watching him on videotape. I felt he was disturbed,” Dr. Frank said. “He fits the profile of a former drinker whose alcoholism has been arrested but not treated.”
Let's Roll. The two northern West Bank settlements went down without serious violence between the IDF and settlers, though some settlers have raided Palestinian villages. But a recent announcement of Jerusalem-region settlement construction jeopardizes any peace deal. E1 is going to be enclosed by the Big Fence. Cutting off South West Bank (Bethlehem & Palestinian neighborhoods) from North West Bank (Ramallah and northern Palestinian Jerusalem villages) . This tract of land is literally an ALL IMPORTANT key to a Final Agreement. But Sharon, ever the tactician, is going to make his move, World Court be damned. What does the Israel Hasbara Committee say?
(^this graphic from The UK Times)
Peace Now, the Israeli peace group which is anti-settler (and pro-Stable Zionism I might add) What is E-1?
What is E-1? Is it the same as reported plans to expand Ma'ale Adumim?
E-1 is short for "East 1," the administrative name given to the stretch of land northeast of Jerusalem, to the west of the settlement of Ma'ale Adumim. When people talk about E-1 today, they are referring to a longstanding Israeli plan – never implemented – to build a large new Israeli neighborhood in this area.
E-1 is not the same as the expansion of Ma'ale Adumim. The ongoing expansion of Ma'ale Adumim, which the biggest settlement in the West Bank (about 30,000 people), is toward the east, in the direction of another settlement, the Mishor Adumim industrial park.
Is E-1 part of Israel or the West Bank?
E-1 is part of the West Bank. It was never annexed to Israel and since 1967 it has been under Israeli military law.
(photo source) Is Ma'ale Adumim part of Israel or the West Bank?
Due to its close proximity to Jerusalem, Ma'ale Adumim is viewed by most Israelis as a suburb or neighborhood of Jerusalem. However, Ma'ale Adumim is located in the West Bank and is therefore a settlement. The area on which it is located was never annexed to Israel and since 1967 has been under Israeli military law. Ma'ale Adumim is the largest settlement in the West Bank and is one of only four settlements in the West Bank classified by Israel as a "city." Many observers expect that under any future peace agreement Ma'ale Adumim will remain part of Israel, as was the case under the Clinton proposal and the Geneva Initiative (with a land swap to compensate the Palestinians for the territory).
Why are Israeli construction of E-1 and the expansion of Ma'ale Adumim a big deal? (AERIAL PHOTO)
Construction of E-1 would jeopardize the hopes for a two-state solution. It would, by design, block off the narrow undeveloped land corridor which runs east of Jerusalem and which is necessary for any meaningful future connection between the southern and the northern parts of the West Bank. It would thus break the West Bank into two parts – north and south. It would also sever access to East Jerusalem for Palestinians in the West Bank, and sever access to the West Bank for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem. Both of these situations are antithetical to the achievement of any real, durable peace agreement and the establishment of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state.
The expansion of Ma'ale Adumim, as with the expansion of any other settlement, is a unilateral act which undermines and jeopardizes efforts to resume negotiations which are based on the principal of two states living side by side with peace and security.
Yes, it's got its own website: www.securityfence.mod.gov.il/Pages/ENG/operational.htm
So the latest news:
Israel plans police station on key West Bank land
Thu 25 Aug 2005 10:26 AM ET
By Cynthia Johnston
JERUSALEM, Aug 25 (Reuters) - Israel is finalising plans to build a police station on a strategic tract of land near Jerusalem in a move Palestinians fear will ultimately isolate the West Bank from the holy city and deny them a viable state.
The construction would be Israel's first on land where the Jewish state hopes to build 3,500 settler homes to link Jerusalem to the biggest West Bank settlement, Maale Adumim, despite U.S. opposition. That plan is on hold for now.
A spokesman for Israel's civil administration, Adam Avidan, said on Thursday final approval to build the station was days away and construction could begin in as little as two months.
Such a move is likely to anger Palestinians two days after Israel completed its evacuation of all 21 Gaza Strip settlements and four of 120 in the West Bank under a plan that has been touted as a springboard to renewed peacemaking.
It also comes a week after Israel issued orders to seize four tracts of Palestinian-owned land near Maale Adumim to build its West Bank barrier, whose route takes in that settlement.
By enveloping the enclave on Israel's side of the barrier, Palestinians say Israel would cut off the West Bank from Arab East Jerusalem, which they want as capital of a future state.
Israel, which says its barrier keeps suicide bombers out of Israeli cities, said the police station was needed purely for security reasons. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has said he wants more settler homes built in the area. "I think everyone understands that Maale Adumim in any final status scenario would be part of Israel," Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said of Israel's largest settlement, which has around 30,000 inhabitants. [NOTE "Hegemonic Discourse"!! ]
"But we are not building residential housing. Although the prime minister has expressed his position that he would like to see that happen, it is not happening. And I think there is an appreciation of that."
Israel considers all of Jerusalem as its eternal capital, a claim not recognised internationally. Palestinians want the Arab eastern sector, which Israel also captured in 1967.
U.S. embassy spokesman Stewart Tuttle, asked about the plan, reiterated a call by President George W. Bush that Israel stop settlement construction, but had no comment on the fresh plans.
Israel evacuated 9,000 settlers and some 6,000 supporters from Gaza and part of the West Bank this month. More than 200,000 West Bank settlers remain, primarily in large blocs like Maale Adumim Sharon says Israel must keep for strategic reasons.
Sharon billed the pullout as "disengagement" from conflict with Palestinians in revolt but Palestinians fear the move was a ruse to cement Israeli control over much of the West Bank. They said they now fear Israel will use the police station to stake a claim to West Bank land near Jerusalem and block the creation of a territorially contiguous Palestinian state with a capital in the eastern sector of the holy city.
Without that tract of land, which Israel has labelled as E-1, Palestinians fear they will be unable to reach agreement with Israel for a two-state solution to decades of conflict.
"I think it is a rather cynical move. At a time when Israel is trying to gain brownie points for the Gaza disengagement, its real strategy is being executed in East Jerusalem," said Michael Tarazi, legal adviser to the Palestinian Authority on Jerusalem affairs.
The International Crisis Group think tank has said barrier construction and settlement growth, especially around Jerusalem, could drive Palestinians to violence and damage prospects for a comprehensive peace deal. A fragile ceasefire now prevails.
(source)
E-1: The End of a viable Palestinian state by ElectronicIntifada, a few months ago:
Still, Israel cannot “digest” the 3.6 million Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories. Giving them citizenship would nullify Israel as a Jewish state; not giving them citizenship yet keeping them forever under occupation would constitute outright apartheid.
What to do? The answer is clear: establish a tiny Palestinian state of, say, five or six cantons (Sharon's term) on 40-70% of the Occupied Territories, completely surrounded and controlled by Israel. Such a Palestinian state would cover only 10-15% of the entire country and would have no meaningful sovereignty and viability: no coherent territory, no freedom of movement, no control of borders, no capital in Jerusalem, no economic viability, no control of water, no control of airspace or communications, no military - not even the right as a sovereign state to enter into alliances without Israeli permission.
And since the Palestinians will never agree to this, Israel must “create facts on the ground” that prejudice negotiations even before they begin. Last week's announcement that Israel is constructing 3500 housing units in E-1, a corridor connecting Jerusalem to the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim, seals the fate of the Palestinian state.
As a key element of an Israeli “Greater Jerusalem,” the E-1 plan removes any viability from a Palestinian state. It cuts the West Bank in half, allowing Israel to control Palestinian movement from one part of their country to another, while isolating East Jerusalem from the rest of Palestinian territory. Since 40% of the Palestinian economy revolves around Jerusalem and its tourist-based economy, the E-1 plan effectively cuts the economic heart out of any Palestinian state, rendering it nothing more than a set of non-viable Indian reservations.
The apparent Development pattern as Palestinians project. Note that the connection between Arab areas, between the northern and southern West Bank:
A few years ago, a group of Bedouin who had settled in the area after getting kicked out of Israel at the beginning, was chased out of their resettled spot inside the area known as Maale Adumim.
The Jahalin Bedouin, who have been living on the site of Ma'ale Adumim since the early 1950s after their forced transfer from the 'Arad area in the Negev, have enjoyed a mixed relationship with the Israeli settlement. When the first construction began in earnest in 1982, some Bedouin (who have traditionally been non-political) supplemented their income by working on the new building sites. However, the expansion of Ma'ale Adumim has gradually ensured the displacement of nearly all the Jahalin; and those of the tribe still remaining in their original homes are now protesting fervently against Israel's threatened confiscation.
The land on which the Jahalin have been living belongs to Palestinian landowners in the neighbouring village of Abu-Dies. However, since Israel declared the area to be 'State land' in 1982, the claims of these landowners, let alone the Jahalin, have been dismissed. Israel is pursuing its claim to the land even though the Jahalin's lawyers have been able to establish serious irregularities in the procedures by which the area was made State land. The fight to save the remaining Jahalin, or at least to ensure that they are properly and fully compensated for the loss of their homes, continues to date in the Israeli High Court [Requested Compensations].
So guess what? This isn't good.... The game of crazed Holy Geography continues. Which reminds me of how much clarity being an Atheist provides with these situations.
On television, the tumult in the Gaza Strip looks like nothing less than a pogrom -- soldiers dragging Jews out of their homes and synagogues for immediate, involuntary, permanent relocation. Does it matter that the soldiers are Jewish, too? Not to the Jews being hauled away. Does it matter that some of the most vociferous protesters don't even live in Gaza and are just there to make a point? Not if you remember all the Freedom Riders of the civil rights era who came from Massachusetts or Michigan, not Mississippi.
What's happening in Gaza is geopolitically and historically correct, and when seen from the proper altitude -- high enough that individuals blur into groups -- it's morally correct as well.
[.......]A friend once observed that for African Americans and Jews, the word "paranoid" has no meaning. That's because history proves that it's not our imagination: They are out to get us.
So can I recognize the necessity, the inevitability of the autopogrom in Gaza without cheering its execution? I guess I don't have a choice, since that's what I feel. I'm sorry for those people, long misguided and now betrayed. Some may be religious fanatics and others political extremists, but their sugar-plum-fairy visions of Greater Israel didn't just pop into their heads. Their political and religious leaders put them there. And now, as those leaders do what they must, they should feel the deepest sorrow and shame.
'Goodbye to all that:" IDF plans to complete evacuating Gaza by Tuesday. Not bad! Haaretz writers put disengagement in perspective. A Defining Moment. Who will rule Gaza now?
IDF digs trench to keep Palestinians out of Gush Katif
By Nir Hasson and Amos Harel, Haaretz Correspondents
Israel Defense Forces on Friday began digging eight-meter-deep trenches around the evacuated Gush Katif settlements in the Gaza Strip in a bid to prevent Palestinians from reaching the settlement bloc prior to its complete evacuation. Troops will renew operations on Sunday as activity was halted for the Sabbath. By Tuesday, the IDF intends to complete the evacuation of all settlements in the Gaza Strip. Troops will then focus their efforts on the northern West Bank settlements of Homesh and Sa-Nur. Hundreds of radical settler youths have moved into the latter settlement in recent weeks.
So we will get a bit of a Round Two from those damn Yesha teenagers.
Israel's Gaza Operation Sets Precedent (AP)
With its lightning operation in Gaza — nearly all Jewish settlers evacuated in just 55 hours — Israel has shown the world that it can dismantle such enclaves with relative ease, despite the settlers' tears, anguish and occasional violence.
Having set this precedent, Israel will likely come under increasingly intense pressure to do the same in the West Bank — though Israeli officials insist it could be years before settlements there even come up for discussion.
On the Palestinian side, leader Mahmoud Abbas' success in preventing deadly attacks by militants during the pullout has boosted his image as a peace partner and given new weight to his demand that Israel resume negotiations.
Sheehan stuff: It was a good episode for the antiwar movement, few can doubt. A spearhead of the peace movement? has it touched off some kind of national nerve? Yeah. A good roundup from Froomkin at the WaPo. Too bad she's gone. NewsFromBabylon is a sweet site, and they posted a big NY Times story about "The Other Army," namely all those private military firms, or "private security companies" as the softies wish you'd call them. "US Spy satellites under scrutiny:"
One of the systems under scrutiny by Negroponte is a classified program to build the next generation of stealth satellites, whose estimated costs have nearly doubled to $9.5 billion in recent years, according to sources.
The program has been severely criticized in closed session by members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, who have objected to the rising costs and who argue that it is ineffective against modern adversaries such as terrorist networks. The Senate panel has tried to kill the program in the past, sources said, but it has been supported by House and Senate appropriations committees and the House intelligence panel.
Because of their small size, these satellites -- early generations had been code-named Misty -- would be almost invisible among existing space debris to enemy radars. But those same small dimensions would also limit some of their collection capabilities, according to John Pike, an expert in space vehicles with GlobalSecurity.org.
The other futuristic spy satellite program that Negroponte has focused on is the new generation of non-stealth space vehicles -- using optical, radar, listening and infrared-red capabilities -- known collectively as the Future Imagery Architecture (FIA). Development of these satellites, which has been going on since the late 1990s, has also had major cost increases, now estimated at more than $25 billion over the next decade. As a result, the House intelligence panel voted sharp reductions in its version of the fiscal 2006 intelligence authorization bill.
The Sign That Knows You: Look at this graphic as it looks back at you.
GAZA: Haaretz: STATUS: Disengagement - Day Five Diary. Analysis: Resistance to the disengagement has been futile.
You have to read Sharon's speech:
Sharon did not use his speech to joyfully declare that he has no intention of withdrawing from even one millimeter of Judea and Samaria. In fact, he opened the door to a continuation of the process: "The world is awaiting the Palestinian response, a hand toward peace or the fire of terrorism. We will respond to the outstretched hand with an olive leaf, but we will respond to fire with stronger fire than ever before."
Herein lies a hint that the Gaza prototype, with requisite corrections, would be applied in areas to the east. In an interview appearing in last Friday's Yedioth Ahronoth, Sharon provided a few more details about his plans for the West Bank: "Not everything will remain; the settlement blocs will remain."
Toward of the end of the speech, Sharon offered another, surprising, diagnosis: "The disengagement will give us a chance to look inside ourselves. The agenda will change. Economic policy will find the time to address closing the social gaps and a real war on poverty."
You could hardly believe your ears. For this is the exact argument of the left: that the settlements were built at the expense of the development towns, investment in infrastructures, in roads, in education and vocational training, and are therefore the major cause of social and economic gaps and poverty.
Sharon slams 'grave' Jewish terror attack on Palestinians. Man who killed 4 Palestinians: I hope someone kills Sharon:
Asher Weissgan, a 38-year-old resident of the West Bank settlement Shvut Rahel, on Wednesday shot to death four Palestinians with whom he worked and wounded two others, one of them seriously. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon condemned the attack as an "exceptionally grave Jewish act of terror," Israel Radio reported, and instructed the security establishment to deal harshly with all attempts to harm innocent people. "I'm not sorry for what I did," said Weissgan before entering a remand hearing at the Petah Tikvah Magistrate's Court. "I hope someone also kills Sharon."
Earlier Thursday, security forces prepared for possible riots in Palestinian areas in the territories in reaction to the shooting. Hamas has threatened to avenge the shooting, which was the second Jewish terror attack in two weeks. Sources in Hamas told Haaretz on Wednesday night that it was still committed to the current cease-fire, but that they would not be able to continue restraint in the face of repeated Jewish terror attacks. "We are in favor of quiet and continue to be committed to it but will not permit it to be unilateral," said Sheikh Hassan Yusef, a senior Hamas official in the West Bank. But Sami Abu Zohari, a Hamas spokesman in the Gaza Strip, warned that retaliation would follow. The victims have been identified as Mohammed Mansour, 48, and Bassam Tauase, 30, both from the Nablus region; Halil Salah, 42, from Qalqilyah; and Osama Moussa Tawafsha, 33, from the village of Sanjil, not far from the West Bank town of Ramallah.
Palestinians fire mortar shells towards Gaza settlement of Gadid. IDF says thwarted terror attack by Palestinians during pullout. Children caught in middle of settlers' struggle to make gains on TV (not to mention caught in the settlements themselves). They never had to cut off the power & water. Palestinian After Party by Amira Hass. Op: Territory for Israel. I thought this argument about how settler rabbis sanctify random objects to theologically justify their activities was fascinating. Analysis / Settler leaders: Riding the tiger: Who would have thought that people who even see the state of Israel as an enemy wouldn't obey their leaders?
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a leading settler rabbi, who was cursed as a heretic this week after trying to restrain a group of angry teenagers, has perhaps learned the lesson that his colleagues should have learned from countless incidents in Jewish history: He who nurtures a tiger will not always be able to control it. If you wish to retain control, your ranks must be confined to those willing to accept your authority.
It is almost ironic: Those who refused to accept the authority of the state's decisions have now discovered that they cannot impose their authority on their own forces. Except that this is no laughing matter.
AIPAC bits and PR for the West Bank settlements. I found today I have a good Google ranking for 'AIPAC intel.' So why not add a story from about a year ago, "Israel has long spied on U.S., say officials." in the LA Times via w3ar.com. Even Billmon is talking about the latest bits of the AIPAC scandal. This site also has exciting keywords like Intelligence:Espionage:Israeli Espionage. Meanwhile, we are getting some trial balloons for the coming PR offensive to help Israel retain West Bank settlements. Note the trickier rhetorical devices, which I will set in subtle HTML:
Mother Knows Best By ZEV CHAFETS
This diplomatic success was possible only because Mr. Bush won Ariel Sharon's trust. Previous administrations tried to bribe or pressure Israel into making territorial concessions. The president used different tools - common sense and credibility.
As a master politician, Mr. Bush realized that there were political limits on what Mr. Sharon could do. Neither Mr. Sharon nor any conceivable Israeli prime minister would ever evict the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who now live in East Jerusalem and the major settlement blocs of the West Bank. Asking for that would be an automatic deal-breaker. Same for the Palestinian demand that millions of Arab refugees and their descendants be "returned" to Israel. And Israel would never relinquish its option to respond militarily to armed aggression.
Mr. Bush acknowledged these Israeli truths in an official letter he sent to Mr. Sharon in April of 2004. In exchange for that recognition, however, the president asked for - and got - Mr. Sharon's agreement to do what he could do. Evacuating Gaza was one of those things.
The American vision for Middle East peace sees exit from Gaza as a first step. Next comes an Israeli withdrawal from those settlements in the West Bank that aren't already de facto parts of Israel, and then the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
You PONK ASS BITCH. LOOK AT THIS DAMN MAP AND TELL ME WHICH ONES. Ariel? Kiryat Arba? sorry folks that was crude. But I find this kind of shady language most antagonizing.
Cut and Run? That is a very good question which is hardly asked with the kind of objective rigor that it deserves. It's converse, "Staying the course," always has struck me as a weird and flimsy oxymoron, since the course has been wobbly and improvised quite badly. For example, what is the difference between "Cutting and Running" from the Kurds, and "Staying the Course" with the Kurds? "Kurdish Autonomy Moves Evoke Bloody Repression [in Iran]- Regional Crisis Growing." Fortunately a retired military theorist, William Odom, brings home the main points in a clear way:
What’s wrong with cutting and running?
If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better.
Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:
1) We would leave behind a civil war.
2) We would lose credibility on the world stage.
3) It would embolden the insurgency and cripple the move toward democracy.
4) Iraq would become a haven for terrorists.
5) Iranian influence in Iraq would increase.
6) Unrest might spread in the region and/or draw in Iraq's neighbors.
7) Shiite-Sunni clashes would worsen.
8) We haven’t fully trained the Iraqi military and police forces yet.
9) Talk of deadlines would undercut the morale of our troops.
But consider this:
1) On civil war. Iraqis are already fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That’s civil war. We created the civil war when we invaded; we can’t prevent a civil war by staying.
[..........]
6) On Iraq’s neighbors. The civil war we leave behind may well draw in Syria, Turkey and Iran. But already today each of those states is deeply involved in support for or opposition to factions in the ongoing Iraqi civil war. The very act of invading Iraq almost insured that violence would involve the larger region. And so it has and will continue, with, or without, US forces in Iraq.
7) On Shiite-Sunni conflict. The US presence is not preventing Shiite-Sunni conflict; it merely delays it. Iran is preventing it today, and it will probably encourage it once the Shiites dominate the new government, an outcome US policy virtually ensures.
8) On training the Iraq military and police. The insurgents are fighting very effectively without US or European military advisors to train them. Why don't the soldiers and police in the present Iraqi regime's service do their duty as well? Because they are uncertain about committing their lives to this regime. They are being asked to take a political stand, just as the insurgents are. Political consolidation, not military-technical consolidation, is the issue.
The issue is not military training; it is institutional loyalty. We trained the Vietnamese military effectively. Its generals took power and proved to be lousy politicians and poor fighters in the final showdown. In many battles over a decade or more, South Vietnamese military units fought very well, defeating VC and NVA units. But South Vietnam's political leaders lost the war.
Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military’s institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation.
[........]
The US invasion of Iraq only serves the interest of:
1) Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, positioned US military personnel in places where al Qaeda operatives can kill them occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America's most important and strongest allies – the Europeans – and squanders US military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al Qaeda in Pakistan.);
2) The Iranians (who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight year war with Iraq.);
3) And the extremists in both Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don't really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war between the United States and most of the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.)
The wisest course for journalists might be to begin sustained investigations of why leading Democrats have failed so miserably to challenge the US occupation of Iraq. The first step, of course, is to establish as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.
So in other words there is little to be salvaged. The potential negatives aren't so bad, relatively, if they are happening already. All right, that's enough. I should go have fun and act like a reasonable person now.
Ok so Andrew has me doing a couple websites now - the front end of a party supply company site, and more complex sort of social services type site. So there's a lot to do for the next few days. Also Arthur Cheng is going off to China tomorrow, so we have to kick it before he returns to the Great Red Middle Kingdom. So I need to clear out these links to free the RAM for web stuff... Enjoy.
Outer Space. Real sweet M8/Lagoon Nebula photograph. From NASA. Congrats to the shuttle folks on patching their stuff and using the International Space Station. Even though the recent affair looked like a mess, they'll learn quite a bit about how to do space patching missions in the future. "How to hack yr craft in space" is something the human race will have to figure out sooner or later. It's a pity, I used to take such an interest in Out There, until this ball suddenly seemed like a much larger problem.
The Next War. "War Plans Drafted to Counter Terror Attacks in U.S." "No Sympathy for the Neocons" by Raimondo, good stuff. Again, here's that creepy report about Cheney requesting nuclear war plans to nuke Iran after a random terror attack, committed by someone, anyone. I recommend this Federation of American Scientists site with all kinds of cool docs about Iran's nuclear program, including the COOLEST BIBLIOGRAPHY EVER:
Journal of Science of the University of Tehran, 1998, Vol. 3, p21-37, A. Pazirandeh
Research Reactor Fuel Element Leak Testing Using Delayed Neutron Counting
Annals of Nuclear Energy, 1999, Vol. 26, p1601-10, H. Khalafi
Calculational Tools to Conduct Experimental Optimization in Tehran Research Reactor
Nuclear Science Journal, 1999, Vol. 36, p42-50, M.Roshan Zamir
Design of the Tehran Research Reactor Spent Fuel Storage
Annals of Nuclear Energy, 2002, Vol. 29, p1591-96, M. Zaker
Effective Delayed Neutron Fraction and Prompt Neutron Lifetime of Tehran Research Reactor
Annals of Nuclear Energy, 2002, Vol. 29, p1989-2000, M.B. Ghofrani and S.A. Damghani
Determination of the Safety Importance of Systems of the Tehran Research Reactor Using a PSA Method
Annals of Nuclear Energy, 2003, Vol. 30, p63-80, M. Boroushaki, M.B. Ghofrani, C. Lucas and M.J. Yazdanpanah
An Intelligent Reactor Core Controller for Load Following Operations, Using Recurrent Neural Networks and Fuzzy Systems
Iranian Journal of Physics Research, 2004, Vol. 4, p13-31, R.I. Najafabadi, R.K. Faegh and H. Afrideh
Measurment and Calculation of High Energy Neutron Flux in Aluminum, Graphite, Water and Paraffin Assembly
Annals of Nuclear Energy, 2005, Vol. 32, p588-605, H. Arab-Alibek and S. Setayeshi
Adaptive Control of a PWR Core Power Using Neural Networks
Scientific Bulletin of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran, 1998, Vol. 18, p9-17, A.A. Hosseini, H. Mansuri and R. Mahmudi
Casting and Irradiation Studies of 8001 Series of Aluminum Alloys for Nuclear Research Reactor Structural Applications
Progress in Nuclear Energy, 2004, Vol. 44, p331-45, P. Parvin, B. Sajad, K. Silakhori, M. Hooshvar and Z. Zamanipour
Molecular Laser Isotope Separation vervus Atomic Vapor Laser Isotope Separation
I think we harbor the fantasy that all these people have no right to do their research, but hopefully something as prosaic as these journal articles helps illustrate that they are well integrated with the global nuclear research community and it can't be wished away. Come on, wouldn't it be Totally Badass to design neural networks to manage an Iranian nuclear power plant?
Ledeen and his uncle Izzy: A lot of neocons were Trotskyists, dontcha know?
Think Tankery: "Rich Liberals Vow to Fund Think Tanks." Also "Bear 'expert' devoured by bears." roughly the same stuff. "Britney 'oblivious' to shooting."
Iraq. I am really appalled that Bush is taking a FIVE WEEK VACATION while everything is going to hell. Fortunately, the appearance of pissed off mom of a deceased soldier Casey Sheehan threatens to turn the entire vacation into a PR disaster for Bush. She has every right to do this, she's giving out dozens of interviews and reframing the whole situation. Top Notch. A whole little tent city of angry veterans families might materialize, and wouldn't that be excellent? Spending August on Caesar's Doorstep, not bad at all.
A weird sort of coup dislodged the US-appointed mayor of Baghdad with a SCIRI guy. how many insurgents?
Going to court yesterday made this report from Raed Jarrar's brother, Khalid, about getting arrested by the New Mukhabarat (Iraqi secret police) all the more vivid. Khalid basically got picked up after surfing a couple websites at a university Internet cafe, and got tossed in the dungeons of the Interior Ministry, now of the refurbished Mean Shiite sort, and his family didn't know where he was for several days. All sorts of guys, mostly Sunnis, are sitting around, getting tortured, accused of having terrorist infrastructures, while in reality they don't know what the hell is going on. Harsh.
They started by asking me: “What’s the connection between you and the London Bombs?” !!!
And I was like: “haaaaa???!!.”. I said: “London Bombs???! Nothing!”
BANG!!
A heavy hand landed on my neck, my brain was too busy to feel the pain, I felt my neck numbing for a while.
“SPEAAAK” he shouted.
“Turn around” he yelled.
I turned, facing the room now, but not seeing anything other than my nose and the shoes of the person who was interrogating me, standing so close.
“Why do you have a beard?” he asked.
“Because the prophet...” (I was trying to tell him that prophet Mohammad had one, and that I have one because I love to look like him...)
BANG
He slapped me on the face. It made a loud noise that the room became dead-silent for some seconds….
“May the prophet curse you” he shouted.
Again, my brain didn’t respond to the pain signals, I didn’t feel it.
For the next few hours, they asked me questions like “who are the other members of our terrorist cell, where does your fund come from? What operations did you have?”
“What do you have against Shia?”
I said: “nothing, my mother is Shia!”
He said” what do you have against Kurds? Why don’t you go blow yourself up and kill Kurds?”
I said: “Because God says in Quran…” (I was trying to tell him a part of Quran where God orders us not to kill any innocent soul) he interrupted me shouting, “We know Quran better than you”.
“My best friend is Kurdish!” I said.
“Of course he is, so that you can get information about Kurds from him, right?” he answered.
Nothing I said seemed to make sense to them. And nothing they said makes sense to anyone in the world.
Then finally I understood why I was there, after few hours. Security guards at the university had printed out all the websites I was reading while I was online there. They were accusing me of “reading terrorism sites” and “having communications with foreign terrorists”.
“Do you know what these pages are?”
I looked at them and figured out they were the comment section of Raed in the Middle!!
[.......]
I was so lucky that I was taken to the Mokhabarat directly. Usually you have to go through a police station or a center of the national guards to get there, where the standard procedure of torturing is hanging people upside down and beating them with cables for hours, pinching their bodies with electrical drills, burning them with hot water, ripping out their finger nails, breaking bones, using acids on the wounds after whipping them, the dead bodies that are found in the dumpsters in Baghdad even had their eyes taken out of them, and a lot of these things happened with people that I know, or with people that were detained with the people that were with me in this jail, before they were brought here, and the list of torturing techniques is long, and you don’t want to hear them or know about them if you want to sleep at night.
In one of the floors in the same building, there is another prison, a bigger one called “The Palace of Hospitality” (doesn’t this remind you of 1984? The ministry of love and stuff?) Where recently a father and his son were arrested, and the son died at night because his rips were broken after they beat him, and then they spelled hot water on his body, he kept moaning of pain for the whole night, said Abo Ayid, who slept right beside him, and then he died. I’ll tell you more about Abu Ayid in the end.
The one thing in common between all the people that were there is that almost all of them were Sunnis. Interrogators told one of the prisoners during an interrogation session “you Sunnis are all terrorists” and during my interrogation, I heard a lot of racist remarks and questions. The Shia Iraqis who were there were mostly accused of non-terrorism crimes, like stealing, carjacking, etc…
It goes on and on, very intense. Glad he's ok, but it's hard to hear about the security apparatus shearing the state into pieces.
Also Riverbend from Baghdad hasn't had any entries since July 15. There are often big gaps in Riverbend's blog, but you always wonder if something horrible hasn't happened, as it regularly does. I would recommend spending awhile both Khalid Jarrar's 'secrets in Baghdad' and Riverbend's 'Baghdad Burning'. I don't have the words to describe the depth of the writing...
Juan Cole on the problems of the Japanese mission in Iraq, where it would appear that the Sadr supporters in their bit of the south are pissed off with the SCIRI/Badr Corps people. Also Hakim of SCIRI officially wants a 'Sumer' super-province in the south, which would negotiate as a bloc with the central government, keeping a lot of the revenue from the southern oil fields, and as a regional counterweight to 'Kurdistan.' This would appear to be a formal manifestation of the fracturing of the country. The question is, can we get a catchy title for Sunni Anbar and other bits? How about "Arabian Texas"?
The great Bush Vacation Conspiracy and the 1999 Russian Apartment building bombings: nathan x over at 911fraud.blogspot.com suggests that whenever Bush takes his August vacations, terror attacks are likely to follow. But he believes that there was a 9/11 coverup and so forth, roughly along the lines of the 9/11 conspiracy theory laid out by the Prison Planet people. I think it's more likely that Bush just doesn't feel like reading goddamn memos like "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S." because he needs to Cut the Brush!! nathan also some other tales/stories/whatever label you want about governments performing terror strikes to manipulate the political situation. One particular site, terror99.ru, chronicles the very suspicious 1999 Russian apartment building bombings and the strange investigation that followed. I think that particular case is especially weird.
However I will take a moment to clarify that I don't believe there was a Grand 9/11 coverup/'false flag' conspiracy (although 50% of New Yorkers are kinda suspicious about it), nor do I think that the London bombing was like that, despite what the conspiracy folks (let's say tinfoilhatvolken) are saying now. On the other hand, very often governments generate terrorist-paramilitary style organizations for various ends, such as the international Islamic front in late 1970s Afghanistan, Israel's bastard child, Hamas, as well as fortifying more concrete organizations like the heroin-laden Kosovo Liberation Army. Would Russia's FSB blow up some stuff to galvanize the withering Russian public to support crushing separatists at Russia's crumbling edges? (I'm still curious about the 9/11 insider trading, but who knows?)
I just don't know. (and far be it from me to risk antagonizing the New KGB, the New Mukhabarat, and the Chinese People's Liberation Army in one mere post). But I'll always enjoy a good yarn. I always try to pass things like this through by John Le Carre/'Absolute Friends' filter before I consider them as Truth. Anyway, there is far too much crazy stuff in the Mundane World to require me to dwell on the more Grand Esoteric Plots.
The 9/11 Israeli Art Student mystery: Speaking of Grand Plots, the weirdly conspiratorial journalist Wayne Madsen has a really enormous story about the strange tale of the Israelis arrested selling art around secure installations in the U.S. and Canada, possibly acting as Mossad agents and shadowing the 9/11 hijackers in several cities. I have trouble judging Madsen's credibility, considering stories like his exciting claims that secret Saudi funds and BCCI-linked offshore cash financed fixing the vote in Ohio last year. Real hard to believe. But still, at the least people like Madsen offer a different kind of prism to evaluate the world. But I was kind of surprised to see a more mainstream guy like James Wolcott announced that he added Madsen's site to his blogroll. So maybe he's a little more credible. Madsen has lots about the AIPAC thing, and definitely accuses Michael Ledeen of being involved.
AIPAC Fun! So now we may add Mossad to the list of intel agencies that should be annoyed today. Perhaps they would like to read Dreyfuss' report on the AIPAC scandal as well. Naughty, everyone's talking about it. Corn says it's Bad News for Rove.
Likud ready to split? With Netanyahu out, former Jerusalem Mayor and Sharon loyalist Ehud Olmert is relatively more important, and has said that Israel is not trying to trade Gaza in order to keep West Bank settlements. I don't know how far that will stick, but it is pretty much the opposite of what Netanyahu says all the time. "Gaza Pullout threatens to split Israel's ruling party."
Interesting stuff from Norman Solomon: War Made Easy, methods of propaganda, etc. Also a Solomon bit about a jailed soldier, Kevin Benderman, who refused to go to Iraq. Although I can't say if this sentiment is legal in such a day and age, (especially in Britannia) I also believe that it is very legitimate for a soldier to fight hard to stay home, if for no other justification than that we invaded that country because of knowingly fabricated intelligence, and those implicated in the Pentagon are still in charge of setting the disastrous policies that the military's Bendermans would have to carry out.
Random: Also check out inside Bush's weird Global Democracy movement. Coldtype.net had a lot of sweet essays about the war and such from Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Solomon, Jim Lobe and others. The Lobe one, in particular, outlines the neocon intelligence fabricating (PDF) with excellent detail.
Safari Crashed so I am dumping in the headlines I wanted to put: "Abu Mazen quietly plans a revolution: He wants to be president, too." The bus shooter case is now a lynching, says Haaretz, and a TV station showed footage of it. And so it's a nasty situation. Talk of the connections between Palestinian security forces, corrupt officials, the Israelis and militants/terrorists, in other words the Robin Hoods of Gaza. Netanyahu is plotting something. So would leaving Gaza truly equal the End of the Occupation? what does that say about efforts to make the West Bank arrangement seem "Normal"?
And that is all.
First of all, the gory details. A video released by the Ansar al-Sunna militant organization in Iraq, associated with an attack that killed several Marines, apparently shows their members firing mortar shells, a dead US soldier getting stripped of his dog tag, and a wide variety of weapons and equipment looted from the American forces. The disturbing & graphic insurgent video, and several stills, are available via ogrish.com. Former CIA guy Larry Johnson describes how the video indicates the futility of our current situation:
A friend of mine who has spoken to members of the unit indicates that the Marines were talking via radio to their base and trying to arrange an exfiltration. While they were talking the sound of gunfire erupted over the radio, then the radio went silent. One possibility is that the insurgents snuck up on the team. In any event, they were wiped out.
[.....]
It is important to view the videos to gain an idea of how awry our current strategy on the ground is. Despite happy talk that we are winning the war, we lost this skirmish and the images portray a happy, confident group of insurgents who are operating virtually unmolested.
One particularly disturbing image shows an insurgent inspecting the body of a partially stripped dead Marine. The insurgent bends down and cuts away the dog tag from the soldier's neck. The insurgent appears to conduct himself in a professional manner to the extent that he does not desecrate the Marine's body. What is so shocking is that this Marine has been left abandoned, albeit temporarily, on the battlefield while an insurgent leisurely and methodically strips him of uniform and weapons.
A second video shows two insurgents with a collection of captured U.S. Marine weapons. Again, with an air of non-chalance, the insurgents provide an impressive equipment display. The fact that they have time to lay weapons out on the ground and pose with them is a reminder that they are operating in territory where they feel comfortable and protected.
A third image from the videos shows two insurgents firing a mortar at an unknown target. The mortar, I'm told, appears to be and 82mm mortar. The individuals operating the weapon appear unconcerned about being discovered or being attacked by a counter battery of some sort. While it is not clear whether or not the mortar was being fired during this operation, it is certain that the insurgents intend to deliver the message that they can do what they want, where they want, when they want.
Taken as a whole the implications of this action are disturbing. The US Marine reservists were not backed up by a Quick Reaction Force that could respond quickly and decisively to the attack. The reservists appear to have inadequate artillery and air support to cover their operations. Unfortunately, reservists have been treated as the red headed step child as far as the regular military is concerned. Add to this that reservists normally do not operate at the same level of efficiency as regular military units. This is, as we see from the latest action, a lethal combination. The more fundamental, long term problem, is that our force levels on the ground in Iraq are not sufficient to ensure control and command of the battlefield.
In the mythical mountainside confrontation known as the Tora Bora incident during the (first) anti-Taliban campaign, people have disputed whether the military and the CIA knew that Bin Laden was inside the cave complex. This became a proxy idea for Bush's general incompetence in the 2004 elections, as Kerry accused Bush of screwing things up at Tora Bora 476 times, every one a scintillating rhetorical jewel. Bush claimed that they didn't know Bin Laden was there. But now Newsweek reports that a CIA field commander, with forthcoming new book, asserts that they knew Bin Laden was very much in the area, and the Pentagon failed to deploy a cordon to catch the various militants running around:
During the 2004 presidential campaign, George W. Bush and John Kerry battled about whether Osama bin Laden had escaped from Tora Bora in the final days of the war in Afghanistan. Bush, Kerry charged, "didn't choose to use American forces to hunt down and kill" the leader of Al Qaeda. The president called his opponent's allegation "the worst kind of Monday-morning quarterbacking." Bush asserted that U.S. commanders on the ground did not know if bin Laden was at the mountain hideaway along the Afghan border.
But in a forthcoming book, the CIA field commander for the agency's Jawbreaker team at Tora Bora, Gary Berntsen, says he and other U.S. commanders did know that bin Laden was among the hundreds of fleeing Qaeda and Taliban members. Berntsen says he had definitive intelligence that bin Laden was holed up at Tora Bora—intelligence operatives had tracked him—and could have been caught. "He was there," Berntsen tells NEWSWEEK. Asked to comment on Berntsen's remarks, National Security Council spokesman Frederick Jones passed on 2004 statements from former CENTCOM commander Gen. Tommy Franks. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. bin Laden was at Tora Bora in December 2001," Franks wrote in an Oct. 19 New York Times op-ed. "Bin Laden was never within our grasp." Berntsen says Franks is "a great American. But he was not on the ground out there. I was."
Also the CIA agent, Gary Berntsen, has sued the agency for taking too damn long to vet his book. As I've noted here before, Scooter Libby was always a leading suspect in the Valerie Plame affair. And now indeed we learn that Judith Miller and 'Scoot' met only days before the famous Novak column:
I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, the chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, has told federal investigators that he met with New York Times reporter Judith Miller on July 8, 2003, and discussed CIA operative Valerie Plame, according to legal sources familiar with Libby's account.
That story is by Murray Waas, who is keeping a blog with much more ongoing stuff @ whateveralready.blogspot.com.
TalkLeft has an absurdly detailed dissection of an important aspect of the Niger-uranium scandal: ongoing efforts in the Senate to cover up things about the forgeries, such as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report that carefully obfuscated the connection between the forgeries and their aggressive claims about WMD. There are just buckets of minutia to pore over, if yr. so inclined.
Some basic points about the WMD disinformation, in more crude terms than perhaps necessary: "Judith Miller's Dirty Little Secret":
So, the question of the hour is what does everyone in Washington know as of today? They know the administration lied about WMDs with the help of media operatives like Judith Miller. They know that there was no “intelligence failure” and that Joseph Wilson was punished for exposing the post-war cover-up. They also know that the administration and its media partners in crime continue to twist the facts about the situation in Iraq. Add to the mix the recent indictments of AIPAC officials in the Pentagon spy case, which might expose the culprits as the very same senior administration officials who outed Valerie Plame.
In Washington, they all know Judith Miller’s dirty little secret. Miller is a senior neo-con propagandist. If she goes down, she won’t go down alone. She will take the paper of record and Sulzberger with her. Her intimate relationships with Ahmed Chalabi, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, AIPAC, and the American Enterprise Institute are all part of the public record. Miller coordinated her work with the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon, an outfit set up by Wolfowitz and Feith and tasked with fixing intelligence to make a case for war. Judith Miller is pleading the fifth to avoid confessing to the prominent role she played in launching weapons of mass deception at the American people.
The neo-con cabal and the Israeli lobby are an instrumental force in framing the foreign policy of the United States towards the Middle East. Other political forces had considerable influence in charting the path to war – including the equally formidable Saudi lobby and the usual suspects in the military industrial complex. But only the neo-cons had access to the media muscle necessary for implementing a massive propaganda campaign to sell the war. Judith Miller was by far the most lethal weapon in the war party’s media arsenal – if only because she wrote for The New York Times.
Ok whatever, that's all for now. I have been working very hard on getting the new website going, be patient and it will soon happen very nicely...
There was a big earthquake over in Montana, and I shot Andy an email about it. He says he's doing all right, but the big thing he's looking out for is the Yellowstone Caldera, which could really take out the whole area if it blew up. What is in Yellowstone's Future? There was an earthquake off the coast of Kamchatka just a little while later.
Couple days ago: Bloomberg Reporting That Rove, Libby May Be Subject To Perjury Charges
Arianna raises a theory that Judith Miller herself got very angry with Joe Wilson, which propelled her into telling Rove Plame was a CIA agent. In other words, good Judy was very much a fellow traveler of the neocons and Chalabi, and therefore took accusations they were spoofing the intelligence very personally. That would be a horrible twist, yes?!?! Steve Clemons on it, he thinks it tracks loosely with other things he's heard.
Social Security: Thomas Frank, a good article on the trillion dollar hustle. Frank is doing this Book Club thing online at TPMcafe and it's pretty interesting. He also linked to Pissed Off White Truck Driver Guy:
Can't you morons in the DLC see that blue-collar America clings to the Repubs. because the Repubs. WANT us. And they PROVE it by consistently addressing just 1 or 2 wedge issues that concern blue collar America. Nevermind that these issues don't even relate to our work life; it still trumps the absolute NOTHING that Democrats offer! And _traditional_ Democratic values offer the blue-collar worker nothing less than actual salvation from what ails him at work. But these working-man values - even the mere NAMING of these ailments we are plagued with - have been WITHHELD for 20 years! Not a peep. Not a sound. No one comes. No one speaks. No one gives a diagnosis. So, clearly, we have been thrown away. Disposed of. And there still are MILLIONS of us. Millions who could be voting Democratic by 2006 if the Party would actually come and talk to us, beginning with the NAMES of the Unfair Labor Practices used against us everyday. Posing for pictures with John Sweeney once every 4 years is not even in the ballpark of what is needed! Do you want us? Really? Then show us. Come down to the loading dock.
The GOP wishes to investigate Pat Fitzgerald. Josh Marshall thinks it's funny that Sen. Roberts is such a tool, but will Hastert try to can PattyPat?. Also a dude named Murray Waas on the situation. Agonist notes: For Two Aides in Leak Case, 2nd Issue Rises: NYT - At the same time in July 2003 that a C.I.A. operative's identity was exposed, two key White House officials who talked to journalists about the officer were also working closely together on a related underlying issue: whether President Bush was correct in suggesting earlier that year that Iraq had been trying to acquire nuclear materials from Africa.
Also see: Ex-CIA Officers Rip Bush Over Rove Leak and related thread: Testimony By Rove And Libby Examined
Also WaPo: "Prosecutor In CIA Leak Case Casting A Wide Net" now including all that damn fake intelligence!!!
Always worth checkin in on Juan Cole. Just found occupationwatch.org and its list of news aggregators.
CNN.com - U.S. study: Insurgents infiltrate Iraq police - Jul 25 Raimondo: Blowback in Iraq: The U.S. invasion empowered Iran: was that the agenda all along?
Maybe I put this before but its worth repeating: Government Defies an Order to Release Iraq Abuse Photos. Sad: Burns in NY Times: If It's Civil War, Do We Know It - Iraq. Patrick Cockburn: Sunday Independent - Iraq has descended into chaos way beyond West's worst-case scenario. Peter Galbraith: NY Review of Books: Iraq: Bush's Islamic Republic
The DLC is quite catty these days. (via Atrios)
If only we could hear such moral clarity from our own party's left! Instead, we heard from Daily Kos, the ur-liberal ur-blogger, whose blog included a cheer for, among others, outcast Labourite George Galloway, who blamed the attacks on Blair's Iraq policy -- and was roundly denounced by virtually all British politicians. "See, Democrats? That's how it's done," lectured the blogger ignorantly [Ed note: This item was written by "Bill in Portland Maine," a regular contributor to Daily Kos]. Likewise, Matt Yglesias, an articulate liberal voice at The American Prospect, who belittled Marshall Wittmann's call for moral clarity as a phrase never used "unironically" anymore. No wonder Democrats are perceived to have a values problem.
My liberal friends are quick to point out that the left's chief grievance is with the war in Iraq, not the war on terror. But what does it do for the image of the Democratic Party -- not to mention the thinking of rank and file Democrats -- when some of our most skilled commentators use a moment of unambiguous terror to first find fault with an American policy (unseating Saddam Hussein) rather than first condemning the terrorists? It's both morally wrong and politically dumb. These musings in the left-wing blogosphere may be read regularly by only a few thousand people, but they seep into the intellectual bloodstream of the Democratic Party. They once again place Democrats on the wrong side of the ultimate issue of our time: winning the war on terror.
Haaretz - U.S.-Israel crisis deepens over defense exports to China. Corridors of Power / Who would give the go-ahead? Peace Now: TV program funding incitement by extreme right wing. This stuff about the religious right wing wanting to take over the state, and their bizarre messianic theology, is most alarming.
The results of this poll of Israeli settlers are fascinating:
Compensation law should apply to West Bank too, settlers say
By Akiva Eldar, Haaretz Correspondent
Most settlers want the government to compensate residents of West Bank settlements - and not just those from the Gaza Strip - who move within the Green Line, according to a poll conducted by Market-West on behalf of the Peace Now movement. Fifty-three percent of settlers said the Evacuation-Compensation Law, which determines that settlers evacuated under the disengagement plan will receive compensation payment, should also apply to the West Bank. While a solid majority of religious settlers (83.6 percent) oppose the disengagement, the level of support for the pullout among the secular settler population is not much lower than the level in the overall Israeli population. Nearly 47 percent of secular settlers support the pullout from Gaza and part of the northern West Bank, while 58 percent of the overall population expressed support for the plan. The Peace Now poll, conducted on July 18, surveyed a representative sample of 503 people over the age of 18 from 57 settlements. Of the respondents, 126 described themselves as secular, 207 as religious, 111 as traditional and 60 as ultra-Orthodox. A slight majority of secular settlers oppose continued construction in the West Bank settlements, the poll found. While 51.3 percent of secular settlers say further construction must be prevented, 42.7 percent expressed support for more building in the West Bank. However, 67 percent of the overall settler populace expressed support for the construction of new West Bank settlements, an increase of 6 percent since January. A whopping 86.6 percent of religious settlers expressed support for continued construction, while just 7.5 percent oppose more building. Among settlers who described themselves as traditional, 58.1 percent support continued settlement construction and 35.2 percent oppose it. Among the ultra-Orthodox settlers, 66.7 percent said they support more construction and 25.4 percent oppose it.
Well who knows, even settlers can surprise the hell out of me.
As I have previously explained, my ironclad Internet marketing and search engine strategy so far has relied upon comment spammers or spambots to regularly plug their crap into old posts on my site, although periodically I close threads older than a month or so.
About a week ago, the number of comments on the site reached beyond a staggering 10,000 (10,921 was the highest comment serial number). This has a negative effect on MovableType's ability to export the entire contents of the site. in other words, it hasn't yet been able to create the complete export file because it gets overwhelmed with spam.
So I spent a few hours today trimming the fat off the spam, while opting to preserve the spams with funny quips and philosophical fragments about Hegel above the cialis links.
I also ran across *real* comments that I'd never seen before, as they were tucked away in infinite Texas Holdem plugs. It seems that, shockingly enough, people these days actually look at their referrer logs (which indicate to a website where surfers come from). I found that the proprietor of "NewsCorpse" took some umbrage when he found i'd described his site as somewhat "pretentious." I suppose I should clarify: I thought the graphics are a little cheesy, but NewsCorpse has an all right name and metaphor for its purpose. Anyhow...
There was a CNN reporter who responded to my post that addressed the Pentagon's new plans to scoop up high schoolers' data for recruiting purposes. They were wondering if I was someone who had initially supported the war, and become pissed off by the new policy. Unfortunately, as this site documents pretty well, I was opposed to this mad conflict before it started, and have since followed along by publishing stories (169 about Iraq, in all) about the deceptive and intentional schemes of fake intelligence and disinformation that were used to sell it to the public.
So if the draft comes along, I have enough evidence to prove I'm a conscientious objector. At least I'm planning ahead for a change. This from a kid who had to pay more than $140 for two incredibly late parking tickets today >:-(
This may be part of the reason that I keep getting all these hits from the government. The CIA openly returned on July 7, on a Google search for "text messaging IED" and ended up on the Afghanistan page. The "text messaging" keyword appears in a blockquote from, who else, Michael Ledeen, who is talking about what a great idea it is to arm the Iranian opposition. Fortunately the rest of it goes on to make fun of John Bolton and his potential connections to the Iranian terrorist group, based in Iraq, the MEK.
So let us consider the IP numbers of the CIA's openly marked relays. This is information released publicly (over DNS) - so don't anyone accuse me of going Novak. The CIA obviously has computers whose IP numbers don't say friggin "CIA.gov" when you look them up. 198.81.129.194 and 198.81.129.193. On the 193 address they came on a google search for "goss punish cia analysts cold war 2004" back on Nov. 10, 2004, when surely Agency employees were pondering the blowback from the election. They ended up on the War on Terror index page.
So for some bizarre reason the CIA also looked for "bloomington lrt condo" on March 17, 2005, and landed on some nighttime light rail shots.
Blah. Who knows what intelligence agencies want these days: condominiums or text messaging?
Anyhow here is a grand old list of every domain containing ".gov" that visited since the start of the year: (ignore the odd numbers there)
apm.gov.ec 2928
pix-a-20.gov.calgary.ab.ca
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
ins.nh.gov
daoutside.hanford.gov
chameleon.doechicago.gov
strata.mt.gov
bhappy.jpl.nasa.gov
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca
bcccache6-3.tco.census.gov
nersc2.lbl.gov
some.security.gov.ge
gw.conab.gov.br 1 2
pix-a-20.gov.calgary.ab.ca
testcache.rtp.epa.gov
gk-central-23.srvs.usps.gov 0
nat-235.fw08nat.dot.ca.gov
lsm5.gtwy.uscourts.gov
sherman.state.gov+computer+logging 1
sherman.state.gov 2
sherman.state.gov 3
jaffwa.staffordshire.gov.uk
s0b1ed1.ssa.gov 0
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca
bcccache6-3.tco.census.gov
gk-west-24.srvs.usps.gov
n021.dhs.gov
ip12-156-194-3.ita.doc.gov 2
sherman.state.gov
vicce001.net.gov.bc.ca
relay2.cia.gov 6498
box.suffolkcountyny.gov
More below.. w00p w00p!
ip .gov.nf.ca
cache2.cdc.gov 6
152-130-7-130.res.net.va.gov
wkst146.uc.usbr.gov 0
152-130-6-130.res.net.va.gov
bowie-fc.census.gov 0
gtwy.uscourts.gov 1
office+of+personnel+management.gov 2
housegate4.house.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
gtwy.uscourts.gov 1
housegate4.house.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
management.gov 2
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
smtp1.sanantonio.gov
n021.dhs.gov
sherman.state.gov
clayton.state.gov
cwood.etl.noaa.gov
turnerra.ornl.gov
152-133-7-130.kc.net.va.gov
unwgsgs3.customs.treas.gov
vicce003.net.gov.bc.ca
wcfc.ocio.usda.gov
gk-central-23.srvs.usps.gov 0
wdcsun24.usdoj.gov
sherman.state.gov 2
sherman.state.gov 2
denver-254.blm.gov
vance004.net.gov.bc.ca
enduser5.faa.gov 6498
unwgsgs4.customs.treas.gov
ns1.corr.ca.gov 6274
host246.welsh-ofce.gov.uk
ip12-156-194-3.ita.doc.gov
clayton.state.gov
internet.fsa.gov.uk
digger1.defence.gov.au
client1.ed.gov 6498
vance002.net.gov.bc.ca 2 0
152-133-7-133.kc.net.va.gov
user.plano.gov
ns2.corr.ca.gov
vicce002.net.gov.bc.ca
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
dknrgwpxav02.defence.gov.au
bcccache6-2.tco.census.gov
dknrgwpxav01.defence.gov.au 224
server4.gba.gov.ar
correo.transmilenio.gov.co
smtp.mpi.gov.vn
gatehouse.cambridgema.gov
a032-fw1.nyc.gov
housegate10.house.gov
vicce002.net.gov.bc.ca 168
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
pool3253.ihs.gov
pt .pnl.gov 1
clayton.state.gov
b12-arbiter-b.net.nih.gov
proxyout2.maricopa.gov 8
binhdinh.gov.vn 6778
smtp.mpi.gov.vn 84
bacninh.gov.vn 6934
relay1.ucia.gov
152-132-11-64.dal.net.va.gov
subnet84.idsc.gov.eg 1786
housegate10.house.gov
sherman.state.gov 1
sherman.state.gov 1
dnscachelastupdate.hongpong.com.txt: 50 130.20.172.158 pt .pnl.gov
dnscachelastupdate.hongpong.com.txt: 50 209.128.29.254 ip .gov.nf.ca
SCOTUS and other intestinal parasite-like acronyms: WaPo: Unraveling the Twists and Turns of the Path to a Nominee. They are trying to keep Roberts docs out of the hands of Democratic lawmakers. Clash likely. He was in the cheesy Federalist Society, but claims no memory of it.
UK cops (are) killaz: Blast Inquiry hampered by shooting (UPI)
A summary of tasty Karl Rove Yellowcake news:
You can tell Frank Rich is having a lot of fun these days: Eight Days in July
Dan Froomkin in the WaPo Gets It: What Did the President Know?: My favorite:
So was the Roberts nomination moved up in an attempt to distract from the CIA leak scandal? And did it fail?
Howard Kurtz asked the National Review's Byron York for his thoughts.
"Just shows you the president's brilliance," York said with a big smile. "Roberts is not taking the heat off Rove; Rove is taking the heat off Roberts. And now we don't have the Supreme Court controversy which we thought we were going to have."
Some dude in Niagara Falls: "Karl Rove: An American Traitor."
TIME: "The Rove Problem": featuring fun at teh Home with Valerie.
Pissed off ex-CIA dudes: Larry Johnson is all right. He was Plame's classmate back in CIA training, he's been out defending her record. And best of all, he and another ex-CIA dude, Pat Lang, have a fine blog called NO QUARTER. Well done, good luck.
Whizbang weird political things: Liberty Dollar - Inflation Proof Currency - only in America. Small question: How can it be inflation proof if it's pegged to the US Dollar?
Best .gov site ever: Sen Lautenberg deconstructs the Chickenhawk. Also check out WhiteHouseTapes.org.
Torture Watch: Government Defies an Order to Release Iraq Abuse Photos.
Moustache Watch: Bolton may snag the recess appointment, McClellan says. And now that batshit neocon Frank Gaffney is lauding Bolton as our man to stop the UN's EVIL GLOBAL (BLACK HELICOPTER) TAX!!!! YAY!!!! Who'd think they needed the Idaho militia set? Via Clemons.
Collapse of Civilization Watch: Jared Diamond on Failing to Think Long Term. What was the guy cutting down the last tree on Easter Island thinking?
Global Guerrilla Watch: I feel dumb that I didn't find Global Guerrillas, a site run by some trendy buzzword defense analyst type dude, earlier. It has lots of good stuff, sort of a merger of open-source talk with security strategy: The Global Guerrilla Venture Model, THE BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE IN IRAQ, 4GW -- FOURTH GENERATION WARFARE, STIGMERGIC LEARNING AND GLOBAL GUERRILLAS, SCENARIO: CHECHEN INDEPENDENCE, THE OPTIMAL SIZE OF A TERRORIST NETWORK, Global Guerrilla Credo, THE BAZAAR'S OPEN SOURCE PLATFORM, AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY: SUPERPOWER BAITING, EXPORTING SYSTEMS DISRUPTION, URBAN TAKEDOWNS, TRANSNATIONAL GANGS. OK wasn't that a fun collection of keywords? Should get me some FBI hits for sure. I will return to this fine subject later...
Iran Contra Infiltration Watch: Confessed Iran-Contra Figure Lands Sensitive Pentagon Post
Iran Belligerency Watch: Congresscritters want to use the MEK to swipe at Tehran: Alert for proxy war potential... Iran ‘terrorist’ group finds support on Hill.
Israel Disengagement Watch: Hey the United Arab Emirates is going to build a nice new Palestinian town in Gaza on the site of an abandoned settlement, with at least $100 million for 30,000 to 40,000 Palestinians. Not bad!
Protest March: "Victory or Flop?" Haaretz asks. Opinion: Democracy needs to go on the offense:
The rule of law faced a battle of life and death last week. The determined efforts of the police and army succeeded in thwarting the desires of tens of thousands of demonstrators to reach Gush Katif and prevent implementation of the order issued by the prime minister under the Disengagement Implementation Law that limits entry into the areas to be evacuated. This determination will be put to trial day after day, and any acceptance of a "small" infringement will end up as a dangerous downward spiral.
[....]The overall conclusion is that our defensive democracy at this time must defend itself against rebels from within, and turn into an offensive democracy, with all the human suffering involved.
Knesset passes immunity reform on eve of Omri Sharon indictment. Bush nominates Richard Jones as next ambassador to Israel. Editorial about Egyptian efforts to deal with sudden terror surge.
Settlers still trying to get into Gaza & cause trouble. Going to organize out in the western Negev desert.
But somehow this mess is a civics lesson?!
The recent days have, in fact, strengthened Israeli democracy. Contrary to all the whining about the supposed damage to the rule of law, the police and the Israel Defense Forces have learned an important lesson on the subject of human dignity and freedom. [.....]
For the first time in their history, they learned to use a foreign language: non-violence. Now it is only to be hoped that the thousands of soldiers and police, the new learners, will internalize what they studied in the fields of Kfar Maimon, at the Kissufim roadblock and on the roads of Israel: It is also possible without beatings, without "means for dispersing demonstrations" and, of course, without shooting. Not only is it possible, it turns out that these methods also harvest great success. Indeed, even when a soldier is run over by demonstrators, there is no need to open fire immediately. Henceforth, every Hebrew soldier and every member of the police force will know that there is also another way, and that it is possible to think twice before beating, kicking and shooting. Someone who did not hit anyone at Kfar Maimon will not shoot at Kissufim, and perhaps will not do so elsewhere either. It is an irony of fate that it has, in fact, been the Jewish settlers in the territories, the sector that has turned breaking the law into a way of life more than any other population group, are the ones who have, unintentionally, taught this stunning lesson in civics to the police and soldiers of Israel.
And a great deal of further detail about Israeli police violence upon the residents of Israel, Arabs and Jews. Hm. Good ol dove Shimon Peres says that Hebron has to go back to Palestinians, Jerusalem has to be divided, but illegal West Bank settlement bloc of Gush Etzion is fixed to be annexed no matter what. Dammit man, that's wrong. One more final thing about the settlements: Israeli president Moshe Katsav praised the values & goals of the remaining West Bank settlers, and credited Bush for acceding to illegal settlement bloc annexation:
In an op-ed published in Yedioth Ahronoth, Katsav said that the settlers "have played a significant role in the achievements of the State of Israel," including U.S. President George W. Bush's agreement to "settlement blocs in Judea and Samaria."
Katsav said Bush also reached his conclusion thanks to the prayers of Jews in the Cave of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb. The president called on settlers to restrain themselves, but expressed much sympathy for the objectives of their struggle. He advised them to stay calm ahead of the struggle over the West Bank and said, "The values for which the residents of Judea and Samaria are struggling continue to be essential for the nation and the state."
These are untenable statements. The settlements play no role in the achievements of the state. On the contrary, the more they multiplied, the smaller the chance of reaching an agreement with the Palestinians and the greater the danger to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
Via billmon and various other people, in The American Conservative, not available online:
The Pentagon, acting under instructions from Vice President Dick Cheney's office, has tasked the United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) with drawing up a contingency plan to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States. The plan includes a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons.
Within Iran there are more than 450 major strategic targets, including numerous suspected nuclear-weapons-program development sites. Many of the targets are hardened or are deep underground and could not be taken out by conventional weapons, hence the nuclear option. As in the case of Iraq, the response is not conditional on Iran actually being involved in the act of terrorism directed against the United States.
Several senior Air Force officers involved in the planning are reportedly appalled at the implications of what they are doing -- that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack -- but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objections.
Now let's not get riled up yet. For one thing the story could be totally fake. Also, we all remember that fine scene in WarGames where WOPR runs all the fun nuclear war scenarios the military has stashed away, just in case. And Washington reporter Laura Rozen says settle down here:
as I've said before, a plan is not the same thing as a policy decision. I would be more surprised if we were to learn that the US has no such contingency plan for Iran. But still....
On the other hand, this scenario ever so slightly parallels the idea behind Operation Northwoods. (read the damn declassified PDF or James Bamford's interpretation) Namely, that a terrorist attack would justify attacking Cuba, even though the Cubans had nothing to do with the attack.
I'd like to quote Bamford's description of what happened around Northwoods. While reading, ask yourself if something vaguely similar could occur regarding Iran:
[After the Bay of Pigs] the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government. In the name of antiCommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against Cuba.
Code named Operation Northwoods, the plan, which had the written approval of the Chairman and every member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington, D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would be blamed on Castro, thus giving Lemnitzer and his cabal the excuse, as well as the public and international backing, they needed to launch their war.
[.......something about planning remotely piloted planes getting shot down and framing the Cubans.. quite amazing itself.......]
[....] Operation Northwoods also had the support of every single member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and even senior Pentagon official Paul Nitze argued in favor of provoking a phony war with Cuba. The fact that the most senior members of all the services and the Pentagon could be so out of touch with reality and the meaning of democracy would be hidden for four decades.
[......] It has long been suspected that the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident-the spark that led to America's long war in Vietnam-was largely staged or provoked by U.S. officials in order to build up congressional and public support for American involvement. Over the years, serious questions have been raised about the alleged attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on two American destroyers in the Gulf But defenders of the Pentagon have always denied such charges, arguing that senior officials would never engage in such deceit.
Now, however, in light of the Operation Northwoods documents, it at deceiving the public and trumping up wars for Americans to fight and die in was standard, approved policy at the highest levels of the Pentagon. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin seems right out of the Operation Northwoods playbook: "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba . . . casualty lists in U.S. newspapers cause a helpful wave of indignation." One need only replace "Guantanamo Bay" with "Tonkin Gulf," and "Cuba" with "North Vietnam" and the Gulf of Tonkin incident may or may not have been stage-managed, but the senior Pentagon leadership at the time was clearly capable of such deceit.
Scott Ritter said that "The US War with Iran has Already Begun." And I note that Raimondo finished writing his own tidbit tying the American Conservative plan with that poll showing most Americans expect World War III. With all apparent seriousness, he says that he's got to help save us from Cheney's apocalypse:
We must mount a last desperate attempt to stand athwart the apocalypse shouting "No!" The alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
Never for a minute did any of us who founded Antiwar.com imagine we would one day be front and center in a twilight struggle to protect the country and the world from such a monumental evil, and yet here we are, a band of hobbits up against all the dark powers of Mordor. Without getting any more melodramatic than is absolutely unavoidable, I can only note that we've come a long way on our quest to rid the world of this particular Ring of Power, and the battle seems to be reaching some sort of dramatic climax. As to whether or not the Cheney-neocon-War Party axis of evil will be defeated in the end, no one can confidently predict at the moment. Yet one thing does seem clear: as long as Antiwar.com is around, we have at least a fighting chance.
I don't know if that much hyperbole is really warranted yet. Whatever. Everyone has duly noted the fine piece by Juan Cole about the recent love fest in Tehran. It is not exactly a subtle irony that (most of) Iraq will end up being a close ally of that other Axis of Evil that we thought we'd surrounded so well...
In contrast, Bush calls Iran part of an axis of evil and dismisses its elections and government as illegitimate. So the Bush administration cannot have been filled with joy when Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and eight high-powered cabinet ministers paid an extremely friendly visit to Tehran this week.
The two governments went into a tizzy of wheeling and dealing of a sort not seen since Texas oil millionaires found out about Saudi Arabia. Oil pipelines, port access, pilgrimage, trade, security, military assistance, were all on the table in Tehran. All the sorts of contracts and deals that U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney had imagined for Halliburton, and that the Pentagon neoconservatives had hoped for Israel, were heading instead due east.
Let's remember what WOPR told us: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."
Ouch. When the Associated Press goes this way, you've lost that bit of spin you really need:
Vice President Dick Cheney's top aide was among the sources for a Time magazine reporter's story about the identity of a CIA officer, the reporter said Sunday.
Until last week, the White House had insisted for nearly two years that vice presidential chief of staff Lewis Libby and presidential adviser Karl Rove were not involved in the leaks of CIA officer Valerie Plame's identity.
I found this really weird and interesting: "Vladislav Surkov's Secret Speech: How Russia Should Fight International Conspiracies," complete with allegations of CIA meddling in the recent Ukraine elections, etc. There's even a jab at James Woolsey for interfering. The site also carries a story about possible Soviet WMDs hidden in the US. The government of tiny, horribly poor Russian republic of Dagestan, adjacent to Chechnya, is on the verge of collapsing, and Islamic militants are causing persistent problems.
Eurasia Daily Monitor: LEAKED MEMO SHOWS KREMLIN FEARS COLLAPSE OF DAGESTAN
On July 8, Moskovsky komsomolets published a report leaked from the office of Dmitry Kozak, Russian President Vladimir Putin's Special Envoy to the Southern Federal District. The report, from Kozak to Putin, described Dagestan as rife with interethnic, religious, and social conflicts and on the brink of collapse. Specifically, "One should recognize that, taken together, the unsolved social, economic, and political problems are now reaching a critical level. Further ignoring the problems and attempts to drive them deep down by force could lead to an uncontrolled chain of events whose logical result will be open social, interethnic, and religious conflicts in Dagestan" (Moskovsky komsomolets, July 8). The authors of the report also warned that the rising influence of religious communities, especially at the local-government level, could result in the emergence of "Sharia enclaves" in the mountain districts of the republic. The report warned that an Islamic state could potentially materialize in the Dagestan mountains.
Iraq: Billmon curses the Flypaper theory of anti-terrorism how Bush's advisor, Townsend, still seems stuck on it. Krugman on the depressing White House detachment from reality. Sunni-Shiite violence and tensions intensify. "Insurgents active again on the streets of Falluja". Tales of an Iraq veteran. Another leaked British document indicates that the Iraq war is seen to radicalize British Muslims. "Shiites bring rigid piety to Iraq's south."
A strange story about ongoing conflict between privatized military firms/forces and the US military in Iraq. There are conflicting stories about whether the US wants to build permanent bases in Iraq -- either in the desert or urban enclaves -- as Stratfor reported last year, VS. recent reports that the British want to get the hell out.
Iraqi blogger Raed "in the Middle" Jarrar's brother has been arrested by the new Iraqi security forces or new Mukhabarat / Mokhabarat. "Fortunately, it's a nice governmental gang!"
If your child or sibling vanishes for two days then calls from the secret service jail in any other place on earth, that would be considered a disaster and a violation of human rights… In Iraq, however, it’s Happy News.
Because the other options include: To be tortured, executed, and thrown in garbage by SCIRI and their Badr brigades. To be held by the Iraqi police and left to choke to death in one of their cars. To be held by the US troops then disappear and be mistreated for months in one of their many prisons. To be kidnapped by one of the countless criminal gangs and cost your family some tens of millions of Iraqi Dinars and/or your life.
So now you can see why being held at the mukhabarat jail is such happy news!
Rovification: (defined as a vortex of scandal from which not even spin can escape)
See the Video: Cooper confirms Rove told him! Ouch! Cooper's tell all TIME story (excerpts). Howard Fineman with a surprising amount of candor in Newsweek. Via CrooksAndLiars.com, sweet site. Alex Cockburn bitterly compares coverage of the Rove story with the Franklin/AIPAC scandal, and a lot of nasty things to say about the CIA. Scooter Libby may have released Miller from confidentiality agreement?
Wilson pounces, calls for Rove resignation. Krugman points out that Rove was the guy who changed our political environment post-9/11, making it clear that "we're living in a country where there is no longer such a thing as nonpolitical truth." In other words, we're in Team B country now.
it seems plenty clear that rightwing hawks band together to provide more threatening propaganda about enemies of the United States, in order to undermine other people in Washington's professional intelligence community. This has happened quite a few times, and the general moniker of "Team B" style thinking -- named after a 1976 group that produced dramatically inflated disinformation about the Soviet Union from the CIA's data -- has become associated with manipulating intelligence, to create public impressions the hawks need to support their policies. Wolfowitz was on Team B back in the 1970s, which is where he first started mucking about with the exciting political potential of WMD threat construction. (Andy Tweeten and Adam Zelmer introduced me to this interesting idea about how security discourse is manipulated. Threat construction arguments in debate are very helpful.)
As Rovegate goes down, Team B-style tricks seem to be popping up all over. The Yellowcake uranium forgeries may yet get tied to the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which worked quite a bit like Team B to subvert America's intelligence agencies. Scooter Libby was the OSP's liason to the CIA, which means he might be involved with the whole thing, as Wilson has alleged more than once. I earlier linked to this interview with a former top CIA officer, Vincent Cannistaro, who quite directly talks about Ledeen, the Iraqi National Congress fabricating WMD intel, the whole bit.
Keep an eye on TPM, it's damn good.
Juan Cole is yet again saying he thinks that Michael Ledeen was involved with fabricating the Niger-Yellowcake documents. Daniel Schorr on NPR talking about how the real issue is how America was misled into the war, featuring Wilson. Raimondo maps it onto the conflict between neo-cons and the CIA, before the war started:
Seen against the backdrop of the fierce intra-bureaucratic war that broke out in the administration in the run-up to the Iraq war – with the CIA and the mainline intelligence and diplomatic communities pitted against civilian neoconservatives in the upper echelons of the Pentagon and the Office of the Vice President – the outing of Plame and her colleagues amounts to an act of espionage committed out of a desire to exact revenge. The leakers meant to retaliate not just against Joe Wilson, through his wife, but against the "old guard" that was resisting the campaign to lie us into war. When the CIA wouldn't go along with the neocon program and "spice up" their analyses with Ahmed Chalabi's tall tales and the outright forgery of the Niger uranium documents, the War Party struck back at them with the sort of viciousness for which the neocons are rightly renowned.
And it goes on further into the links between Scooter Libby, John Hannah, John Bolton, AIPAC, Chalabi, the Yellowcake forgeries, etc. etc. etc. Raimondo's earlier piece about the unmitigated calls for post-London fascism from former Mossad director Ephraim Halevi is also quite interesting, as I noted earlier.
Older stories: "A Flood in Baath Country" about depressing conditions in Syria has been widely acclaimed in Lebanon. The filibuster deal has apparently harmed the Senate Republicans, causing fundraising setbacks--they are way behind the Democrats! It would seem the hard-right base is furious that Senators cut a deal, and ties have loosened between the leadership and the base. All the more pressure on Bush to appease them with some dingbat on the Supreme Court
Iran: Kissinger says don't discount military action if talks fail. (via CFR... bum bum bummm...)
Whatever: Guardian: Reporters find cocaine in EU parliament. World of Paparazzi: Photo Wars. They've got the best intel of all, it seems:
He opens a drawer, pulls out a few stacks of paper. Here, he says, are this week's scheduled movements of every famous passenger of a major limousine company in Los Angeles. He has an employee of the limo company on retainer, with bonuses "if there's results."
Here, too, are what Mr. Griffin describes as the passenger manifests of every coast-to-coast flight on American Airlines, the biggest carrier at Los Angeles International Airport. "I get the full printout," he says. "If they fly any coastal flight, I know. I can also find anybody in the world within 24 hours, I guarantee it. If they don't mask the tail number on a private plane, I'll find it." He says he has law-enforcement officers on his payroll, too, and can have a license plate checked in an hour on weekdays, 20 minutes on weekends.
I thought this set of photographs from the point of view of snipers was creepy but sort of cool.
It's going down in Israel: Fighting both Palestinian militants and hardcore Jewish protesters, the protest actions are starting up pretty much right now. It's coming: "Settlers to march on Gaza despite police ban". Keep tabs with right-wing sites Arutz Sheva (offering opinion from settlers), GAMLA, a for more on settler actions. Of course there is also the weird and disinformation-laden DEBKAfile.
Disturbing new law enforcement stuff: "Genesis of an American Gestapo," a somewhat ranting bit about the spooky new National Security Service, or as this writer dubbed it, the New SS. I don't feel like looking for new horrible news about the FBI-law enforcement shakeup, but it's damn interesting, and real important. The next COINTELPRO or whatever could spring out of this kind of stuff...
Tech: Wouldn't this keyboard be amazing? Programming on offshore boats = sweatshops at sea?
It's hard to know where the motives of defense people begin or end... Another memo leaked out from that sieve of a British government, which said that they are looking for a way to withdraw troops. We've got a little bit about Syria, as well.
BAGnewsNotes is usually interesting photo analysis, including this pic of an Iraqi soldier in some house, as well as photos of Bashar Assad and the memorably titled "Move Over Zarqawi: The New Iranian President And The 1979 Embassy Take-Over."
Brad at Bradblog interviews Joe Wilson.
I would recommend looking at Syria Comment, which is down at the moment but quite good. Josh Landis has a lot of interesting stuff, including a really good story translated from French press about Syria's history and political development. A huge feature on Syria & Assad by lead NY Times reporter James Bennet is really quite good.
Prof. Juan Cole talks about increased sectarian violence in Iraq, as well as the fact that apparently his site is being censored by some military computer administrators in Iraq itself--the soldiers are cut off. (via Dkos) As he says:
I have a lot of .mil readers, and know for a fact that the blog is valued by many intelligence professionals in DC, so it is a shame if it is not available at some bases.
Good stuff from Billmon at Whiskey Bar: The Devil's Flypaper. I didn't know that Bush's nasty new counterterror specialist, Fran Townsend, had quite likely pressured Abu Ghraib personnel to give detainees that special care. Evidently she's still upholding the flypaper theory. As Billmon put it,
"I don't know how you would even begin to de-program someone capable of believing, with fanatical certainty, two completely contradictory statements: i.e., that because there are terrorists in Iraq, they can't be in London blowing up the subways -- even though they're in London, blowing up the subways."
There's a good column by Dionne about this in WaPo:
Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Fran Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, said that the war in Iraq attracts terrorists "where we have a fighting military and a coalition that can take them on and not have the sort of civilian casualties that you saw in London."
Huh? If British troops fighting in Iraq did not stop the terrorists from striking London, then what is the logic for believing that American troops fighting in Iraq will stop terrorists from striking our country again? Intelligence reports -- and Townsend's own words -- suggest that Iraq has become a terrorist breeding ground since the American invasion. How, exactly, has that made us safer?
This is also a weirdly racist or at least dehumanizing argument: Townsend is stating that there aren't massive civilian casualties in Iraq? Can we actually be sure she believes Iraqis are real human beings?
This was a good article in The American Conservative about how the phenomenon of suicide terrorism is most closely linked to foreign military occupation -- or the perception of foreign military occupation.
Oh good, one of Bush's top intelligence advisors is lobbying to help China buy UNOCAL.
I feel like throwing in a true classic: Judith Miller's famous NY Times article about Saddam purchasing those damn aluminum tubes.
Arch-neocon Michael Ledeen is accusing a wide set of the British public, including the BBC, of sweeping, deeply rooted antisemitism... and who better to exemplify this than Ahmed Chalabi?!?
The final component of British blindness on the subject of the Middle East is one we are not supposed to talk about in good company: the Jews. Yet I don't know any country this side of the Levant in which there has been so much anti-Semitism, so many complaints that "Zionists," "Likudniks," "Jewish hawks," and — the single epithet that sums up all of the above — "neocons" had manipulated America and its poodle Blair into the ghastly blunder of Iraq. The BBC has devoted hours of radio and television to slanderous misrepresentations of places like the American Enterprise Institute, where I sit, and of such Jewish luminaries as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, and Paul Wolfowitz. Sometimes it seemed one was reading translations from the Saudi or Egyptian or Iranian press, so total was the hatred of the Jews.
This fit nicely with the desire of the British establishment to carry on their special relationship with some Arab leaders, and many British elites often seemed a micro-step away from saying that the world would be a better place if only Israel weren't there. The Middle East would be so much easier, you know. And when London was bombed, you can be sure — indeed you can read it — many of these people blamed Israel and the Jews, both those in the Middle East and those in New York and Washington. Indeed, within minutes of the attack, a story appeared according to which the Israelis had advance notice, and had instructed Finance Minister Netanyahu to stay put, instead of going to give a speech. The story was as false as the one according to which Israelis had stayed away from the World Trade Center on 9/11, but they both reflected a state of mind. An anti-Semitic mind.
All too many Brits (as some Americans, albeit far fewer) would prefer to devote their national energies to the elimination or "taming" of Israel, and, as they see it, the silencing of their own Jews, rather than fighting Islamic terrorism. Combined with the desire to keep Arab money in London and special access for British businessmen and diplomats and scholars in the Arab world, it explains why HMG gave sanctuary and indeed benevolent assistance to the jihadis in their HMG midst.
IRAQIS — THE NEW JEWS?
And so Israel was not on the prime minister's list [of damaged countries]. What about Iraq?
The Iraqis are viewed much the same way, and are at some risk of becoming the new Jews of the Middle East. In the enormous hate literature directed against the neocons, Ahmed Chalabi is part and parcel of the anti-Semites' hateful vision. No matter that he is a Shiite, and no matter that he was rudely dismissed by the Israeli government before Operation Iraqi Freedom. He was in cahoots with the Jewish cabal, and was therefore "one of them." And as Chalabi, so the rest of the lot. ..... When is the last time you read anything, anywhere (with all too few exceptions — like Arthur Chrenkoff's "good news" beat), celebrating these rare qualities of spirit? And this question goes hand in hand with its twin: When is the last time you read anything about the incredible performance of the State of Israel, similarly under siege and similarly stressed by the crisis that surrounds it?
[......]
This sickness is certainly not limited to Great Britain; we find it here as well, in such personages as Pat Buchanan and Juan Cole, along with their acolytes.
It is a bit depressing to hear Ledeen resort to tarring the BBC with the Nazi brush. Where does Macalester prof. Emily Rosenberg, for example, fit into his rubric of Jew haters? In a fine moment during the International Roundtable conference last year, she took him to task for his shady prescriptions of global Trotskyist-inspired revolution, the war and all the rest. Naturally Ledeen also calls for attacking Iran after the London bombings (via Prospect.org).
It's also a little weird to hear him claim that the AP story about Israel getting tipped off by Scotland Yard was basically the product of an antisemitic mind. It was just an AP story, not 21st Century Goebbels. The antisemitism gun is pretty much the first refuge of a scoundrel, the rhetorical fog deployed to cover for a handful of nasty bureaucrats in Washington - Christians, Jews, Muslims, Moonies and their newspapers. (note: Among Holocaust researchers it is accepted to spell "antisemitic" as such, or as "anti-semitic" -- "Semitic" doesn't need to be capitalized because the term was first developed by bigots anyway)
More about post-London hawks randomly calling for overthrowing Tehran without really explaining how, or why the hell it would even be feasible, helpful, good, etc...
Kos bans some people who have been posting raving conspiracy theories in the diaries, as well as those recommending said diaries. This seems like a decidedly hazardous step for DailyKos, as one of the people on the huge reaction thread put it:
Or maybe my definition of a conspiracy theory is different. Definitions are important, because a large portion of "acceptable" diaries on this site could be defined as conspiratorial in nature, by right wing ideologues or even average joe types. Check the recomended list, Congressman Conyers diary asks for a timeline of Bush Administration actions up to the war, specifically looking for evidence of fixed intelligence. The President lies and it ends up in the death of close to 2000 military personnel, thousands badly injured, and billions of tax payer dollars sunk into the sand and the pockets of corporations linked to administartion officials. Sound like a wacked out conspiracy theory?
But this response makes some damn good sense:
The point is (so far as I can tell) not to ban all discussion of conspiracies at all.
Markos believes in several conspiracies, at least.
The point is that if you are speculating about a conspiracy, or promoting others who do, you have an obligation to either:
a) cite some documented facts that lend credence to your assertions
or
b) recognize that you are engaging in rank speculation and that therefore
b-sub1) especially if it is inflammatory and not backed up by any real investigation -
b-sub2) and most especially if you are nasty to those who challenge you to back up your claims - b-sub3) people here will come down on you
True enough... but the question about the barrier between conspiracy and plain political speculation's a tough one... Eh whatever...
Stay tuned here for one hell of a scandal.... Damn skippy, things are blowing up all over the place.
The Star Tribune just put up a pretty scathing editorial about Rove, Wilson and the case for war, for the July 14 newspaper, "Karl Rove/Real issue is the case for war". What do you know, they cut right to the chase:
The real issue, more serious and less glitzy than whether Bush will stand by his political adviser, is the extraordinary efforts the Bush administration made to protect a case for war in Iraq from all contradictory evidence -- in effect, as the British spymaster Sir Richard Dearlove put it, to "fix" the facts and intelligence so they would support a decision already made.
[.......]
In January 2003, however, President Bush asserted an Iraq-Africa uranium connection in his State of the Union message. Subsequently, it turned out that Bush was indeed referring to Niger. The Niger-Iraq connection became one of the pillars in Bush's case for war with Iraq.
After the start of the war, Wilson wrote a lengthy op-ed piece for the New York Times laying out the facts of his trip and saying he had "little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
Five days later, Rove told Time reporter Matt Cooper he should "not get too far out on Wilson." His trip to Niger, Rove said, wasn't approved by Cheney or CIA Director George Tenet. Cooper wrote to his boss, "It was, KR said, wilson's wife, who apparently works at the agency on wmd issues who authorized the trip."
[.....]
This is a classic Rove technique: undercut a critic by planting the notion that he was off to Africa on a lark arranged by his wife. Rove's history as a rough political player is well-documented. But this wasn't about a political campaign; this was about a serious question of national security and the justification for a difficult war.
[......]
It is instructive to remember that the investigation into who revealed Plame's identity was initiated by Tenet, not by administration critics. Remember also that Wilson was correct; ultimately the White House had to retract Bush's State of the Union statement on the Niger connection.
In addition to discrediting critics of the Niger connection, the Bush administration, through the actions of John Bolton -- now nominee to be U.N. ambassador -- sought to intimidate intelligence analysts who objected to conclusions about Iraq's WMD, and to get a U.N. chemical weapons official fired so he wouldn't be able to send inspectors back to Iraq, where they might disprove more of the case for war.
In the scheme of things, whether Rove revealed Plame's identity, deliberately or not, matters less than actions by Rove, Bolton, Cheney and others to phony up a case for war that has gone badly, has cost thousands of lives plus hundreds of billions of dollars, and has, a majority of Americans now believe, left the United States less safe from terrorism rather than more.
The Republican communications team shifts into high gear trying to lay out a multi-pronged defense for Karl Rove, now that he's been outed for telling Matt Cooper of TIME that Plame worked at the CIA. It looks rather half-cocked, as Republican partisans try hard to spin while claiming they don't want to impede the investigation. President Bush and Scott McClellan have declined to answer questions about the matter. The RNC and its chairman Ken Mehlman are playing the attack dog role while the White House waits and hopes the story will blow over. As it very well could when Rehnquist suddenly turns into a pile of dust...
I started by reading a bizarre Wall Street Journal editorial today about how Rove should be rewarded for his valiant efforts against CIA nepotism -- or something like that. It all made more sense when I found out that this was a quite precise regurgitation of RNC talking points, with many WSJ points still in the same order. Happily, RawStory.com managed to get ahold of the RNC's actual talking points memo against Wilson. Mehlman said that Rove was merely "discouraging a reporter from writing a false story based on a false premise." A-haaa... It is so staggeringly unethical that some Republicans are complementing each other for supporting outing Plame. How weird. Maybe Rove should really have been more careful. So many of his past statements are now known to be lies.
A fairly good general summary of the mess. The Great Grilling of McClellan been going on for days now. On Monday, I spent several hours watching network news TV, for the first time in a few weeks. It was quite satisfying to see the normally emasculated White House press corps pounce on hapless, clumsy McClellan (QT video awesome!) about his past statements defending Rove. Nowadays he's not even willing to still uphold those statements. It would be funny, if this whole clusterfuck hadn't damaged America's ability to track weapons of mass destruction (let's not forget about the fallout for Plame's former fake CIA company).
ABC's quasi-insider memo The Note is happily framing the matter as Washington journalists acting like a pack of dogs. The Daily Show returns to skewer FOX News' fucking maniacal John Gibson (QT video) and the rest of the media reaction. Gibson is even more scary today (QT video). "Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody and nobody else had the cojones to do it. I'm glad Rove did, if he did do it, and he still says he didn't." OMG it's crazy....
A transcript of TIME reporter Matt Cooper's public remarks after swallowing hard and going to the Fitzgerald grand jury today. Oddly enough, it seems possible that Cooper only secured that release from his non-disclosure agreement because Rove's blustering lawyer, Robert Luskin, fucked up. There is also some amusing background on Luskin (via TPM). Luskin is himself a somewhat shady operator, who once represented Stephen A. Saccoccia, a guy accused of laundering hundreds of millions in drug money through precious metal companies. He paid Luskin handsomely... with gold bars! (Luskin discussion thread)
The mess has even reached back to Minnesota, where Norm Coleman is yet again the cheesy Capitol hatchet man (as assigned), fresh off his Kofi-bashing tour-de-force. Norm has Karl himself to thank for the Senate seat, as Karl halted Pawlenty's quest to run against Wellstone.
There's plenty of bamboozlement and disinformation getting peddled. I don't really know how to get ahead of this story, except to push it back towards its most fundamental context--the mendacious attitude at the White House towards anyone in government who threatened the Administration's case for invading Iraq, as the Strib points out. The yellowcake uranium claims were a fairly minor pillar of their case, but what's interesting is that it was based on forged documents, apparently concocted by a former member of Italian intelligence (SISMI). As Josh Marshall points out, these documents seemed to take a weird path through the executive branch, different than most of the fraudulent parts of their case for war.
While most of the fabricated Iraq WMD/terrorism disinformation came out of the Pentagon (Office of Special Plans, Bill Luti, people under Douglas Feith, etc.), it seems that the Niger documents kept getting put back on the table and inserted into speeches by people in the State Department, which was hardly the neo-con's center of operations. But who in State would have known about Valerie Plame working on CIA WMD counter-proliferation? Then-Undersecretary of State for Arms Control John Bolton.
Indeed, the ever-watchful Steve Clemons at TheWashingtonNote has an update on possible links between Rove, Bolton and the Yellowcake case, and he has pushed this angle before. Former CIA officer Ray McGovern asserts a tie between Bolton and the Yellowcake matter, and of course I had a post about how Rep. Henry Waxman claimed that Bolton was involved with generating Yellowcake documents at State (Waxman's PDF letter). And Bolton also apparently instructed State personnel to lie to Congress about his role in the Niger uranium case. His assistants, John Hannah and David "Clean Break" Wurmser, who were also working for Cheney at the time, also were probably related. Scooter Libby and Hannah believed for years that the CIA was being unfair to Chalabi, so they were certainly not Agency lovers.
It seems that Hannah and Bolton likely helped to shepherd along these forged yellowcake documents through the process, stuffing them into Bush's speeches, and they could have known all along that they were forgeries. At various points, the yellowcake documents were debunked by State Department analysts, and Bolton would have had to throw away the analysts' objections and soldier forth. Hell, Bolton could have forged them himself.
And so when Wilson wrote his famous op-ed in the Times, Rove, Bolton and the rest of the inner circle quite likely perceived it as a political swipe at them coming from the rational CIA/State analysts, which explains why their counterattack took the improbable form of this famous leak, intended to make the CIA look bad. Otherwise, Rove probably saw it would be politically critical to scare the rest of the analysts and bureaucrats shitless about what would happen to them and their families if they stood up to the lies and disinformation winding through Washington. In my view, intimidating potential whistleblowers from stepping forward about war lies was the primary purpose of Karl Rove's attack on Wilson, Plame and the CIA. As Juan Cole wrote about the Plame affair last year:
We now know that the Niger story involved the forgery of documents by a man with ties to Italian military intelligence, and that, moreover, Italian military intelligence has ties to Michael Ledeen, Harold Rhode and Lawrence Franklin, pro-Likud neoconservatives, two of whom had high-level positions in the Pentagon and all three of whom were tightly networked with the American Enterprise Institute. Franklin (a neoconservative Catholic) is being investigated for spying on the U.S. for Israel. The nexus of Italian military intelligence, the office of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, and the neoconservatives in the Pentagon suggests a network of conspiracy aimed at dragging the U.S. into wars against Iraq and Iran.
[.......]
The neoconservatives around Dick Cheney, including Scooter Libby and John Hannah, were highly committed to the Niger uranium story as a casus belli against Iraq, and were furious when Wilson revealed that he had shown it false in spring of 2002. They were convinced that the CIA was behind this strike at their credibility, and that Valerie Plame had been the one who managed to get Wilson sent. That is, in their paranoid world, Wilson's honest reportage of the facts was a CIA plot against the Iraq War and perhaps against the neoconservatives around Cheney and in the Pentagon.
It has been being leaked for many months now that the FBI believes the leak came from persons in Cheney's circle, possibly John Hannah and/or Scooter Libby.
Juan Cole has even more nasty things to say about Karl right now.
Most people I've talked to seem convinced that Karl will get off somehow. Indeed, the spin is thick and heavy on that point.
The first key Republican argument is that Karl didn't use Valerie Plame's actual name when conversing with reporters. This is totally irrelevant, since anyone could have found the ambassador's wife's name on Google, as MediaMatters points out. David Corn debunks this stuff.
Second argument is that Karl didn't share anything classified. This could very well become the focus of the legal debate, but politically it really isn't that helpful for them. This is BS: it's not legal to leak a CIA agent's name just so that a reporter doesn't have the wrong idea. Corn again. Larry Johnson, a guy who went with Plame through CIA training, says that they were all "covert."
Another element in the Republican defense plan is that some intelligence committee report showed that the intelligence about Niger was still ambiguous. Consider Wilson's own rebuttal to that.
Yet another element is a claim that Wilson was already caught lying about why he was sent to Africa. Mehlman says that Wilson had earlier lied that Cheney had sent him there. But the news clip that Mehlman references actually says the exact opposite, according to TPM.
There's a great many Washington liberals finally pouncing on the Plame leak story. Some say that Karl may be guilty of conspiracy because he was conspiring to make it difficult for Plame to do her job. Maybe it made Bush a lame duck, although I think that's a little premature. On TPMCafe, Marshall Wittmann, a Heritage/McCain/Christian Coalition/DLC conservative, points out that Karl is too damn important for the President to cut him loose. (Yes you can go from McCain to the DLC. That's why they suck) Naturally tons of people on the HuffyPost. Buzzflash has plenty of stories. Josh Marshall has been doing a hell of a job this week. Murray Waas exclusive: "Novak co-operated with prosecutors" and totally spilled the beans.
Incredible. Whatever part of my body processes irony is totally burned out....
Technorati Tags: cia
So much for the flypaper theory. Let's think about why the hell it was ever taken seriously in the first place.
Ok then, I am going off for the weekend real soon. So here is a bunch of links yall should check out.
Israel and Palestine: The Pullout is a real big deal, but Sharon is also trying to lock in the West Bank settlements as far as possible. There are 38 days until the pullout. I am suspicious that the recent money handed to the Palestinians may be used to build fences, checkpoints and shit in the West Bank on the premise that it "improves their quality of life" by allowing more streamlined processing around the vast chunks of stolen land. Haaretz has a furious editorial about detatching Jewish religious fundamentalism from secular Israeli politics. It is spooky:
While Gush Katif residents are trying to postpone the Gaza Strip's closure to visitors until the last possible moment, the Yesha Council of settlements has its own agenda, no longer focused on thwarting the disengagement, but on seizing the moment to arouse the entire settler camp.
It is doubtful that anyone in the settler leadership thinks protest can prevent the evacuation of Gush Katif. After all, they know Ariel Sharon better than anyone, and they know that the more spokes put in his wheels, the more determined he becomes. The settler leadership's political goal is to exploit the fire that has already been started in the youth, the yeshivas, the girls' schools, the road blockings, the prisons, the army and even the ultra-Orthodox camp to ignite a huge conflagration to prevent further evacuations. This blaze is also liable to destroy any remaining empathy that the Israeli public has for the settlers' concerns.
Given that we are dealing with brainwashed youngsters, who from their infancy have been spoon-fed the belief that it is forbidden to give up any scrap of land, grew up on memories of Sebastia and learned from their parents that breaking the law always pays, any attempt to direct and moderate the protest is doomed to failure.
[......]
The mass march to Gush Katif, like the scale of refusal by religious soldiers, will determine not only the future of the hesder yeshivas, but primarily whether religious Zionism in its current incarnation is not a Trojan horse that has infiltrated Zionism in order to destroy it from within.
The hardcore settlers and their supporters are going to have a mass march towards Gush Katif in Gaza pretty soon, and will attempt to overwhelm the Israeli military. It is interesting that the whole area is so small, that such tactics are viable.
Right-wing protesters set up new Gush Katif stronghold
Right-wing protesters have begun establishing a new stronghold in the settlement of Shirat Hayam, bringing in large amounts of equipment over the past few days and carrying on construction work, in contravention of the order issued last week by GOC Southern Command Dan Harel.
Far-right activist Moshe Feiglin, head of the Jewish Leadership faction in the Likud Party, moved there yesterday.
Israel denies the press reports about their getting intelligence (or providing it) to the British government. However we should point out the key sentence:
"After the first explosion, our finance minister received a request not to go anywhere," Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom told Army Radio.
We need to know for certain when the British actually determined they were experiencing a terror attack -- because it apparently wasn't after the first explosion. This timeline the thing that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists dwell on, and if we're to parse out this whole crazy theory -- again, based on an AP story and a Stratfor report -- the timeline matter.
IDF gives Amuna outpost 48 hours to evacuate 9 homes (built illegally on Palestinian land). Sharon's London statement and more on the denials. Radical stories from Right wing: More soldiers say "I cannot expel Jews". Israel wants US Aid for Pullout Plan. New border crossing system. West Bank barrier construction accelerated.
Iraq: Now it's being claimed that the Iraq insurgency may be directly tied to the bombings, besides a whole swath of people that are just quite happy about it because the British illegally invaded their country and helps continue blowing it up.
It's too bad though--if the American military leadership had been forced to take more cues from the Brits, it surely wouldn't have gotten so bad in Iraq. For example, the British initially accepted -- as the Americans finally came to accept -- the Shiite sheiks in southern cities that threw the Baath off and took relatively calm control of their areas immediately.
So it's all gone to hell. I usually count on Juan Cole to offer finer-grained details about the disaster. His line these days, "sometimes you are just screwed." In this Salon article, he remarks on the message the bombers posted, "the time of revenge has come".
Minnesota: /bin/shutdown --stategovernment now
It pisses me off. I also feel somewhat embarrassed because I helped put together the Politics in Minnesota index for a Legislature, that for whatever else, caused the state's first shutdown. BLAH. Why do they think that evaporating the government is useful? <That zap sound you're hearing is my neurons killing themselves in despair.>
Damn Judy Miller: Why the hell does she have to be the saint of journalism, after putting out all of Chalabi's WMD disinformation for the whole damn country to swallow? The WaPo says its a bad case for the fight. Although their editorials are usually ridiculous these days. Some say she should go to jail.. No one in White House press corps questions Rove.
Misc: ok we;re shifting to Linkdump:
Scarborough is crazy. Durrr. FOX's bombing reaction is fucking scary. FUcking SCARY. Again SCARY. Do conservatives believe in revolution? Yes it was practically an attack on London Muslims... "It's Up to the Anti-War Movement to Restrain the Thirst for More Blind Revenge". Fisk: "Bush was right, but too late"
Info Clearing House is good. Watch the Antiwar blog.
For some fun, NewsBreakers awesome!
Well I am sorry, that is all the links I have time for. MUST GO NOW. Damn... as always time's a bitch.......... Have a good weekend all.
To know the ending would be pretending...
Oh my, the Karl Rove Google News search looks pretty goddamn bad today!
I think I should just copy and paste the whole damn thing. It may be ugly and run all over the place, but that's exactly how it ought to be.
Maybe this summer will work out, after all.
My bitterness towards how this man apparently damaged the CIA's weapons of mass destruction counter-proliferation programs can't be expressed.
Over a year ago I quoted an AP story suggesting Scooter Libby, or possibly Karl Rove, were named by Joe Wilson as prime suspects in the case, in his book. And of course there was Wilson's famous quote in 2003: ""At the end of the day, it's of keen interest to me to see whether or not we can get Karl Rove frog-marched out of the White House in handcuffs. And trust me, when I use that name, I measure my words."
Let's Roll, Joe, things are in motion...
Karl Rove story ignites political fireworks over Independence Day ...
OhmyNews International, South Korea - 16 hours ago
A story about Washington insider Karl Rove, who is referred to as "Bush's Brain," is setting off its own set of political fireworks over the long weekend and ...
Democrat Calls on Rove to Make Statement on Probe (Update1) Bloomberg
Senator urges Rove to make statement on inquiry Fort Worth Star Telegram
Agent's name leaked by Rove, magazine says International Herald Tribune
Waldo Village Soup - Pioneer Press - all 103 related »
Lack Of Rove Coverage Proves Roger Ailes Wrong Again About FOX ...
News Hounds, CA - 20 hours ago
The revelation that Karl Rove has been implicated in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame is currently being reported in 482 news reports aggregated under one ...
Christmas in July - Karl Rove source of Plame leak News Hounds
all 2 related »
JUDITH MILLER and KARL ROVE
Middle East Report, D.C. - 6 hours ago
... leaking out further in Washington because of the confidential sources investigation, is that it was non-other than White House Rasputin Karl Rove himself who ...
Karl Rove's new brand of McCarthyism
Buffalo News, NY - Jul 3, 2005
... In 2005, Karl Rove has attacked liberals for being therapists. Thus is born a kinder and gentler form of McCarthyism. Named after the late Sen. ...
Karl Rove Plame Leak Source: Yawn
uruknet.info, Italy - Jul 2, 2005
... the clink. Do you think Karl Rove will see the inside of a jail cell? Do you think he will actually be prosecuted? Judith Miller ...
Karl Rove Offends Liberals, But Proves a Salient Point about the ...
Human Events - Jul 1, 2005
Karl Rove proved a very salient point last week in his speech to the Conservative Party of New York. ... Karl Rove, therefore, was correct in his assessment. ...
Lawrence O’Donnell Says Karl Rove Source in Plame Case
Outside the Beltway, VA - Jul 2, 2005
... talk show, Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, claimed to know that name--and it is, according to him, top White House mastermind Karl Rove. ...
Analyst: Cooper Documents Reveal Karl Rove As Source
OfficialWire, NY - Jul 2, 2005
... 05 -- According to an article published Friday by Editor & Publisher, Assistant to the President, Deputy Chief of Staff and Senior Advisor Karl Rove (shown here ...
O'Donnell Says Second Source Confirms Rove as Plame Leaker ...
Editor & Publisher - Jul 2, 2005
... Lawrence O'Donnell, senior MSNBC political analyst, now claims that at least two sources have confirmed that the name is--top White House mastermind Karl Rove. ...
Report: 'Open season' on US journalists Science Daily (press release)
all 3 related »
In Plain Sight: Why the Betrayal of Our National Security by the ...
uruknet.info, Italy - 2 hours ago
... who would expose that the White House lied America into war, the White House -- in an action that could have only been authorized by Karl Rove, perhaps with a ...
Wouldn't you know it, my over-laden browser finally crashed, taking with it a couple dozen interesting sites that I opened up, which have already slid off the browser's history page. However, I managed to get through most of them before it halted.
"The Deal," about a sleazy oil executive, Christian Slater, who gets tangled up in some kind of deal to traffic illegal oil, looks really sweet and I wish it was playing in town. Because we're going north of $60 a barrel, baby, and it ain't comin back down...
It looks like John Bolton may refuse to accept a recess appointment, perhaps because it would be Quite Silly to have a UN ambassador that never got approved by the Senate. But sillier things have happened. The Washington Note is still the place to look for news on it.
Iran's election happened. There's a real good user, alimostofi, posting every day about Iran on the Agonist, as well as the unwieldy nickname vsredthoughtsecondedition at DailyKos. The Lebanese Daily Star has a piece making fun of the Western media. Gordon Robison, the author of that piece, has a new site, mideastanalysis.com. But can it meet the Juan Cole standard?
(Cole's analysis of what makes a last "throe" is hilarious, as well as Ahmadinejad's usage of Bush-style political tactics. And Afghanistan's "neo-Taliban" forces are regrouping for another round.)
AmericaSedition or America's Edition? Karl Rove says there's not much difference these days. Also check out news of the apocalypse at The Boom Shelter. "What happens in Gitmo stays in Gitmo." Thanks, Rush.
The Supreme Court is less beloved than ever, by both left and right, polls show.
There were bombings in Iranian Khuzestan, which Iran blamed on the People's Mujahedin, which I believe is the same as the neo-cons' beloved MEK or Mujahedin-el-Khalq:
"It's unbelievable," one State Department official said. "It's a pretty cushy arrangement for a terrorist organization. But the Pentagon continues to see them as useful, and they seem to be playing a waiting game until the policy toward the MEK changes."
Guardian: WMD claims were 'totally implausible':
A key Foreign Office diplomat responsible for liaising with UN inspectors says today that claims the government made about Iraq's weapons programme were "totally implausible".
He tells the Guardian: "I'd read the intelligence on WMD for four and a half years, and there's no way that it could sustain the case that the government was presenting. All of my colleagues knew that, too".
Carne Ross, who was a member of the British mission to the UN in New York during the run-up to the invasion, resigned from the FO last year, after giving evidence to the Butler inquiry...
Poor Senator Durbin. Fell yet again to the Republican strategy of bitching about how someone is bitching in order to avoid talking about what's so bitch-worthy in the first place. Now we all know about how you shouldn't compare your opponent to Nazis, it's worth considering how spooky absolute power is being implemented in our system of government. This guy complains that it's the startup chime of fascism. Actually he didn't phrase it that way. I did...
The Red States got their own mega community blog. Good for them. I hope they can reach a better level than littlegreenfootballs.
Agonist:Toxic waste containers wash up in Somalia. This story about Bird Flu drugs being rendered useless by wide use in China is depressing.
The Downing Street reporter reflects on the nine months since he got the first Downing Street Memo. This focuses more attention on the "secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress" as he terms it.
Also on the Agonist, Sean-Paul is cackling a bit about how he was already covering the airstrikes against Iraq before the War Proper started... he notes the monopoly media "in the run up to their wargasm they missed several very important stories that were sitting in their faces" Wargasm. I like it. This is in response to a big feature at RawStory about the massive pre-war Iraq bombing campaign that some people are now pondering as illegal. I am sorry I used the inherently false phrase "massive pre-war Iraq bombing campaign." As RawStory explains:
“It was no big secret at the time,” GlobalSecurity.org director John Pike told RAW STORY. “It was apparent to us at the time that they were doing it and why they were doing it, and that was part of the reason why we were convinced that a decision to go to war had already been made, because the war had already started.”
I just want to throw in this op-ed by Sibel Edmonds, the mysterious FBI whistleblower.
Over four years ago, more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, during April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden.
This asset/informant was previously a high-level intelligence officer in Iran in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. Through his contacts in Afghanistan he received information that:
1. Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities;
2. The attack was going to involve airplanes;
3. Some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States;
4. The attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.
The agents who received this information reported it to their superior, Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism, Thomas Frields, at the FBI Washington Field Office, by filing “302” forms, and the translator, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, translated and documented this information. No action was taken by the Special Agent in Charge, Thomas Frields, and after 9/11 the agents and the translators were told to ‘keep quiet’ regarding this issue. The translator who was present during the session with the FBI informant, Mr. Behrooz Sarshar, reported this incident to Director Mueller in writing, and later to the Department of Justice Inspector General.
The press reported this incident, and in fact the report in the Chicago Tribune on July 21, 2004 stated that FBI officials had confirmed that this information was received in April 2001, and further, the Chicago Tribune quoted an aide to Director Mueller that he (Mueller) was surprised that the Commission never raised this particular issue with him during the hearing (Refer to Chicago Tribune article, dated July 21, 2004).
Mr. Sarshar reported this issue to the 9/11 Commission on February 12, 2004, and provided them with specific dates, location, witness names, and the contact information for that particular Iranian asset and the two special agents who received the information. I provided the 9/11 Commission with a detailed and specific account of this issue, the names of other witnesses, and documents I had seen. Mr. Sarshar also provided the Department of Justice Inspector General with specific information regarding this case.
For almost four years since September 11, officials refused to admit to having specific information regarding the terrorists’ plans to attack the United States. The Phoenix Memo, received months prior to the 9/11 attacks, specifically warned FBI HQ of pilot training and their possible link to terrorist activities against the United States. Four months prior to the terrorist attacks the Iranian asset provided the FBI with specific information regarding the ‘use of airplanes’, ‘major US cities as targets’, and ‘Osama Bin Laden issuing the order. ’ Coleen Rowley likewise reported that specific information had been provided to FBI HQ. All this information went to the same place: FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and the FBI Washington Field Office, in Washington DC.
In October 2001, approximately one month after the September 11 attack, an agent from (city name omitted) field office, re-sent a certain document to the FBI Washington Field Office, so that it could be re-translated. This Special Agent, in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, rightfully believed that, considering his target of investigation (the suspect under surveillance), and the issues involved, the original translation might have missed certain information that could prove to be valuable in the investigation of terrorist activities. After this document was received by the FBI Washington Field Office and retranslated verbatim, the field agent’s hunch appeared to be correct. The new translation revealed certain information regarding blueprints, pictures, and building material for skyscrapers being sent overseas (country name omitted). It also revealed certain illegal activities in obtaining visas from certain embassies in the Middle East, through network contacts and bribery. However, after the re-translation was completed and the new significant information was revealed, the unit supervisor in charge of certain Middle Eastern languages, Mike Feghali, decided NOT to send the re-translated information to the Special Agent who had requested it.
I found another story about Edmonds at TomFlocco.com. However, Tom Flocco seems like he might be crazy. Consider this: "Campaign coffers profit from 911, coke and courts: FBI linguist won’t deny intelligence intercepts tied 911 drug money to U.S. election campaigns":
"It’s so simple," Edmonds told TomFlocco.com. "Nobody is looking at the Department of Defense aspect of the whole 911 cover-up. The FBI is citing two reasons for my gag order: to protect ‘sensitive’ diplomatic relations and to protect foreign U.S. business relationships."
In attempting to let the American people how close the 911 cover-up comes to home, Edmonds told us, "I will say this: the FBI is only a mouthpiece for the State Department. The State Department is the main reason for the cover-up. It has to do with foreign business relationships and who they are...Pakistan, Turkey...espionage in the State Department...preventing an investigation." The former FBI translator has implicated everything "from drugs to money laundering to arms sales. And yes, there are certain convergences with all these activities and international terrorism," adding "they don’t deal with 1 or 5 million dollars, but with hundreds of millions."
[.....]
While only a subpoena, testimony and questioning by non-political, career prosecutors will properly answer the insider trading question, we asked Sibel Edmonds the big question anyway--given the above FBI track record implicating espionage:
Do you deny that the FBI intercepts you translated indicated that financial arrangements were in place well before the 911 attacks to both fund and profit from the World Trade Center and Pentagon "terrorism" while also facilitating the laundering of drug money into recent congressional and presidential campaigns? "I cannot comment on that, Tom. You know I’m under a gag order," she said.
Hilarious! But kind of cheesy journalism. She could deny any crazy question. On the other hand, this Tom Flocco story about a brainwashing sex ring operating at the highest levels of government is hands-down the funniest "news" I've read in a long time.
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition. I hope that works. Lots of solid people are members.
Even more important: Mean gossip about Jared Fogle.
Was GHW Bush linked to JFK's shooting? Sure, why not?
I have so many damn links piled up for days on end, gotta get rid of them!!
The Downing Street Memo continues to exert a certain effect on things... It's interesting how the New York Times has bent over backwards to soften the way they talk about the memo and its contents. NewsClip Autopsy has a bit about their mastery of deception. Sanjoy Maharajan's "Anatomy of a Coverup" at Zmag has all the gory details about how the news copy obfuscates key points about the memos and their contents, although the text layout gives me a headache and I can't help but skim it. An old grumble about the Winds of War by Jim Kirwan has a link to an interesting "Iraqi Resistance Report"... And this page of war headlines has all kinds of leftie stuff.
Tracking Election Irregularities (HongWiki page): Bev Harris and the crew at Black Box Voting soldier on, and determine that Diebold optical scanner machines can be manipulated with programs on the memory cards. Wow.
The Diebold optical scan system uses a dangerous programming methodology, with an executable program living inside the electronic ballot box. This method is the equivalent of having a little man living in the ballot box, holding an eraser and a pencil. With an executable program in the memory card, no Diebold opti-scan ballot box can be considered "empty" at the start of the election.
The Black Box Voting team proved that the Diebold optical scan program, housed on a chip inside the voting machine, places a call to a program living in the removable memory card during the election. The demonstration also showed that the executable program on the memory card (ballot box) can easily be changed, and that checks and balances, required by FEC standards to catch unauthorized changes, were not implemented by Diebold -- yet the system was certified anyway.
The Diebold system in Leon County, Florida succumbed to multiple attacks.
Meanwhile the people at the Free Press in Columbus, Ohio have published "Did George W Bush Steal America's 2004 Election? Essential Documents." From the introduction:
This volume of documents is meant to provide you, the reader, with evidence necessary to make up your own mind.
Few debates have aroused more polarized ire. But too often the argument has proceeded without documentation. This volume of crucial source materials, from Ohio and elsewhere, is meant to correct that problem.
Amidst a bitterly contested vote count that resulted in unprecedented action by the Congress of the United States, here are some news accounts that followed this election, which was among the most bitterly contested in all US history:
• Despite repeated pre-election calls from officials across the nation and the world, Ohio's Republican Secretary of State, who also served as Ohio's co-chair for the Bush-Cheney campaign, refused to allow non-partisan international and United Nations observers the access they requested to monitor the Ohio vote. While such access is routinely demanded by the U.S. government in third world nations, it was banned in the American heartland.
• A post-election headline from the Akron Beacon Journal cites a critical report by twelve prominent social scientists and statisticians, reporting: "Analysis Points to Election ‘Corruption': Group Says Chance of Exit Polls Being So Wrong in '04 Vote is One-in-959,000."
• Citing "Ohio's Odd Numbers," investigative reporter Christopher Hitchens, a Bush supporter, says in Vanity Fair: "Given what happened in that key state on Election Day 2004, both democracy and common sense cry out for a court-ordered inspection of its new voting machines."
• Paul Krugman of the New York Times writes: "It's election night, and early returns suggest trouble for the incumbent. Then, mysteriously, the vote count stops and observers from the challenger's campaign see employees of a voting-machine company, one wearing a badge that identifies him as a county official, typing instructions at computers with access to the vote-tabulating software.
When the count resumes, the incumbent pulls ahead. The challenger demands an investigation. But there are no ballots to recount, and election officials allied with the incumbent refuse to release data that could shed light on whether there was tampering with the electronic records.
This isn't a paranoid fantasy. It's a true account of a recent election in Riverside County, California..."
• Hundreds of Ohio African-American voters give sworn testimony that they were harassed, intimidated, deprived of voting machines, given faulty ballots, confronted with malfunctioning machines and hit with a staggering range of other problems that deprived them of votes that were destined for John Kerry, votes that might have tipped the Ohio outcome.
• A team of high-powered researchers discover results in three southern Ohio counties where an obscure African-American candidate for the state Supreme Court somehow outpolls John Kerry, a virtually impossible outcome indicating massive vote fraud costing Kerry thousands of votes.
• Up until 11pm Eastern time on election night, exit polls show John Kerry comfortably leading George Bush in Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Mexico, giving him a clear victory in the Electoral College, and a projected national margin of some 1.5 million votes. These same exit polls had just served as the basis for overturning an election in Ukraine, and are viewed worldwide as a bedrock of reliability. But after midnight the vote count mysteriously turns, and by morning George W. Bush is declared the victor.
There is far far more…enough, indeed, to result in massive court filings, unprecedented Congressional action and a library full of documents leading to bitter controversy over the 2004 election, especially in Ohio.
In this volume, we have attempted to present many of the most crucial of those documents.
Do they prove that George W. Bush stole the U.S. presidential election of 2004?
Should John Kerry rather than Bush have been certified by the Electoral College on January 6, 2005?
Historians will be debating that for centuries. What follows are some of the core documents they will use in that debate:
The most hotly contested evidence comes most importantly from Ohio, whose 20 electoral votes decided the election. But it also comes from other key swing states—-especially Florida and New Mexico—-where exit polls and other evidence raise questions about the officially certified vote tallies in favor of Bush.
Let's not forget that the certification of Ohio's electors was halted by Democratic senators back in January...
Campaign 2008: The Hillary business continues in an effort to discredit before a likely 2008 run. BBC noted this funny sentence:
While Klein says his references to lesbianism in the book illustrate how "Hillary's politics were shaped by the culture of radical feminism and lesbianism at Wellesley College in the 1960s", the woman herself has altered her stance on one of America's key feminist issues: abortion.
I didn't realize that lesbianism was an ideological orthodoxy. Do they have a little red book?? Klein got on Air America and he admits to quite a lot of errors, including the messing up the name of Hillary's chief of staff and various other hack mistakes. Bill Richardson is an interesting possible candidate and he is being annoyingly coy about it. From back on June 8, a Richardson trip to New Hampshire:
MANCHESTER - Wondering if Bill Richardson is running for president? It depends on which language you speak.
"I want to be very clear about this presidential stuff," Richardson, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, said at yesterday's New Hampshire Latino Summit. "No, I will not run for president."
Then, switching to Spanish, he told the heavily Hispanic crowd, "Segura que si, voy a ser candidato!"
Rough translation: You bet I am!
It was a light-hearted response to a question that is bound to follow Richardson for the next few years. But the bilingual answer also underscored a point Richardson made several times yesterday, as he met with members of New Hampshire's Hispanic community and other state business and political leaders.
Leaked government documents: From the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) meetings going on, some dude scanned in internal goodies. (via Boingboing)
The Military, Karl Hate and Recruiting:
Hey, the MinuteMen started a branch in Texas (and they've got a funny movie coming up). And China widely has a more popular global image than the United States. Such are two effects of the present political crisis, and now Karl Rove is attempting to mint some anti-liberal hate currency because they can't figure out real solutions. The military is under pressure and Rove insults all serving liberals. Recruitment is down, which might be a pressure point. Some thoughts about anti-recruitment action on the Left by Michael Neumann on Counterpunch:
Worst of all, the very concept of political action has been attenuated to the vanishing point. By now, many leftists have only the faintest idea of what it is to do something. They see two options, non-violent protest and violent protest, never suspecting that both of these are closer to speech than to action. 'Support' has come to mean equally little: like protest, it has to do with uttering words. ....
...Of course, leftists are quite aware of the recruitment crisis in today's armed forces. But awareness isn't enough - excitement would be more appropriate. This is not just a weakness in the system which sustains the war effort. It is a fatal weakness.
Recruitment is essential: no troops, no war. Recruitment happens, and has to happen, all over the country. All over the country, right where they live, people can do much to make recruitment less effective. Parents of high school kids (and veterans' groups) are already working on this. Every high school, every university, every place where recruiters go, is an ideal battleground, because the anti-war forces, far more than the recruiters, are on home ground.
Recruiters are vulnerable to student protest, to one-on-one confrontations, to anti-war parents and to all those adults who can support them. Anti-recruiters, who make the case against joining up to potential recruits, can circulate on the ground; others can use online services to reach fighting age computer users. Posters can go up all over cities and towns across the country, perhaps with pictures of some of the wounded Bush likes to hide.
On the other hand I sympathize for the guys who have to work as recruiters because it is really quite a horrible job. However, by that very statement we run into a classic fallacy deployed against the left, "Supporting the Troops == Supporting the War", in this case, they will try to imply that "Opposing the War == Opposing recruiting == Opposing the troops". But we can't let them get away with blaming noisy liberals for a lack of recruits. There's a lack of recruits because the war has gone to hell, everyone knows it, and no one wants to go. Bob Herbert is saying this may very well lead to the draft... The normally hilarious 'Jesus General' makes a depressingly serious comment, and cites this little set of pictures. Apparently Rove's nasty recent comments were fully coordinated with the White House, and nasty talking points got released before he even started the rant.
They'd like to blame the failure of the war on the antiwar voices, much as Vietnam got reframed in people's heads over the last year with the silly argument that leftist protesters caused national will to implode. In truth, the worthless political strategy caused the expression of national will via violence to fall apart. And that's
happening again. But the recruiters don't deserve a pass, and they don't deserve to know my brother's grade point average.
Well what do you know, now there's a blog for "Taking the Fight to Karl: American Service Men and Women Mad at Karl Rove". Including the memorable post, "Active Iraq Soldier: Karl, Come over _here_ and say that, Chickenhawk":
I'm writing you from [Location Withheld] Iraq, about 35 miles NW of Baghdad.. And I'm too tired to give Karl the verbal beating he deserves for his insults. I'm too tired because we're jsut a bit shorthanded over here, fighting his war for him. A war taht has made nearly every country in the world fear and distrust America, a war fought for a knowing lie dreamed up by Karl and his buddies, none of whom have ever heard a shot fired in anger, or helped pick up the parts of another human being after an IED blast.
I enlisted after the war beganm and after I'd gotten my degree. I could easily have stayed home and watched the war on TV, and Karl does. I do not support this war in the slightest, but I will not sit at home and lecture others on their insufficient patriotism when the nation is in need. I joined because I believe in giving back some measure of service and devotion to my country.
To hear a man like Karl insinuate that only conservatives are really patriotic is a knife in the back to every man and woman in Iraq who serves here. At least a third of us voted against Bush and pals. The number increases every day that we stay here, forced to make bricks without straw for months on end.
We've been here for 6 months. We're going to be here for at least 6 more. And next week we're moving to a more 'active' sector because the unit there is rotating home and the are is still too hot to entrust to the IA or IP, most of whom are still not fit to guard a traffic light, despite two years of efforts on our part. For some of us, this is our second tour through Iraq. My unit, [Withheld] was the tip of the spear in OIF I. At least half of us are combat veterans of a major battle and liberals. Can any of your gang say that, Karl?
Never insult me and my fellow liberals again, Karl. Watching a fat, hateful thing like you that has never faced any greater danger in your life than a long golf shot denigrate every liberal who has put on a uniform is more demoralizing than ten thousand speeches that uphold America's highest ideals from Sen. Biden or Byrd.
[Name Withheld]
And lots more... On Thursday the Supreme Court is supposedly meeting to look at the Valerie Plame case. Something exciting may happen. There is terrible nastiness happening at PBS now (look at that GOPBS logo!). I saw Moyers on the Daily Show recently. Depressing. Moyers is fighting hard in this.
Tech: Google to launch online video playback on Monday, using my favorite open-source media player VLC. Or so they say. Also check out combining RSS and BitTorrent. Well it's an old story. But worth thinking about. The Onion 2056. Good stuff at amphetameme.org. What is Outfoxed (not the anti-Fox flick)? The Avian Flu blog.
More politics: DemBloggers still has great streaming media including some great Rumsfeld moments (WMV required but it works on the Mac) Hijacking Catastrophe is frickin sweet.
Random culture: via BoingBoing Rare Bollywood LP covers. An amazing act of sarcasm for the Kansas School Board:
We have evidence that a Flying Spaghetti Monster created the universe. None of us, of course, were around to see it, but we have written accounts of it. We have several lengthy volumes explaining all details of His power. Also, you may be surprised to hear that there are over 10 million of us, and growing. We tend to be very secretive, as many people claim our beliefs are not substantiated by observable evidence. What these people don’t understand is that He built the world to make us think the earth is older than it really is. ..... But what our scientist does not realize is that every time he makes a measurement, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is there changing the results with His Noodly Appendage. We have numerous texts that describe in detail how this can be possible and the reasons why He does this. He is of course invisible and can pass through normal matter with ease.
This just rolled in: "Supreme Court Rules Cities May Seize Homes" for the purposes of profitable eminent domain, in this case a constructing huge friggin Pfizer research plant that locals objected to. So Pfizer has more rights than Joe pink Flamingo ranch house owner. Really quite awful. But that's just the beginning!
I forget who said: you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.
Fortunately this circle will apparently widen to include all 16 to 18-year olds, whose private data will be added to a privately owned database administered on behalf of the Pentagon. Adding lots of personal information, including GPAs, Social Security numbers, and ethnicity, for the primary purpose of more closely targeting students to recruit into the military. I'd almost forgotten that the No Child Left Behind Act requires high schools to give the DoD information:
The Defense Department began working yesterday with a private marketing firm to create a database of high school students ages 16 to 18 and all college students to help the military identify potential recruits in a time of dwindling enlistment in some branches.
The program is provoking a furor among privacy advocates. The new database will include personal information including birth dates, Social Security numbers, e-mail addresses, grade-point averages, ethnicity and what subjects the students are studying.
[.....]
According to the Federal Register notice, the data will be open to "those who require the records in the performance of their official duties." It said the data would be protected by passwords.
The system also gives the Pentagon the right, without notifying citizens, to share the data for numerous uses outside the military, including with law enforcement, state tax authorities and Congress.
Some see the program as part of a growing encroachment of government into private lives, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
"It's just typical of how voracious government is when it comes to personal information," said James W. Harper, a privacy expert with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "Defense is an area where government has a legitimate responsibility . . . but there are a lot of data fields they don't need and shouldn't be keeping. Ethnicity strikes me as particularly inappropriate."
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the Social Security Administration relaxed its privacy policies and provided data on citizens to the FBI in connection with terrorism investigations.
Oddly enough, an AP story from last year entitled "Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials" has since vanished from Yahoo! News. However a Google search on the matter shows that many around the Internet found the story interesting enough to post in full. As the Maritime Homeland Security and Force Protection Blog posted it:
Yahoo! News - Blog-Tracking May Gain Ground Among U.S. Intelligence Officials
Tue Apr 27, 8:53 AM ET
By Doug Tsuruoka
People in black trench coats might soon be chasing blogs.
Blogs, short for Web logs, are personal online journals. Individuals post them on Web sites to report or comment on news especially, but also on their personal lives or most any subject.
Some blogs are whimsical and deal with "soft" subjects. Others, though, are cutting edge in delivering information and opinion.
As a result, some analysts say U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials might be starting to track blogs for important bits of information. This interest is a sign of how far Web media such as blogs have come in reshaping the data-collection habits of intelligence professionals and others, even with the knowledge that the accuracy of what's reported in some blogs is questionable.
Still, a panel of folks who work in the U.S. intelligence field - some of them spies or former spies - discussed this month at a conference in Washington the idea of tracking blogs.
"News and intelligence is about listening with a critical ear, and blogs are just another conversation to listen to and evaluate. They also are closer to (some situations) and may serve as early alerts," said Jock Gill, a former adviser on Internet media to President Clinton (news - web sites), in a later phone interview, after he spoke on the panel.
If they had read my stuff a while ago they might have learned more clearly that the neocons are dangerous liars and so is Ahmed Chalabi. But tragically that circle never got completed.
Well I am not terribly surprised. I have already gotten 95 hits from US military computers this month, 170 in May. More military computers than Israelis or French end up here for whatever reason. And of course the Central Intelligence Agency paid a visit last November, shortly after the election. hm, it doesn't seem that I wrote a post about that. The CIA also came to Hongpong earlier on a search for "tower bridge terrorism" and why not, the Department of Homeland Security came looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos". And of course CENTCOM.mil, the US Central Command, downloaded the whole Iraq category page. The everyday military guys love searching for the helicopter kill video. (my post is lacking in details about the incident: apparently the dead Iraqis were farmers or something)
If you want to see more military video excitement, check out militaryvideos.net, with files via bittorrent. It was really quite shocking, although I couldn't play a lot of the WMVs on my infidel Macintosh.
If you have certain keywords sitting around, then it's not a huge surprise that your site might come up on a few Google searches. Once the CIA starts getting your RSS feed, then you must really be important... I recently noticed that I've also got the top result for "Pipelines balkans" purely because I laid out the sources for a paper on the Pipelines:Balkans hongwiki page, purely for my own use. Google found its way in there, and the rest is history...
Let's not forget,
there's a lot of flag burners who have got too much freedom and I want to make it legal for policemen to beat em', because there's limits to our liberty!
For the fifth time the US House addressed the serious problems facing our troubled nation and passed a Constitutional amendment barring the torching of the American flag. I suppose this will become a justification to bomb Iran. Thune speaks for the mythical fascists of the plains:
Among the new votes for the amendment is Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), who pushed the issue in his campaign and helped recruit co-sponsors. "Out in the country, at the grass-roots level, it's seen as a common man's practical patriotism," Thune said.
Not surprisingly, John Kline voted for it, Betty! against, and unfortunately Collin Peterson (D-Rural MN) supported it, as well. Now that's settled, we just have to ignore the budget, steal the Arabs' oil, fund some Israeli settlements, design nuclear bunker-buster bombs and sit back and wait for the apocalypse. While the Pentagon tracks my little brother's GPA.
Let's do the link dump again!
Agonist reported twice that the DC-based Nelson Report discussed how the Downing Street Memo is causing people to begin making historical comparisons to impeachments and other scandals. "British bombing raids were illegal, says Foreign Office", referring to the Iraq bombing that escalated before the "real" war started. Getting to be big news on the AP finally... Produced a faboulous Poll on MSNBC... anyway, the goods::
A SHARP increase in British and American bombing raids on Iraq in the run-up to war “to put pressure on the regime” was illegal under international law, according to leaked Foreign Office legal advice.
The advice was first provided to senior ministers in March 2002. Two months later RAF and USAF jets began “spikes of activity” designed to goad Saddam Hussein into retaliating and giving the allies a pretext for war.
The Foreign Office advice shows military action to pressurise the regime was “not consistent with” UN law, despite American claims that it was.
The decision to provoke the Iraqis emerged in leaked minutes of a meeting between Tony Blair and his most senior advisers — the so-called Downing Street memo published by The Sunday Times shortly before the general election.
Democratic congressmen claimed last week the evidence it contains is grounds for impeaching President George Bush.
Those at the meeting on July 23, 2002, included Blair, Geoff Hoon, then defence secretary, Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, and Sir Richard Dearlove, then chief of MI6. The minutes quote Hoon as saying that the US had begun spikes of activity to put pressure on the regime.
Ministry of Defence figures for bombs dropped by the RAF on southern Iraq, obtained by the Liberal Democrats through Commons written answers, show the RAF was as active in the bombing as the Americans and that the “spikes” began in May 2002.
However, the leaked Foreign Office legal advice, which was also appended to the Cabinet Office briefing paper for the July meeting, made it clear allied aircraft were legally entitled to patrol the no-fly zones over the north and south of Iraq only to deter attacks by Saddam’s forces on the Kurdish and Shia populations.
The allies had no power to use military force to put pressure of any kind on the regime.
The increased attacks on Iraqi installations, which senior US officers admitted were designed to “degrade” Iraqi air defences, began six months before the UN passed resolution 1441, which the allies claim authorised military action. The war finally started in March 2003.
[.....]
Although the legality of the war has been more of an issue in Britain than in America, the revelations indicate Bush may also have acted illegally, since Congress did not authorise military action until October 11 2002.
The air war had already begun six weeks earlier and the spikes of activity had been underway for five months.
it is fun to follow gov't proceedings on CSPAN via threads on DailyKos. In this case, yet another blocking of Mr Bolton in the Senate. Gotta love this Bolton cartoon. Sounds like things are already working better at the State Department now that he's gone.
Also via the Kos, Scott Ritter is saying the war on Iran has already begun. Well, that's true, as far as we let the dogs of war at the MEK go attack Iran... And of course the new Republican effort to shut down the independence of reporting at PBS. A consultant termed pieces on the show Now with Bill Moyers. Various new tags included "anti-corporation," "anti-DeLay" and "anti-Bush." Orwell is so helpful.
Old transcript from MSNBC Hardball featuring Pawlenty and James Bamford, author of "A Pretext for War." Not relevant to everyone else, I just needed the link.
There is news that the United States is pissed off that Israel is selling sweet tech to China, in particular Harpy Killer unmanned attack drones designed to target radar systems. The U.S. apparently developed these drones and now fears they could be used to attack Taiwan. Nice.
Kinda liked this Friedman article because it suggests that without an heir apparent, Bush's agenda is drifting towards chaos and pandering instead of actually useful policy.
Richard Clarke about the quiet squawking coming from military people in Washington who are-gasp-willing to depart fluffy cloud country and say something negative about Freedom Quest:Mesopotamia.
The "gay vague" style. WTF, this is another reason why popular culture is ridiculous to me.
Political orientation may have genetic markers. Oh shit, here comes the mental genetic engineering.
Older stories about Syria's state-sponsored clergy and it's voices for change.
i gotta go. Arthur Cheng's here, and we're going to a Twins game tonight. Hell yeah!
It seems that there are a lot of sources now leaking memos out of the British government, which help reveal a more complete picture of the mentality of the hawks early on... ThinkProgress.org has the full text of five different British government papers. Of course, on June 12, the Times of London released another Cabinet Office paper, "Conditions for Military Action," which talked about the need to fabricate a legal pretext to invade the country.
So here are your new and tasty leaked docs: The British Iraq Options Paper, the Manning Paper, the Meyer Paper, the Ricketts Paper, the Straw Paper and the British Legal Background Paper.
I haven't dug around to determine the veracity of these memos... However they all contain information that discredits the Bush administration's drive for war. As thinkprogress cites:
British Knew Iraqi WMD Were Not a Threat: “There is no greater threat now that [Saddam] will use WMD than there has been in recent years, so continuing containment is an option.” [Iraq: Options Paper]
Evidence Did Not Show Much Advance In Iraq’s Weapons Programs: “Even the best survey of Iraq’s WMD programmes will not show much advance in recent years on [the] nuclear, missile or CW/BW fronts: the programmes are extremely worrying but have not, as far as we know, been stepped up.” [Ricketts Paper, 3/22/02]
Evidence Was Thin on Iraq/Al Qaeda Ties: “US is scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and Al [Qaida] is so far frankly unconvincing.” [Ricketts Paper, 3/22/02]
“No Credible Evidence” On Iraq/Al Qaeda Link: “There has been no credible evidence to link Iraq with UBL and Al Qaida.” [Straw Paper, 3/25/02]
Wolfowitz Knew Supposed Iraq/Al Qaeda Link Was Weak: Wolfowitz said that “there might be doubt about the alleged meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on 9/11, and Iraqi intelligence (did we, he asked, know anything more about this meeting?).” [Meyer Paper, 3/18/02]
As Justin Raimondo bitterly noted, the Meyer paper says that Wolfowitz wanted to dwell on Saddam's atrocities. As Meyer put it, "Wolfowitz thought that this would go a long way to destroying any notion of moral equivalence between Iraq and Israel." This struck me as an interesting element of the structure of the American-Israeli moral hegemony complex. It sort of suggests that the war itself was designed to alter the moral geography between Israel and Iraq, to prove that Israel is on some sort of higher plane of geopolitics, and in turn, is more morally suited to dominate the region. Of course, this tracks with the worldview seen in such classic hits as the Clean Break document.
In the WaPo, EJ Dionne offered:
"The notion that the president led the country into war through indirection or dishonesty is not the most damaging criticism of the administration. The worst possibility is that the president and his advisers believed their own propaganda."
In another column Raimondo cites the unexpected antiwar swing of a "Freedom Fries" Republican Representative Walter Jones of North Carolina. He has no love for the neo-cons these days:
"'When I look at the number of men and women who have been killed – it's almost 1,700 now, in addition to close to 12,000 have been severely wounded – and I just feel that the reason of going in for weapons of mass destruction, the ability of the Iraqis to make a nuclear weapon, that's all been proven that it was never there"
Interviewer George Stephanopoulos asked him who is to blame: Rumsfeld? The president? Jones answered:
"I think it's primarily the neoconservatives who were advisers in key positions in both the Department of Defense and I think that they gave bad advice."
He "felt deceived when he was told that so-called 'neoconservatives' in the Pentagon had wanted to invade Iraq long before Sept. 11," and he recalls how he got "'very, very upset' when he learned there were no weapons of mass destruction 'and that information was manipulated to justify the invasion.'"
Sweet. So someone Red Gets it. How many more on the way?
Dude from the London Times offers a basic explanation of the Syrian-foreign fighter route into Iraq. There is staggering corruption. Porter Goss' recent comment about knowing where Bin Laden is provoked some waves in Pakistan and Afganistan. So maybe Goss doesn't want to go in and get OBL in Pakistan because it might cause an Islamist coup. Juan Cole has some interesting thoughts about what they feel in Pakistan now.
Free Thoughts In Iran reports:
Participation: 61.7%
Rafsanjani: 6,108,029 (21.2%)
Ahmadi Nejad: 5,555,458 (19.3%)
Karrubi: 5,394,031 (18.7%)
Qalibaf: 4,009,620 (13.9%)
Moeen: 3,949,240 (13.7%)
Larijani: 1,715,190 (6.0%)
Mehr Alizade: 1,269,790 (4.4%)
Spoiled Ballots: 847,642 (2.9%)
A day before the election, Bush sharply denounced the vote, saying it was designed to keep power in the hands of the clerics. But some Iranians said they were motivated to vote to retaliate against Bush’s denunciations. “I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.
And I don't even want to start into what happened in Lebanon. In a move sure to annoy the many regime change enthusiasts in Washington, the Iranian public (including a significant number of expatriates) voted in surprisingly large numbers in the first round of their presidential election--although naturally Michael Ledeen now claims that various people cooked the numbers, provided fake ballots and perhaps bussed in a million Shiites from Pakistan. Now the former president, Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, will face off against a rather hardcore mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the final election this Friday. Snooping around the burgeoning Iranian presence online these days shows that progressive Persians are annoyed as hell that they'll have to vote for Rafsanjani to prevent the even more conservative Ahmadinejad from taking over.
Check an interesting NY Times Q&A with professor William Beeman, who just returned from there. (Rafsanjani, by the way, was involved with Iran-Contra back in the good ol' days, but it doesn't seem to bother people too much, because, hey, they got some missiles out of it, right?) A good summary of the whole thing, including a broader look at how American hawks tried to frame the situation.
And there are claims of voting fraud now coming from Rafsanjani's people, as well as the #3 candidate Mehdi Karroubi, who represented sort of an anti-poverty religious angle that progressives took cynically. A letter about fraud that Karroubi published was printed in two daily newspapers, Eqbal and Aftab Yazd, and they got shut down by the government. Even IRNA reported this was about "some rigging in the elections."
There were polls in Los Angeles, and some people tried to picket them. Apparently the "Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran" quoted in this story is basically a one-man front that people shouldn't take seriously. But he did yell at people.
Human Rights Watch summarized Iran's exclusionary election system, termed as 'pre-cooked elections.' The distribution of votes was fairly close among six candidates, which suggests that if the various progressive movements in the country hadn't tried to boycott it, they might have actually gotten someone more preferable into the final round. Mostafa Moin (spellings vary-"Moeen" as well) was the supposed progressive candidate and he seems to be claiming that he took a nap in the morning and when he awoke a million votes had shifted. But Moin might not really be that progressive. As the Sunnis in the next war zone over learned, boycotting elections in imperfect systems doesn't really solve anything.
There are many pictures of the election process available online. That is pretty nifty to see.
As Prof. Juan Cole described the results,
The Iranian voting public put a hardliner and a conservative pragmatist into a run-off election with their ballots on Friday. With a turnout of 62 percent or more, voters rejected reformist youth calls for a boycott and some said they meant their vote to be a slap in the face of US President George W. Bush. In the lead is Mahmud Ahmadinejad, the former mayor of Tehran and a hardliner close to the Islamist vigilantes ("Basij") of the grass roots Khomeinist movement. Coming in close second is former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a conservative pragmatist who dealt with the Americans during the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal. They will face each other in a run-off next Friday. Wire services report,
“I picked Ahmadinejad to slap America in the face,” said Mahdi Mirmalek after attending Friday prayers at Tehran University.
At Tehran University, the leader of Friday prayers, Ayatollah Mohammad Emami Kashani, told worshippers that voting “strengthens the pillars of the ruling Islamic establishment.” Followers then joined in with the common chant of “Death to America!”
The vote is a repudiation of the relatively timid reform movement of outgoing president Mohammad Khatami, which never delivered an improved economy or administration. Its attempts to open up the Khomeinist system to greater personal liberties and greater freedom of speech were relentlessly blocked by the hardline clerics that controlled the judiciary and other oversight bodies. The Right closed dozens of reformist newspapers and cracked down on student demonstrations. The most outspoken reformist on the ballot, Mostafa Moin, did poorly. He had initially been excluded by the hardline clerics that vet Iranian candidates, but was put back on the ballot at the insistence of Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei. A more moderate reformer, Mehdi Karrubi, came in third and charged ballot fraud by the Revolutionary Guards who supported Ahmadinejad.
It is likely that the Iranian electorate's swing to the Right reflects in part a deep unease about being surrounded by the United States, which has troops both in Afghanistan and Iraq. Post-revolutionary Iranians are nationalistic and determined to maintain their national independence, and all the talk by the Bush administration about regime change, aggressive action against Iran over its nuclear research program [which so far appears to have been conducted within the limits set by the Non-Proliferation Treaty], and the illegitimacy of the Iranian elections themselves, appears to have contributed to the greater success of the hardliners.
Ahmadinejad is a very bad character, with a long history of essentially fascist activity in suppressing points of view other than those of the hardline Khomeinists. He is said to have plotted the murder of novelist Salman Rushdie and to have been involved in planning terrorist actions by Iranian agents in the 1980s. Ironically, in Iranian terms he is a "Neoconservative," the opposite number of the Cheneys, Perles and Feiths in the United States.
I did some research on how the domestic scene is put together in Iran, and it is interesting that indeed there is a segment labeled 'neoconservative' that is closely tied to the religious establishment and the bazaaris, more traditionalist merchants of the informal economy that have a great deal of influence over affairs. An Interview with Ahmadinejad on IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency. What a great name for an agency. Anyway:
Nuclear energy is the scientific achievement of the Iranian nation. Our youth have crowned themselves with this achievement, via domestic technology and by reliance on their own knowledge. The energy belongs to the Iranian nation. Definitely, the progress of a nation can not be obstructed. Scientific, medical, and technical development of our nation is necessary.
I believe there are certain individuals that create a false mood. They want to portray the situation as critical, while there is no crisis here. The technology is at the disposal of the Iranian nation. Certain powers do not want to believe this. They resist a bit against accepting such a right, such an achievement of the Iranian nation. Their scientists and experts have admitted that the Iranian nation is entitled to this right.
I believe the problem can be solved with prudence and wisdom, by utilizing opportunity and relying on the endless power of the Iranian nation, through our self-confidence. The ongoing artificial mood is political sleight of hand. The mood aims to influence the Islamic Republic's domestic developments.
One can not impede scientific progress. You can see scientific progress everywhere in the world. One can not obstruct this movement. This is not something that can be prevented with an order. No one can deprive the Iranian nation of this right. They are vainly trying to stir conditions worldwide. They want to fan tension, create crisis to meet their transitory objectives.
That's a kind of psychological war; nothing else meets the objectives. That may not be the case. This is as if you want to deprive someone of industrial progress. This is something impossible. Industry is intertwined with the nature of an individual. Technical knowledge has now become an integral aspect of the Iranian psyche. You can not say that the Iranian nation should not use math, should not have physicians, should not build large dams, or should not be able to build a refinery or a plane.
So that is kind of disturbing, but interesting... Really shocking that they feel entitled to use technology, oh how could they ever be so crazy? :-P To put another point on this, Beeman said:
I think there is no question that the public, all the candidates, and the current establishment are completely unified on this point: Iran should be developing its nuclear industry.
Here's one point that utterly escapes us in the United States, and I really wish people in power could understand: The discourse on the nuclear question between the United States and Iran is almost a complete disconnect. The United States, not to put too fine a point on it, thinks Iran is going after nuclear weapons in order to do some damage to the United States and its allies. To put it really crudely, as one adviser connected to the White House told me, "Look, we know Iran wants to develop a nuclear bomb to drop on Tel Aviv." This kind of statement just utterly and completely floors me.
The Iranian side of the discourse is that they want to be known and seen as a modern, developing state with a modern, developing industrial base. The history of relations between Iran and the West for the last hundred years has included Iran's developing various kinds of industrial and technological advances to prove to themselves--and to attempt to prove to the world--that they are, in fact, that kind of country.
The nuclear-power issue is exactly that. When Iranians talk about it, and talk about the United States, they say, "The United States is trying to repress us; they're trying to keep us down and keep us backward, make us a second-class nation. And we have the ability to develop a nuclear industry, and we're being told we're not good enough, or we can't." And this makes people furious--not just the clerical establishment, but this makes the person on the street, even 16- and 17-year-olds, absolutely boil with anger. It is such an emotional issue that absolutely no politician could ever back down on this question. But again, the public, when you ask them about nuclear weapons, they just sort of look at you like you are crazy. Because that's not even close to what it means to them.
Here are some links. Editor:Myself by Hossein Derakhshan, who is based in Toronto. He says that things are getting kind of scary.
Also check out Iranian Truth, IranScan1384, Free Thoughts on Iran, IranMania news service/portal, aptly named Brooding Persian, The Iranian Feminist Tribune, Adventures of Mr. Behi, and a huge friggin' list @ blogsbyiranians.com. And of course Iranians have many sites purely in Farsi.
More articles... bitterness about Iran's double apartheid based on gender and beliefs. I liked the different notes on freethoughts.org.
Finally then, I think this post by an Iranian student in Toronto rounded it out:
History seems to follow no pattern. The lesson is that there is simply no lesson to learn(*). Politics due to <put your favorite reason here> is not a deterministic game.
There is no guarantee of what is going to happen to Iran after this presidential elections and many of the heated debates going on about boycott or supporting a specific candidate are at best superficial.
I know this was a lousy post but I thought the nihilistic nonchalant should have a voice as well.
----------- (*) Reminds me of "We learn from history that we never learn anything from history," as Hegel said.
Pacifica Radio is carrying some interviews, with Rep. Maxine Waters and others, following the Democratic hearings on Iraq intelligence and the Downing Street documents today. Link to stream:
How amazing....
UPDATE
Some discussion on Air America radio...
Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky: The Democrats' hearings on the Downing Street Memo and the distortion of pre-war intelligence will happen at the Capitol at 2:30 Eastern time Thursday afternoon. I really hope they spring some new documents, wouldn't that be fantastic? John Conyers, "A Busy Day Today, and an Important and Historical Day Tomorrow" [Thurs]:
The pace will not let up tomorrow either. At 9am [all times Eastern], I will be on C-Span’s Washington Journal for a half hour. Shortly after 10, I will be appearing on Stephanie Miller’s show to break some news I am very excited about. Finally, at a time to be determined, I will appear on the Al Franken Show at 12:15pm.
For those commenters who were concerned (or hoping) that there would be a media blackout of the forum, that will not be the case. I have every major network, other than Fox, bringing cameras to the hearing. Nightline is taping the event, which I think represents a welcome development from a well respected investigative program. In addition, C-Span 3 and Radio Pacifica are carrying it live.
Member interest in the hearing has been stellar and participation is expected to be very high. My friends Jerry Nadler, Maxine Waters, Chris Van Hollen, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Sheila Jackson Lee, Barbara Lee, Jim McDermott, Lynn Woolsey, Major Owens, barney Frank, Cynthia McKinney, Corrine Brown, Jay Inslee, and Charlie Rangel are all likely to attend. A number of other Members are attempting to adjust their schedules to attend as well.
Following the hearing, I will personally deliver a letter with stacks and stacks of signatures to the White House. This is the culmination of all of your efforts and I hope Thursday makes you very proud. I also hope at the end of the day tomorrow, we will all feel that the truth has begun to be known by more and more Americans and that we are all re-invigorated to do the critical work that comes next.
Conyers, John Jr., U.S. Representative, D-MI Bonifaz, John C., Founder, National Voting Rights Institute Wilson, Joseph, Deputy Chief of Mission (1988-91), Iraq McGovern, Ray, Member, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity Sheehan, Cindy, Mother [of 9-11 victim]
Rep. John Conyers, Jr., and other Democrats hold a public meeting concerning the "Downing Street Memo" and pre-war intelligence on Iraq.
On May 1, 2005 a Sunday London Times article disclosed the details of a classified memo, also known as the "Downing Street Minutes", recounting the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair with his advisers that depicted an American president already committed to going to war in the summer of 2002, despite contrary assertions to the public and the Congress. The minutes also described apparent efforts by Bush administration officials to manipulate intelligence data in order to justify the war to the international community.
Rep. Conyers is also going to be on C-SPAN's call in show "Washington Journal" at 9 AM Eastern. RawStory.com, a pretty good spot these days, (earlier story) has the press release:
CONYERS TO HOLD DEMOCRATIC HEARING ON DOWNING STREET MEMO AND LEAD UP TO IRAQ WAR
WASHINGTON, D.C. - On Thursday June 16, 2005, Rep. John Conyers, Jr., Ranking Member of House Judiciary Committee, and other Democratic Members will hold a Democratic hearing to hear testimony concerning the Downing Street Minutes and the efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence.
On May 1, 2005 a Sunday London Times article disclosed the details of a classified memo, also known as the Downing Street Minutes, recounting the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair that describes an American President already committed to going to war in the summer of 2002, despite contrary assertions to the public and the Congress. The minutes also describe apparent efforts by the Administration to manipulate intelligence data to justify the war. The June 16th hearing will attempt to answer the serious constitutional questions raised by these revelations and will further investigate the Administration's actions in the lead up to war with new documents [OOH?!!] that further corroborate the Downing Street memo.
Directly following the hearing, Rep. Conyers, Members of Congress, and concerned citizens plan to hand deliver to the White House the petition and signatures of over a half million Americans that have joined Rep. Conyers in demanding that President Bush answer questions about his secret plan for the Iraq war.
WHAT: Democratic hearing on Downing Street Minutes and Pre-war intelligence
WHEN: Thursday, June 16, 2005, 2:30pm
WHERE: HC-9 The Capitol
(Overflow Room - 430 S. Capitol Street, The Wasserman Room)
WITNESSES: Joe Wilson, Former Ambassador and WMD Expert, Ray McGovern, 27-year CIA analyst who prepared regular Presidential briefings during the Reagan administration, Cindy Sheehan, mother of fallen American soldier, John Bonifaz, constitutional lawyer
It is nice that they're going to deliver the petition. I signed it. Maybe if you do, you might get somewhere in that pile of 500,000 people for intelligence sanity... Raw Story also has a nice timeline about how the War started, with what I assume is a newly labeled section about "fixing the intelligence" in 2002. Also a pretty god damned sweet PDF collection of British government documents.
The LA Times also totally harshed their mellow. Kerry is going to finally make a statement about it. There's also a jolly good editorial from the Star Tribune called "Fig Leaf for war/Paper indicates UN was misled".
...more important [that the Pentagon's lack of postwar planning] is the use of the United Nations to fashion a rationale for war. The British briefing paper says that when Blair met Bush at his ranch in Texas, in April 2002, Blair said "the UK would support military action to bring about regime change...." But in order to do that, the paper continues, it "is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action."
The paper goes on to explain that "Regime change per se is not a proper basis for military action under international law." But it would be lawful if "authorized by the U.N. Security Council." It goes on to say that this is the preferable route, provided the Security Council does not allow the weapons-inspections process to continue indefinitely.
This is where the plot really thickens. Perhaps readers will recall that Bush's nominee for U.N. ambassador, John Bolton, recently was accused of orchestrating the 2002 ouster of Jose Bustani, head of the Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons, a U.N. agency. Why did Bolton want Bustani replaced? Because Bustani was aggressively seeking to reinsert chemical weapons inspectors into Iraq. The conclusion of many observers is that the United States did not want inspectors in Iraq because it undercut the U.S. case for an invasion.
Many Bush critics accused him of "using" the United Nations to justify war, rather than truly working to avoid military conflict. But they were naturally suspect because they oppose U.S. policy. The British briefing paper is especially significant because it comes from a government that is not only astute, but is also quite friendly to Bush's objective of invading Iraq. The unavoidable conclusion is that both British and American citizens were duped into hoping that the United Nations would make such a conflict unnecessary. In fact, Britain eagerly and the United States reluctantly went to the United Nations to get a fig leaf of respectability for a war on which they had already decided.
In the end, the Security Council refused to play its role, arguing that the weapons inspectors needed more time (actually ample time) to complete their mission. Then the United States threw up its hands, branded Security Council members a bunch of hand-wringing pansies, and went to war. As the British briefing paper makes clear, that was pre-ordained.
It makes me happy when the Strib seems to Get It, and their ombuds[wo]man's perspective on why it took the Strib so long to talk about the Downing Street Memo struck me as a forthright admission of how newsrooms wait around to get their cues from wire services like the AP, which has been criticized for failing to write anything at all about the story. It was also great to hear Juan Cole about how bloggers managed to pressure the corporate media into finally starting to explain how they helped co-opt public opinion with the bad intel. Awkward!
Stay tuned because there are exciting hearings in Washington, breaking down the fake case for war... John Conyers and a host of others have scheduled minority hearings, because of course the Republicans don't want to talk about this. More later......
Democracy Now: The Downing Street Memo Comes To Washington; Conyers Blasts "Deafening Sound of Silence":
Tomorrow in Washington, Congressmember John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, will convene a public hearing on the so-called Downing Street Memo and other newly released documents that Conyers says show the administration's "efforts to cook the books on pre-war intelligence." Conyers also says that he plans to raise new documents that back up the accuracy of the Downing Streets memo, which is actually the classified minutes of a July 2002 meeting of Tony Blair and his senior advisers.
The minutes, which were published May 1 by the Sunday Times of London, paint a picture of an administration that had already committed to attacking Iraq, was manipulating intelligence and had already begun intense bombing of Iraq to prepare for the ground invasion. This was almost a year before the actual invasion officially began. The minutes are from a July 23, 2002 briefing of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security advisers by British intelligence chief Richard Dearlove. The minutes contain an account of Dearlove's report that President George W. Bush had decided to bring about "regime change" in Iraq by military action; that the attack would be "justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD" (weapons of mass destruction); and that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Meanwhile, this past weekend, The Sunday Times of London had another expose, showing that British cabinet members were warned that the UK was committed to taking part in a US-led invasion of Iraq and they had no choice but to find a way of making it legal. The memo was written in advance of the Downing Street meeting that produced the Downing Street Minutes.
[Former top CIA officer] RAY McGOVERN: Well, Amy, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity had been saying for three years that the intelligence and the facts were being fixed to support an unnecessary war. We never in our wildest dreams expected to have documentary proof of that under a SECRET label: “SECRET: U.K. EYES ONLY” in a most sensitive document reserved just for cabinet officials in the Blair government. And so, what we have now is documentary proof that, as that sentence reads, the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.
The Washington Post this morning is still at it. They quote that sentence, and they say, “Well, this is vague, but intriguing.” Well, there's nothing vague about that at all, and it's not at all intriguing. It's highly depressing. Now, we veteran professionals, we professionals that toil long and hard in the intelligence arena are outraged at the corruption of our profession, but we are even more outraged by the constitutional implications here because as Congressman Conyers has just pointed out, we have here a very clear case that the Executive usurped the prerogatives of Congress of the American people and deceived it into permitting, authorizing an unauthorizeable war.
Huzzah! I wonder if the TV networks will cover all this up tomorrow, or if it's just gotten too embarrassing to keep stepping around.
With four GIs killed in a day, the official death toll of American personnel reached 1,700 on Sunday.
Oil production remains sporadic, and a story reports that various northern tribes currently paid to defend Iraqi pipelines may in fact be attacking those lines, in order to provide the appearance of more demand for their services. On the other hand, maybe Kurds are being awarded these security jobs at the expense of Arabs. Haaretz ponders "Why isn't Iraq getting on its feet?"
Does Bush believe his own propaganda? And is persuasion dead?
Pirates raid the oil tankers at Basra. The persistence of the insurgency. Pointed out that suicide tactic-using groups generally direct their fire against foreign occupiers. A rare interview with Muqtada al-Sadr. Oh great, Zalmay Khalilzad is ready to provide Iraq with his special golden touch as our new ambassador. Stories about the "Bunkers reveal well-equipped, sophisticated insurgency:"
an Islamic mufti, or spiritual leader, living near Fallujah offered a different take: He said the bunkers were proof that the insurgency is unbowed.
"This shows the failure of the Marines. It was close to their base and they could not see it," said the mufti, who formerly sat on the council that directed insurgents in Fallujah. He spoke by phone Saturday evening on the condition of anonymity. "The Americans think they know everything. But when they came to Iraq they thought the people would receive them with flowers. Instead of flowers they found these bunkers."
Haitham al-Dulaimi, who works at a garage in Ramadi, had a similar reaction.
"Are you sure they found it near Fallujah?" he asked, laughing. "It shows you how much the Iraqi resistance has insulted the Americans."
Our Man Bolton is in some more trouble as news comes out that he monkeyed with WMD bureaucrats at the UN, basically in order to prevent the further erosion of Bush's WMD war rationale. And of course more from a DailyKos diarist.
"The Left Must learn from 2004" an interview addressing the antiwar movement etc. Blumenthal on the Gulag.
Freedom House is one of the sketchiest things in the world. Consider press releases about the evil of Kazakhstan, the major cash they have running it... more on this later.
Did I already mention Karen Kwiatkowski? Yeah.
We heard about a recent video that purportedly showed the Srebrenica massacres. but was it all sort of a spun-up justification for "Imperial intervention in the Balkans"? Why not?
Latin America doesn't fancy the Democracy Monitoring thing.
Newsweek's Baghdad Bureau Chief is leaving the place after two years, and he sounds sad and embittered.
Frontline has a bunch of sweet Middle East stories including the stuff in Lebanon, Iraq etc.
Daniel 'Pentagon Papers' Ellsberg reflects on the need to call for withdrawal from Iraq. Rep. Lynn Woolsey has offered a proposal in the House about finding withdrawal policies. Sort of a symbolic gesture but worthwhile.
"Long-exiled general battles warlord in Lebanon voting." Ah the sublime ironies of Lebanese politics.
Interesting BBC documentary called the Power of Nightmares, which I linked to a while ago, now has a fairly astute review of it via PressTrust.com.
Reflecting on Deep Throat week in Washington. I watched "All the President's Men" the other day. Hell yeah. "It's not about the big break; it's about doing the job well." The best kind of anon source. Larry David is hilarious.
A German city is building 'sex huts' for prostitutes at the World Cup. Now that's servicing a crowd...
WaPo opines that the recent court ruling wasn't really about pot. Another victory for the industrial-drug-law-enforcement complex. People at smokedot are sad.
Interesting looking website: "Defense and the National Interest" @ defense-and-society.org. Haven't examined it too closely but they have a very interesting feature pages about fourth generation warfare, Col. Boyd and military strategy, as well as various essays from such folks as William Lind (Rummy's Wreck it and Run management, striking back at the empire, the Century of the Believers), and also the "Werther Report - fourth generation warfare and riddles of culture." I don't agree with all this stuff but i find it interesting.
Also a SFTT story about how the military pursues deserters. Certainly has its own viewpoint on the matter... I tend to believe that people bailing on the armed forces have the right to do so, considering the top management is quite crazy and the war is incredibly bad.
Here's the full text of the British Cabinet Office paper "Conditions for Military Action." I just like to read these paragraphs:
1. The US Government's military planning for action against Iraq is proceeding apace. But, as yet, it lacks a political framework. In particular, little thought has been given to creating the political conditions for military action, or the aftermath and how to shape it.
2. When the Prime Minister discussed Iraq with President Bush at Crawford in April he said that the UK would support military action to bring about regime change, provided that certain conditions were met: efforts had been made to construct a coalition/shape public opinion, the Israel-Palestine Crisis was quiescent, and the options for action to eliminate Iraq's WMD through the UN weapons inspectors had been exhausted.
3. We need now to reinforce this message and to encourage the US Government to place its military planning within a political framework, partly to forestall the risk that military action is precipitated in an unplanned way by, for example, an incident in the No Fly Zones. This is particularly important for the UK because it is necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action. Otherwise we face the real danger that the US will commit themselves to a course of action which we would find very difficult to support.
The British security bureaucracy has done it again, as another exciting memo from 2002 has leaked out, this one more closely detailing how the Brits feared the consequences of an illegal invasion of Iraq. Check out Walter Pincus' story in the WaPo, vs. the rather more intense one in the London Times, as well as one from a couple days ago about how America finally learned about the memo... Juan Cole has informed comment on the memos:
It makes me deeply ashamed as an American in the tradition of Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Lincoln, and King, that in their private communications our international allies openly admit that the United States of America routinely disregards international law. The Geneva Conventions were enacted by the United Nations and adopted into national law in order to assure that Nazi-style violations of basic human rights never again occurred without the threat of punishment after the war. We have an administration that views the Geneva Conventions as "quaint." The US has vigorously opposed the International Criminal Court.
The cabinet briefing, like Lord Goldsmith, is skeptical that any of the three legal grounds for war existed with regard to Iraq. Iraq was not an imminent threat to the US or the UK. Saddam's regime was brutal, but its major killing sprees were in the past in 2002. And, the UNSC had not authorized a war against Iraq.
[.......]
The polite diplomatic language hides the implications that there would be a global black psy-ops campaign in favor of the war, conducted from London. Since the rest of the briefing already admits that there was no legal justification for action, the proposal of an information campaign that would maintain that such a justification existed must be seen as deeply dishonest.
One press report said that the British military had planted stories in the American press aimed at getting up the Iraq war. A shadowy group called the Rockingham cell was apparently behind it. Similar disinformation campaigns have been waged by Israeli military intelligence, aiming at influencing US public opinion. (Israeli intelligence has have even planted false stories about its enemies in Arabic newspapers, in hopes that Israeli newspapers would translate them into Hebrew and English, and they would be picked up as credible from there in the West)
Also check out a couple earlier posts on British memos, the WMD spoof and etc. As well as Cole's recent piece in Salon about Iraq.
Meanwhile, in a disturbing display of anti-democratic tendencies, Wisconsin Rep. Sensenbrenner got infuriated as the House committee he chairs discussed the upcoming renewal of everyone's favorite piece of righteous legislation, the Patriot Act. They halted in the middle of the hearing, and it was an awful display of the surprisingly rapid erosion of our democracy. And then they cut the Democrats' mikes off. I can't find the damn links & video clip I had of this. Will post later.
So now we have AfterDowningStreet.org as well as DowningStreetMemo.com, both sites devoted to discussing the real meaning of these memos as well as what sorts of political action people ought to take in response. They're putting a petition together, to go along with Rep. Conyers letter to the President:
Dear Mr. President:
We the undersigned write because of our concern regarding recent disclosures of a Downing Street Memo in the London Times, comprising the minutes of a meeting of Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top advisers. These minutes indicate that the United States and Great Britain agreed, by the summer of 2002, to attack Iraq, well before the invasion and before you even sought Congressional authority to engage in military action, and that U.S. officials were deliberately manipulating intelligence to justify the war.
Among other things, the British government document quotes a high-ranking British official as stating that by July, 2002, Bush had made up his mind to take military action. Yet, a month later, you stated you were still willing to "look at all options" and that there was "no timetable" for war. Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, flatly stated that "[t]he president has made no such determination that we should go to war with Iraq."
In addition, the origins of the false contention that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction remain a serious and lingering question about the lead up to the war. There is an ongoing debate about whether this was the result of a "massive intelligence failure," in other words a mistake, or the result of intentional and deliberate manipulation of intelligence to justify the case for war. The memo appears to resolve that debate as well, quoting the head of British intelligence as indicating that in the United States "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
As a result of these concerns, we would ask that you respond to the following questions: 1)Do you or anyone in your administration dispute the accuracy of the leaked document? 2) Were arrangements being made, including the recruitment of allies, before you sought Congressional authorization to go to war? Did you or anyone in your Administration obtain Britain's commitment to invade prior to this time? 3) Was there an effort to create an ultimatum about weapons inspectors in order to help with the justification for the war as the minutes indicate? 4) At what point in time did you and Prime Minister Blair first agree it was necessary to invade Iraq? 5) Was there a coordinated effort with the U.S. intelligence community and/or British officials to "fix" the intelligence and facts around the policy as the leaked document states?
These are the same questions 89 Members of Congress, led by Rep. John Conyers, Jr., submitted to you on May 5, 2005. As citizens and taxpayers, we believe it is imperative that our people be able to trust our government and our commander in chief when you make representations and statements regarding our nation engaging in war. As a result, we would ask that you publicly respond to these questions as promptly as possible.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
In a not very related matter, something is going on between the Pentagon and China. Also check out the story of the trojan programs that the Israeli police found all over many different companies.
The funniest thing to come through lately came from Dan Schwartz, the "Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries," such as the Communist Manifesto, Chairman Mao's little Red Book, the Kinsey Report, the Feminine Mystique, and why not, Nietzsche and Keynes. Those fine people at Human Events, a batty rightwing journal, have done it again with their panel of righteous judges. Darwin, Mill, Nader, Gramsci and Adorno were also noted as dangerous writers.
Lebanon: Robert Mayer on PubliusPundit.com has a good summary of the complexity of Lebanese electoral politics. I am a little sketched out by the wave of 'pro-democracy' talk purportedly coming from Lebanon, but nonetheless I like the picture at the top of their site because like mine it features riot police and people showing the victory sign. Also reported on the voting. Not sure who Mayer is or what his political orientation is. ok.
So something about the filibuster: FilibusterFrist.com hails the compromise as a victory. When discussing the vote, an anchor at FOX was caught referring to the Republican Party as "we" (see the FOX Freudian slip in a Movie!) James Dobson calls down hellfire.
Random blog: Security Awareness, angry about something in OS X.
Local Music: A friend of mine named Dave is starting up a record label called The Firm Records. He's working with his friend Jared to get an album released under the name "The Beckoning." You can hear some cuts on their site.
Media makes me cry: A Pie Fight that you can edit yourself on a site promoting "The Real Gilligan's Island." I don't understand what the hell this is.
Piss-Off-Nixon Dept. Deep Throat is out and about in his walker. It is marvelous to hear G Gordon Liddy and Patty Pat Buchanan tell us about what a bad deed it was to harm that paragon of virtue Richard Nixon. On a somewhat related topic, the intelligence analysts responsible for the aluminum tube nonsense got rewarded! Of course, people made fun of this. Who will be the deep throat for this Pentagon? Does Karen Kwiatkowski have to do everything around here?
Misc: A Republican congressman attacks Bill Maher. Shocking. "What a social security deal might look like." The left's fear of money?
Stand at the Apocalypse: Who knows what's happening with Bolton? Steve Clemons at TheWashingtonNote.com. Sen. Reid comments on it. But of course, we still got Jesse Helms: ""John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."
Peak oil: There's a lot about the Peak Oil problem from Kevin Drum at WashingtonMonthly.com. This Matthew Simmons character is some sort of expert as featured in this Agonist post (or this one).
GWOT Part III... Oh great, the lens of the War On Terror is going to be widened, because, believe-it-or-not, Al Qaeda is not really a concrete organization and there are many other people the government would like to kill. Apparently Bush's top terrorism advisor is named Frances Fragos Townsend. Sounds like an alias. Thomas Friedman says "Just Shut it Down" as Guantanamo is rapidly corroding America's values and generating legions of people who hate us even more for our crazy policies.
...but Part II isn't over! The vaunted "Operation Lightning" that coincided with Memorial Day is not getting a lot done. Raimondo has a funny column about his confrontation with Nancy Pelosi, the winged goddess of victory. Of course she is caught up in trying to appear mega-Super Tough in the War Against Evil, and this is leading to a certain moral erosion... And don't forget her exciting speech to AIPAC!
We need whistle-blowers: It is said that Coleen Rowley, the Minneapolis FBI agent who performed some painful whistleblowing upon the FBI, may run for Congress in Minnesota against the rightwinger John Kline, most well known for being trustworthy enough to carry the nuclear launch codes at some point in his military career. Sibel Edmonds has a strange case, the translator who tried to stop craziness inside the Department of Justice at least has herself a website.
Star Wars projects into the Real World: A whole freakin lot of people commented on how Star Wars fits into the national debate. Orson Scott Card of the "Ender's Game" sci-fi series commented that Jedi-ism is not a very good religion: "in the new movie, the knights are elitist, dictatorial, and unconvinced that good is an absolute." (although he is surprisingly anti-media as well) I don't really feel like writing more on this subject now, even though I went to go see the movie a second time with Cheng Diggity last night.
Rat Race Status: This NY Times article about how people chase elusive class status symbols in America today really hit home for me. Alison sent it to me, noting its connection to what we learned about Marcuse's theories of the one-dimensional man, propelled by the false needs of a society designed to appear as if it catered to his every desire, while actually trapping him. A related very interesting "info Marxist" column by the generally senile Mr. Brooks. At the least, this proves that neo-cons are still old leftists.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, lord and serf, capitalist and proletariat, in a word oppressor and oppressed, stand in opposition to each other and carry on a constant fight. In the information age, in which knowledge is power and money, the class struggle is fought between the educated elite and the undereducated masses.
The information age elite exercises artful dominion of the means of production, the education system.
[.....]
The information society is the only society in which false consciousness is at the top. For it is an iron rule of any university that the higher the tuition and more exclusive the admissions, the more loudly the denizens profess their solidarity with the oppressed. The more they objectively serve the right, the more they articulate the views of the left.
Periodically members of this oppressor class hold mock elections. The Yale-educated scion of the Bush family may face the Yale-educated scion of the Winthrop family. They divide into Republicans and Democrats and argue over everything except the source of their power: the intellectual stratification of society achieved through the means of education.
More than the Roman emperors, more than the industrial robber barons, the malefactors of the educated class seek not only to dominate the working class, but to decimate it. For 30 years they have presided over failing schools without fundamentally transforming them. They have imposed a public morality that affords maximum sexual opportunity for themselves and guarantees maximum domestic chaos for those lower down.
So I have been settling into this new apartment. It's a cool spot to be at, and everyone likes the front porch's lofty perch above Selby Avenue. However, the relaxation of summer has been disrupted by the departures of so many of my best friends from school... Peter, Tim and Chris took off over the last couple days, and it really stings to realize I won't see those guys for a long time.
On the plus side Adam Gerber and Arthur Cheng are back in town for a while... And of course there are still plenty of people around town until at least the end of the summer.
With the ridiculous charges against me still to be resolved (obstruction of legal process with force), it adds some little bit of tension to my whole situation. I have to call into my Conditional Release officer every week, or else face Something Bad Happening. Until the charges go away, getting nailed any little thing, probably even jaywalking, could send me right back to jail. That's a horrible feeling, but at least it adds... zest, I guess.
And hey, I've got a new computer now, a fine graduation gift. A G5 tower with dual processors @ 2.4 GHz should keep me occupied for quite a while. You wouldn't believe how many friggin browser windows I can have open. Top Notch.
Ok ok... so I suppose everyone would like some interesting stuff to look at. I have been piling up the links for a few days, so I think these chunks of info will have to go into a few posts.
Memorial Day: It started oddly, as I finished packing my stuff from the house at 1834 Grand Avenue, as plumes of carpet fibers and decades of dust mite feces plumed around me. My former landlord Scott, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the fetid, ancient carpets of the living room and bedrooms needed to be ripped out Right Away. I couldn't pack my stuff with all the dust, as he chopped them up with a razor blade. I left for about 45 minutes and when I returned, he had shut and locked all the windows, locking in all the trillions of particles of dust and shit. Looking back, I'm pretty sure that those old carpets (pre-1995, I learned) were responsible in part for my sniffles and nasty coughs over the last 24 months.
And I spent a while in the final embrace of Cable, sweet sweet cable. I packed all night long in the dust, and as the sun on Memorial Day rose, I watched the patriotic programming fire up. Very early, Saint Paul Network News carried a Democracy Now! special feature on "Preventive Warriors," which was really pretty damn good. Then they played ironic music to footage of American bombers cruising over Southeast Asia. The program ended with "THE EXCEPTION TO THE RULERS" on the credits, and SPNN clicked back on to bombastic music over the usual slideshow. (speaking of DN, here's a fun bit with Seymour Hersh about Israeli agents in Iran Iraq and Syria)
A few hours later the plug was pulled for good. Brit Hume is a fading memory.
So then, what about the nameless soldiers, the ones who get wiped out by an IED or friendly fire or disease or the heat or a suicide or a RPG or a helicopter crash. State Rep. Becky Lourey's son met his end only a few days ago. The war touches lots of people, it takes them away. That is the essential moral framework of the issue. The Hiawatha light rail cruises past the National Cemetery before it reaches the Mall of America. How excellent that people should be reminded of the many who left this world in the name of serving the calling for their nation, before they enter that edifice of materialism and sheer idolatry.
I curse the anti-war folks for somehow not making the connection with the rest of the country, to help them understand that we value the people of our military the most highly when we protect them from having to go to these places, before we force them to make terrible decisions and compromise their morals. To respect their sacrifice is to reduce the amount of sacrificing that the leaders deem necessary.
The argument of our time is that "he/she did what they had to do," be they the insurgent, the soldier, the settler, the terrorist, the drug smuggler, the lobbyist, the PR flack, the factory laborer. Politics and ethics these days are situational — there is no good platform to stand on anymore. To protect and respect our soldiers, we should have kept them out of the Casbah in Ramadi and Fallujah, the teeming slums that we couldn't begin to really understand. We should never have put these young folks in the irrational position of having to decide these matters of life and death, always without the adequate information, guidance and leadership from the top needed to make sane decisions.
I've met quite a few people in the active service, the reserves, veterans and the recently discharged. They're of all sorts, came in misfits and down on their luck, looking for some sort of money and some sort of structure. They got worldly whether they wanted to or not. Haiti, Somalia, parachute missions into North Korea, the base complexes of Europe. Cogs in a vast machine, leveraging its power over the whole world.
As an atheist, the tragedies that pile up, one after another, becoming all the more bitter as I realize that their souls don't get some kind of automatic nice ride to somewhere sweet — isn't that a common thread binding the true Islamic fundamentalists and their monotheistic brethren?
I want to toast those many fallen Americans and their counterparts in the living world. They are trying to do what they have to do with some kind of morality, and some kind of a goal in mind, even if it is bitterly impossible to reach. I wish their top leadership wasn't totally crazy, and I wish that they hadn't gotten snagged in Iraq, fighting ghosts. We should redouble our efforts to get them out of this mess, and rip the lunatics away from the ability to give these folks orders.
I would start with Juan Cole re our situation: "Sometimes you are just screwed." Bad things afoot towards the Syrian border, on the road to Damascus if you will. "Insurgents plotted in Syria, U.S. says." I love how our threat construction these days works a bit like the Kremlinology of old. There is civil war breaking out (Sunni v. Shiite) at Tal Afar, on said Damascene road.
What are those moustache-twirlers up to?? Reuters yesterday reported that Syria has officially broken off intelligence work with the CIA and other agencies. Of course this is a true pity, since Syria originally offered such help against Al Qaeda earlier. (The Syrian government is in a bit of a deathmatch with Al Qaeda--it hates secular governments.
Our hawks are officially fantasizing about insane Lebanon-like solutions on television. Let that alarm bell go off... I was stunned to watch this exchange about Syria on CNN the other night:
DOBBS: And the U.S. counterterrorism, counterinsurgency forces that are in Iraq working with the population there, the intelligence is obviously still woeful and is still not adequate to forestall what are now rising, not diminishing, bomb attacks against Iraqis and Americans.
GRANGE: Rising because right now it's having a tremendous effect on the morale and attitude of the units, the attitude of the people to support the government, to support the insurgency. And when you have, let's say, if it's true, the reports are true, that you have meetings going on in Syria to plan new offensive actions and car bombings, or improvised explosive devices along roads, a surge of these things, you have to nip it in the bud somewhere. Maybe in Syria. But they are coming from someplace.
DOBBS: The United States military already hard-pressed. Is it a fact within the region, whether one is talking about Syrian leaders or Iranian, that they are watching the drain on both the U.S. forces and the will of the U.S. government, at least in their own projections and assessment, that we have come up with a situation where we are limited in what we can actually -- in the ways in which we can actually extend the United States political will in that region?
GRANGE: Well, it's going to be tough for the political will, because it's a long -- it's going to take a long time to solve -- solve the situation. Counterinsurgencies last a long time. And that's hard to swallow when you want to get in there and get out.
But if the other forces aren't trained to standard yet, then the U.S. or someone has to do that. And you sure don't want to quit now. You want to win this thing. And if some things are happening, let's say supported by Syria, personally, I wouldn't let Syria get away with it.
DOBBS: What would you do?
GRANGE: Well, I would put more pressure on Syria than we have now.
DOBBS: Militarily?
GRANGE: I would use a lot of pressure. There's some behind-the- scenes pressure, but maybe you need a zone of separation that's partly into the country of Syria to stop some of this movement. Maybe 10 kilometers or so deep.
DOBBS: General David Grange, thanks for being with us.
GRANGE: My pleasure.
What an excellent justification to get Cable out of my life. CSM Article ponders the possibilities of a Colombia-like bleeding disaster or the eventual stabilization of other Central American countries. Hey, it's the End of Secularism. A depressing note from Riverbend in Baghdad. The Iraqi police forces still not measured as cohering very well. "U.S. generals issue grim outlook on Iraq".
Justin Raimondo is saying exciting things about "The Franklin Affair: A Spreading Treason." Catchy headline:
Rozen, a perceptive reporter who has been following this story from the start, gives us the essential context of the Franklin affair by showing that he was very much a part of a small, tightly-knit network inside the Pentagon dedicated to provoking war not only with Iraq but also igniting a regional conflict including Iran, Syria, Lebanon, and beyond. She does a very good job, in her piece, of showing how Franklin was at the center of this group's covert machinations: he had a penchant, as she puts it, for "showing up at critical and murky junctures of recent history":
"He was part of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which provided much-disputed intelligence on Iraq; he courted controversial Iraqi exile politician Ahmad Chalabi, who contributed much of that hyped and misleading Iraq intelligence; and he participated with a Pentagon colleague and former Iran/contra arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar in a controversial December 2001 meeting in Rome – which, in a clear violation of US government protocol, was kept secret from the CIA and the State Department."
"In all these endeavors," Rozen writes, "Franklin … was hardly acting as a lone wolf." These rogue operations were projects of the neoconservative matrix in Washington, which reaches not only into the bowels of the Pentagon but also seems to have gained access to the higher echelons of this administration, and virtually taken over the Vice President's office lock, stock, and barrel.
Douglas Feith, Franklin's boss, is close to Israel's Likud party, and in 1996, he and Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser prepared a position paper for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break," that outlined a strategy for extracting Israel from its strategic dilemma: the invasion of Iraq, followed by the elimination of Syria, and the neutralization of Iran, topped their agenda. What they didn't say in the policy paper was that the United States would be doing their dirty work for them, but in retrospect we can see plainly enough that utilizing American military power figured prominently in their plan.
And so on and so forth. Worth looking at. So this British memo has caused some things to come up about whether Bush intended to topple Iraq way back in 2000. A fine story by Juan Cole in Salon outlines the charges. A classic Guardian link from 2003 states that "Blair 'dissuaded Bush from attack after 9/11' "...
Galloway kicked Norm Coleman's ass, (CNN link) and we are better for it. Of course, Norm is trying to peddle goods that he seems to have gotten from Chalabi and the Neo-cons, so we know it must be reliable stuff. More on Galloway. The Newsweek flap has receded a little now but it's still a small matter when compared with how crazy our government is.
The military is having trouble hanging onto young officers, especially Lieutenants and Captains, people who want to find some stability, not to keep getting churned in the system. Of course, they are also getting swooped up by Privatized Military Firms.
"At no time before has the Army had LTs [lieutenants] who have made decisions like that on a daily basis," he said. As he sees it, the military now has an entire generation of young officers who are battle-hardened and knowledgeable about battling insurgencies.
Even in Iraq, he said, senior commanders were keenly aware of those officers who might be considering leaving the military and applied various degrees of pressure to persuade them to remain in uniform.
....
Yet Tuohey, who was promoted to captain upon returning to Ft. Hood, said he was not sure whether he would stay in the Army when his commitment ended next year. He said he was tempted to work on Wall Street.
It's not the money he's after. It's the fact that an Army that was gutted after the Cold War was promising him a future of perpetual deployments fighting a war that could last for decades. That is not a future he is sure he can commit to. "What's the end point?" he asked. "When do you declare victory?"
A little more on the stuff in Uzbekistan altho of course Raimondo has something on that too. Check out Registan.net for ongoing news on that matter.
Stayed up late watching WarGames. WOPR always manages to figure out the Nuclear Codes, and somehow that Matthew Broderick convinces it to transcend its boundaries and comprehend the futility of nuclear war. If only things went so well in Washington today... The Experts are Really Confused about what's going on.
Our Macalester news story in the Pioneer Press. Not 100% accurate. Can't say more.
The WaPo finally tackles the British Intelligence "fixed around the policy" story which hey, Hongpong (and a zillion other sites) brought you sooner than the Mass Media. George Galloway hates on our favorite Norm Coleman.
The elections in Iraq maybe made it worse. For your shot of fatalism consider this argument: let the Shiite death squads run amok. Why not? It makes about as much sense as anything else... Keep readin Juan Cole. Sunnis hint at peace terms.
The Bolton thing really bit them in the ass. No endorsement. Voinovich's passionate statement against Bolton. Crazy brave. Brownstein on how it is playing out inside the GOP. Steve Clemons is a key guy against all this, he wrote a piece and runs the TheWashingtonNote.com, worth watching:
Whereas much of the support for Bolton has had the veneer of being about United Nations reform, what Bolton proponents really want is a ferocious show-down with Iran and North Korea through the United Nations -- not because the U.N. is a good venue for such a battle but because the weaknesses of the U.N. and the problem of getting Security Council unity behind resolutions may allow Bolton to kick apart the institution.
Another news bit.
Newsweek apologizes for the Koran toilet paper thing that set off fatal riots.
Worth looking at this major Agonist post about Franklin and the AIPAC case.
Where is the corporate cash going to paper over global warming?
Something crazy is happening around the Ferghana Valley (PDF) in Central Asia. One thought on it. Good background reading.
The Bush-Bolton Plan to Bomb Bushehr [Iran] by Jude Wanniski
A service I haven't seen before, the NY Times Link Generator for your blogging needs.
I am suddenly getting German spam to news links I can't read. Why did they send me this?
Sorry I haven't written lately. It's the last weekend of college & I just have a couple more little papers left to do. Meanwhile in the real world, it turns out that the British were Quite Annoyed about how the U.S. was trying to justify the war. They say straight up, regarding Iraq, that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Apparently Blair does not deny the truth of the document. Well, that moves the story forward a wee bit, doesn't it? There should be a Black Adder episode about this... "What Ho, Black Adder?" "The Americans are making shit up again! They want the oil!"
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.
The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.
Conclusions:
(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.
(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.
(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.
(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.
He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.
(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.
(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.
(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)
MATTHEW RYCROFT
(Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide)
I'd like to note the unceremonious dismissal of some top AIPAC officials, due to the fact they were allegedly passing intelligence and secret government machinations about Iran to Israeli intelligence. This would apparently be fallout from the Larry Franklin scandal.
This particular case gnaws at the underpinnings of the case for war, and as more information becomes widely know about how much stuff was truly fabricated in order to start the Invasion of Iraq, it will extract a political price from the neo-cons and perhaps one day lead to their downfall.
Certainly John Bolton's role in spoofing information and intimidating honest analysts has become more prominent in recent weeks... even with all the madness in the Capitol regarding judicial nominees and the Nuclear Option, arguments about the threat they pose to "National Security" could still make a difference. Maybe the Democrats should take this and run with it for 2006?
Raimondo at Antiwar.com describes his view with characteristic bluntness:
...the FBI clearly has the goods, not only on Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman, but on AIPAC as well. They don't just start launching raids on one of the most powerful lobbies in Washington for the fun of it: this investigation has been going on for at least two years, and something has been sustaining it. Mowbray and Israel's amen corner insist it's anti-Semitism, but is AIPAC, too, part of the Vast Anti-Semitic Conspiracy? The once-powerful lobby is now running away as fast as possible from these two because they're the victims of a pogrom?
A nest of spies in the Pentagon, determined to bend policy – and the rules governing the dissemination of top secret materials – to Israel's benefit. That's what the FBI investigation has uncovered, and it's no accident that the core of this espionage cell is located in the policy department of the Pentagon, formerly overseen by Douglas J. Feith, who resigned earlier this year. Why did he resign so suddenly? Perhaps we are about to find out.
Franklin worked in the bureau for Near East and South Asian Affairs, under William J. Luti, until he was reassigned in the wake of the scandal: it was Luti who presided over the infamous Office of Special Plans, which was responsible for "stove-piping" patently false "intelligence" on Iraq prior to the invasion. According to Julian Borger of the Guardian, there was an identical unit based in Israel that was funneling phony intelligence to key decision-makers: Pentagon analyst Karen Kwiatkowski, now retired, also witnessed a strong Israeli connection, with IDF officers exempted from having to sign in on visits to agency facilities. What is under investigation by the FBI is what Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, writing in Mother Jones, dubbed "the shadow agency within an agency" – Israel's fifth column in the Defense Department.
Most times I just scowl or ignore the neo-cons' "scruffy little mascot," as the barmiest inhabitant of the NY Times opinion page is best described. (someone besides me described him that way, I swear, but Google disagrees :-/ )
Brooks is gloating today about how apparently fat people actually get to live longer. As a ball o' Establishment Corpulence himself, he's delighted that life is so unfair for the skinny ones like me. But perhaps my all-cheeseburger diet will pay dividends for decades!
I thought this was funny, especially the Hitchens bit. So in a rare moment i will turn a few bytes over to Brooks:
I've been happy because as a member of the community of low-center-of-gravity Americans, I find that a lifetime of irresponsible behavior has been unjustly rewarded. If this study is correct, I'll be ordering second helpings on into my 90's while all those salad-munching health nuts who have been feeling so superior in their spandex pants and cutoff T-shirts will be dying of midriff pneumonia and other condescension-related diseases.
I've been happy because now there will inevitably be a shift in the fashion winds, favoring members of the Zaftig Corps. Sports enjoyed by people with Rubenesque proportions, like floating, will come into vogue. More people will appreciate the thigh-rubbing musical rhythms you hear when overweight people wear corduroys. More people will realize we should all be patterning our lifestyle decisions on those made by Christopher Hitchens.
Mostly, I'm happy on an existential level. I like to be reminded that the universe is basically crooked. This is what the zero-tolerance brigades and all the better living gurus never quite get. They're busy trying to mold everybody into lifelong valedictorians, who spend their adulthood as carb counters and responsible flossers - the sort of organized folk who actually read legal documents before they sign them.
In reality, life is perverse and human beings don't get what they deserve. The people with the worst grades start the most successful businesses. The shallowest people end up blissfully happy and they are so vapid they don't even realize how vapid they are because vapidity is the only trait that comes with its own impermeable obliviousness system.
And he will be back to his incontinent rambling next week, soiling himself with dribblings of whatever cocktail circuit swill winds through his porous and transfat-addled brain.
As long as I am eating my own soul and crediting rightwing humor, the "Take that hippy! Four more years" line of merchandise @ cafepress also has a certain Zeitgeist quality. Obesity and arrogance--at least the empire knows where it's at.
Check out the sweet new Google satellite imagery. Macalester from Space, In Color! Yeah, you can see the red bricks of the plaza in front of the Campus Center. Our house is a little to the west, next to the movie theater... Check out even more interesting Google Satellite Maps people have noted. I suggest Duluth because it has an interesting orthogonal appearance.
Read this: "Is John Bolton Going Down? An amazing afternoon at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. By Fred Kaplan"
you can download the most unlikely video of the committee hearing that halted Bolton's march. NY Times reports. Reuters. Agonist.org Bolton Watch thread.
Wow, yesterday was an unexpected political victory for the "reality-based community" as somehow Republican Senator Voinovich from Ohio (something of a maverick) said he wouldn't vote to get John Bolton out of his nominating committee. This came out of the blue and apparently surprised everyone. Now there are three more weeks to accumulate nasty information about Bolton and his radical duplicitousness, and I'd say he's probably toast.
This is without a doubt the first major public setback the neoconservative clique has had since the election. Aside from the harm to Bolton's reputation, his little trial is causing all sorts of well-cemented lies about the war (and WMD lies, in particular the Niger case) to slide apart. This could go very far, and there is quite a bit of energy suddenly floating around. It seems possible that moderate Republicans see a need to push back against DeLay-Bolton-style embarassingly corrupt petulance and bullying, let alone their many crimes and pathological lying.
The long-awaited Return of the Establishment Conservatives may be at hand, and the Great Battle of RightWing ThinkTankery may yet unfold. Perhaps Lewis Libby will go to jail after an opportune leak about the Valerie Plame CIA case, perhaps Cheney will have to resign. As the Republicans seem to be agitated like a tank of hungry piranhas, and the Lame Duck air that Bush reeked of back in 2001 has returned with force.
Washington Post: "Bolton often blocked information, officials say", somewhat related "The Neocons' Unabashed Reversal" by Michael Kinsley. A tidbit about Bolton lying about Cuba.
I have bumped into some nice blogs about the subject, some new, some not. Democracy Arsenal, Washington Note is totally essential, Obsidian Wings, War and Piece, Arms Control Wonk, Stygius, Mattie Yglesias, Juan Cole, hey why not CounterPunch?
Slate on some specific allegations:
The allegations were made by at least seven officials who have been interviewed by the committee staff (and leaked or otherwise provided to the press) as well as, in a public hearing, by Carl Ford, a conservative Republican and career intelligence official who, until recently, was assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research. They boil down to these: On at least five occasions, Bolton intimidated and tried to get fired intelligence analysts at the State Department and the CIA who disagreed with his views. A former official with the U.S. Agency for International Development wrote a letter to the committee stating that during one run-in with Bolton, while she was working on projects in Kyrgyzstan, he harassed her in a Moscow hotel lobby, banged on her door, then went to Kyrgyzstan and spread lies about her—saying she was being investigated for absconding with government funds—that nearly derailed her work. Several officials have claimed, though anonymously for now, that Bolton blocked official documents about Iran from moving up the chain of command to Colin Powell.
During his hearings, Bolton was asked about some of these matters. He said that he'd asked for the reassignment of one intelligence analyst not because of a dispute over substance but because the analyst had gone behind his back. This claim has been thoroughly rebutted by several witnesses, who affirm that the dispute was over substantive intelligence analysis. A small but telling lie: When Biden asked Bolton whether he personally drove out to CIA headquarters to pressure one high-ranking official to fire the national intelligence officer for Latin American affairs, Bolton said that he'd gone there mainly to ask about intelligence procedures and that he drove there on his way home from work—it was no special trip. Biden said today that he'd since received Bolton's logs for that day. It turned out he made the trip in the morning, then came back to the State Department for a full day's work.
On a totally unrelated note, the George W. Bush conspiracy generator is awesome. It gave me "George W. Bush lowered taxes so that big corporations could oppress transgendered people."
Other stuff: More about oil-for-food, the real deal. That weird fake hostage thing shows sectarian tension growing. FT: Sunni Arabs face dilemma. Shiite bloc plans purge of Saddam-era officials. BBC: "Iraq militias 'could beat rebels'". A Hole in Bush's Exit Strategy (interesting stuff about Privatized Military Firms SAIC etc) Cockburn: "Iraqi Peace in Tatters". Is God taking sides in Iraq?
Fear and loathing with Republicans.
Israel's Military "Justice" system in occupied territories.
What the fuck are these Minutemen, really?
Well Mr Bolton is winding his way through Washington and things look more dicey than many expected. He will probably get in, and go on to start Armageddon sometime this summer, but at least his nomination caused some mostly hidden contradictions about how we went to war in Iraq to burble up in Washington. It's pretty widely known that Bolton was an essential part of the war scheme.
I have returned yet again to the questions of Chalabi and fake intelligence that enabled the drive to war. The interview with a former CIA officer, Vincent Cannistaro basically describes the process of how the U.S. convinced itself to invade Iraq as an instance where the intelligence process went in "reverse," and various obviously false stories were pushed along at just the right moments and places through the system. (he also said that the Niger forgeries were manufactured in the U.S.)
I want to put huge chunks of this in, because it involves the closest details of how the members of Congress were wrongfully persuaded to support the war:
...there was an awful lot of so-called information coming from Iraqi exiles, primarily Ahmed Chalabi’s INC—the Iraqi National Congress. And that seemed to have a very receptive audience in some areas of the government, particularly at the Defense Department and at the vice president’s office. These were reports that tended to support the preconception of the administration that Saddam Hussein needed to be gotten rid of, and the primary reason for doing that was that he was in imminent possession of weapons of mass destruction, which could be turned against the United States of America or its allies.
So in that kind of environment — where there’s a tremendous policy need for information and you don’t have a great deal of source information that’s proprietary — then that’s how information that seems to be comprehensive, coming in from a foreign source, is overemphasized.
[.....]
The interesting thing to me is that the only DIA analyst who ever met with Curveball — who went to Germany and was given access to him — came back with an assessment which was very, very negative.
The problem was: what happened to his assessment? It didn’t get reported up through the senior levels of DIA — and therefore it didn’t get disseminated to CIA — until the Germans were directly queried by CIA on Curveball. That’s when they said, “Look this guy may be a fabricator, don’t trust any of his information.” His information had already gotten into the system, because it had been disseminated by the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency. And it had been distributed through our government, where of course in some sectors — particularly the Defense Department policymakers civilian policy makers and at the vice president’s office — it found an extremely receptive audience.
It was believed because it fit the preconceptions of those policy makers. Now, why did the CIA — which ultimately was responsible for putting the National Intelligence Estimate together in 2002, which was the most critical assessment of any intelligence report that the U.S. government has to offer — put the information in there and play a part in its key judgment of alleged WMD programs by Saddam Hussein? And that’s the question which is still not answered. We do know that some of the analysts at CIA were very suspicious of the Curveball information, as well as information provided by other so-called Iraqi defectors in exile. But that information, that assessment, was reported up through the chain of command at CIA, but apparently nothing was done about it.
[.....]
...the point is that it’s being taken as conventional wisdom that there really wasn’t any pressure by policy makers on the analytical process itself. And that’s just simply not true. It’s simply not true because analysts, generally, are like anyone else. They are concerned about their careers, their futures. Many of them are ambitious. If they understand that a dissenting opinion against the conventional policy wisdom is heard, that it’s going to affect their careers. There was a chilled environment in which to express any kind of opposite opinion.
Not only that, there wasn’t very much of a receptiveness at the senior levels of the CIA — at George Tenet’s level, for example, because he was a very political director. And he was very concerned about getting along with the administration. He was formerly a Democrat, appointed by a Democratic President and he had to stay on in a Republican administration. And he had to compete with a secretary of defense, Rumsfeld, who really didn’t want the CIA playing a large role in the intelligence community, and wanted to supplant that role. So, George had a more political bent. He wanted to get along, and therefore he had to play along. And “playing along” really meant to sustain the conceptions of the policy makers — particularly at the Pentagon and the vice president’s office — that Saddam Hussein was a real and imminent danger.
To do that, you had to accept some of these alarming reports that kept coming in, being fed by Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group. In many cases, the information was fabricated. Information, for example, about an alleged attempt by Saddam Hussein to acquire nuclear material, uranium, from Niger. This, we know now, was all based on fabricated documents. But it’s not clear yet — either from this report, or from any other report — who fabricated the documents.
The documents were fabricated by supporters of the policy in the United States. The policy being that you had to invade Iraq in order to get rid of Saddam Hussein, and you had to do it soon to avoid the catastrophe that would be produced by Saddam Hussein’s use of alleged weapons of mass destruction.
Q: Well, Ambassador Wilson publicly refuted the claims — particularly the 16 words in the President’s State of the Union address that the Iraqis were trying to buy significant quantities of uranium from Niger. That document, I understand, was fabricated ... it originally came out of Italian intelligence, I think SISME, or SISDE—I’m not sure which one.
It was SISME, yeah. ... [D]uring the two-thousands when we’re talking about acquiring information on Iraq. It isn’t that anyone had a good source on Iraq—there weren’t any good sources. The Italian intelligence service, the military intelligence service, was acquiring information that was really being hand-fed to them by very dubious sources. The Niger documents, for example, which apparently were produced in the United States, yet were funneled through the Italians.
Q: Do we know who produced those documents? Because there’s some suspicion ...
I think I do, but I’d rather not speak about it right now, because I don’t think it’s a proven case...
Q: If I said “Michael Ledeen”?
You’d be very close . . .
The great thing about John Bolton is that he was a key element of the scheme, as he managed to Box In Colin Powell.
Here's a great post from Antiwar.com which sums up a great deal of the story. Also interesting is the claim that the famous Curveball was in fact the brother of one of Chalabi's top aides.
The stroke of genius was to put Bolton into the "Arms Control" undersecretary slot, where he could make hell for Colin Powell, going over him and behind his back, intimidating the segment of analysts who correctly believed that the WMD stuff (needed to build up the imaginary threat from Saddam Hussein) was really, truly fake.
Bolton also seems to be an enthusiast about using the weird MEK matriarch cult/terrorist organization/something-or-other, which opposes the Iranian government, as an instrument to bring them down. (via the well named armscontrolwonk.com) StopBolton.org, yet another website dedicated to an impossible cause. (informative agonist.org news thread about Bolton)
So it seems that Bolton may have caused State Dept. employees to lie to Congress about where the WMD discrepancies came from. (Steve Clemons on the Washington Note is All About This) The Great Niger Uranium forgery returns to play a role, it seems. Rep. Henry Waxman (D) wrote a letter about this (PDF):
Concealment of a State Department Official's Role in the Niger Uranium Claim
In April 2004, the State Department used the designation "sensitive but unclassified" to conceal unclassified information about the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, in the creation of a fact sheet distributed to the United Nations that falsely claimed Iraq had sought uranium from Niger.
On December 19, 2002, the State Department issued a fact sheet entitled "Illustrative Examples of Omissions from the Iraqi Declaration to the United Nations Security Council." (9) The fact sheet listed eight key areas in which the Bush Administration found fault with Iraq's weapons declaration to the United Nations on December 7, 2002. Under the heading "Nuclear Weapons," the fact sheet stated:
The Declaration ignores efforts to procure uranium from Niger.
Why is the Iraqi regime hiding their uranium procurement?
It was later discovered that this claim was based on fabricated documents. (10) In addition, both State Department intelligence officials and CIA officials reported that they had rejected the claim as unreliable. (11) As a result, it was unclear who within the State Department was involved in preparing the fact sheet.
On July 21, 2003, I wrote to Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for an explanation of the role of John Bolton, Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, in creating the document. (12) On September 25, 2003, the State Department responded with a definitive denial: "Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security Affairs, John R. Bolton, did not play a role in the creation of this document." (13)
Subsequently, however, I joined six other members of the Government Reform Committee in requesting from the State Department Inspector General a copy of an unclassified "chronology" on how the fact sheet was developed. (14) This chronology described a meeting on December 18, 2002, between Secretary Powell, Mr. Bolton, and Richard Boucher, the Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Public Affairs. According to this chronology, Mr. Boucher specifically asked Mr. Bolton "for help developing a response to Iraq's Dec 7 Declaration to the United Nations Security Council that could be used with the press. According to the chronology, which is phrased in the present tense, Mr. Bolton "agrees and tasks the Bureau of Nonproliferation," a subordinate office that reports directly to Mr. Bolton, to conduct the work.
This unclassified chronology also stated that on the next day, December 19, 2003, the Bureau of Nonproliferation "sends email with the fact sheet, 'Fact Sheet Iraq Declaration.doc.'" to Mr. Bolton's office (emphasis in original). A second e-mail was sent a few minutes later, and a third e-mail was sent about an hour after that. According to the chronology, each version "still includes Niger reference." Although Mr. Bolton may not have personally drafted the document, the chronology appears to indicate that he ordered its creation and received updates on its development.
Waxman's a good guy on some important matters, and has done stuff about the famous Cheney energy task force, Halliburton and other stuff...
Bolton was also tied to some sketchy business and foreign fundraising, as well.
More about Google searches: I am happy to have the top Google result for "disinformation designed to direct the united states in a certain direction," a quote from Dr. Rashid Khalidi regarding the wild stories used to persuade Americans to support invading Iraq, from a Mac Weekly interview in October 2003:
DF: 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. [....] 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.
So apparently Mr. Bolton was the man at State making the disinformation happen. That's not a great reason to send him to the UN, but it is a fabulous reason to send him to prison.
Blah, it is bad when you write a few paragraphs, cut them and forget to paste them, they're gone for good. Damn, that just happened. Dan Schwartz sent me a news item about how protesters arrested at the Republican National Convention last fall have been getting mostly let off charges, as video evidence has shown that the police exaggerated incidents and arrested people without justification. As someone who was there, I felt lucky that we managed to avoid getting arrested... I don't want to go through the details now...
US Draws Up List of Unstable Countries:
03/28/05 "Financial Times" - - US intelligence services are drawing up a secret watch-list of 25 countries in which instability might lead to US intervention, according to officials in charge of a new office set up to co-ordinate planning for nation-building and conflict prevention.
The list will be composed and revised every six months by the National Intelligence Council, which collates intelligence for strategic planning, according to Carlos Pascual, head of the newly formed office of reconstruction and stabilisation.
The new State Department office amounts to recognition by the Bush administration that it needs to get better at nation-building, a concept it once scorned as social work disguised as foreign policy, following its failures in Iraq.
Shocking! Bin Laden bribed Afghan militias in 2001 to let him escape, says the head of the German intelligence agency BND. What, you require cash for loyalty in Afghanistan? That's a historical lesson that brought down two Global Empires, yet the U.S. either doesn't quite get it. If we build permanent bases, we will fully, permanently embrace the heroin smugglers which dominate Afghanistan's economy.
"US Appears to Have Fought War for Oil and Lost It", amusing headline of piece in the Financial Times by Ian Rutledge. "US Has no Exit Strategy for Iraq, Rumsfeld Says" (we have a victory strategy, hurr hurr):
The U.S. has no exit strategy or timetable for withdrawing its forces from Iraq and a pull-out depends on the readiness of the Iraqi Security Forces, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said.
``We don't have an exit strategy, we have a victory strategy,'' Rumsfeld told soldiers during a surprise visit to Baghdad, according to a pooled broadcast report from the capital. ``The goal is to help the Iraqi Forces develop the skills and the capacity to provide their own security.''
[....]
The Defense Secretary, whose visit wasn't disclosed until his arrival for security reasons, praised the U.S. soldiers he addressed in Baghdad and told them that they'll earn their place in history for fighting ``a war where victory depends not only on military successes but on reconstruction and civil affairs.''
Some stuff by raimondo @ antiwar.com about the various ethnic fissures opening up in northern Iraq, and how that might sink what he terms the Iraqi potemkin village. He points out that Article 58 of Iraq's TAL (transition administrative law-the temporary basis for the interim government) has some rather explosive logic to it:
"Expeditiously to take measures to remedy the injustice caused by the previous regime's practices in altering the demographic character of certain regions, including Kirkuk, by deporting and expelling individuals from their places of residence, forcing migration in and out of the region, settling individuals alien to the region, depriving the inhabitants of work, and correcting nationality. …
"With regard to residents who were deported, expelled, or who emigrated; [the Iraqi Transitional Government] shall, in accordance with the statute of the Iraqi Property Claims Commission and other measures within the law, within a reasonable period of time, restore the residents to their homes and property, or, where this is unfeasible, shall provide just compensation."
This is going to cause some ethnic cleansing, then. One of those nice little time bombs that Saddam built into the tortured society of that country, which the Americans have now appointed themselves to untangle. But it probably won't work, and the preconditions for a stable Democracy probably won't gel.
This does not stop Michael Ledeen and some guy named Peter Ackerman, the chair of the "International Center for Nonviolent Conflict" from proclaiming the sweeping democratic revolution that will go on throughout the region. (is Ledeen really just working for Iran anyway? ha!)
Anyhow, they are dressing up the next stage that they want to see: using some exiles and smuggled weapons to start fighting more directly against the regime in Tehran. All the "democracy" talk is stapled on, and they are counting correctly on the Western media's ability to persuade their audiences that the chosen destabilization agents are Vanguards of the Democratic Revolution.
Ledeen has that element of Trotsky in him (one view) and you can always spot the repackaged Advanced Red Guard of Freedom type thing. It has great appeal, it's got all the buzzwords, but it has a certain Stalinist-utopian quality. Teaming with this International Center guy, the Creative Destruction/Utopian Terrorfighter ideology is getting a nice solid institutional engine:
In recent months, skepticism about the appeal of freedom has given way to a new belief: that democratic revolution is now possible, even inevitable, in places such as Lebanon, Iran, Syria and Kyrgyzstan. But "people power" is not an unstoppable tidal wave, and it would be wrong and naive to conclude that we need only step back and let it happen. The Western world has a lot at stake, and our support for democratic forces in the Middle East and beyond will be important, perhaps even decisive.
Freedom-loving people know what we want to see in Beirut, Damascus and Tehran: the central square bursting with citizens demanding an end to tyranny, massive strikes shutting down the national economy, the disintegration of security forces charged with maintaining order, and the consequent departure of the tyrants and the beginnings of a popularly elected government.
A successful people's revolution is the outcome of careful planning and mass discipline, but it requires political and economic support from outside the country — and maybe some from within.
There are three indispensable requirements: first, a unified opposition that can put aside internal disagreements over the details of what will follow the downfall of the tyrannical regime; second, a disciplined democratic movement that rigorously applies the rules of nonviolent conflict; and finally, careful preparation of the battlefield — which means that members of the armed forces must be persuaded to make individual decisions rather than act as part of a collective organization.
In Iran and Lebanon, and probably in Syria, the prerequisites for democratic revolution are in place. Opposition groups in Iran are united in their call for free elections, perhaps preceded by a national referendum that will either legitimize or reject the theocratic state. In Lebanon, 1 million people just demonstrated their support for the quick removal of the Syrian occupiers.
Now the West needs to help. The lessons learned in Georgia and Ukraine need to be passed along. Indeed, this information is so important that Western governments should provide funding so that it can be broadcast around the clock.
The activists will need to communicate with one another, and the West can provide them with suitable equipment — satellite phones, text messaging, laptops and servers — that they may not be able to get by themselves. Just as the West provided Solidarity and Soviet dissidents with fax machines during the Cold War, we should help contemporary dissidents get the best tools available.
Finally, outsiders seeking to aid democratic revolutions must remember this: Only indigenous forces can be the prime movers. There must be no replay of 1953 in Iran, when the United States and Britain stage-managed mass demonstrations against the government in order to restore the shah to his throne. We must trust the judgment of the people who are, in all cases, the foundation of lasting change.
If they want open support, they should get it. If they want it delivered discreetly, donors should respect their wishes.
Americans, Europeans and others who freely choose their own rulers cannot be indifferent about the success or failure of democratic revolution around the world, and we must not limit our support to rhetoric. There is every reason to believe that this latest surge of revolution will succeed, provided that the courage and passion of the people of the region receive suitable assistance from the democratic world.
So, then, the anti-Tehran MEK will be getting its weapons from us promptly. And there is even more to say about the connections between the MEK and John Bolton. Yes, surprise surprise, a paragon of soup-straining integrity like Mr. Bolton might be connected to listed foreign terrorists. What, the "Iran Policy Committee" wants the MEK delisted? (which sparked a reaction) Also can't forget this classic by Josh Marshall and others about "Iran-Contra II?" in the making.
There were previously reports that the recent vote in Iraq was fraudulently manipulated, and now former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, a somewhat odd character (of unknown trustworthiness) in the Iraq saga, says that Bush has already approved plans to attack Iran in July (story originally by United for Peace of Pierce County, WA):
Ritter made two shocking claims: George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and the U.S. manipulated the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
Scott Ritter, appearing with journalist Dahr Jamail yesterday in Washington State, dropped two shocking bombshells in a talk delivered to a packed house in Olympia's Capitol Theater. The ex-Marine turned UNSCOM weapons inspector said that George W. Bush has "signed off" on plans to bomb Iran in June 2005, and claimed the U.S. manipulated the results of the recent Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
[...]
The principal theme of Scott Ritter's talk was Americans' duty to protect the U.S. Constitution by taking action to bring an end to the illegal war in Iraq. But in passing, the former UNSCOM weapons inspector stunned his listeners with two pronouncements. Ritter said plans for a June attack on Iran have been submitted to President George W. Bush, and that the president has approved them. He also asserted that knowledgeable sources say U.S. officials "cooked" the results of the Jan. 30 elections in Iraq.
On Iran, Ritter said that President George W. Bush has received and signed off on orders for an aerial attack on Iran planned for June 2005. Its purported goal is the destruction of Iran's alleged program to develop nuclear weapons, but Ritter said neoconservatives in the administration also expected that the attack would set in motion a chain of events leading to regime change in the oil-rich nation of 70 million -- a possibility Ritter regards with the greatest skepticism.
The former Marine also said that the Jan. 30 elections, which George W. Bush has called "a turning point in the history of Iraq, a milestone in the advance of freedom," were not so free after all. Ritter said that U.S. authorities in Iraq had manipulated the results in order to reduce the percentage of the vote received by the United Iraqi Alliance from 56% to 48%.
[....]
Scott Ritter said that although the peace movement failed to stop the war in Iraq, it had a chance to stop the expansion of the war to other nations like Iran and Syria. He held up the specter of a day when the Iraq war might be remembered as a relatively minor event that preceded an even greater conflagration.
Amazing photo galleries and dispatches from Iraq by Dahr Jamail who is going around with Ritter. Later, more about John Bolton & the fake war intelligence we know and love...
Haaretz: PM: Settlement blocs to stay ours in any final deal
Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, speaking at a new conference with President George W. Bush in Texas on Monday, said large West Bank settlement blocs would remain in Israeli hands in the framework of any final status agreement with the Palestinians.
"The settlement blocs will remain in Israel's hands in any final-status agreement no matter the repercussions entailed," Sharon said.
"We are very interested in having (territorial) contiguity between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, however the matter will take many years and we will have many more opportunities to discuss it with the Americans," Sharon added.
Bush, concerned about the progress of negotiations toward peace in the Middle East, asked Sharon both publicly and privately Monday not to expand the key West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim.
PM: Atmosphere in Israel looks like eve of civil war
In an interview with NBC News on Monday, Sharon spoke of the growing threat of violence by extreme-right Jewish activists in Israel ahead of the disengagement plan.
"The tension here [in Israel], the atmosphere here looks like the eve of the civil war," Sharon said. He also said that although he had been defending Jews all his life, steps are now taken to protect his own life from attacks by Jews.
PBS Frontline "Days of Rage":
Scene III: Late February, the Jerusalem headquarters of the Council of Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza
Twenty-five settler leaders gather in emergency session around a long polished boardroom table a day after the cabinet's authorization of Sharon's plan. The morning is devoted to political and PR action against the plan, the afternoon to "practical steps." The leaders emerge with a two-pronged strategy: to go on pressing for a referendum on disengagement and, failing that, to flood the areas designated for evacuation with tens or even hundreds of thousands of supporters to help settlers physically block police and army efforts to remove them. The council members set up a "general staff" to work out the details. Settler leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who a few days earlier declared that settlers and their supporters should be "ready to risk their lives" to reach the evacuation areas, dubs it the "Judgment Day" team.
These scenes demonstrate what lies ahead in the struggle over evacuation. Together they reveal the three major strategies that Israeli authorities expect opponents of disengagement to adopt: precipitating "a cata-clysmic event that changes the course of history"; using the system to beat the system; and scuttling the disengagement plan by sheer weight of numbers.
[.....]
Besides the threat to [Ariel] Sharon, the police identify two other potentially "cataclysmic" events: An attack on the mosques of the Temple Mount, sacred to Muslims the world over; or indiscriminate gunning down of Arab civilians, following the example of Kahanist Baruch Goldstein's massacre of 29 Muslim worshippers in Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs in February 1994. An event of either kind could inflame the Muslim world, disrupt the nascent accommodation with the new Palestinian leadership and jeopardize Sharon's disengagement plan.
In early February police reported "intelligence of a general sort" of an impending attack on the Temple Mount. On February 22, National Police Chief Moshe Karadi told the Knesset's Finance Committee that he wanted 187 more men and an additional 61 million shekels ($14 million) to beef up security at the holy site. Over the next few days, police called in the media to show the tight measures already in place to cope with what they see as an emergency situation: cameras in strategic places, stringent body checks for all visitors, ground patrols and spotter planes.
Today I heard Bush and Sharon's press conference in Texas, wherein Bush basically handed the major West Bank settlement blocs to the Likud, and "at least" managed to extract a promise from Sharon to remove the more recent outposts and freeze construction. This disturbed the morality of my worldview, and came as yet another signal reinforcing the new Israeli-American hegemon in all its ever-expanding glory. However, the engine of this spatial acquisition, the settlers themselves, will prove to be a hazardous geopolitical tool as political friction increases inside Israel...
I'm going to turn this one over to a bunch of extended blockquotes.... I want to go to bed and leave these elements for the record. See also the extended section...
Also, shame on the neoconservatives who have, by and large, supported the Likud party quite closely, since of course neo-cons have an ideological debt to the patron saint of Likud, Vladimir "Iron Wall" Jabotinsky. I have been over this all before, but now we are really going to see the nasty fallout from their militant ideas...
There are rumors that Israeli settlers will try to attack the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa complex in Old Jerusalem in July, in order to Precipitate a Regional Conflict and forestall the evacuation of settlers from Gaza and a few West Bank points. On the other hand, Hezbollah sent an unmanned drone whizzing into northern Israel. Things nearly got out of hand just the other day:
Haaretz: Vigorous law enforcement needed:
Rightists opposed to the disengagement, including MKs Aryeh Eldad, Uri Ariel, Yehiel Hazan and Michael Ratzon, wanted to go to the Temple Mount yesterday during Muslim prayers, to actualize what they called "the State of Israel's sovereignty" over the site. They apparently forgot that the decision on the content and meaning attributed to the historic cry, "The Temple Mount is in our hands," is not in the hands of MKs or the citizens of the state, but rather in the hands of the political echelon of the government.
Given the level of sensitivity at present, Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra's decision not to allow the rightist MKs to reach the mount was particularly justified. Security considerations can override the special "freedom of movement" afforded MKs. Calls by the Revava organization for a mass demonstration of Jews on the Temple Mount created the "real possibility" of violence. The relative quiet with which the Muslim prayers ended yesterday is not necessarily a harbinger of what is yet to come.
While the police were concentrating enormous forces on and around the mount yesterday to prevent violence, rightist activists managed to surprise the police by blocking a major transportation route - the Ayalon highway. The demonstrators burned tires and blocked traffic in both directions during the morning rush-hour traffic. The police gradually managed to open the route and arrested dozens of activists. This was not the first time the highway was blocked. Presumably, in the coming months there will be more scenes of refusal to obey the law on main thoroughfares.
Prevent Jewish Moves on Al-Aqsa: Cabinet
JEDDAH, 12 April 2005 — Saudi Arabia yesterday called for prompt action by the international community to prevent Jewish extremists from invading the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem and warned that such moves could destabilize the region.
The Council of Ministers, chaired by Crown Prince Abdullah, said that the move by ultranationalist Jews would also derail the Middle East peace process.
“The move by Israeli extremists to storm into Al-Aqsa Mosque will endanger security and stability in the Palestinian territories as well as the region as a whole and will obstruct all efforts to establish peace in the region,” said a statement carried by the Saudi Press Agency.
IDF to disarm four West Bank settlements set for evacuation
Jewish settlers in four West Bank settlements will be disarmed about two weeks before they are to be removed from their homes this summer, military officials said Monday, reflecting growing concern that settler resistance to a West Bank pullback will be particularly intense.
Settlers, however, said they would not give up their weapons.
Israel plans to dismantle all 21 settlements in the Gaza Strip and four in the northern West Bank in July and August, removing about 9,000 Israelis from their homes. While the Gaza operation will be much larger, Israeli officials have grown increasingly worried about violence in the West Bank.
Gaza is surrounded by a barrier and access can be easily controlled, while West Bank settlements can be reached from many directions. The West Bank also holds special significance for religious Jews, raising the likelihood that Jewish ultranationalists might pour into the West Bank settlements to resist the evacuations.
Military officials, speaking on customary condition of anonymity, said troops will collect all military-issue weapons from residents of the four settlements slated for evacuation about two weeks before the pullout. Military commanders expect more settler resistance in the West Bank than in Gaza, the officials said.
Gaza settlers will also be disarmed, although the timing of the weapons collection remains unclear, they added.
The West Bank withdrawal, meanwhile, is increasingly shaping up to be a more complicated operation than the Gaza evacuation. "We are worried more about settlers coming from the outside, not necessarily the residents," said a military official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Yedioth Ahronoth daily quoted a senior military officer as saying "violent cells" have already been established in two of the West Bank settlements slated for evacuation, Sa-Nur and Homesh. The four settlements have a total population of about 500 people.
PBS Frontline: Israel's Next War? Against the Extremists: (interview with producer)
How many people are we talking about -- those who believe the country should be exclusively Jewish?
Latest polls show that 30 percent of the people in Israel support the idea that the land belongs exclusively to the people of Israel, to the Jews, and that the state should be exclusively Jewish.
Can you break down this 30 percent into smaller groups?
Think of it as a pyramid. At the very bottom is the foundation, the ideology. At this bottom level you get to those who believe that Israel should be inhabited by Jews only, that the Arabs should find another place to live in. Go higher and you have less people, but more determined ones, who say something should be done to reach that goal. At the very top are the people who are willing to do something about this themselves, to take some action to escalate events, to help bring about the final biblical redemption. They are a small minority, but it only takes a few to change the course of history. We saw what happened when one man assassinated Prime Minister Rabin [Yigal Amir]. It stopped the peace process, changed its course. It took a while until it was resumed again. This was a very traumatic event that is still fresh. It has not been forgotten.
Now there's a chance that we resume the process. And what the security forces and many people in Israel are concerned about is that some of these extremists will derail the fragile process again, using violent means.
Is there a sense that the security forces and the media didn't take these extremists seriously enough before Rabin's assassination in 1995?
Yes, very much so. Or else how can you explain the easy way in which it happened? No one believed this was possible. That a Jew would murder a Jew?… Even those who did not accept Rabin's views and his ways were shocked at the very fact that this was possible, that it happened. And if it happened once, it can happen again. Rabin's assassin, Yigal Amir, came from the same circles, the same ideology as the people in the film. He might be from a different background, but he shares the same values and was just as determined as they are. In essence the extremists are very much against the way Israel is run and want to change it. They want a Jewish Kingdom, a monarchy. They want a king. They want the Torah to be the law.
[....]
What did [convicted violent settler] Shlomi and the others think of the film?
The people I portray in the film, and many like them, weren't shocked by what they saw. They felt I represented what they believed in, although I'm told they didn't like the tone.
The wider Israeli audience [see press reaction in Israel] was shocked by what these guys had to say. Again, they knew about radical settlers, but suddenly, it came to them in full color along with the real "revelation" if you want, that having the Arabs leave is only their first step. What the extremists really want is a different kind of country altogether. A different way of life. They don't want a democratic state. They don't want a country with Western elements. They don't want a country with cinema and television and what have you, all the Western kind of culture, Western music, secular books and all that. They want a pure Jewish country. A Jewish theocracy with a king who rules by the law of the Torah. They want a Temple. They want to destroy the mosques on the Temple Mount and rebuild the temple that's their temple. They want to have sacrificial rituals.
Frontline excerpts "Talking with Jewish Extremists" by Jessica Stern:
...But what about the murder of [Itzak] Rabin? I ask. Do you believe it was religiously acceptable, given that there exists today no ultimate authority to sanction such a step?
"You've got a ticklish point," he says. "Contrary to popular belief, the highest value for a Jew is not the preservation of human or even of Jewish life. The highest value is doing what God wants you to do. So in an attempt to put Jewish values in a hierarchy, human life in general, Jewish life in particular, is high on the list. But it's not the top."
But how, I wonder, does a Jew know what God wants him or her to do in any given instance? Why is it that the only people who seem to know with absolute certainty are the people who become terrorists?
"There are a number of circumstances under which the individual is enjoined to take a Jewish life if necessary without consulting a court," Lerner continues. "If you see a person preparing to commit a capital crime -- rape or murder -- it is your duty to stop him. You must stop him any way you can. It's similar in some respects to the right Jewish law accords the individual to restore his own property from a thief if it is stolen. You don't have to bring him to court. If you can catch up with him, you can take your property back by force. You don't have to bother the court with stuff like that. Rabin was stealing Jewish property, proposing to give it away."
So the death of Rabin was simply "collateral damage" in an effort to recover stolen property, according to Lerner's convoluted reasoning. His murder would not even have required a ruling by the Sanhedrin, if it had existed.
"I had been convinced for some time that Rabin's death was coming, that it had to come," Lerner continues. "I understand what motivated Yigal Amir [Rabin's murderer]. I am convinced that he felt that Yitzhak Rabin was putting the survival of the Jewish people in danger by his policies. There was no other way of removing Rabin from the gun he was pointing at the Jewish people. I'm ninety-nine percent positive that that's what he thought. Honestly, I can't argue with it."
After his arrest, Amir proclaimed that the killing of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was justified, even commanded, by the rulings of Din Mosser and Din Rodef, as described in the Jewish religious law, or halakha.
According to the halakah, the rulings of Din Mosser and Din Rodef apply to those Jews who have committed the most despicable crime imaginable -- the betrayal of their fellow Jews. The punishment of the Mosser -- a person who hands over sacred Jewish property to the gentile -- as well as that of the Rodef -- a person who murders or facilitates the murder of Jews -- shall be death. Since the execution of the Mosser or the Rodef is aimed at saving the lives of other Jews, there is no need for a trial.
[....]
Kach and Kahane Chai were declared terrorist organizations in 1994 by the Israeli cabinet. The banning of the two groups followed one of the most well-known incidents of Jewish extremism, namely the massacre of twenty-nine Muslims in Hebron by Dr. Baruch Goldstein on February 25, 1994. Goldstein, a thirty-seven-year-old doctor and father of seven at the time of the shooting, was a prominent member of Kach. The group had issued statements supporting Goldstein's attack.
Both Kach and Kahane Chai organize protests against the Israeli government and harass and threaten Palestinians in Hebron and the West Bank. Groups affiliated with them have threatened to attack Arabs, Palestinians, and Israeli government officials. They claimed responsibility for several attacks of West Bank Palestinians in which four persons were killed and two were wounded in 1993. In April 2002, the current leader of Kach, Baruch Marzel, was arrested by Israeli police in connection with a plot to leave a trailer laden with two barrels of gasoline and two gas balloons outside a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem. The West Bank settlements of Tapuah and Kiryat Arba are strongholds of the Kahanist movement. According to the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism, both organizations receive support from American and European sympathizers. ...
I ask Erzion to explain his feeling of urgency about rebuilding the Temple. "If you seek the kernel of meaning in the Temple," he says, "it is akin to the meeting of love between the Jewish people and God, or the attraction between men and women. The Jewish people are the female aspect, and they are missing their other, an other which can only be recovered when the Temple is rebuilt. The view of God is symbolized by the man, and the Jewish people as a woman.
"It is something so wonderful you can hardly imagine it. None of us has ever seen or touched anything like it. It is not just the stones it's built of. That's just the framework, like the peel of an orange. The Temple is the collective spirit of the people." Erzion is clever, like Lerner. But he is also poetic. Listening to him, I start to feel the loss of this mystical place. I feel the longing. For the Temple, and for this sensual union between God and man that he describes. Fundamentalism is always about longing, I remind myself, often for something that never existed.
[.....]
On May 2, 1980, Fatah threw a grenade into a group of Jews who were praying in Hebron, six of whom were killed. The Jews in Hebron wanted to take revenge. Most of them wanted to go to a market and blow up as many Arabs as they could or do the same in a mosque. But Erzion persuaded his colleagues that wounding, not killing, several Palestinian leaders was a better strategy. Erzion felt that killing them would only make them heroes. This was a clever strategy. The group managed to wound several Palestinian mayors.
In subsequent attacks, Erzion failed to prevail over his more violent colleagues. On July 17, 1983, an Israeli yeshiva student was killed in Hebron. Erzion's colleagues entered the Islamic College in Hebron, determined to kill as many Arabs as they could. They killed three and injured over thirty.
[.....]
Although Erzion appears to have given up violent struggle, at least for now, he has not given up his efforts to prepare Israelis to rebuild the Third Temple when the time is ripe. Yehuda Erzion, Yoel Lerner, and Avigdor Eskin are all members of the Temple Mount Treasury, a group that continues to raise funds to rebuild the Temple.
Gillon believes that the radical right continues to pose a grave threat to Israeli national security, perhaps even more than Hamas. "Here in Israel we don't like to say this very loudly, bur the radical-right Jewish groups have a lot in common with Hamas," he told me. Hamas and the radical-right groups have twin objectives: one religious, the other political, Gillon explains. Both use selective readings of history and of religious texts to justify violence over territory.
Etzion tells me sadly that he has learned the Jewish people are not ready for redemption. He serves as the leader of the group Chai Vekayam (Alive and Existing), which regards itself as "the catalyst for a Jewish renaissance." The group focuses on encouraging Jews to prepare themselves for the imminent redemption through prayer.
The Temple Mount is the only holy place for the Jews, Etzion explains. "The one thing I am sure of," he says, "is that the Dome of the Rock is a temporary building. It must come to an end. Exactly when and exactly how I cannot say. But as a principle, I am sure its end is near."
Other nice links: so who was this Kahane fanatic anyway? See what his fans put on the Internet.
Tonight's entry is dedicated to my favorite Roman god, Non Sequitur. We have many things to note.
The Montana House resoundingly confirmed a resolution disparaging the Patriot Act as Fascist Horse Manure. (via Eschaton)
Prince Charles is an ill tempered hemorrhoid of a heir.
Misc links: Did anyone notice that the famous The Blogging of the President bopnews.com needs to update all this '2004' crap they have written all over. HongPong.com started going in 2001 but I'm not still obsessed with high school... Taegan Goddard's PoliticalWire.com, interesting stuff... American Constitution Society has a fancy lookin blog with all sorts of ongoing legal news, and in particular some good thoughts about the Schiavo case and federalism:
...the Schiavo case reveals the true priorities of the right: they are happy to abandon the principles of federalism if the issue is related to questions of "life." But if they are willing to cast aside federalism in the Schiavo case, won't they be willing to do the same in the context of abortion? And if they are, won't that inevitably lead to attempts to pass federal legislation banning abortion?
There is a big deal going on regarding how political contributions via websites should fit into the FEC regulations. Info @ redstate.org. Behold pretentious blog of rightwing Robert Kaplan supporters. This is why Kaplan and his pagan ways make him a bastard.(Hey, they use WordPress, which probably works better than this system).
Gonna have to get me a gravatar. In here is the very best picture to come out of the Terri Schiavo circus (this one). A more moderate Republican dared asked for sanity, then they cut off his fingers. The Pope pleaded for world peace.
C-SPAN provides platform for Holocaust denier to badger author??
MOONIES! John Gorenfeld takes it upon himself to look out for the good Reverend Moon and his Unification Church's ongoing efforts to destroy America and bring that special blend of Korean Neo-Jonestown Messianism to us all... Scrap Democracy! The Evil Elliot Abrams will speak at your functions! I believe Gorenfeld was the one who found out about that crazy crowning ceremony when good ol Moon told us he was the Messiah. That's Washington for ya!
These links should have been in the last post: A little more about the White Supremacists getting ignored by the Department of Homeland Security, as I mentioned earlier. And a little More about Team B in the late 1970s using fake information to support hawkishness...
Kyrgyzstan revolution: it seems like another mess on Afghanistan's doorstep, rather than one of these glossy color coded revolutions intended to provide a jolly narrative for the Folks Back Home. Most of these are sugarcoated, like Ukraine's Yuschenko, for example, is portrayed as a Hero of Democracy rather than someone who embezzled vast sums from the IMF.
In Kyrgyzstan, a poor country that lacks even a spellcheck entry on my computer, is one of these rather authoritarian (post-Stalinist?) Central Asian republics, overrun with heroin smuggling operations and the Russian mob. This article from March 1 describes the local "managed democracy" (ie rigged systems) that the former president, Akayev, couldn't quite rig enough to Inspire Confidence. Oddly enough, some people say that Kung Fu was responsible for this turn of events:
KARA SUU, Kyrgyzstan (AFP) - Many say people power brought down the regime in Kyrgyzstan last week. But Bayaman Erkinbayev, a lawmaker, martial arts champ and one of the Central Asian nation's richest men, says it was his small army of Kung Fu-style fighters.
In southern Kyrgyzstan, where the protests that brought down the Askar Akayev's 15-year regime first flared, the name of 37-year-old Erkinbayev seems to be on everyone's lips. Erkinbayev is the wealthy playboy head of the Palvan Corporation, who led 2,000 fighters trained in Alysh, Kyrgyzstan's answer to Kung Fu, to protests launched after the first round of a parliamentary election on February 27.
A hero in his hometown Osh, he is generally considered to have financed the protests and sent his martial arts trainees to the front lines of the demonstrations, including in the capital Bishkek.
"When our old men were beaten and thrown out of the regional administration building, my fighters were on the front line. And during the siege in Bishkek, my fighters went in first," Erkinbayev told AFP in his gymnasium in Osh.
Iraq still rockin: The Fallujah brigades might be comin back again. Keep reading Juan Cole. Hey, who remembers how Ahmed Chalabi provided all that fake information about weapons of mass destruction in a successful effort to trick the American public into supporting an invasion? Ahh, the good old days... For that honed sense of outrage about the recent panel report on the WMD lies, consider Raimondo:
If and when the [Larry] Franklin [AIPAC-related] case finally comes to trial, the courtroom deliberations could shed new light on the question of how and why we were lied into war. It will prove in a court of law what I have long contended: that the only way to understand this shameful episode in the history of American wars is to look at the series of "mistakes" and "miscalculations" as a covert operation carried out by agents of a foreign power. Contra the WMD report, it wasn't "tunnel vision" that led to a monumental "intelligence failure" – it was treason.
Ray McGovern on the need for Honest Intelligence, regarding National Intelligence Estimates (such as those previously spoofed) etc., and of course our spotty intel on Iran. Scott Ritter says that Bush has a plan to get ready for war with Iran by June this year of our lord 2005.
Lebanon: something written in an unorthodox fashion by William Lind against the U.S. meddling about in Lebanon, and how it plays into al-Qaeda's interests if we go after Authoritarian Syria.
Israel: The Planned Chaos Of Illegal Settlements. This is very important.
Israel/Russia: Funny story about a corrupt financier named Vladimir Gusinsky and his Russian and Israeli schemes. Apparently he has some sympathy from characters like Benjamin Netanyahu... The Agonist is doing some serious reporting of its own now, kudos to them.
The Local Front for Fatal Hubris: Any criticisms of Tom DeLay and the cockroaches oozing from his mouth will be Taken Personally and Reinserted Rectally.
By now you have surely read about House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's ethics troubles. Probably, too, you aren't entirely clear as to what those troubles are--something to do with questionable junkets, Indian casino money, funny business on the House Ethics Committee, stuff down in Texas. In Beltway-speak, what this means is that Mr. DeLay has an "odor": nothing too incriminating, nothing actually criminal, just an unsavory whiff that could have GOP loyalists reaching for the political Glade if it gets any worse. The Beltway wisdom is right. Mr. DeLay does have odor issues. Increasingly, he smells just like the Beltway itself [...] Taken separately, and on present evidence, none of the latest charges directly touch Mr. DeLay; at worst, they paint a picture of a man who makes enemies by playing political hardball and loses admirers by resorting to politics-as-usual. The problem, rather, is that Mr. DeLay, who rode to power in 1994 on a wave of revulsion at the everyday ways of big government, has become the living exemplar of some of its worst habits. Mr. DeLay's ties to Mr. Abramoff might be innocent, in a strictly legal sense, but it strains credulity to believe that Mr. DeLay found nothing strange with being included in Mr. Abramoff's lavish junkets. Nor does it seem very plausible that Mr. DeLay never considered the possibility that the mega-lucrative careers his former staffers Michael Scanlon and Mr. Buckham achieved after leaving his office had something to do with their perceived proximity to him. These people became rich as influence-peddlers in a government in which legislators like Mr. DeLay could make or break fortunes by tinkering with obscure rules and dispensing scads of money to this or that constituency. Rather than buck this system as he promised to do while in the minority, Mr. DeLay has become its undisputed and unapologetic master as Majority Leader. Whether Mr. DeLay violated the small print of House Ethics or campaign-finance rules is thus largely beside the point. His real fault lies in betraying the broader set of principles that brought him into office, and which, if he continues as before, sooner or later will sweep him out.I know Dan will want to highlight this as an example of the nefariousness that is allowed to simmer on in the Republican Party, but I am going to to take WSJ's side here and say that Delay (a) is not going to be convicted and (b) is not going to be House Majority Whip much longer. Remember Newt Gingrich's mistress? DeLay's trespass is bigger, but less gross, because we don't have to picture anyone having sex with Tom DeLay. What is the point of all this Schiavo nonsense, then, in the end? Nothing and a tuppence, because it turned out to be a disastrous miscalculation for Bo and Luke (Tom and Bill) and the Dems finally stood to the side while the Republicans ran up on their own swords for a cause that would seem to be precious to a tiny portion of America. Now for the apologies: To Terri Schiavo- I'm sorry for spelling your name wrong. If there is a God, you are with him, but I doubt it, so I make jokes about your IQ approaching that of an English breakfast. If you are actually in there listening, or in heaven, I am sure that you will rain fists down on my ass like a WWE wrestler in order to straighten me out. This concludes the apologies. Wellkidsallfornowloveyoubyebye...
All right, Major Things have to Happen today and I've got to set about doing them real quick-like, in preparation for the trip. Have to write midterm exam all day...
Civil war stuff further down. Turns out that the Bush Administration makes up more shit than any other presidency, ever. They use fake news broadcasts with fake reporters, distributed to TV stations, to help provide the public with a fuzzy background of "a caring get-it-done Administration". The Congressional Budget Office has considered some of this stuff potentially "covert propaganda". The NY Times had a major feature on it Sunday.
"Thank you, Bush. Thank you, U.S.A.," a jubilant Iraqi-American told a camera crew in Kansas City for a segment about reaction to the fall of Baghdad. A second report told of "another success" in the Bush administration's "drive to strengthen aviation security"; the reporter called it "one of the most remarkable campaigns in aviation history." A third segment, broadcast in January, described the administration's determination to open markets for American farmers.
To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. The report from Kansas City was made by the State Department. The "reporter" covering airport safety was actually a public relations professional working under a false name for the Transportation Security Administration. The farming segment was done by the Agriculture Department's office of communications.
Under the Bush administration, the federal government has aggressively used a well-established tool of public relations: the prepackaged, ready-to-serve news report that major corporations have long distributed to TV stations to pitch everything from headache remedies to auto insurance. In all, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, records and interviews show. Many were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
This winter, Washington has been roiled by revelations that a handful of columnists wrote in support of administration policies without disclosing they had accepted payments from the government. But the administration's efforts to generate positive news coverage have been considerably more pervasive than previously known. At the same time, records and interviews suggest widespread complicity or negligence by television stations, given industry ethics standards that discourage the broadcast of prepackaged news segments from any outside group without revealing the source.
Federal agencies are forthright with broadcasters about the origin of the news segments they distribute. The reports themselves, though, are designed to fit seamlessly into the typical local news broadcast. In most cases, the "reporters" are careful not to state in the segment that they work for the government. Their reports generally avoid overt ideological appeals. Instead, the government's news-making apparatus has produced a quiet drumbeat of broadcasts describing a vigilant and compassionate administration.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy.
Some of the segments were broadcast in some of nation's largest television markets, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Atlanta.
All right other stuff, quickly. Stratfor says that John Bolton is not such a horror for the UN post, and of course I disagree because he is A) batshit crazy B) antagonizes people purely for symbolic value C) incredibly dishonest and dangerous.
In fact, there is some extremely deep diplomacy going on here. Bolton belongs to the "put-up-or-shut-up" branch of American neocons, believing that the United Nation's original charter prescribed a much more activist organization -- where resolutions would be strengthened by possible consequences if violated, often including the use of force. In Bolton's mind, the Korean War is precisely the type of military action the United Nations was designed to authorize and carry out.
This is, needless to say, very different from the circumstances surrounding the Iraq war of 2003 -- in which the Bush administration, we believe, hoped that the United Nations would not go along with U.S. requests. The whole point of the war was not to oust Saddam Hussein but to intimidate Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia into acting against al Qaeda on Washington's behalf. Bush wanted to scare regimes that supported or enabled al Qaeda by placing uninvited, unsanctioned American armored divisions -- not a sea of polite blue helmets -- in the sands of Iraq.
[.....]
Had the administration simply wanted to destroy the United Nations, it would have appointed someone far less controversial and independent-minded who would simply rubber-veto U.N. Security Council resolutions ad nauseam. As Bush pointed out during his first term, the United Nations is relevant only if it takes steps to enforce its own dictates.
Bolton feels the same way. He believes the U.N. system is not necessarily irredeemable, but simply discredited. Rather conveniently, he has two ready-made test cases waiting: North Korea has withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while Iran is, at best, attempting to skirt the IAEA on technical grounds. In effect, both states have -- in the eyes of the United Nations -- placed themselves outside of the system, and are therefore squarely in what Bolton and his neocon circle feel are the United Nations' crosshairs. Bolton's task will be to get the United Nations to act against them -- not for American interests, but to prevent the United Nations from sliding into total irrelevance.
In the four years to come, the United Nations is likely to have several "legitimate" targets, from the neocons' point of view. In his second term, Bush seems committed to finishing the work not just of his first administration, but of the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations as well. The White House has made no secret of goals that include not only tying up the final loose ends of the Cold War and completing the rollback of Russian power, but also of extending that geopolitical effort to Communist East Asia and the Middle East.
I don't buy it. Ok. Also a former US soldier, Nadim Abou Rabeh, claims that the U.S. faked the news of Saddam's capture on Dec. 13, 2003, and he was actually captured by Rabeh and others somewhere totally different on Dec. 12. Justin Raimondo speculates on whether this is true, and the upcoming demonization of Bashar Assad as the next-worst-thing-to-Hitler. He also has a bit about how the Neo-cons have been chased out of one of their periodical redoubts, National Journal.
The pro-Syrian govt in Lebanon is back in the saddle. Experts warn that the War on Terror (TM) is going to make more terrorists. Apparently the U.S. is finally ready to acknowledge that Hezbollah has a key role to play in Lebanon. We just don't have the traction to play the stupid demonization card anymore.
Speaking of liars around Bush, a bit by David Corn about the bad old days of massacres in El Salvador, and Elliot Abrams lying to Congress to cover it up. These days are going to be here again, with people like him and Negroponte running around. Dowd points out that these 'security-minded' bastards are not really that competent at security.
Oh yeah, here's some batty stuff. David Horowitz made up a site, discoverthenetwork.org, that purports to connect, say, the editors of The Nation with Zacharias Moussaui. It also shines light on the evil conspiracy that is Counterpunch.org. Nuts.
Ok finally, something about that civil war stuff. Uri Averny, an old-school Israeli peacenik, has a ton of good thoughts about what kind of mess we are getting drawn into with Lebanon and elsewhere.
Many years ago, I read a book called The Quiet American by Graham Greene. Its central character is a high-minded, naive young American operative in Vietnam. He has no idea about the complexities of that country but is determined to right its wrongs and create order. The results are disastrous.
I have the feeling that this is happening now in Lebanon. The Americans are not so high-minded and not so naive. Far from it. But they are quite prepared to go into a foreign country, disregard its complexities, and use force to impose on it order, democracy, and freedom.
[....]
Exactly 50 years ago, a secret, heated debate took place among the leaders of Israel. David Ben-Gurion (then minister of defense) and Moshe Dayan (the army chief-of-staff) had a brilliant idea: to invade Lebanon, impose on it a "Christian major" as dictator, and turn it into an Israeli protectorate. Moshe Sharett, then prime minister, attacked this idea fervently. In a lengthy, closely argued letter, which has been preserved for history, he ridiculed the total ignorance of the proponents of this idea in face of the incredibly fragile complexity of the Lebanese social structure. Any adventure, he warned, would end in disaster.
At the time, Sharett won. But 27 years later, Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon did exactly what Ben-Gurion and Dayan had proposed. The result was exactly as foreseen by Sharett.
[....]
In Lebanon, all the diverse communities are in action. Each for its own interest, each plotting to outfox the others, perhaps to attack them at a given opportunity. Some of the leaders are connected with Syria, some with Israel, all are trying to use the Americans for their ends. The jolly pictures of young demonstrators, so prominent in the media, have no meaning if one does not know the community that stands behind them.
[...]
It took us 18 years to get out of that morass. Our only achievement was to turn the Shi'ites into a dominant force. When we entered Lebanon, the Shi'ites received us with showers of rice and candies, hoping that we would throw out the Palestinians, who had been lording it over them. A few months later, when they realized that we did not intend to leave, they started to shoot at us. Sharon is the midwife of Hezbollah.
[....]
If a civil war breaks out in Lebanon, it will not be the only one in the region. In Iraq, such a war – if almost secret – is already in full swing.
The only effective military forces in Iraq, apart from the occupation army, are the Kurdish peshmerga ("those who face death"). The Americans use them whenever they are fighting the Sunnis. They played an important role in the battle of Fallujah, a big town that was totally destroyed, its inhabitants killed or driven out.
Now the Kurdish forces are waging a war against the Sunnis and Turkmens in the north of the country, in order to take hold of the oil-rich areas and the town of Kirkuk, and also to drive out the Sunni settlers who were implanted there by Saddam Hussein.
How can such a war be practically ignored by the media? Simple: everything is swept under the carpet of the "war against terrorism."
But this small war is nothing compared to what may happen in Iraq, once the time comes for deciding the future of the country. The Kurds want complete autonomy, or independence by another name. The Sunnis would not dream of accepting the rule of the Shi'ite majority, which they despise, even if it came about in the name of "democracy." The outbreak of a full-fledged civil war may only be a question of time.
[....]
If the Americans succeed, with Israel's discreet help, in breaking the ruling Syrian dictatorship, there is no assurance at all that it will be replaced by "freedom" and "democracy."
Syria is almost as splintered as Lebanon. There is a strong Druze community in the south, a rebellious Kurdish community in the north, an Alawite community (to which the Assad family belongs) in the west. The Sunni majority is traditionally divided between Damascus in the south and Aleppo in the north. The people have resigned themselves to the Assad dictatorship out of fear of what may happen if the regime collapses.
It is not likely that a full-scale civil war will break out there. But a prolonged situation of total chaos is quite likely. Sharon would be happy, though I am not sure that it would be good for Israel.
[....]
Israel is now openly threatening to bomb the Iranian nuclear installations. Every few days we see on our TV screens the digitally blurred faces of pilots boasting of their readiness to do this at a moment's notice.
The religious fervor of the ayatollahs has been flagging lately, as happens with every victorious revolution after some time. But a military attack by the "Big Satan" (the U.S.) or the "Little Satan" (us) may set fire to the whole Shi'ite crescent: Iran, south Iraq, and south Lebanon.
[....]
And here, too. Israel, too, has recently witnessed a tiny civil war.
In the Galilean village Marrar, where a Druze and an Arab Christian community have been living side by side for generations, a bloody incident suddenly erupted. It was a full-fledged pogrom: the Druze fell upon the Christians, attacking, burning, and destroying. By a miracle, nobody was killed. The Christians say that the Israeli police (many of whose members are Druze) stood aside. The immediate reason for the outbreak: some doctored nude pictures on the Internet.
Here are a couple other writings by Averny. This one is interesting but in particular please read "Israel's coming civil war," it is scary as hell. It was written back in October but it is highly relevant.
Everybody in Israel is talking about the Next War. The most popular TV channel is running a whole series about it. Not another war with the Arabs. Not the nuclear threat from Iran. Not the ongoing bloody confrontation with the Palestinians.
The talk is about the coming civil war.
[....]
The seeds of the civil war were sown when the first settlement was put up in the occupied territories. At the time, I told the prime minister in the Knesset: "You are laying a land mine. Some day you will have to dismantle it. As a former soldier, let me warn you that the dismantling of land mines is a very unpleasant job."
[...]
Many settlers do not yet say so openly and pretend to be insulted when such attitudes are attributed to them, but in fact they are dragged along by the hard core that has already thrown off all the masks. They challenge not only the policy of the government, but Israeli democracy as such. They declare openly that their aim is to overthrow the State of Law and put in its place the State of the Halakha.
A State of Law is subject to the will of the majority, which enacts the laws and amends them as necessary. The State of the Halakha is subject to the Torah, revealed once and for all on Mount Sinai and unchangeable. Only a very small number of eminent rabbis have the authority to interpret the Halakha. That is, of course, the opposite of democracy. In any other country, these people would be called fascists. The religious coloration makes no difference.
The religious-rightist rebels are powerfully motivated. Many of them believe in the Kabbala – not Madonna's fashionable Kabbala, but the real one, which says that today's secular Jews are really Amalekites who succeeded in infiltrating the People of Israel at the time of the exodus from Egypt. God Himself has commanded, as everyone knows, the eradication of Amalek from the face of the earth. Can there be a more perfect ideological basis for civil war?
In preparation for the Great Rebellion, the settlers have unveiled their potential. The most eminent rabbis of the "Religious Zionist movement" have declared that the evacuation of a settlement is a sin against God and have called upon the soldiers to refuse orders. Hundreds of rabbis, including the rabbis of the settlements and the rabbis of the religious units in the army, have joined the call.
The voice of the few opponents is being drowned out. They quote the Talmudic saying "the law of the kingdom is law," meaning that every government has to be obeyed, much as Christians are required to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, etc. But who listens to these "moderate rabbis" now?
The conquest of the army from the inside began long ago. The "arrangement" with the yeshivot (religious schools) that serve in the army as separate units has allowed the entry of a huge Trojan horse. In any confrontation between their rabbis and their army commanders, the soldiers of the "arrangement yeshivot" will obey the rabbis. Worse: for years now, the settlers have systematically penetrated the ranks of the officers' corps, where they now constitute an even more dangerous Trojan horse.
[....]
Altogether, the settlers, together with their close allies in Israel including the yeshivot students, may amount to something like half a million people – a mighty phalanx for rebellion.
Well that's a pretty serious blog post. I don't think I'll have time to add anything else. I didn't really even have time for this, but it is really important stuff to note. Everyone have a great spring break, and hopefully Mordred will offer something to us over that time....
I've been way too busy lately, and I feel like I'm barely getting anywhere. Once again I'll warn everyone that I have no time to make regular updates, despite all the hulabaloo in the world i just can't sit around blogging for hours yet. So if it's quiet around here, be patient. Believe me, I am collecting a lot of information these days...
The Mac Weekly website which is my charge looks purty sorry right now, as I haven't put together a complete replacement for the front page. Nonetheless it has been a rather momentous week in the world, so I gotta finally say something. I just cracked open my window to this incongruous heat wave sweeping us all week. It's nice to have fresh air in the house but also disconcerting because in the last century in Minnesota Februaries YOU COULD NOT OPEN THE WINDOWS!!! (is there a plural for February?)
We watched the rebroadcast of the State of the Union late Wednesday, and I flipped away to check if the Daily Show had started just as the famous Hug O Compassion magnetized the whole audience. Aw shucks, it looked like Bush got a tear in his eye. Then he quickly started speaking again, which indicated to me that the whole thing wasn't spontaneous. (or else CNN shortened the moment in the replay edition, I don't know)
These days I always look askance the participants in Iraqi Symbolic Events Recognizing the Innate Righteousness Of Freedom (®©✌), because they often turn out to be tied to the neocons. (the Firdaus Square flag-waving statue topplers and the INC would be the other major example, famously cited in Control Room) Well, some other people started looking around and they found that this woman appeared in, for example, a State Department pseudo-news report — PR releases, really — supporting the drive to war. So check out the Metafilter post and DailyKos diary on this.
It also turns out the State Department was totally complicit in the oil smuggling games that happened under Saddam, thusly undermining the line that Norm Coleman, William Safire and Ahmed Chalabi (truly my favorite people) keep flogging, that the UN was somehow culpable for all the shady dealings, and it never could have happened without Kofi messing around, and etc etc. Now we find that the U.S. condoned this stuff all along, for fairly straightforward reasons, or so they say:
(CNN) -- Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances with Iraq's neighbors. The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S. government and the United Nations for years.
The unclassified State Department documents sent to congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign policy divulge that the United States deemed such sales to be in the "national interest," even though they generated billions of dollars in unmonitored revenue for Saddam's regime.
The trade also generated a needed source of oil and commerce for Iraq's major trading partners, Turkey and Jordan. "It was in the national security interest, because we depended on the stability in Turkey and the stability in Jordan in order to encircle Saddam Hussein," Edward Walker, a former assistant secretary of state for Near East affairs, told CNN when asked about the memo documents.
"We had a great amount of cooperation with the Jordanians on the intelligence side, and with the Turks as well, so we were getting value out of the relationship," said Walker, who served in both the Clinton and Bush administrations.
[......]
The justifications came at a time when the United States was a staunch backer of U.N. sanctions on Iraq imposed after it invaded Kuwait in 1990.
"Despite United Nations Security Council Resolutions," a 1998 memo signed by President Clinton's deputy secretary of state, Strobe Talbott, said, "Jordan continues to import oil from Iraq." But Jordan had a "lack of economically viable alternatives" to Iraqi oil, Talbott's memo said. [....] "Timely, reliable assistance from the United States fosters the political stability and economic well-being critical to Jordan's continuing role as a regional leader for peace," Talbott said. Identical language was used four years later in a 2002 memo by Richard Armitage, undersecretary of state under President George W. Bush.
"Jordan has made clear its choice for peace and normalization with Israel," Armitage said, calling Jordan "an important U.S. friend" and citing its 2001 free trade treaty with the United States. "U.S. assistance provides the Jordanian government needed flexibility to pursue policies that are of critical importance to U.S. national security and to foreign policy objectives in the Middle East," Armitage said.
Economic and military ties to Turkey were cited by Talbott and Armitage in justifying waivers of U.S. penalties to Iraq's northern neighbor. Indeed, their memos advocated hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the U.S. allies.
[......]
"With Jordan and Turkey the circumstances were unique," Ereli said. "We approached them in a way that preserved key alliances and didn't help the regime of Saddam Hussein."
[Current State Dept spokesman Adam Ereli] added that Saddam's smuggling to Syria, which the United States tried to curtail, raised far more concerns because of the possibility of "dual use" goods reaching Iraq.
[....]
Estimates of how much revenue Iraq earned from these tolerated side sales of its oil to Jordan and Turkey, as well as to Syria and Egypt, range from $5.7 billion to $13.6 billion. This illicit revenue far exceeds the estimates of what Saddam pocketed through illegal surcharges on his U.N.-approved oil exports and illegal kickbacks on subsequent Iraqi purchases of food, medicine, and supplies -- $1.7 billion to $4.4 billion -- during the maligned seven-year U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq.
[....]
John Ruggie, a former senior adviser to U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said U.S. diplomats focused on assuring U.N.-approved shipments to Iraq were free of military components, and the United States felt Jordan and Turkey needed to be compensated for the adverse impact of the sanctions.
Ruggie said, "The secretary of state of the United States said each and every year that those illegal sales were in the national security interest of the United States. So it wasn't just that the U.S. was looking the other way."
Oh yeah, it looks like Dean is going to take over the DNC, then. Well, Establishment, this is what you get for being so stodgy and letting the Republicans take over town. Neener neener... I have very mixed feelings about all of this, but considering where we are now at (the nadir), why the hell not? The New Republic, a periodical I'm often suspicious of, has an interesting look at how, in one writer's view, Dean split the Democratic Party during the primaries, seduced the state party heads and secured the the DNC chairmanship. Very worth reading.
Ordinary folks and county officials in Fargo-Moorhead area, who happen to be on some MeetUp lists, find themselves blacklisted from a Bush appearance. Nice.
I was wondering what the hell Dean's "Democracy for America" organization was really intended for, and right after the race they came right out of the gate, a still-beating structure of true believers. Hey, why not? It should turn out to be entertaining.
Meanwhile the prime minister of Georgia died mysteriously of carbon monoxide. Talk about your classic Caucasus intrigues. Georgia is a place I'm concerned about, because of its position in the oil/ethnic unrest situation around the Caucasus. I got an email from the Stratfor mailing list, with George Friedman on what this might be about:
The former Soviet republic, a key land bridge between the Caspian and Black seas, is an important pawn in the rapidly accelerating Great Game still being waged by Russia and the United States. A Georgia where Russian influence holds sway allows Moscow to project power into the Middle East, whereas a pro-U.S. regime means Tbilisi can cut Russia off from any potential allies to the south. Iran and Turkey also seek to influence opinion in Georgia's power circles.
What, if anything, this political backdrop has to do with the death of Zhvania remains to be seen. Security forces found the prime minister's body in the home of Raul Yusupov, the deputy governor of the Kvemo-Kartli region. Yusupov also died; both men apparently having suffocated on fumes from a small heater that was in use, though foul play has not been ruled out.
In this case, disguising a murder as an accident -- by sabotaging a space heater so that it would emit carbon monoxide, for instance -- would not have been difficult, and sources in Georgia say many actors, from hard-line nationalists to organized crime groups, might have had reason to want Zhvania dead.
The deaths appear to have unsettled Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, a passionate nationalist who has consistently defied and annoyed Moscow since taking office. Saakashvili, who temporarily assumed the prime ministership for himself, relied heavily upon the advice of the more sober-minded and tactical Zhvania. According to a source in the Georgian Interior Ministry, Saakashvili has requested personal protection from the United States in the wake of Zhvania's death -- highlighting concerns that the prime minister's demise could have been more than accidental.
Even if Zhvania's death proves to be nothing more sinister, the consequences could be great. The last powerful Georgian leader to die was Zviad Gamsakhurdia, in 1993. His death left the state in political limbo until Eduard Shevardnadze took power -- and in the process of solidifying control, waged two wars against separatist provinces.
With separatist movements (backed by Russia) still lingering in the provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, and given the number of other players -- both domestic and foreign -- who take an interest in Georgia, any perception of instability in Tbilisi could be enough to prompt any one of them to make a move.
So hey, that's some interesting stuff.... Back to the mess o' things to do.
A brief break from writing profiles of Minnesota state House and Senate members for the book. I bring you a bit of the past and future wreckage of the Bush3 Administration... Also I have been sort of out of the loop on my usual things this week. Dan Schwartz sent me the Sy Hersh story that I totally missed, and for that I thank him.
If you ever wanted evidence that the Pentagon is a pathologically destructive force bent on destroying the past, present and future of the planet simultaneously, here you go. From the Beginning:
US-led troops using the ancient Iraqi city of Babylon as a base have damaged and contaminated artifacts dating back thousands of years in one of the most important archeological sites in the world, the British Museum said yesterday.
Military vehicles crushed a 2,600-year-old brick pavement, for example, and archeological fragments, including broken bricks stamped by King Nebuchadnezzar II around the same time, were scattered across the site, a museum report said.
The dragons at the Ishtar Gate were marred by cracks and gaps where someone tried to remove their decorative bricks, the paper said.
John Curtis, keeper of the British Museum's Near East department, who was invited by Iraqis to study the site, also found that large quantities of sand mixed with archeological fragments have been taken from the site to fill military sandbags.
''This is tantamount to establishing a military camp around the Great Pyramid in Egypt or around Stonehenge in Britain," Curtis said in the report.
In an interview yesterday with Associated Press Television News, Iraq's minister of culture, Mufeed al-Jazairee, said coalition troops in Babylon had used ''armored vehicles and helicopters that land and take off freely. In addition to that, the forces also set up other facilities and changes."
He added, ''I expect that the archeological city of Babylon has sustained damage, but I don't know exactly the size of such damage."
[....]
In the report, Curtis acknowledged that at first the US presence had helped to protect the site from looters.
But subsequent work, including the decision to cover large areas of the site with gravel brought in from elsewhere to provide parking lots and heliports, was damaging, he said.
Lord Redesdale, an archeologist who heads a parliamentary archeology committee, described the report's findings as ''just dreadful."
''Not only is what the American forces are doing damaging the archeology of Iraq, it's actually damaging the cultural heritage of the whole world," he said.
For more than 1,000 years, Babylon was one of the world's premier cities, where King Nebuchadnezzar II built the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
Meanwhile Seymour Hersh has a whole barrel of info for us about the planned unleashing of the Pentagon to 'prepare the battle space' around Iran. "Prepare the battle space" was one of my favorite creepy euphemisms for the strategic bombing campaigns they undertook just before the invasion of Iraq.
Ah yes, the weapons of mass destruction were never found. So why did Fallujah become an all-important social engineering project by force? Was the intent of this circus to demonstrate national will rather than secure the U.S. from actually dangerous materials? Yeah, of course it was. But it had something to do with Iran too. Before the war we were apparently going to use Iran against Saudi Arabia (yes, that seems to be why we marched into the Mesopotamian mousetrap) but now it's all gone to hell, and yet another brilliant scheme is At Hand.
Anyhow back to Hersh: the Bush Administration intends to attack the Iranian nuclear project complexes, and in fact has been running covert operations within Iran for quite a while. Also Defense Undersecretary of Batshit Madness Douglas Feith (not to be confused with Undersecretary of Fanatical Crusaderism William Boykin) is closely coordinating with the Israeli military to figure out which things to try and blow up.
Clearly this is yet another scheme which will unfold perfectly and only involve propaganda that isn't designed to mislead the American public. These are serious people here....
I thought that I would have some more stories for you today but I feel that this stuff is big enough to justify its own post. Yes, the national security state we all know and love is reconstituting itself in a new and more uncontrolled form. This is an exceedingly dangerous problem for those of us living Inside the Asylum.
I also saw some stories about how the Pentagon is going to conduct its own preemptive intelligence covert wars, operations, whatever the hell you call it these days. In this article it is called 'black reconnaissance' as a way of distancing it from the beloved old CIA label of 'covert operations.' Read Mr. Hersh... Sy, I'm sorry I quoted like half your story, but this one is too important not to enter into the record:
The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degre unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—durin his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one governmen consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
[....]
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
[....]
Rumsfeld will become even more important during the second term. In interviews with past and present intelligence and military officials, I was told that the agenda had been determined before the Presidential election, and much of it would be Rumsfeld’s responsibility. The war on terrorism would be expanded, and effectively placed under the Pentagon’s control. The President has signed a series of findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as ten nations in the Middle East and South Asia.
The President’s decision enables Rumsfeld to run the operations off the books—free from legal restrictions imposed on the C.I.A. Under current law, all C.I.A. covert activities overseas must be authorized by a Presidential finding and reported to the Senate and House intelligence committees. (The laws were enacted after a series of scandals in the nineteen-seventies involving C.I.A. domestic spying and attempted assassinations of foreign leaders.) “The Pentagon doesn’t feel obligated to report any of this to Congress,” the former high-level intelligence official said. “They don’t even call it ‘covert ops’—it’s too close to the C.I.A. phrase. In their view, it’s ‘black reconnaissance.’ They’re not even going to tell the cincs”—the regional American military commanders-in-chief.
[....]
In my interviews, I was repeatedly told that the next strategic target was Iran. “Everyone is saying, ‘You can’t be serious about targeting Iran. Look at Iraq,’” the former intelligence official told me. “But they say, ‘We’ve got some lessons learned—not militarily, but how we did it politically. We’re not going to rely on agency pissants.’ No loose ends, and that’s why the C.I.A. is out of there.”
[.....]
There are many military and diplomatic experts who dispute the notion that military action, on whatever scale, is the right approach. Shahram Chubin, an Iranian scholar who is the director of research at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy, told me, “It’s a fantasy to think that there’s a good American or Israeli military option in Iran.” He went on, “The Israeli view is that this is an international problem. ‘You do it,’ they say to the West. ‘Otherwise, our Air Force will take care of it.’” In 1981, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak reactor, setting its nuclear program back several years. But the situation now is both more complex and more dangerous, Chubin said. The Osirak bombing “drove the Iranian nuclear-weapons program underground, to hardened, dispersed sites,” he said. “You can’t be sure after an attack that you’ll get away with it. The U.S. and Israel would not be certain whether all the sites had been hit, or how quickly they’d be rebuilt. Meanwhile, they’d be waiting for an Iranian counter-attack that could be military or terrorist or diplomatic. Iran has long-range missiles and ties to Hezbollah, which has drones—you can’t begin to think of what they’d do in response.”
[...]
The Administration has been conducting secret reconnaissance missions inside Iran at least since last summer. Much of the focus is on the accumulation of intelligence and targeting information on Iranian nuclear, chemical, and missile sites both declared and suspected. The goal is to identify and isolate three dozen, and perhaps more, such targets that could be destroyed by precision strikes and short-term commando raids. “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible,” the government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon told me. [....] The American task force, aided by the information from Pakistan, has been penetrating eastern Iran from Afghanistan in a hunt for underground installations. The task-force members, or their locally recruited agents, secreted remote detection devices—known as sniffers—capable of sampling the atmosphere for radioactive emissions and other evidence of nuclear-enrichment programs.
[....]
There has also been close, and largely unacknowledged, coöperation with Israel. The government consultant with ties to the Pentagon said that the Defense Department civilians, under the leadership of Douglas Feith, have been working with Israeli planners and consultants to develop and refine potential nuclear, chemical-weapons, and missile targets inside Iran. (After Osirak, Iran situated many of its nuclear sites in remote areas of the east, in an attempt to keep them out of striking range of other countries, especially Israel. Distance no longer lends such protection, however: Israel has acquired three submarines capable of launching cruise missiles and has equipped some of its aircraft with additional fuel tanks, putting Israeli F-16I fighters within the range of most Iranian targets.)
“They believe that about three-quarters of the potential targets can be destroyed from the air, and a quarter are too close to population centers, or buried too deep, to be targeted,” the consultant said. Inevitably, he added, some suspicious sites need to be checked out by American or Israeli commando teams—in on-the-ground surveillance—before being targeted.
The Pentagon’s contingency plans for a broader invasion of Iran are also being updated. Strategists at the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command, in Tampa, Florida, have been asked to revise the military’s war plan, providing for a maximum ground and air invasion of Iran. Updating the plan makes sense, whether or not the Administration intends to act, because the geopolitics of the region have changed dramatically in the last three years. Previously, an American invasion force would have had to enter Iran by sea, by way of the Persian Gulf or the Gulf of Oman; now troops could move in on the ground, from Afghanistan or Iraq. Commando units and other assets could be introduced through new bases in the Central Asian republics.
[....]
The immediate goals of the attacks would be to destroy, or at least temporarily derail, Iran’s ability to go nuclear. But there are other, equally purposeful, motives at work. The government consultant told me that the hawks in the Pentagon, in private discussions, have been urging a limited attack on Iran because they believe it could lead to a toppling of the religious leadership. “Within the soul of Iran there is a struggle between secular nationalists and reformers, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the fundamentalist Islamic movement,” the consultant told me. “The minute the aura of invincibility which the mullahs enjoy is shattered, and with it the ability to hoodwink the West, the Iranian regime will collapse”—like the former Communist regimes in Romania, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz share that belief, he said.
“The idea that an American attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would produce a popular uprising is extremely illinformed,” said Flynt Leverett, a Middle East scholar who worked on the National Security Council in the Bush Administration. “You have to understand that the nuclear ambition in Iran is supported across the political spectrum, and Iranians will perceive attacks on these sites as attacks on their ambitions to be a major regional player and a modern nation that’s technologically sophisticated.” Leverett, who is now a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, at the Brookings Institution, warned that an American attack, if it takes place, “will produce an Iranian backlash against the United States and a rallying around the regime.”
[.....]
Two former C.I.A. clandestine officers, Vince Cannistraro and Philip Giraldi, who publish Intelligence Brief, a newsletter for their business clients, reported last month on the existence of a broad counter-terrorism Presidential finding that permitted the Pentagon “to operate unilaterally in a number of countries where there is a perception of a clear and evident terrorist threat. . . . A number of the countries are friendly to the U.S. and are major trading partners. Most have been cooperating in the war on terrorism.” The two former officers listed some of the countries—Algeria, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, and Malaysia. (I was subsequently told by the former high-level intelligence official that Tunisia is also on the list.)
Giraldi, who served three years in military intelligence before joining the C.I.A., said that he was troubled by the military’s expanded covert assignment. “I don’t think they can handle the cover,” he told me. “They’ve got to have a different mind-set. They’ve got to handle new roles and get into foreign cultures and learn how other people think. If you’re going into a village and shooting people, it doesn’t matter,” Giraldi added. “But if you’re running operations that involve finesse and sensitivity, the military can’t do it. Which is why these kind of operations were always run out of the agency.” I was told that many Special Operations officers also have serious misgivings.
Rumsfeld and two of his key deputies, Stephen Cambone, the Under-secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and Army Lieutenant General William G. (Jerry) Boykin, will be part of the chain of command for the new commando operations. [and they're fucking crazy -- Dan]
[.....]
“I’m conflicted about the idea of operating without congressional oversight,” the Pentagon adviser said. “But I’ve been told that there will be oversight down to the specific operation.” A second Pentagon adviser agreed, with a significant caveat. “There are reporting requirements,” he said. “But to execute the finding we don’t have to go back and say, ‘We’re going here and there.’ No nitty-gritty detail and no micromanagement.”
The legal questions about the Pentagon’s right to conduct covert operations without informing Congress have not been resolved. “It’s a very, very gray area,” said Jeffrey H. Smith, a West Point graduate who served as the C.I.A.’s general counsel in the mid-nineteen-nineties. “Congress believes it voted to include all such covert activities carried out by the armed forces. The military says, ‘No, the things we’re doing are not intelligence actions under the statute but necessary military steps authorized by the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to “prepare the battlefield.”’” Referring to his days at the C.I.A., Smith added, “We were always careful not to use the armed forces in a covert action without a Presidential finding. The Bush Administration has taken a much more aggressive stance.”
[....]
In some cases, according to the Pentagon advisers, local citizens could be recruited and asked to join up with guerrillas or terrorists. This could potentially involve organizing and carrying out combat operations, or even terrorist activities.
[....]
The new rules will enable the Special Forces community to set up what it calls “action teams” in the target countries overseas which can be used to find and eliminate terrorist organizations. “Do you remember the right-wing execution squads in El Salvador?” the former high-level intelligence official asked me, referring to the military-led gangs that committed atrocities in the early nineteen-eighties. “We founded them and we financed them,” he said. “The objective now is to recruit locals in any area we want. And we aren’t going to tell Congress about it.” A former military officer, who has knowledge of the Pentagon’s commando capabilities, said, “We’re going to be riding with the bad boys.”
[....]
There was pressure from the White House, too. A former C.I.A. clandestine-services officer told me that, in the months after the resignation of the agency’s director George Tenet, in June, 2004, the White House began “coming down critically” on analysts in the C.I.A.’s Directorate of Intelligence (D.I.) and demanded “to see more support for the Administration’s political position.” Porter Goss, Tenet’s successor, engaged in what the recently retired C.I.A. official described as a “political purge” in the D.I. Among the targets were a few senior analysts who were known to write dissenting papers that had been forwarded to the White House. The recently retired C.I.A. official said, “The White House carefully reviewed the political analyses of the D.I. so they could sort out the apostates from the true believers.” Some senior analysts in the D.I. have turned in their resignations—quietly, and without revealing the extent of the disarray.
[....]
“Rummy’s plan was to get a compromise in the bill in which the Pentagon keeps its marbles and the C.I.A. loses theirs,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Then all the pieces of the puzzle fall in place. He gets authority for covert action that is not attributable, the ability to directly task national-intelligence assets”—including the many intelligence satellites that constantly orbit the world.
“Rumsfeld will no longer have to refer anything through the government’s intelligence wringer,” the former official went on. “The intelligence system was designed to put competing agencies in competition. What’s missing will be the dynamic tension that insures everyone’s priorities—in the C.I.A., the D.O.D., the F.B.I., and even the Department of Homeland Security—are discussed. The most insidious implication of the new system is that Rumsfeld no longer has to tell people what he’s doing so they can ask, ‘Why are you doing this?’ or ‘What are your priorities?’ Now he can keep all of the mattress mice out of it."
It is finally the end of 2004 and things look set for another strange year ahead of us. I have not had much time or impulse to write on the site for the last few days. I am doing some more web work for Andrew at Computer Zone Consulting. Andrew is himself Sri Lankan, and I saw him for the first time in a few weeks on Monday as the news rolled in from the tsunami disaster zone.
It's a hard thing to figure out the scale of this thing, to put it in a relative view that you can even comprehend. All those videos they've been playing on the cable news constantly—people washing and twirling away—is so incredibly unnerving and weird.
So anyhows, I'm trying not to get down about this whole mess, because the world is a messy place and we all end up muddling along no matter what. Of course, things are going weirdly in other places. By the end of January we'll have a sense of whether or not the situation in Iraq is going to screech off and out of control, or else fizzle down. Meanwhile in Washington they are getting hunkered down for another round of the Amazing Bush Administration and its Circus of Follies.
So it's a season of change for everyone now. I'm looking back at the things I have done and seen this year, and I think overall I did pretty well, but I still don't know what I ought to do when I graduate. It's kind of amazing that it's already time to get out of college. I have enjoyed the experience, but I do regret not studying abroad somewhere, as I think it would have given me a clean slate and fresh approach instead of those pointless months here... specifically the difficult experience of the Dupre Single days.
This year was a good one, though. I learned a lot of things about how the world worked, I talked with a lot of strange people. When I look back, I think that this was very much a breakthrough year in terms of just being willing to go out in the world and see what happens, for an often skittish person like myself.
January 2004 was pointless, so I guess we should skip to February. Back then, I advanced the story of the war, as I see it, in a worthwhile way, when I asked John Kerry during his visit to Macalester if the intelligence distortions (meaning the fake WMD and al Qaeda stories, mainly) should be considered a criminal matter akin to Iran-Contra. Kerry gave me one of those classic two-paragraph answers, but I would say, looking back almost a year on it, that he probably gave me the wrong answer.
My view of the matter is that Ahmed Chalabi and the neo-cons consciously knew they were providing bad information about Iraq, and hence deceived everyone in the government, and in particular our elected representatives in Congress. Kerry said that he had 'no evidence' that it was illegal, but he never really pursued the issue as a campaign matter, I suppose in particular because his campaign acted self-consciously 'tainted' by his position on the war early on.
But that's the key thing about it: Kerry could have weaseled out of responsibility for the war vote by saying that 'we wuz lied to!!' and provided the American public an entertaining tale about Chalabi and the rest of them, which would have drawn more attention to the malevolent incompetents running the Pentagon, forcing the frame of debate back to Bush's systematic deception and the war's managerial disasters. By the end of the campaign, Kerry was alleging that they were 'playing games' with intelligence, but that doesn't really mean anything to Joe Sixpack. They should have given us the spy story. It would have been cool.
Afterwards, in March I went to London for a week and stayed on the floor of Nick Petersen's flat. This came just a couple days after the Madrid bombings, and I thought that security would be escalated all over the place. It was my first trip to Europe and I made the most of it. I didn't obsess with seeing tourist attractions, and instead tried to wander all through town, a project assisted by Nick's encyclopedic knowledge of London architecture. On the first night, Victoria came back from her apparently horrible school in Wales. Vic's mom and siblings had also come to London for break, and they had a fabulous suite at the County Hall (Hotel?). The room had a little balcony high above the river Thames, and from there I could look right across the river at Parliament and the clock tower, as that huge Ferris wheel thing turned overhead. I saw the House of Commons meet, I went to the Prime Meridian and some museums...
Then I hopped the Eurostar (?) train to Paris, and wandered around there for a day, eating a Royale with Cheese on the banks of the Seine, and I even went in and saw the Mona Lisa and other places in the Louvre. Emi showed me all over town, and it was just a damn awesome place to be, like something out of a movie of someone else's life (this sense was helped along when I watched that recent Jack Nicholson movie, which ends in Paris, on the flight back to Chicago).
The summer was an interesting venture. I took an electronic art and journalism law classes at the University of Minnesota. Made some friends, picked up some useful information and put together a sweet DVD of many of my better photographs and videos.
After that stuff ended, I went to the site of the Republican National Convention with Dan Schned and Peter Gartrell. It was at times the most overwhelming experience I've ever had. When the police officer pulled his hat off to show us the photos of his friend who died at the WTC, or when the girl from Iowa showed us a video of anarchists setting the dragon on fire right next to her, or when we stood on a corner as AIPAC delegates to the convention streamed past, happily celebrating the renewal of the Likud-Republican political alliance that I so loathe. Or when we tracked down the bar where Dick Cheney was drinking, or when we chanted in the streets in an unlicensed march....
So, then, was it worth it? Was it worth the hassle, the arrests, the gasoline expended, just to go out there and watch people wave some signs around? You know, I think it was. I think that it helped me to ground some of the symbols that they manipulate in our minds—the WTC site, for one. These things become easier to understand once you see them, stripped of the media frames, the pretexts and moral arguments. Just to stand there and smoke a cigarette, then another cigarette, in the great important Negative Space in south Manhattan, helps to assert some control over the symbols they wield. It helped me settle the issue somehow.
After that we went down into the WTC subway stop. I walked over to one of the support beams and rubbed my finger on a bolt encrusted with sparkling reddish-brown dust. I rubbed the dust between my fingers and smelled it, a certain, dusty, burned smell, the torched synthetic substances from the offices, mixed with window and beam particles, had plunged down, and puffed into the tunnels under the city where no amount of cleaning could ever eradicate the traces.
I saw Bush himself a few days before the trip, as he made a campaign appearance in Hudson, Wisconsin. I saw him get off the bus and shake people's hands, and I could finally see what is so difficult to discern from home: that man is just the front face for a whole vast system of domination and control. It's a much larger problem than just that man. It's the administrative deception, the suppression of agencies like the EPA. We make the mistake of projecting perceived personality traits into understanding the political problems we have, without understanding how much of the issue is organizational.
School went pretty well this semester. I actually did something that I thought might not happen: I had a conversation with a really quite devious neoconservative that came to Macalester. For quite a while I wondered what might happened if I encountered Michael Ledeen at the Roundtable, but when I suddenly did, it was a surprise because he hadn't even given his speech yet. I ended up talking with the odd character over lunch, a bizarre twist. I gamely tried to suggest to him that the Iranians weren't determined to nuke Jerusalem the moment they developed the Bomb, but Ledeen would have none of it. A quixotic sort of notion to try convincing this guy that we shouldn't lose our cool about Iran, but of course he would never change his mind.
I learned a key thing about the people that run things from this encounter: They are very moody people. They are not well-adjusted low-key technocratic sorts of people. They are grim and weird. Ledeen himself admitted a manic depressive condition, and I think that whole kind of thing is what drives them to make their crazy decisions as much as any kind of Evil Agenda we might try to fathom from their actions.
And then the election. In some ways I barely want to hear about it, to hear about how such a vast section of the American public wholeheartedly embraced absurd lies about the situation, and how despite a sense that we were careening out of control, we were still destined to end up with these ridiculous cats for another four years.
I guess a sense of needing to refute that 'destiny' led me to place a shred of hope in the election-challenge folks, although of course it offends my sense of what it means to live in a democracy when I hear of a single vote damaged, lost, vanished or even potentially manipulated by our crappy system. At this point, we are hearing some interesting stuff out of Florida about Congressman Feeney and the usual Florida corruption, but it seems like we will never hear much of an articulation of how evil it was in Ohio when election supervisors implemented a strategy to direct voting machines away from heavily Democratic precincts into the suburbs. Is that really what we can accept as an element of a 'legitimate' election?
To round out this year end ramble, I would say that I am still much the same sort of person as when I began this year, but I think that I managed to advance my view of the world by talking straight to some of the important people, going into hazardous places like New York, and trying to express my own views of the world via this website, the campus paper, and just talking with people. I think I've tried to criss-cross some interesting slices of Americana this year and listen to what people have told me. As time has gone past, it seems more clear to me than ever that I still have a very long ways to go before things make sense to me.
The good thing is that right now I feel less like giving up than before. I don't have a sense that my energy is evaporating, but with the end of school coming around I have to try to pull together a new plan. Not easy for anyone... There is still a world of opportunities out there. I will have to spend a while poking around...
So here's to 2004. A year I got through by taking some chances and going new places. As for 2005, that's the year when things really better start clicking.
I'm feelin pretty bleary eyed. It's been a pretty weird semester, I think you'd all agree. Nonetheless I am not as angry as I might have expected to be... The feeling I get these days is "Oh, here we go for another round of the nonsense," but for some reason, at times I feel less terrified than usual. There is a large degree of uncertainty, as usual, but things could shake out in a good way, or else catastrophically fall apart.
I am still not done with Macalester this semester, and still have not had as much time as usual to follow things, but I will lay out some things about both the voting irregularity complex and the usual war madness. Then I am going to drink.
Then I will finish things tomorrow and Tuesday. Then it will be done. Don't expect more posts till late Tuesday at the earliest, more likely Wednesday.
It seems clear that the story about the Florida programmer Clint Curtis being asked by Republican Congressman Feeney actually has some legs, although it's hard to say how conspiratorial we should view this. It still sounds like a classic case of wildly unscrupulous bastards in Florida doing horrible things. Once again, Florida didn't let us down.
THE BRAD BLOG following the election mystery has returned to its former web address, now that they have gotten a better server setup. Brad Friedman just posted a whole batch of stuff about this guy Curtis, and the coverage he has gotten. Friedman says that a major news network is snooping around the story, and there was a good story in a local Florida paper (brad's comment) as well. The Raw Story is also all over some stuff in Ohio, including the Kerry campaign, who have filed a lawsuit alleging vote tampering in an Ohio county. Also some Diebold people were recently 'calibrating' a machine before the incremental recounts were to be held in Ohio, a county official testified.
From six days ago, Bob Fitrakis on what the special hearings in Ohio... heard. Brad Blog on candidate David Cobb's Judiciary Committee Testimony which was apparently pretty dramatic. WashingtonPost.com: Several Factors Contributed to 'Lost' Voters in Ohio. Thanks, guys. The Official Kerry-Edwards Position on How to Handle the Ohio Recount, Sent to the Individual Boards of Election in the State.
The NY Times reports on it, hurray: Lawmaker Seeks Inquiry Into Ohio Vote."See also the exciting "Ohio presidential vote challenged" The AP report which first cited "dissident groups" (via MSNBC). Sweet.
So where's the big picture? I don't really know, it seems like the electoral manipulation that could have very well occurred has been legitimized by the media pretty thoroughly now, yet finally we're getting some stories that are cracking the surface.
But then, back to the regularly scheduled program, i.e. the circus of idiocy known as 'the Beltway.' One thing we have working is the purge throughout the government, which might get rid of the more incompetent neo-cons, but also will likely gut the CIA and other pockets of sane people. Either way, people are getting fired, so we will get more dirt about the internal workings of the place, and some of the really bad ones might get fired.
There is a fairly good chance that things might straighten out on the international stage before February or March. If the Iraqi elections get some kind of assembly going, they aren't all killed, and the U.S. gets the hell out of the Sunni areas, then things might simmer down before the emerging civil war cracks all the way open.
Meanwhile the Israelis see an opportunity to lock in their stolen territory right now, but they also seem reluctant to attack militarily until things shake out with Arafat's successor and the Palestinian Authority. I haven't written too much about this because it is damn hard to tell where things are shifting, and everyone is in 'wait and see' mode.
I have noticed there is a major Public Relations offensive gearing up against Syria now via that instrument of doom, the U.S. cable TV network. Besides allegations on CNN about Syrians doing things in a segment about "Inside the Insurgency," we have Dore Gold. Former Israeli ambassador to the UN Mr. Gold was on the Daily Show pimping his book "Tower of Babble," critical of the United Nations. He kept arguing that the organization has a lack of moral standards etc. etc.
Jon Stewart did his best under the circumstances (Of course, Gold's statement is ironic because of the sheer number of times that his country has been singled out by the UN, and all those times that the United States has blocked Security Council resolutions against them).
Anyhow Gold insinuated that Syria was orchestrating the insurgency and Baathists were running stuff from there... He said this retroactively proved they could not be trusted to be on the UN Security Council and uphold world peace etc. His rhetorical strategy was really good here and he managed to reverse the times of cause and effect.
On the one hand, I think it is quite probable that people and arms are going from Syria to Iraq. There are plenty of Sunni tribes that span the Levant region into Syria, and these are the people that the U.S. has decided are Morally Incorrect Terrorists to Wipe Out from the Sunni Triangle.
I think it is worth noting that the Syrians used their time at the Security Council to attempt to prevent the invasion of Iraq, even while they trafficked arms up to the last minute into Iraq. That would qualify them as fairly interested in world peace, at least in this instance. As for terrorism, after 9/11 the Syrians have supplied the CIA with crucial intelligence against Al-Qaeda, which has directly saved us from terrorist attacks. We didn't lose that intel source until the Bush folks, cajoled by the neo-con crew of the Administration (probably on the basis of false intel, as usual) turned against Syria.
I've long expected a big anti-Syria thing to happen, and it seems like the time is probably at hand. The Syrian ruling clique has long opposed political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood that support elements of Al-Qaeda's ideology. If Prez. Assad gets taken out then then the fundamentalist folks will be in a very strong position. If the U.S. keeps blowing away their cousins, then the war will spread.
One tiny thing... an old BradBlog post about the weirdness of Warren County, which had the mysterious Nov. 2 lockdown and a really really high turnout for Bush. Warren County, OH anomalous count. I'll add this to the Wiki, and the other stuff, once I finish my papers.
Its the middle of finals time, and I was delayed in putting this post together for the better part of the week. Here it is, hodgepodgy and overgrown with intrigue...
Now, kiddos, it's back to tinfoil hat land for another installment of Tracking Election Irregularities, and we've got some great tales tonight. Sit back and hear of the prototype vote hacking machine that a Florida congressman allegedly ordered built, and hear more about offshore banking—and how the CIA may be so angry about Bush's purges that they're revealing some of the parapolitical financial arrangements used to finance their schemes.
(A quick note: breaking the programmer story caused the BradBlog site to get overwhelmed with internet traffic, so it got bumped over to BradBlogtoo.blogspot.com for now. more below...)
Do not assume these stories are credible. First, take them as examples of the kinds of ways the world might work. Then look at it as audacious journalism. Then, and only then, should you start on the what-ifs. and there are a lot of what-ifs tonight. Smoke the pipe of conspiracy, and get high on its strands of intrigue... Damn it, I'm feeling pretentious tonight.
First item for the hodgepodge: A contributing writer, Larisa Alexandrovna, at a site called RAW STORY (reposted by BlueLemur) found a couple news story references to 21 voting machines in good old Broward County, Florida getting rolled out of polling sites—after several days of voting—and possibly back to some local voting administration center. Apparently these machines may have been recalled because they showed the wrong votes for buttons touched. (story via DailyKos diary)
The RAW STORY writer's catch is that there ought to be some kind of chain of custody for these machines, and we ought to be able to find out what their serial numbers were, if they did exist. How many votes might be recovered from such machines? Were they wildly statistically skewed for Bush, as many other errors have been?
Who knows? Either way, she tried to pester the AP wire journalist that wrote the original story, who said they were "moving on." The Miami Herald doesn't seem to care much either. In the end, she had to post this story, incomplete, another frustrated path on the quest to find out what happened within the Black Boxes.
“Twenty-one touch-screen voting machines in Broward County were replaced because of technical problems, said Gisela Salas, the county’s deputy supervisor of elections. At least one of the machines had shown votes cast for the wrong candidates.”
This striking sentence in the fourteenth paragraph of a Nov. 4 AP wire story was merely the accidental starting point for RAW STORY research into voting irregularities in Broward County, Florida.
I came across Ms. Salas’ statement by sheer accident while researching another story. Twenty-one voting machines being removed and replaced on Election Day would seem to merit more than a four sentence description. I wondered as to the process by which these machines were taken and replaced. Who supervised this process?
This brief mention in the AP was all I could immediately find. Documented in an article entitled “State lauds performance of touch-screen machines; critics uncertain,” other voting irregularities were briefly mentioned with the same terse detail. These references are delivered as a matter of fact, as if most of us should know that large-scale voting glitches occur and are corrected instantaneously.
How then are we to correct these issues for future elections? I wondered.
After some thought, I contacted an Associated Press editor not involved with the Nov. 4 article, who quickly dismissed me as “paranoid,” though I neither discussed the outcome of the election or commented on anything other than the 21 machines allegedly removed in Broward County.
NOW let's throw in some more colorful tales about these very sorts of tech specialists. This story is caroming around the Internet because, well, it's a darn good one. If, hypothetically, you were spoofing an election, you would need to pay off a lot of technical specialists, and for that matter, you would need source code designed to be compiled into voting machines that could manipulate the numbers. (Daily Kos :: Sworn affadavit: vote-rigging prototype developed for FLA congressman)
Fortunately, some programmer dude has surfaced claiming that a Florida Republican congressman paid him to make this code back in 2000, and now he's pissed about it. This story stretches off into all kinds of bizarre directions. The programmer has a website, JustAFlyOnTheWall.com.
Another election held and another election stolen. In 2000 Bush stole the election by restricting the ability to vote by those people most likely to vote against him. The abuses were wide spread and the Democrats and other groups that believe in each individuals right to vote put together an impressive attempt to make sure that every individual that wanted to vote would not be turned away. Everywhere you went there was booths where new voters could register. Celebrities in commercials were urging voters to get out and vote. Poll watchers were placed in polling stations across the country to guarantee that every voter would not be turned away on any technicality.
What these well meaning groups failed to account for was that they were defending the 2000 election fixing plan and not taking into account that this election would be decided not by voters but by the rise of technology. Every one might be allowed to vote but their vote, and your vote made no difference at all. The programmers had already decided who would win and by how much.
Prior to this election I personally sent out information to the media which should have been provided to the electorate. It was not. The biggest turnout in history had no chance to win this election or any other unless the programmers of the voting machine allowed it. I believe they will allow it less and less as the machines control the elections and the Republicans control the machines.
This is not speculation. It is not a rant designed to make the losers feel better. I speak from first hand information and unless people stand up and act, democracy in this country is ended.
While employed at Wong Enterprises, Congressman Feeney had requested if Wong could write a voting program that could alter the vote and be undetectable. As the technology advisor, I explained that as long as the source code was provided and complied under supervision, code which altered the vote and was undetectable could not be built. Another problem would be that no one would trust a program that provided for no paper trail to substantiate its accuracy. When the vote was flipped the paper trail could easily detect the fraud.
This request was early in my exposure to Congressman Feeney, so I was not familiar with what a total piece of crap he truly was. My assumption was that he was worried that the other side (the Democrats) would introduce voting machines which could manipulate the vote. Mrs. Wong volunteered that we (meaning me) could put together a quick prototype that he could view and show others.
I have recreated that prototype and posted it at http://www.justaflyonthewall.com/votefraudprogram.htm. It is essentially the same code that I built for the vote fraud demo for Congressman Feeney. You will notice that by clicking on the correct hidden spots on the screen, the vote will flip so that the Republican candidate will receive fifty one percent of the vote. The hot spots make it possible to flip the vote as often as necessary yet it will never fire accidentally so as to avoid detection. My prototype was actually very simplistic. The actual sequence to flip the vote could be as complex as the programmer wished or even to operate automatically. In cases when the Republican is already leading, the vote is left as is. I built the program to demonstrate that with proper supervision that the election machines would be safe. The code would not be able to be hidden.
The next day I complete the prototype and presented it to Mrs. Wong. I stressed how the tampering could be detected. She quickly set me straight as the to true intention. Her exact words were "If we can’t hide the manipulation, we won’t get the contract the program is needed to control the south Florida vote." Another confirmation of why I needed to get a different job. I would not build something that would defraud every voter in this country. Even better, I knew that as long as the election supervisors used proper computer procedures, no one else would or could either.
What I did not anticipate was that this country would allow the placement of voting machines where the source code was not provided. The programs were pre-compiled (you have no idea what is in them or what hidden triggers exist), and where no paper trail would be required to check their accuracy. Any moron could build a voting program that could flip the vote under those circumstances and no amount of testing could discover the deception.
The plausibility of the idea of this vote hacking software has been basically confirmed.
There are two main branches to the story. BradBlog has a more circumscribed look at it, having interviewed the dude in question a couple times, and offering a PDF version of his sworn affadavit that Congressman Feeley paid him to write the software.
Then, on the other hand, mysterious investigator Wayne Madsen writing on OnlineJournal.com has asserted that this is just an element of a complex scheme involving offshore banks tied to Iran-Contra schemer and Richard Perle's dinner friend (as Sy Hersh reported) Adnan Khashoggi. Madsen's exciting claim is that the CIA is really pissed off that the Bushites are trying to purge their agency, so CIA partisans have deliberately chosen to reveal part of their sketchy shadow finance network in an effort to smoke the Bushes. And they're showing this network to.... taa-daa, Wayne Madsen.
In other words, let me restate. I am not asserting that the above two paragraphs are true. In fact, Madsen's writings, the last round which I posted earlier, seem to fit like puzzle pieces into a classic paranoid conspiracy tale, like an Iran-Contra projected forward into our present context. It all sounds a little too slick to me so far. Nevertheless, I always enjoy a good baroque conspiracy yarn, and this one doesn't disappoint.
The manipulation of computer voting machines in the recent presidential election and the funding of programmers who were involved in the operation are tied to an intricate web of shady off-shore financial trusts and companies, shady espionage operatives, Republican Party politicians close to the Bush family, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) contract vehicles.
An exhaustive investigation has turned up a link between current Florida Republican Representative Tom Feeney, a customized Windows-based program to suppress Democratic votes on touch screen voting machines, a Florida computer services company with whom Feeney worked as a general counsel and registered lobbyist while he was Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, and top level officials of the Bush administration.
According to a notarized affidavit signed by Clint Curtis, while he was employed by the NASA Kennedy Space Center contractor, Yang Enterprises, Inc., during 2000, Feeney solicited him to write a program to "control the vote." At the time, Curtis was of the opinion that the program was to be used for preventing fraud in the in the 2002 election in Palm Beach County, Florida. His mind was changed, however, when the true intentions of Feeney became clear: the computer program was going to be used to suppress the Democratic vote in counties with large Democratic registrations.
According to Curtis, Feeney and other top brass at Yang Enterprises, a company located in a three-story building in Oviedo, Florida, wanted the prototype written in Visual Basic 5 (VB.5) in Microsoft Windows and the end-product designed to be portable across different Unix-based vote tabulation systems and to be "undetectable" to voters and election supervisors.
Yang, an engineering and computer services company subcontracted to NASA prime contractors like Lockheed Martin, was founded in 1986 by Dr. Tyng-Lin (Tim) Yang. Granted minority-owned "Section 8A" and woman-owned preferential status by the U.S. government, Yang's clients also include the Florida Department of Transportation (DOT). Yang's President, Li-Woan (Lee) Yang, is Tim Yang's wife. Feeney was the registered agent for another Yang company, Y & H Greens, Inc., a company that was dissolved in 1988 and operated from the Yangs' residence on Merritt Island. The Yangs also serve as co-trustees for an entity called Yang of Merritt Island, Ltd., founded on January 31, 2000, and also run from their residence.
In the autumn of 1999, Curtis, who served as a sort of technology adviser for Yang, first became aware of Feeney's interest in election rigging. Curtis said at one meeting, Feeney "bragged that he could reduce the minority vote and deliver the election to 'George.'" At the same meeting, according to Curtis, Feeney said he had "implemented a list that would eliminate thousands of voters that would vote for Democratic candidates" and that "a proper placement of police patrols could further reduce the black vote by as much as 25 percent."
CANNONFIRE: Exposed: Funding vote fraud -- a "five star" investigation Digests the Wayne Madsen story. Don't know who Cannonfire is, but they are following along further.
OffshoreBusiness.com has got interesting stuff on the shadow financing.
More from Bob Fitrakis in Ohio. Suppression: STEALING VOTES IN OHIO URBAN AREAS. what happened in Columbus, Ohio?
Minor details for the obsessed Data tables from Ohio precincts, reflecting on the changes in registered voters etc.RICHARD HAYES PHILLIPS : uncounted votes. comment from John Allen paulos. Also we got Warren County registration stuff here as well. Onward....
I got several books from Amazon this weekend that distracted me from the much-belated homework that is increasing before finals time. I started reading George Friedman's "America's Secret War," an unparalleled tome of wisdom about the late great War on Terror, intelligence agencies and what I'd like to talk about today: how the Bush administration knowingly sold false intelligence, mainly provided by Ahmed Chalabi, mostly about WMD, to the American public.
Now you might say, "That's old news" or "What? Chalabi lied?!" but this particular book is different, because Friedman is one of the founders of STRATFOR, an amazing organization kind of like a 'private CIA' that sells intelligence (strategic forecasting) to businesses and whoever else. They provide a free page of information every week, and it is always interesting. (Right now it's all about the Ukraine stuff)
Anyhow, Friedman's book turns a lot of things inside out for a more rational view of what exactly has propelled the U.S. to invade Iraq. It stresses how the points of view of various intelligence agencies are very important to understanding how events unfold. Fortunately, they've got a lot of the inside dirt on this.
The book's jacket claims to address "the real reasons behind George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq, and how WMD became the cover for a much deeper game." I have been one of those folks who believed that the WMD stuff was so overtly fake that someone should go to prison about it, but Friedman lays out how the guys in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans basically knew this stuff was baloney, but sold it anyway.
The real reason we invaded, according to the book, was to cajole the Saudi government into cracking down on the Al Qaeda movement thoroughly in its midst. However, this had to be covered up because the American public wouldn't support that. Blockquoth Friedman (p 250-1):
Iran wanted the United States to invade Iraq. It did everything to induce the United States to do so. Its strategy was to provide the United States with intelligence that would persuade the United States that the invasion was both practical and necessary. There were many intelligence channels operating between Teheran and the United States, but the single most important was Ahmed Chalabi, the Defense Department's candidate for President of Iraq. Chalabi... was the head of the Iraqi National Council, which provided key intelligence to the United states on Iraq, including on WMD. But what it did not provide the U.S. was most important: intelligence on Iranian operations in Iraq or on Iraqi preparations for a guerrilla war. Chalabi made it look easy. That's what the Iranians wanted.
The primary vector for Chalabi's information was not the CIA, but the [Pentagon's Office of Special Plans] under Abe Shulsky. OSP could not have missed Chalabi's Iranian ties, nor could they have believed the positive intelligence he was giving them. But OSP and Shulsky were playing a deeper game. These were old Cold Warriors. For them, the key to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the American alliance with China. Splitting the enemy was the way to go, and the fault line in the Islamic world was the Sunni-Shiite split. The United States, from their point of view, was not playing the fool by accommodating Iran's wishes on Iraq. Apart from all of its other virtues, they felt that the invasion would create a confluence of interests between the U.S. and Iran, which would have enormously more value in the long run than any problems posed by the Iraqi invasion. From the standpoint of OSP—and therefore of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld—Chalabi's intelligence or lack of it was immaterial. The key was alignment with Iran as another lever against Saudi Arabia. And there were more immediate effects as well...
You can judge for yourself whether Dr. Khalidi's statements to me about Chalabi, the Office of Special Plans and the faked intelligence in an interview last October fit into this framework or not. I think the interview still holds up real well. Friedman adds that "the entire point of the WMD rationale was to put France in a position where it could not reasonably object to the undertaking [i.e. the war]. (p 272)" There's more to how they actually argued the case to the American public—an interesting thing for any rhetorician to look at—but for now this is what I feel like typing in.
Well, that's really more of a metal helmet than a tinfoil hat theory. Coming up in a sec, we will return to Votergate. In the meantime, now you finally know a key underpinning of the war's rationale. Not bad, eh? I'll talk more on this book later, to be sure!
Here is some more stuff from Dan Schwartz about the new Defense Science Board report which basically assaults what the Pentagon and White House are trying to claim about the "War on terror" etc, plus the Ukraine story and how Wal-Mart alienates the labor of Chinese people... Mr. Schwartz:
First, an unexpected bit of good sense from the Pentagon: the Defense Science Board, an advisory panel within the military, issued a report admonishing the US government for a failure to communicate effectively with the Muslim world AND warning that even if we communicate our policies and intentions clearly, there is no P.R. remedy for bad policies. (it hasn't been released to the public, so all I know is what the NYT has reported)
"In stark contrast to the cold war, the United States today is not seeking to contain a threatening state empire, but rather seeking to convert a broad movement within Islamic civilization to accept the value structure of Western Modernity - an agenda hidden within the official rubric of a 'War on Terrorism,' " the report states. "Today we reflexively compare Muslim 'masses' to those oppressed under Soviet rule," the report adds. "This is a strategic mistake. There is no yearning-to-be-liberated-by-the-U.S. groundswell among Muslim societies - except to be liberated perhaps from what they see as apostate tyrannies that the U.S. so determinedly promotes and defends."
I would add, obviously, that those yearning to be free of such tyrannies are unlikely to wish our assistance in casting of their yokes; as the report notes, we often support the dictators. "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies," adding that "when American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy."
Further, "The critical problem in American public diplomacy directed toward the Muslim world is not one of 'dissemination of information' or even one of crafting and delivering the 'right' message. Rather it is a fundamental problem of credibility. Simply, there is none - the United States today is without a working channel of communication to the world of Muslims and of Islam."
I'm incredulous that a government agency of any striping, let alone the DOD, would say things like this. Questioning American altruism? Denying American credibility on the world stage? Betraying the rhetoric of the War on Terror? Ladies and gentlemen, this is HERESY. let's see if anything comes of it...
"The United States is deeply disturbed by extensive and credible indications of fraud committed in the ... presidential election. We strongly support efforts to review the conduct of the election and urge ... authorities not to certify results until investigations of organized fraud are resolved. We call on the Government ... to respect the will of the ... people, and we urge all ... to resolve the situation through peaceful means. The Government bears a special responsibility not to use or incite violence, and to allow free media to report accurately on the situation without intimidation or coercion. The United States stands with the ... people in this difficult time."
So goes the White House press release concerning the recent US elections. Just kidding. Everything was FINE here, but the Ukraine, it would seem, just doesn't meet international standards for electoral legitimacy, so we'll probably need a recount or maybe even a new election. The press has been all over this one; I've seen more coverage, closer to the front page, from more sources in the last 3 days alone than there has been in the 22 since our own election.
Here's a nice roundup of some Ukraine coverage via Metafilter.
Speaking of double standards, Wal-Mart has conceded to allow store associates in its Chinese retail locations to form unions. The company has fought tooth and nail over the years to prevent such perversity among its employees here in the states, but I guess even unionized Chinese workers won't ask much in the way of decent pay or dignified working conditions. The All China Federation of Trade Unions is relatively weak—not much more than an extension of the national party bureaucracy—so hey! if that's the price we pay for expanding to this enormous new market, so be it.
Happy Turkey Day!
I am hungover. Dan knows why.
Anywhoodalolly, I have a sweet little nugget of goodness for you Pongsketeers (and no, it's not THAT, you perverts), I found a site called TheyRule, where you can track down the links between executives, major corporations, political entities and EVIL... well, not evil, but the Brookings Institution, so close to evil. Also, there is a raging debate on the site regarding the relative autonomy of Apple Computer board members. Workers of world, unite! But don't get too excited, because you can't win any way you cut it.
I'm not sure if I can round this up into a coherent point. It looks like the Bush administration is determined to wipe out those sections of the intelligence services that tried to discredit the lies necessary to trick the American people into the march on Iraq.
Now, there will come more incompetent political appointees like Porter Goss, partisan Republican hitmen determined to crush all opposition–not just political opposition, but all 'reality-based' opposition as well. That is, bureaucrats inside the State Department and CIA who thought that "A) this WMD evidence isn't good; B) We should have written a post-invasion plan; C) Ahmed Chalabi is a dangerous liar who can't be trusted to run Iraq," are now going to get thrashed right out of the bureaucracy.
It's a shame, and it upsets me... not least because these are the people who actually have the operational knowledge to protect us from terrorist attacks. Not that the targets of the Stalinist Election Purge are "good liberals" or "progressives." I don't think most of them are; in fact they are as likely as anyone to be adherents to the old 'Washington Consensus' neo-liberal school. Unfortunately, these guys have been the best institutional brake we've had against the imperial schemes of neoconservatives. I hope as many of them as possible survive inside the CIA, and I hope that the ones who get slashed out of the program actually manage to get their story out to the public. Michael Scheuer, you're not the only articulate one...
Some stuff about the CIA purging: Justin Raimondo says it's one hell of a victory for the neo-cons. Here's a nifty source: schema-root has lots more news about neoconservatives, updated constantly.
On a somewhat related note, Dr. Rashid Khalidi has an excellent piece in In These Times about the history of Fallujah, "Fallujah 101: A history lesson about the town we are currently destroying." Thanks for the historical context we never get!
The ideas that came out of the eastern part of Saudi Arabia in the late 18th Century, which today we call Wahhabi ideas—those of a man named Muhammad Ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab—took root in this city more than 200 years ago. In other words, it is a place where what we would call fundamentalist salafi, or Wahhabi ideas, have been well implanted for 10 generations. This town also is the place where in the spring of 1920 ... the British discerned civil unrest.
The British sent a renowned explorer and a senior colonial officer who had quelled unrest in the corners of their empire, Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, to master this unruly corner of Iraq. Leachman was killed in an altercation with a local leader named Shaykh Dhari. His death sparked a war that ended up costing the lives of 10,000 Iraqis and more than 1,000 British and Indian troops. To restore Iraq to their control, the British used massive air power, bombing indiscriminately. That city is now called Fallujah.
Shaykh Dhari’s grandson, today a prominent Iraqi cleric, helped to broker the end of the U.S. Marine siege of Fallujah in April of this year. Fallujah thus embodies the interrelated tribal, religious and national aspects of Iraq’s history.
The Bush administration is not creating the world anew in the Middle East. It is waging a war in a place where history really matters.
[....]
The United States is perceived as stepping into the boots of Western colonial occupiers, still bitterly remembered from Morocco to Iran. The Bush administration marched into Iraq proclaiming the very best of intentions while stubbornly refusing to understand that in the eyes of most Iraqis and most others in the Middle East it is actions, not proclaimed intentions, that count. It does not matter what you say you are doing in Fallujah, where U.S. troops just launched an attack after weeks of bombing. What matters is what you are doing in Fallujah—and what people see that you are doing.
[....]
Most Middle East experts in the United States, both inside and outside the government, have drawn on their knowledge of the cultures, languages, history, politics of the Middle East—and on their experience—to conclude that most Bush administration Middle East policies, whether in Iraq or Palestine, are harmful to the interests of the United States and the peoples of this region. A few of these experts have had the temerity to say so, to the outrage of the Bush administration and its supporters, who are committed to what I would call a fact-free, faith-based approach to Middle East policymaking.
...and it is precisely those annoying voices that shall be purged, purged from the leaner meaner Bush2 government. A little more about Fallujah: a writer on the Egyptian periodical Al Ahram says Fallujah is "a crucible of discontent" that heightens friction between Sunnis and Shiites. The shocking video of the Marine blasting the wounded insurgent dominated the Arab media, surprise surprise. Pressure grows to delay voting, even though they've set the deadline for the end of January. Mosul has apparently spun out of control, as the Sunnis are essentially rebelling against the Kurds, with the U.S. supporting the Kurds. There are rumors of Kurds ethnically cleansing the area of Sunnis, something I find quite believable these days.
From a more unorthodox source, the World Socialist Web Site: Behind State Department, CIA shake-up: Bush-Cheney regime prepares a second term of all-out militarism. Yes, this comes from "The Socialists" rambling about "American imperialism," but look, even the Reds can refer to Knight Ridder news service as a source!
Throughout the first four years of the Bush administration, Powell and the State Department have been viewed with suspicion or outright hostility by right-wing neo-conservative elements entrenched in the civilian leadership of the Pentagon and in Vice President Cheney’s office. Neither Powell nor his chief deputy, Richard Armitage, opposed the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they were regarded as too closely aligned to the traditional foreign policy methods of American imperialism favored by career State Department and CIA officials, based on utilizing alliance structures like NATO and international institutions like the UN.
[....]
The purge of top officials in the CIA is an even more glaring case of suppressing any potential source of internal criticism or restraint on Bush administration foreign policy. On November 12, deputy CIA director John McLaughlin resigned, to be followed three days later by the deputy director for operations, Stephen Kappes, and his top deputy, Michael Slusick. This brings to nine the number of top-ranking CIA officials to depart since former director George Tenet was replaced by Porter Goss, a Republican congressman and head of the House Intelligence Committee. Only two of Tenet’s top aides still remain.
[....]
Sections of the CIA officialdom were effectively aligned with the Democratic campaign, providing a series of leaks to the press demonstrating that the White House had lied about prewar planning for postwar Iraq and debunking various Bush lies about the “war on terror.” The agency even authorized one top CIA official, Michael Scheuer, former head of the bin Laden unit, to publish a book—under the pseudonym “anonymous”—denouncing the White House for failing to take the threat of bin Laden seriously before the 9/11 attacks. Scheuer also quit the agency, on November 11.
Goss has brought with him into the CIA four top aides from the House Intelligence Committee, all far-right Republican Party activists determined to remove any political opponents from the agency’s leadership.
The right-wing press, spearheaded by the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, has demanded such a purge of both the CIA and the State Department. At the time the pre-election leaks, the Journal published an editorial denouncing the CIA for “declaring war” on the Bush White House. The newspaper greeted Powell’s resignation with an editorial demanding that Bush stamp out similar opposition in the diplomatic corps.
In both the State Department and the CIA, it should go without saying, the opposition to Bush is within the framework of the defense of imperialist interests. Both agencies are staffed by battle-hardened defenders of American imperialism who have participated in countless crimes against working people on every continent. Their opposition to Bush arises largely from the debacle produced in Iraq by a policy that deliberately ignored the complex politics of the country and the Middle East as a whole, in favor of a crude doctrine that the United States could have its way by force alone.
The result of the bureaucratic infighting is that the Bush White House is moving to concentrate power in fewer and fewer hands, riding roughshod over the established institutions of American imperialism. As the Knight-Ridder news service observed: "by agreeing to Powell’s departure and approving an apparent purge by new CIA chief Porter Goss, Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney appear to be eliminating the few independent centers of power in the US national security apparatus and cementing the system under their personal control."
More about Powell: a UPI analysis sums it up pretty well:
For as it turned out, Powell's moderate, cautious internationalist approach to U.S. foreign policy, impeccably in line as it was with the broad policy strategies of Republican Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and George Herbert Walker Bush would have fitted well with Clinton's own approach and preferences. But it proved totally out of touch with the Republican president he actually served.
At first, it did not seem to be that way. In the first eight months of the first Bush administration Powell, as had been widely expected, fought many bruising policy battles with the confident and energetic neo-conservatives who had Vice President Dick Cheney's ear and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. But he won a few battles too.
In those days, Powell appeared to be Bush's "go to" guy. It was he the president turned to in order to defuse tensions with China after a U.S. EP-3 electronic surveillance aircraft made a forced landing on Hainan Island after colliding with a Chinese fighter buzzing it in international air space. And in early September 2001, he appeared to have won a major policy victory by convincing the president to approve a major U.S. diplomatic initiative to establish a fully independent Palestinian state.
[....]
As Bob Woodward wrote in "Bush at War", the secretary of state often did not even meet face to face with the president he served for weeks at a time. In a Washington where personal access to the Chief Executive is the gold standard of clout and influence that probably hurt his standing more than anything.
Powell's writ did not even run within key areas of his own State Department. Under Secretary of State John Bolton, now widely tipped to be the next deputy secretary of state repeatedly made end-runs around him especially on Middle East policy issues with the aid of his neo-con allies in the Pentagon.
But Powell would not resign and the president would not fire him. He was determined to complete a full term of office as the first black secretary of state in U.S. history. And he was convinced his moderating presence was still essential at the top table to try and keep things on an even keel.
So what is going into the neo-con agenda in the second term? Veteran snooper Jim Lobe at Asia Times Online writes about leading neo-con Frank Gaffney's newest plans as laid out in a National Review article (via interesting site 'The Experiment'). Gaffney is one of the more batshit, institutional neo-cons who's always rambling about "Islamofascists" and World War IV. He didn't let us down this time.
The list, which begins with the destruction of Fallujah in Iraq and ends with the development of "appropriate strategies" for dealing with threats posed by China, Russia and "the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America", also calls for "regime change" in Iran and North Korea.
The list's author, Frank Gaffney, the founder and president of the Center for Security Policy (CSP), also warns that Bush should resist any pressure arising from the (then) anticipated demise of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to resume peace talks that could result in Israel giving up "defensible boundaries".
[....]
Yet its importance as a roadmap of where neo-conservatives - who, with the critical help of Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, dominated Bush's foreign policy after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon - want US policy to go was underlined by Gaffney's listing of the names of his friends in the administration who he said "helped the president imprint moral values on American security policy in a way and to an extent not seen since Ronald Reagan's first term".
In addition to Cheney and Rumsfeld, he cited the most clearly identified - and controversial - neo-conservatives serving in the administration: Cheney's chief of staff, I Lewis "Scooter" Libby; his top Middle East advisers, John Hannah and David Wurmser; weapons-proliferation specialist Robert Joseph; and top Mideast aide Elliott Abrams, on the National Security Council.
Also on the roster are: Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; Under Secretary for Policy Douglas Feith; Feith's top Mideast aide William Luti, in the Pentagon; Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton; and for global issues, Paula Dobriansky at the State Department.
Virtually all of the same individuals have been cited by critics of the Iraq war, including Democratic lawmakers and retired senior foreign-service and military officials, as responsible for hijacking the policy and intelligence process that led to the US invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
[.....]
As Perle's longtime protege and associate, Gaffney sits at the center of a network of interlocking think-tanks, foundations, lobby groups, arms manufacturers and individuals that constitute the coalition of neo-conservatives, aggressive nationalists such as Cheney and Rumsfeld and Christian Right activists responsible for the unilateralist trajectory of US foreign policy since September 11.
Included among CSP's board of advisers over the years have been Rumsfeld, Perle, Feith, Christian moralist William Bennett, Abrams, Joseph, former United Nations ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, former navy under secretary John Lehman and former Central Intelligence Agency director James Woolsey.
Woolsey also co-chairs the new Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), another prominent neo-con-led lobby group that argues Washington is now engaged in "World War IV" against "Islamo-fascism".
Also serving on its advisory council are executives from some of the country's largest military contractors, which - along with wealthy individuals sympathetic to Israel's governing Likud Party, such as prominent New York investor Lawrence Kadish and California casino king Irving Moskowitz, and right-wing bodies, such as the Bradley, Sarah Scaife and Olin Foundations - finance CSP's work.
Gaffney, a ubiquitous "talking head" on TV in the run-up to the war in Iraq, sits on the boards of CPD's parent organizations, the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and Americans for Victory Over Terrorism. He was a charter associate, with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Perle, Wolfowitz and Abrams, of the Project for the New American Century, another prominent neo-conservative-led group that offered up a similar checklist of what Bush should do in the "war on terrorism" just nine days after the September 11 attacks.
[.....]
"The reality is that the same moral principles that underpinned the Bush appeal on 'values' issues like gay marriage, stem-cell research and the right to life were central to his vision of US war aims and foreign policy," according to Gaffney. "Indeed, the president laid claim squarely to the ultimate moral value - freedom - as the cornerstone of his strategy for defeating our Islamofascist enemies and their state sponsors, for whom that concept is utterly [sic] anathema."
To be true to that commitment, policy in the second administration must be directed toward seven priorities, according to Gaffney, beginning with the "reduction in detail of Fallujah and other safe havens utilized by freedom's enemies in Iraq"; followed by "regime change - one way or another - in Iran and North Korea, the only hope for preventing these remaining 'axis of evil' states from fully realizing their terrorist and nuclear ambitions".
Third, the administration must provide "the substantially increased resources needed to re-equip a transforming military and rebuild human-intelligence capabilities (minus, if at all possible, the sorts of intelligence 'reforms' contemplated pre-election that would make matters worse on this and other scores) while we fight World War IV, followed by enhancing protection of our homeland, including deploying effective missile defenses at sea and in space, as well as ashore".
Fifth, Washington must keep "faith with Israel, whose destruction remains a priority for the same people who want to destroy us (and ... for our shared 'moral values') especially in the face of Yasser Arafat's demise and the inevitable, post-election pressure to 'solve' the Middle East problem by forcing the Israelis to abandon defensible boundaries".
Sixth, the administration must deal with France and Germany and the dynamic that made them "so problematic in the first term: namely, their willingness to make common cause with our enemies for profit and their desire to employ a united Europe and its new constitution - as well as other international institutions and mechanisms - to thwart the expansion and application of American power where deemed necessary by Washington".
Finally, writes Gaffney, Bush must adapt "appropriate strategies for contending with China's increasingly fascistic trade and military policies, [Russian President] Vladimir Putin's accelerating authoritarianism at home and aggressiveness toward the former Soviet republics, the worldwide spread of Islamofascism, and the emergence of a number of aggressively anti-American regimes in Latin America", which he does not identify.
Holy War: Evangelical Marines Prepare to Battle Barbarians:
With US forces massing outside Fallujah, 35 marines swayed to Christian rock music and asked Jesus Christ to protect them in what could be the biggest battle since American troops invaded Iraq last year.
Men with buzzcuts and clad in their camouflage waved their hands in the air, M-16 assault rifles beside them, and chanted heavy metal-flavoured lyrics in praise of Christ late on Friday in a yellow-brick chapel.
[....]
"You are the sovereign. You're name is holy. You are the pure spotless lamb," a female voice cried out on the loudspeakers as the marines clapped their hands and closed their eyes, reflecting on what lay ahead for them.
Between the service's electric guitar religious tunes, marines stepped up on the chapel's small stage and recited a verse of scripture, meant to fortify them for war.
One spoke of their Old Testament hero, a shepherd who would become Israel's king, battling the Philistines 3,000 years ago.
"Thus David prevailed over the Philistines," the marine said, reading from scripture, and the marines shouted back "Hoorah, King David," using their signature grunt of approval.
The marines drew parallels from the verse with their present situation, where they perceive themselves as warriors fighting barbaric men opposed to all that is good in the world.
"Victory belongs to the Lord," another young marine read.
Their chaplain, named Horne, told the worshippers they were stationed outside Fallujah to bring the Iraqis "freedom from oppression, rape, torture and murder ... We ask you God to bless us in that effort."
"American Marines attack Fallujah" via ScotlandToday:
Colonel Gary Brandl of the United States Marine Corps commented:
"The enemy has a face. It is Satan's. He is in Fallujah, and we are going to destroy him."
The Americans needed to free up hundreds of troops for this operation and the Black Watch was moved from the relatively benign Basra area to allow that to happen.
On Thursday, three soldiers died in only their second day in the area - Sergeant Stuart Gray and Privates Paul Lowe and Scott McArdle, all of whom were from Fife.
There's an interesting documentary that I found out about called "THE POWER OF NIGHTMARES: THE RISE OF THE POLITICS OF FEAR" by Adam Curtis, originally aired in late October on BBC2. You could have gotten part 1 via BitTorrent, but it seems to be gone now.
This guy made a transcript of the whole thing (Part 1 [A B], part 2 [A B] part 3 [A B]) It starts with the adventures of one Sayyed Qutb in Colorado, 1949. The writings of this guy have been highly influential in forming Sunni fundamentalist ideas. Then it flips straight over to Leo Strauss. Regardless of how you think these guys fit into the scheme, they are definitely part of the intellectual backdrop of both sides of the 'War o' Terror.'
I have two main threads to post here from the documentary. One theme is the origins of modern Islamist ideology. The other is how the neoconservatives filtered into power and manipulated how the U.S. perceived the threat from the Soviet Union. Both of these are quite important, yes?
Voiceover: This was Truman’s America, and many Americans today regard it as a golden age of their civilization. But for [Sayyid] Qutb, he saw a sinister side in this. All around him was crassness, corruption, vulgarity—talk centered on movie stars and automobile prices. He was also very concerned that the inhabitants of Greeley [Colorado] spent a lot of time in lawn care. Pruning their hedges, cutting their lawns. This, for Qutb, was indicative of the selfish and materialistic aspect of American life. Americans lived these isolated lives surrounded by their lawns. They lusted after material goods. And this, says Qutb quite succinctly, is the taste of America.
VO: What Qutb believed he was seeing was a hidden and dangerous reality underneath the surface of ordinary American life. One summer night, he went to a dance at a local church hall. He later wrote that what he saw that night crystallized his vision.
CALVERT: He talks about how the pastor played on the gramophone one of the big-band hits of the day, “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” He dimmed the lights so as to create a dreamy, romantic effect. And then, Qutb says that “chests met chests, arms circled waists, and the hall was full of lust and love.”
VO: To most people watching this dance, it would have been an innocent picture of youthful happiness. But Qutb saw something else: the dancers in front of him were tragic lost souls. They believed that they were free. But in reality, they were trapped by their own selfish and greedy desires. American society was not going forwards; it was taking people backwards. They were becoming isolated beings, driven by primitive animal forces. Such creatures, Qutb believed, could corrode the very bonds that held society together. And he became determined that night to prevent this culture of selfish individualism taking over his own country.
[ TITLE: CHICAGO ]
VO: But Qutb was not alone. At the same time, in Chicago, there was another man who shared the same fears about the destructive force of individualism in America. He was an obscure political philosopher at the University of Chicago. But his ideas would also have far-reaching consequences, because they would become the shaping force behind the neoconservative movement, which now dominates the American administration. He was called Leo Strauss. Strauss is a mysterious figure. He refused to be filmed or interviewed. He devoted his time to creating a loyal band of students. And what he taught them was that the prosperous liberal society they were living in contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Professor HARVEY MANSFIELD, Straussian Philosopher, Harvard University: He didn’t give interviews, or write political essays, or appear on the radio—there wasn’t TV yet—or things like that. But he did want to get a school of students to see what he had seen: that Western liberalism led to nihilism, and had undergone a development at the end of which it could no longer define itself or defend itself. A development which took everything praiseworthy and admirable out of human beings, and made us into dwarf animals. Made us into herd animals—sick little dwarves, satisfied with a dangerous life in which nothing is true and everything is permitted.
VO: Strauss believed that the liberal idea of individual freedom led people to question everything—all values, all moral truths. Instead, people were led by their own selfish desires. And this threatened to tear apart the shared values which held society together. But there was a way to stop this, Strauss believed. It was for politicians to assert powerful and inspiring myths that everyone could believe in. They might not be true, but they were necessary illusions. One of these was religion; the other was the myth of the nation. And in America, that was the idea that the country had a unique destiny to battle the forces of evil throughout the world. This myth was epitomized, Strauss told his students, in his favorite television program: Gunsmoke.
The episode quickly goes into Qutb's philosophy of jahiliyya (roughly "the pervasively corrupting influence of the West that has poisoned our people and must be destroyed") and how that led to Ayman Zawahiri starting Islamic Jihad.
The documentary also talks about how the neoconservative clique wormed its way into Washington with Cheney and Rumsfeld in 1975-76. Then Paul Wolfowitz started the 'Team B' plan to demonize the Soviet Union and exaggerate the threat it represents. Then the Committee on the Present Danger was created to propagate their bollox findings. A fascinating tale of cold war hawk propaganda.
Suddenly I realize why they titled this "The Power of Nightmares"... But wait, Michael Ledeen makes an appearance!
VO: To persuade the President [Reagan that the Soviets were a global threat], the neoconservatives set out to prove that the Soviet threat was far greater than anyone, even Team B, had previously shown. They would demonstrate that the majority of terrorism and revolutionary movements around the world were actually part of a secret network, coordinated by Moscow, to take over the world. The main proponent of this theory was a leading neoconservative who was the special adviser to the Secretary of State. His name was Michael Ledeen, and he had been influenced by a best-selling book called The Terror Network. It alleged that terrorism was not the fragmented phenomenon that it appeared to be. In reality, all terrorist groups, from the PLO to the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany, and the Provisional IRA, all of them were a part of a coordinated strategy of terror run by the Soviet Union. But the CIA completely disagreed. They said this was just another neoconservative fantasy.
MICHAEL LEDEEN , Special Adviser to the US Secretary of State 1981-1982: The CIA denied it. They tried to convince people that we were really crazy. I mean, they never believed that the Soviet Union was a driving force in the international terror network. They always wanted to believe that terrorist organizations were just what they said they were: local groups trying to avenge terrible evils done to them, or trying to rectify terrible social conditions, and things like that. And the CIA really did buy into the rhetoric. I don’t know what their motive was. I mean, I don’t know what people’s motives are, hardly ever. And I don’t much worry about motives.
VO: But the neoconservatives had a powerful ally. He was William Casey, and he was the new head of the CIA. Casey was sympathetic to the neoconservative view. And when he read the Terror Network book, he was convinced. He called a meeting of the CIA’s Soviet analysts at their headquarters, and told them to produce a report for the President that proved this hidden network existed. But the analysts told him that this would be impossible, because much of the information in the book came from black propaganda the CIA themselves had invented to smear the Soviet Union. They knew that the terror network didn’t exist, because they themselves had made it up.
MELVIN GOODMAN , Head of Soviet Affairs CIA, 1976-87: And when we looked through the book, we found very clear episodes where CIA black propaganda—clandestine information that was designed under a covert action plan to be planted in European newspapers—were picked up and put in this book. A lot of it was made up. It was made up out of whole cloth.
So in other words, neoconservatives used the CIA's black propaganda against the policymaking process of the American people. That's clever! Ledeen again, and he really sounds like he did when he came to Macalester:
VO: [Reagan's 1983 order authorizing covert action against leftists globally was a] triumph for the neoconservatives. America was now setting out to do battle against the forces of evil in the world. But what had started out as the kind of myth that Leo Strauss had said was necessary for the American people increasingly came to be seen as the truth by the neoconservatives. They began to believe their own fiction. They had become what they called “democratic revolutionaries,” who were going to use force to change the world.
LEDEEN : We were aiming for an expansion of the zone of freedom in the world. And in part that had to do with fighting Communism, and in part that had to do with fighting other kinds of tyrannies. But that’s what we were about, and that’s what we’re still about.
INTERVIEWER (off-camera): When you say you were democratic revolutionaries, what do you mean?
LEDEEN : It meant that we wanted to support the people who wanted to carry out revolutions against tyrannical régimes in the name of democracy, in order to install a democratic system.
INTERVIEWER : As simple as that.
LEDEEN : Yeah. It’s not nuclear physics, you know. I mean, freedom is a fairly simple thing to get.
In a nutshell, then, we have gone from the faked threat from the Soviet Union to a situation where our armed forces claim to be fighting the face of Satan in Fallujah.
Ah, the sweet, sweet power of fake moral frameworks. I hope this illustrates a little of how they lied to us before, and how they found the political power of racist dehumanization...
Election day is tomorrow. (Ok, it's actually today and I changed the time of the post a couple hours back for dramatic effect. Yay.)
On what will hopefully be the last day of this strange government’s political domination of our country, I thought that I should share something about the last four years. Where to begin… where to begin…
I wonder how much of this time has been wasted and whether the energy we spent in resisting served no purpose.
Then I think back to the times that we came together to declare with one voice that the war was wrong, the policies were wrong and the leaders were mad. Even in those dark hours, those symbolic gestures in the street assured me that there was some kind of link between people that even Bush couldn’t crush.
All the way back to the fall of high school’s senior year (2001), on that distant planet we once lived on, I felt that the good times couldn’t last. I thought the economy was cruising on a bubble. I thought that things would make less sense before they made more.
That bizarre election four years minus one day ago launched the country into the sea of uncertainty. Little did we know that the political strategy of this president was to burn away the basis of facts themselves, and substitute spin for reality.
After looking at Macalester College in the Clinton days, I found coming here in the calm, almost flippant season before 9/11. Somewhere I still have that summer’s Time magazine all about shark attacks.
We had ten glorious, blazing days at Macalester, partying on Turck Three, Turck Two, up and down Doty and Dupre. The social universe had no barriers. It was just as well that I didn’t yet have the computer my parents had ordered for school.
One Tuesday morning, I hadn’t yet done my work for Griffin’s film analysis class that afternoon. My crappy old clock radio clicked on, disjointed ramblings about some crash on MPR. Hit the snooze button. The second time I listened for a while, buildings on fire. Went to the bathroom and a floormate told me something crazy was going on.
We went into my room and fiddled around with Adam’s shitty old TV. Then the fuzzy image came up: the towers burning in a haze of static. Campus ground to a halt, everyone stopped to watch, agape.
In the days that followed, I looked again and again at the American flag outside the chapel. Anything was possible now. In a way that was a sort of freedom, the idea that from such a chasm something better might be fashioned. But I also feared that they would take this disaster and run away with it.
At least we would have the chance to start afresh in college, at least this epoch would let us cleanly break from the old days.
Unexpectedly, something weird happened to our class, and I think our class alone. The famed Macalester bubble hardened into a Macalester shell through the rest of that semester. We reoriented towards our friends and our studies. Generally, we rarely got far off campus. I think that somewhere among those crucial weeks, when the country wept and the flags flew out of stores, we missed some indoctrination session that everyone else got. We didn’t get saturated by the media—we barely saw cable. We were not formed into believers.
I still remember someone telling me that they could hardly believe that these flags were all over the place. It felt alien—more American than America.
Then came those slogans. “United We Stand” was the best because it was consonant with “United States.” Later the war brought “Support Our Troops.” One night in Mickey’s Diner with some of my Indian friends, I realized that among this group, the slogans became meaningless. If you were among foreigners, the ‘We’ and ‘Our’ become false, and suddenly you escaped from the mental box.
What, then, to say about the war? What to say about where God has gotten placed these last few years? There’s really nowhere to begin but with my persistent atheist beliefs. For me, the most threatening, doom-laden quality of this government has been the way its supporters have attached an eschatological, apocalyptic meaning to September 11. They believe (or purport to believe) that September 11 was not a ‘mundane’ event. Instead, the disaster is elevated to a spiritual or eschatological plane, as it becomes an element of God’s plan for the world. The crashes are not just plane crashes, they are a projection of supernaturally pure moral evil into reality, and a revelatory moment for the believers.
Such heretical thinking has a great political advantage. Over fall break, I saw a few minutes of a Congressional campaign debate from gerrymandered Texas that when the Republican related the dangerous idea. He said that God had allowed this disaster to happen, but God’s grace was revealed in the American reaction to it. The disaster opened a path of redemption, and Bush, as God’s agent, had moved down this path. The War on Terror became spiritually licensed.
No, I say to these people, No a million times. God was not involved. God does not exist, and everyone who says that there was Grace in what followed is fabricating a ghastly deity of convenient vengeance. The Republicans have exploited this unholy narrative and its profoundly evil nature should alarm any student of politics or history. Aggressive nationalists have run this kind of line throughout human civilization, because people fear the uncertainty of not placing faith in the story.
A professor of journalism, David Domke, visited my rhetoric of campaigns and elections class this fall to talk about Bush’s religiously colored language, as part of a tour for his fascinating new book, “God Willing? Political Fundamentalism in the White House, the “War on Terror” and the Echoing Press.”
He describes how the Bush administration fabricated the “good vs. evil” and “security vs. peril” binaries, and applied them to make it seem as if Bush was carrying out God’s will.
Cynical atheistic political theorists like Leo Strauss have said that a political leadership’s appeal to God serves the purpose of lending cohesion to the society, and claiming to speak on behalf of the Invisible One effectively silences the doubters. Some leaders, like Bush, claim to act as prophetic agents or portals of insight into God. These are the dangerous ones; once followers buy into this, there is no stopping them.
Over the course of this government, I’ll say that the most profoundly frightening and disturbing moment of the whole adventure came during my attendance at a rally supporting the war in its first days, on March 22, 2003, where I took pictures.
There, our governor, Tim Pawlenty, uttered something I knew to be racist and totally false. I heard the grief of 9/11 cynically redirected to support the war, an abuse of power that literally made me shake. Pawlenty was speaking on the steps of the state Capitol building. He said that we were going to strike back at those who struck us on 9/11. I instantly knew this to be a lie, a horrible lie. The crowd cheered, and I shuddered.
Early in 2002, I started looking around at the points of conflict between the U.S. and the Muslim world. Without too much trouble, I found the Intifada. Here was a concrete case of Muslims getting crushed by outsiders with military aid from the United States. If we were to patch this War on Terror up, it would have to involve peace in the West Bank and Gaza. There was no other way.
My lifelong fascination with maps took a turn for the surreal when I first looked at the complex diagrams of settlements and Israeli roads on the West Bank. What the hell was this program? Why are these things expanding? Did someone say that God authorized this? Was there some kind of moral fiction being generated to sustain the process? And what does democracy become in a country that generates racially exclusive colonial suburbs?
In the fall of my sophomore year, October 2002, two men from this place came to Macalester. (I wrote an editorial about it a couple weeks before they came) I co-wrote the news story about their visit here, but of course someone failed to put that issue of the Weekly (Vol. 5, Issue 4) online.
I talked briefly with Ami Ayalon, Sari Nusseibeh and George Mitchell. Ayalon, the former director of Israel’s FBI-like security forces, the Shin Bet, and Nusseibeh, the then-president of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University, came to the U.S. to talk about their sensible peace plan, which entailed removing virtually all the settlements, sharing Jerusalem and bringing the Palestinian refugees into the territories, not Israel. They hoped to promote the plan by getting ordinary folks on both sides to sign their statement.
For me, this encounter forever destroyed the idea that to be ‘pro-Israel’ or ‘a friend of Israel’ means supporting the self-destructive policies of the Likud. Ami Ayalon is as much of a hard-nosed Israeli security expert as you will ever find. He could have probably killed me with his ballpoint pen in a dozen different ways. Yet this tough man was acutely afraid of the settlers and the threat they posed to Israel’s stability. His years at the Shin Bet actually were among the safest and most hopeful that the people of that poor, beleaguered country ever had. It was Ayalon’s Shin Bet that cooperated with the Oslo Accord’s new Palestinian security services to prevent the Islamic fundamentalists from bombing and shooting Israelis. There were virtually no suicide bombings under Ayalon’s watch, because he determined how to coordinate Israel with willing Palestinian security forces. I learned it could be done again, because it had been done before. If only the constant process of the settlers’ territorial aggression—which increased dramatically during Ayalon’s tenure—had been checked, things might not have spun out of control.
At this same time, we began to hear rhetoric of plans to invade Iraq. I dismissed these rumors for a while, believing that the U.S. would have to intervene with Israel before breaking out into Iraq. I saw a couple patterns emerge as the deed went down. The first was the source of stories about weapons of mass destruction and lurid tales of terror training within Iraq. These stories tended to depend on the statements of defectors, who in fact turned out to be liars pimped out by Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress. It was difficult, if not impossible, to hear of the really threatening yarns from more objective sources.
The other key pattern was a sense that the government itself was divided about the war, because, as we found out later, there was a dramatic factional battle, roughly between the neoconservatives in Cheney’s office and the top of the Pentagon, versus the State Department, CIA, and some of the uniformed military staff.
Reading one of my weirder “news” sources, I found references to a 1996 policy document called “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm.” This doc, widely available on the Internet, prompted me to rethink what exactly these neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Douglas Feith were gunning for. I have rambled extensively about the significance of the Clean Break, and probably will continue to do so for the rest of my days. Near the beginning of the war in Iraq, I posted my analysis of it on Everything2.com. As the war started during spring break, I remember reading one of the key passages to my family:
Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.
So before I get into the wretched nature of the war, I should explain a politically hazardous, yet profoundly important idea about our present situation. At this moment, we are deeply wrapped within something I call the ‘Israeli-American Hegemony,’ (a.k.a. ‘the Republican-Likud merger’) a crucial, misunderstood component of the ‘War on Terror’ campaign. In some ways this hegemony is a continuation of the old ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ we’ve heard so much about, but it is in fact a new, evolving political form that both the Bush and Sharon administrations have done their utmost to market to their countries.
This hegemony signifies that the national identities of Israel and the United States should merge together, on the basis of perceived political, moral, military and religious congruities between the countries. There is a specific moral calculus fabricated into the hegemony: namely, that Israel and the United States exist on a moral plane apart from the rest of the world, and their decisions are effectively guided by God’s higher moral purpose.
The Clean Break document states that Israel needs to match America’s language. In an institutional fashion, this is what hegemony and integration really means: the Pentagon starts to think and function like the IDF and the American messianic Christians move closer to the messianic Jewish groups in the West Bank.
The Clean Break document said that
Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values…
To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.
To synchronize the language between our governments is precisely the objective.
Yet the success of this hegemon is based on insane, shaky foundations. For one thing, it defies a fundamental premise of international politics: different states have different interests. I’m sorry, but I do not have the same policy interests as a handful of messianic settlers on a West Bank hilltop, and my government should reflect that. The whole enterprise of the Israeli occupation itself is horrible: only our own Christian fundamentalists who see the construction of settlements as a means to fulfill the return of Jesus and bring about the apocalypse favor this undertaking.
This hegemony idea also is rather racist: it suggests that the Israelis themselves are incapable of charting their own destiny. Instead, they are expected to play out the end-of-the-world script that Christian fundamentalists believe they ought to play.
I’ve found that this hegemon has been quite easy to spot lately. We can pick apart political discourse just from the last few weeks of the campaign. We saw it when Sharon and Bush agreed that “Israeli population centers” in the West Bank could be annexed, as if Bush could somehow speak on behalf of the Palestinians.
Thomas Friedman says that Iraqis refer to American troops as “Jews,” while Arab TV networks show split-screens of Israeli aggression in the territories and American lunacy in Iraq. This, Friedman says, is harmful because it merges these identities into a larger complex, but not because it’s an objective fact of the current situation. As he says, now it is hard to know where American policy ends and Sharon’s begins.
Osama Bin Laden’s latest video references the crimes he claims were committed by this same ‘alliance,’ a charge probably not literally true (I doubt he cared that much in 1982) but with much more resonance after the U.S. has tried to kill vast numbers of Iraqis over this year.
I say to you Allah knows that it had never occurred to us to strike towers.
But after it became unbearable and we witnessed the oppression and tyranny of the America/Israeli coalition against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, it came to my mind.
The events that affected my soul in a difficult way started in 1982 when America permitted the Israelis to invade Lebanon and the American 6th fleet helped them in that.
And the whole world saw and heard but did not respond.
In those difficult moments many hard to describe ideas bubbled in my soul but in the end they produced intense feelings of rejection of tyranny and gave birth to a strong resolve to punish the oppressors.
And as I looked at those demolished towers in Lebanon it entered my mind that we should punish the oppressors in kind and that we destroy towers in America in order that they taste some of what we tasted and so that they be deterred from killing our women and children.
Right-wing Israeli hawks crow about how the U.S. is finally absorbing the lesson it learned in Lebanon from the Marine barracks bombing. Our future wars, they say, will more resemble Israel’s campaigns in the West Bank and Lebanon. Hence, we need the Israeli operational methods to succeed (ignoring the fact that the Israeli ventures have been bloody, pointless failures). Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post:
…there is no doubt that the American military's view of Israel's strategic posture today bears little resemblance to its perception of Israel's strategic posture 21 years ago. Particularly since September 11, and as the situation in Iraq continues to evolve and mutate, the US military has increasingly come to see Israel's war fighting experience both against the Palestinians and in Lebanon from 1982-2000 as a composite of how America's wars will look in the future. Everything from Israel's need to have armed guards at the entrances to shopping malls and cafes to our tactics for land-air-sea combat operations and intelligence-gathering techniques informs the US military as its commanders prepare for battles of the present and the future.
Back in Beirut in 1983, US Marines greeted Israeli soldiers with hostility as they, like the rest of America, lived in denial of the reality that our nations' enemies are common ones. So perhaps the fact that as the US builds conceptual models for its wars of the future it asks Israelis to participate in its war games as "subject matter experts" is the best indication that in the final analysis, the Americans have drawn the proper lessons from their Beirut catastrophe.
Hawks also constantly assert that Hezbollah is an enemy of the United States, and its television station, Al Manar, even more so.
I argued in a paper this spring that as the U.S. military depends more and more on private corporations for doctrine, training and logistics, privatized military firms are an ideal transmission belt to strengthen this hegemon, as ‘Israeli security experts’ come in to provide the goods on how to manage these Arabs. In the other direction, the U.S. provides military hardware like Apache helicopters to Israel. If you think that national identity has nothing to do with helicopters, tell me if the images of Apaches blazing missiles that the Arabs constantly see .
Consider that al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia killed an American working on Apache helicopters there. Al-Qaeda is zeroed in on attacking highly visible elements of the hegemon like the Apache.
Perhaps, too, the same informational tools that the Israelis use to target individual ‘terrorists’ are being implemented throughout the U.S. military. In particular, CACI International has been lauded by Israel as providing informational tools to fight the war on terror, and CACI interrogators in Iraq construct matrices that tell the military which Iraqis to go after. What if these very tools are part of the political problem that has obliterated all goodwill between the U.S. and the Iraqis? What if the tools have gotten out of control, instructing the military to lock up the wrong Iraqis in places like Abu Ghraib indefinitely? For that matter, what about the rumors of Israeli interrogators within Abu Ghraib?
Seymour Hersh has reported that one book in particular, “The Arab Mind,” has been instrumental in shaping how the neocons developed their strategies in Iraq. “The Patai book, an academic told me, was 'the bible of the neocons on Arab behaviour'. In their discussions, he said, two themes emerged - 'one, that Arabs only understand force, and two, that the biggest weakness of Arabs is shame and humiliation'."
Now, Iraq. More than a thousand U.S. soldiers dead, many thousands more wounded and crippled. The war has reached out and killed folks in harmless backwater places like Ellsworth, Wisconsin. And now we hear estimates that one hundred thousand Iraqis have been killed by the war and civil disorder.
There has always been something strange and unreal about the invasion and the way our occupation policies have been carried out. There’s been a certain feel or metaphor to their approach that I would describe as the ‘Babylon complex.’
The Babylon complex was a result of the asphyxiated, closed decisionmaking process in the Pentagon, combined with the foolish, racist assumptions of horrible people like Undersecretary Douglas Feith. The image of a Free Iraq that they painted in our heads was one of great power, good for us and a friend of Israel. The operation would finance itself through Iraq’s vast oil revenues, an globally unmatched mountain of wealth under the sand.
The vision of this wealth overwhelmed the planners of the war, really. They bet everything on subduing the Iraqis and implementing their economic-political shock therapy plan. The Bush administration believed that any serious acknowledgement of their horrible planning would harm their political leverage in the U.S., so they did not fire the incompetent people in the belief that somehow Good Faith could carry them through the situation.
The continuity of the operation trumped its stability. Providing the spin or appearance of stability precluded actually working for stability. As the great CPA spokesman Dan Senor (who entered Washington as an aide for the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC) put it when talking about the al-Qaqaa munitions disaster:
(Image composited from the 'Metropolis')
How suitable, then, that in the very site of historical Babylon itself was the stage for this flight of fancy. It reminds me of the 1925 Fritz Lang classic, “Metropolis,” and the story of Babel contained therein.
Maria: Today I will tell you the story of the Tower of Babel.
Let us build a tower whose summit will touch the skies—
and on it we will inscribe: ‘Great is the world and its Creator. And great is Man.’
Those who had conceived the idea of this tower could not build it themselves, so they hired thousands of others to build it for them.
But these toilers knew nothing of the dreams of those who planned the tower.
While those who had conceived the tower did not concern themselves with the workers who built it.
The hymns of praise of the few became the curses of the many.
[Title:] BABEL
[A crowd rushes the tower, and destroys it.]
Between the brain that plans and the hands that build, there must be a mediator.
It is the heart that must bring about an understanding between them.
Worker: But where is our mediator, Maria?
Maria: Be patient, he will surely come.
Worker: We will wait, but not for long.
So now the hands are fighting the planners, surprise surprise. They are only fighting for the greatest material prize of world history, and they’re just settling in to fight to the death.
The spooky feeling stepped up when I heard that the U.S. military was finding mountains of arms all over the country, but lacked the manpower to capture and secure them. All these arms—of all the things you need to capture and secure in an occupied country, for the sake of ordinary folks and your own soldiers, you have to secure the arms. And they didn’t. Al Qaqaa is only the latest example.
The disastrous planning has quickly undermined our moral stature in Iraq, as small tactical victories are actually strategic failures. We play word games about terrorism then airstrike the hell out of Sunni city after Sunni city. As the conservative William Lind put it:
The point here is not merely that in using terrorism ourselves, we are doing something bad. The point is that, by using the word "terrorism" as a synonym for anything our enemies do, while defining anything we do as legitimate acts of war, we undermine ourselves at the moral level — which, again, is the decisive level in Fourth Generation war.
The incredibly astute Professor Juan Cole described how the Bush administration operates by representing, rather than reflecting reality.
The Bush administration will ask for another $70 billion for Iraq in another month or two if re-elected. Remember in the debates when Kerry said Iraq had cost $200 billion, and Bush corrected him that it was only $120 billion? Well, it turns out that Kerry was right, but Bush was being dishonest in postponing the further request until after the election. Another example of how the Bush administration is government by "representation" in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term rather than in the civics sense. Foucault said that people have a tendency to represent reality, and then to refer to the representation rather than to the reality. (This is also the way stereotypes and bigotry work.) So Bush represented the Iraq war as a $120 billion effort, and actually corrected Kerry with reference to this representation. But the representation was a falsehood, hidden by a clever fiscal delaying tactic. So Kerry is made to seem imprecise or as exaggerating, when in fact he was referring to the reality. Bush made representation trump reality.
Edward Said in his Orientalism shows the ways in which Western travelers and writers have often invented a representation of the Middle East that then gets substituted for Middle Eastern realities so powerfully that the realities can no longer even be seen by Westerners. Said cites travel accounts by eyewitnesses who report falsehoods that had already entered the literature. So these travelers let the representations over-rule what their own eyes saw.
Ok, Dan, you think, that’s great but can you prove it? Can you prove anything? And when does this ridiculously long post end?
I’ll be done soon. It’s been four horrible years, for God’s sake! Fortunately, I have collected some useful evidence. Dr. Rashid Khalidi visited Macalester in the fall of 2003, and I managed to snag him for an interview for the Mac Weekly. This interview, for me, answered many of the key questions. Did Iraq have to go so wrong? Did the neocons fabricate intelligence data to justify the war? Is there a connection between Douglas Feith and the settlers? It’s all there…
DF: You said in your talk regarding Iraq that “there are much worse days to come.” What leads you to this?
RK: Several things. The first is that the Administration purposely had too few soldiers for the post-war, leading directly to a chaotic situation which resulted in the destruction of the organs of state. The occupation thereafter took a number of decisions which alienated the entirety of the armed forces, and the Baathist technocrats, without whom it would be almost impossible to run a modern state in Iraq….
DF: What do you believe are the central principles of neo-conservativism? Do you believe it carries an outer moral ideology for mass consumption, and an elite truth for the few?
RK: Yeah, Seymour Hersh in his articles in the New Yorker about these people has argued that these are people who studied under Leo Strauss or under disciples of Leo Strauss at the University of Chicago, people like Wolfowitz himself, [Pentagon policymaker] Abram Shulsky and others, and that they came away with a sort of neo-Platonic view of a higher truth which they themselves had access, as distinguished from whatever it is you tell the masses to get them to go along.
There is a certain element of contempt in their attitude towards people, in the way in which they shamelessly manipulated falsehoods about Iraq, through Chalabi….
DF: 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….
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.
And now, the presidential campaign. Early on, I was all over the place, distrustful of the candidates. I felt that the ‘Washington candidates’ like Kerry were compromised by the war. I wanted someone to wake this slumbering country, and somehow Howard Dean succeeded brilliantly in getting attention and articulating opposition to the war. I went to Iowa to check out the process there. I wrote a story about going to the unofficial kickoff of the Iowa caucus race, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. Outside the hall, Howard Dean shook my hand, but didn’t look me in the eye. Most of the candidates spoke there, and I found Dean’s readiness to holler “You have the power,” amping up his huge section of the crowd, to be somewhat distasteful if not outright demagoguery.
In Iowa, all the candidates met a friendly audience, because they all spoke to the better side of America, and they each went for one of Bush’s exposed quarters. Such a spectacle as this veered into heights of drama so that for those moments, these folks under hardship and war could let each other know they still had friends in Washington, and they were part of a project bigger than themselves.
My admiration for the Dean campaign became a confidence in a stable new coalition, but Dean’s theatrics fit poorly at key moments. My perceptions of Edwards and Kerry as trustworthy and experienced leaders was boosted by Peter’s and Andrew’s thoughtful support. The basic trust of our southern neighbors gave me hope in these bleak days that America isn’t totally in disarray. Their support of each other led me to believe that the majority of the country—which never voted for Bush, or anyone—might still be reached in the wilderness.
I shied away from thinking about the Democratic race after that, but of course the process heated up and Dean faded after the summer. John Kerry, the frontrunner, found himself hamstrung by his Iraq position, so how could he find a way out of the bind and discredit the Bush administration?
Finally, when Kerry came to Macalester and I helped cover it for the Weekly, I had the opportunity to ask him a question as he was shaking hands on the way out. I asked, “Senator Kerry, do you believe that the intelligence distortions on Iraq should be treated as a criminal matter akin to the Iran-Contra affair? Do you believe that the investigation should be a criminal matter?”
Kerry said to me, “I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done.”
A classically hedged answer from Kerry, which wasn’t a surprise. However, I would say it was the wrong answer. His campaign could have challenged the “flip-flopper on the war” idea by telling the American people how the administration fabricated the WMD and terror intelligence on Iraq, and tricked well-meaning legislators like Edwards and himself into supporting the war with it. But Kerry’s people never concretely made it a part of the campaign, although late in the game Kerry finally said that Bush had “played games with intelligence.” People love a spy thriller: Kerry should have laid out how Chalabi and the gang faked it. Bush and the whole administration would have been better discredited. A real pity, a pity. But you can’t say I didn’t try.
Ok, well this has become more a ramble on the usual political topics than a digestion of what the subjective experience of living under this government has been like. Looking back on it, I have some regrets. I have a serious problem with trusting people and even being willing to spend time with them. Most days it was just chickenshit reluctance, but sometimes my political obsessions and paranoia got the better of me, even before I found out that all these military and government guys were looking at my website.
With regards to running this website, it has been an interesting experience. It has brought the CIA and Department of Homeland Security straight into my bedroom, but its also showed me how profoundly interconnected the Internet makes us. How else, besides lunch at Macalester, can you run into so many random people from so many different countries?
I can’t say that every decision I’ve made has been worth it. I know I didn’t do the most I could to challenge the war; I spent a lot of time in a muted, black and fearful moods. Not like the soft weight of clinical depression, this was a kind of burning flame I could see when I closed my eyes. I knew that the bastards were smashing the heritage of all human civilization when they invaded Iraq without protecting our first Artifacts.
As someone who refuses to believe in God, I have only the continuous stream of history to supply a foundation of meaning in our lives. That’s why I’ve found it so difficult to come to terms with the idea that these guys just didn’t give a damn. I am still terrified of the political forces they’ve unleashed.
One last thing that I haven't yet written about online: what it meant for me to visit the World Trade Center site in Manhattan. I will say that it simply makes it easier to think about once the icons become fixed in your concrete reality, instead of the fluid, alternately fixated and amnesiac media sea that we float in. Once the place is tied down in your own experience, it is much easier to understand. Power became easier to understand from we saw later: a young guy reading the Bill of Rights in a park got arrested right in front of us.
(This is the third-to-last picture I took in New York, during the protests outside Bush's speech. Click for larger version)
I remember standing on the stoop outside Wallace a few days before spring break in 2003. They had just clipped the fences between Kuwait and Iraq. This was a time of sociological anomie, I said to Alison and Dan Schned. There are no social norms here. In a way, it was a kind of freedom, and we treated it as such. We are still stuck in that anomie, even when Kerry wins tomorrow, as I’ve guaranteed myself he will.
Fortunately, I still have some glimmering bits of optimism left. When the sun rises on November Third, it will be a whole new world. I feel that I’ve gotten through the worst times now, and maybe, just maybe, the four-year malaise will finally be crushed by the evidence that my people have not yet abandoned hope.
The International Roundtable at Macalester is one of the biggest annual events on campus. This year, (Sir) Ahmed Samatar of the International Studies department managed to corral three leading intellectuals into speaking: super-leftie Tariq Ali, historian of the British empire Niall Ferguson and mega-neoconservative Michael Ledeen. (Right now the Mac Weekly site is not showing my story that was published on Friday. I emailed the webmaster about it, so that should be cleared up.)
As a senior, I was invited to the Roundtable lunch. Things just went from there. The following was my editorial on what happened:
With the election scorching our brains, the future has seldom looked less certain. A small network of ideologues, analysts and bureaucratic adventurers known as neoconservatives have shaped our strange generation in ways unimaginable only a few years ago. As Washington reporter Josh Marshall put it, the war in Iraq will forever be known as the war that neocons agitated for, framed, planned (poorly), and finally carried out, by persuading a trusting American public with fake intelligence, over the resistance of the vast majority of the world. Thomas Friedman stated that this war could never have happened without a couple dozen in the capital leaning on the levers of power.
At this precipitous, binary moment in our nation’s history, either we are about to reach the High Noon of an eight-year Bush presidency, or we are tripping through its final days. If Bush is finished, the psychopathology of individuals like Michael Ledeen will be digested for decades. If the smirk-in-chief is just settling in, we’d better figure out these people’s motives, and quickly.
After Tariq Ali’s Friday morning session, where Ledeen perused a book for long stretches, the speakers, and some seniors and professors retreated to the Weyerhauser Boardroom. I asked Dhruva Jaishankar to save me a seat at some table. I built a croissant sandwich, and I suddenly discovered that Dhruva had landed at Ledeen’s table. He saved me the chair on Ledeen’s left. I thought, “What the hell? Let’s do it,” and sat down with the grim scholar of war.
How do I converse with a genuinely diabolical person, especially one about to speak before the whole campus? I thought, chewing my sandwich, can I just bitch at the man holding the American Enterprise Institute’s ‘Freedom Chair?’
Parsing my words, I asked him if the Middle East was a fundamentally inscrutable “wasteland of mirrors,” a phrase I erroneously thought he’d used. No, the Middle East was pretty easy to figure out, he said.
Ledeen has staked everything on the belief that the fundamentalist Iranian leadership will nuke Israel or the U.S. once they have the bomb. Thus, for him, their downfall is among the highest of priorities. He has fought within what he deemed Washington’s “chaos” of policymaking to go after Iran. But the neocons tend to get carried away with rhetoric for its own sake: witness how State Department Undersecretary John Bolton has threatened the sensitive North Koreans right before negotiations just for the hell of it. So I asked him, if the regime in Iran is highly unpopular, how can he be sure that they aren’t exaggerating their intentions, hoping to goad the United States into overreacting and threatening them, so that they can turn around and tell the Iranian opposition that they must unite to fight the external threat?
Ledeen, a Machiavellian to the core, said that this was much too convoluted for him. He said that he was a historian of the twentieth century who’d read a great deal of fascist rhetoric, and those people were very serious about killing the Jews. Likewise, he said that former President Rafsanjani stated he would nuke Jerusalem despite the losses from a counterattack, because it would benefit Islam to take out a huge proportion of the Jews while only a small proportion of Muslims would get killed in return.
I asked why the Iranians would bomb Jerusalem if it would kill so many Muslims. He said that the Iranians murderously hate Arabs and kill them all the time. In fact, he said, the Iranians are killing “hundreds” of Arabs in Iraq today, sending in money and munitions.
His scheme to free Iran was to supply the opposition with the tools to destabilize the regime, “but not a single bullet.” I have a hard time believing he could resist arming the Iranian opposition. In fact, many say that the Pentagon, administered by Ledeen’s allies, has courted a weird, cultish anti-regime Iranian guerilla group based in eastern Iraq called the Mujahideen al-Khalq. If Bush wins, it’s quite unlikely that the neo-cons will be able to resist using forces like these to harass Tehran, but we have no idea what sort of reaction this would provoke from the highly mobilized, nationalist Iranians.
Trying to avoid provoking more mobilization, I asked Ledeen what sorts of places he got his information. “Never watch television,” he told the students at the table. He’d also given up on The New York Times. He surprised us when he said that he really likes reading online blogs, in particular Iranian and Iraqi blogs. Iranian blogging has snowballed into a serious trend, providing a sizeable young population with the means to skirt government censorship. Ledeen said that once you’d been reading a source for a while, you can get a feeling for their perspective and veracity, something I agree with.
He kept muttering little statements, preparing himself for the dramatic speech to follow. In particular, at both the lunch and his speech, he referenced sliding over the “border between manic depression and genius,” while he later admitted that writing about Iran was his therapy.
More than anything else, this explains the neoconservative agenda in a way that has eluded me during this bizarre presidency. Ledeen’s power in Washington has shaped not just their unresolved debate over Iran. More importantly, his militant myopia has fed the government’s racist, irrational and self-destructive tendencies. Yet Ledeen admits he has an anarchic streak inherited from his Russian anarchist Uncle Izzy. He also admits to a Trotskyist belief in perpetual global revolution. He said that America’s government was a “chaos,” but a better, more productive chaos than others. America is a revolutionary power, he argues, that crushes ideas before it makes a new order. Strip out Trotsky’s stuff about proletarians, swap bourgeoise for ‘terror master,’ and you’ve got a recipe for everlasting wars.
After I got away from that table, my little moral universe was bent. I hadn’t confronted the man like I would have a year ago; I hadn’t hacked the bristly defenses raised so harshly in the talk that followed. I didn’t get to the bottom of their motives. Did I, of all people, make a good impression on a man who wants to crush everything I stand for? Was that the wrong thing to do?
Why have I been silent for a while here? It is not that I'm being lazy out in the Real World. Between four classes, a radio show, editing the newspaper and all the election stuff, it's really hard for me to get onto here and give you all something new to look at.
In no small part because I had a conversation with Michael Ledeen on Friday during Macalester's International Roundtable conference. I feel like my unbalanced little moral universe has totally spun off its bearings. Yet I now understand the neoconservative mindset much better than before. This is not comforting nor relaxing information to find out about. So I haven't been sure what to say about it yet. We will have something in the Mac Weekly about it later this week.
Still, the website gets hits from all over, and the nature of these global information networks still amazes me. And yet again, the government and the military are all over my shit.
I finally got around to looking at the HongPong.com access log, and I found that traffic is quite high right now, higher than my sputtering efforts here probably deserve.
So I have not looked at the site's traffic patterns for awhile. In the last week, there have been an average 356 requests for pages a day. That's not too bad. Traffic has tapered off a bit during September, but there is a lot of variability any given day, from 200 to 500 hits.
Somewhere among these visits came the Central Intelligence Agency, although apparently they were on a Google search for 'tower bridge terrorism.' I just ran this search and found an old post about my London trip up on the third results page, above MSNBC and National Review stories.
I wonder if the CIA's visit was just a spider logging information about terrorism. That wouldn't surprise me any more than CENTCOM's visit to my Iraq page this summer.
The Department of Homeland Security came by looking for "unedited iraqi prison photos and videos." I don't have those. But I feel safer already.
Someone from the State Department came in on Google via searching for "Dan Senor CPA Israel neo-con" and I didn't disappoint them! (that's the second time I've gotten a search critical of neoconservatives from the State Department!)
There also seems to be an uptick in the number of visitors from Israel, including the Tel Aviv University and Weizmann Institute of Science, as well as the mysterious barak.net.il.
A Palestinian newspaper searching for information about radio transmitters found something totally irrelevant here. This would mark the first connection to my site from the West Bank that I've detected. So the site projects some sort of minute, momentary effect on the situation. That's pretty sweet.
Other strange visitors include mail3.JohnKerry.com, a Russian dating site called your-ideal.com, a couple hits from Brandeis and Stanford. There are quite a few folks from the Netherlands and Pakistan this time, as well. I won't get into the country list now.
I got a couple hits from Army computers who came in on Google searched for "helicopter video kills" and "video of riot control," both of which connected with old stories. The Air Force and Navy have also been visiting on similar Google searches.
Another hit came over something called nipr.mil, described as
Nipr.mil is not a single domain a but a hush-hush web proxy that acts as a gateway for hundreds of U.S. military domains in order to hide their identities. It was established by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) in response to a memorandum (CM-5 1099, INFOCOM) issued in March 1999 by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling for "actions to be taken to increase the readiness posture for Information Warfare." "Uncontrolled Internet connections," the document says, "pose a significant and unacceptable threat to all Department of Defense information systems and operations.
Ok, good the information warfare people are here. Nice. Another Army hit came from a Google search for 'tactical humint team team leader' where surprisingly enough, I am on the first results page due to a blockquote in a story about Army deserters. Great, now some computer thinks my site has sympathy for deserters. I wonder how many bad juju points I get for that.
The prize for funniest scary government computer name goes to:
moses.radium.ncsc.mil
More interested government agencies these days include:
I just found this list that someone made about Big Brother computers watching them. It's roughly like that around here! Hurray Tech!!
Well well. Newsweek reported yesterday that Bush's commanding lead in their national poll, around 11 points, has completely evaporated, and now Kerry enjoys about a 2 or 3 point lead. I had a feeling going into the debate that it would shift ten points, one way or the other. Fortunately, Kerry had some damn wits about him! Talking about the now-famous Bush scowl complex. The Dems made a video of it!
Take the Armageddon Books poll immediately: Armageddon Books Prophecy Poll:
Will the Illuminati be the force that brings about Antichrist's one-world government and religion?
I've got a ton of homework and a radio show in two hours so I've got to lay this out quickly.
Keep reading Josh Marshall and the TPM. Lots of interesting stuff coming thru there. Can you believe that we've only fully trained about 8,000 Iraqi police?! Juan Cole always crucial.
The officials in Washington -- CIA, State, Defense -- have rapidly worsening opinions about the situation. Interesting information from a Wall Street Journal reporter, Farnaz Fassihi, who wrote a really hellish email of life in Iraq (also posted here):
It's hard to pinpoint when the 'turning point' exactly began. Was it April when the Fallujah fell out of the grasp of the Americans? Was it when Moqtada and Jish Mahdi declared war on the U.S. military? Was it when Sadr City, home to ten percent of Iraq's population, became a nightly battlefield for the Americans? Or was it when the insurgency began spreading from isolated pockets in the Sunni triangle to include most of Iraq? Despite President Bush's rosy assessments, Iraq remains a disaster. If under Saddam it was a 'potential' threat, under the Americans it has been transformed to 'imminent and active threat,' a foreign policy failure bound to haunt the United States for decades to come.
Iraqis like to call this mess 'the situation.' When asked 'how are thing?' they reply: 'the situation is very bad."
What they mean by situation is this: the Iraqi government doesn't control most Iraqi cities, there are several car bombs going off each day around the country killing and injuring scores of innocent people, the country's roads are becoming impassable and littered by hundreds of landmines and explosive devices aimed to kill American soldiers, there are assassinations, kidnappings and beheadings. The situation, basically, means a raging barbaric guerilla war. In four days, 110 people died and over 300 got injured in Baghdad alone. The numbers are so shocking that the ministry of health -- which was attempting an exercise of public transparency by releasing the numbers -- has now stopped disclosing them.
Insurgents now attack Americans 87 times a day.
Have to love a good military-industrial conspiracy! "Ex-Pentagon official gets 9 months for conspiring to favor Boeing" in an arms deal. Haha talk about the tip of the iceberg!
"International Observers predict trouble in US vote." ...Alarm bells....
Pentagon Paperer Daniel Ellsberg says "Where are the leakers of the Iraq war?" As in, why aren't more horrible facts coming forward right now?
WaPo says that the government is starting a PR campaign to paper over the hellish disintegration of Iraq.
Interesting issue: Google News frequently gives these links to hard rightwing sites when it seems that more balanced news sources should appear instead. Why is this happening?
Humor: Bush and the yawning boy via Wonkette. Bush vs Jesus political advertising via Atrios. Thanks to Alison on the link.
Random right wing opinion: classic anti-Islamic fear mongering from Daniel Pipes: "The Islamic States of America?" Of course they're trying to Subvert our Way of Life, those Damn Commies IslamoFascists!!!
So these are just a few of the random things I've got for you today... Gotta go!
Ok, now is the run-up time for the big venture to New York City. Have to plan things...
Something has gone odd with the style sheets here. I will fix that later.
The Counter Convention. Anyone need to hitch a ride east? (I don't think there will be extra space beyond the folks I'm with, but the local anti-war folks are going)
The identity of CIA agent Anonymous has found its way into print, evidently a little while ago in the Guardian. This story talks all about where Imperial Hubris came from and the CIA anonymity rules. Anonymous is actually CIA analyst Michael Scheuer.
Among some in the intelligence community who have either obtained copies of the Imperial Hubris manuscript or heard about certain passages, the rough consensus is that a not-long-for-his-job George Tenet indicated to the [CIA Publication Review Board] that the book’s publication should be allowed, as it might blunt or contextualize some of the scathing criticism likely to assail the agency in forthcoming 9/11 Commission and Senate Select Intelligence Committee reports — and also might aid the cause of intelligence reform. According to several intelligence-community sources, the manuscript was in limbo at least three months past the Review Board’s 30-day deadline earlier this year. Says one CIA veteran: "I think it’s possible that it got the approval around the time Tenet decided for himself that he was leaving."Pat Buchanan has a new book out and Raimondo thinks its awesome. He threw a couple links in: an insane piece by Office of Special Plans conspirator David Wurmser and a rambling declaration of World War IV from Norman Podhoretz.
Meanwhile Blackwater (yes, that blackwater has an email list) sent me a link about fourth-generation warfare. Interesting.
In Israel, Akiva Eldar demands that the Labor party drop all prior restraints on joining the government. YES. Ugly, tho.
Last Wednesday, in full public view, the supreme forum of the Likud tightened the handcuffs around its leader's wrists. The masses who believed that Sharon is prepared to offer "painful concessions" in return for peace found out that his students in the academy of shackling are not allowing him to pull several hundred Jews out of the Gaza Strip.
[....]
If the disengagement plan and peace are so important to the state and to the party, the architect of Oslo should teach his colleagues a lesson in self-sacrifice; he should inform Sharon that the party is interested in fair representation in the foreign policy-security cabinet and the important ministerial committees of an ad hoc emergency government for a period of one year. The Likud must decide - there are no more excuses.
Two things: firstly, Porter Goss is part and parcel one of Dick Cheney's evil congressional badger brigades, as a Congresscritter acting to cover up investigations into the intelligence distortions that unfolded into the invasion of Iraq. Like Cheney's little finger, said Billmon:
Goss - last seen in Farenheit 9/11 giving out the number to an entirely ficticious civil liberties complaint hotline - is a former CIA operative turned Florida hack congressman who has made himself useful to the administration in ways both large and small, not least by savaging the reputation of the agency he once worked for and now hopes to lead.Billmon referred to an excellent piece in CounterPunch by Ray McGovern, retired CIA dude and a representative of the "sane" intelligence analysts around Washington, ripping Goss apart as a horrible Republican piece of garbage:In other words, picking Porter Goss to be CIA director is roughly the same as nominating Dick Cheney's little finger...
...There are plenty of Mexicans dying for the War on Terror... David Ignatius says that the GWOT (military acronym for take over the world global war on terror) shouldn't get politicized, but of course it already has, shamelessly:
That possibility conjures up a painful flashback for those of us who served as CIA analysts when Richard Nixon was president. Chalk it up to our naivete, but we were taken aback when swashbuckling James Schlesinger, who followed Richard Helms as CIA director, announced on arrival, "I am here to see that you guys don't screw Richard Nixon!" To underscore his point, Schlesinger told us he would be reporting directly to White House political adviser Bob Haldeman (Nixon's Karl Rove) and not to National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger.No doubt Goss would be more discreet in showing his hand, but his appointment as director would be the ultimate in politicization. He has long shown himself to be under the spell of Vice President Dick Cheney, and would likely report primarily to him and to White House political adviser Karl Rove rather than to National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
Goss would almost certainly follow lame-duck director George Tenet's practice of reading to the president in the morning and become an integral part of the "White House team." The team-membership phenomenon is particularly disquieting.
If the failure-prone experience of the past few years has told us anything, it is that being a "team member" in good standing is the kiss of death for the CIA director's primary role of "telling it like it is" to the president and his senior advisers. It was a painful moment of truth when former Speaker Newt Gingrich--like Cheney, a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters--told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president that he would do anything for him."
But now to delightful Pakistan, where nothing makes sense. This Salon piece, "Subcontracting the hunt for Bin Laden," by a former bigshot of the deposed civilian government was quite unnerving:
A government has no asset more precious than public trust. That's especially true for a nation threatened by a terrorist adversary, where good intelligence and reliable warnings can save lives. By linking its reelection campaign so closely to the war on terrorism, the Bush administration has eroded its credibility -- to the point that some members of the public are beginning to wonder whether terrorism warnings are all just politics. The administration risks compounding that climate of politicization by nominating a sitting Republican member of Congress, Porter Goss, to be the next CIA director.
The relative transparency of the U.S. political system should make it difficult for U.S. officials to be blatant about linking political agendas to a national security issue such as the war against terrorism. In an article titled "July Surprise?" in the New Republic, published several weeks before the Democratic Convention, John B. Judis, Spencer Ackerman and Massoud Ansari wrote of pressure on Pakistan by the Bush administration to produce a "high-value target" around the time of the convention to steal Kerry's thunder. The suggestion was rejected by some as a conspiracy theory at the time, but when Pakistan announced the arrest of Ghailani, a Tanzanian, in Gujarat, Pakistan, hours before Kerry's acceptance speech, eyebrows were raised even among those Americans who normally dismiss such conspiracy theories.Meanwhile the Paki government is now going to go after the grandaddy of all Islamic fundamentalist organizations, Jamaat-e-Islami, and the results won't be predictable:For the Bush administration to have risked playing politics with the timing of arrest of terror suspects is a disturbing enough possibility. More disturbing is the prospect that the initiative to gain political advantage from these arrests came not from the Bush administration but from the Musharraf regime. By subcontracting the hunt for bin Laden to an authoritarian ally who has a special interest in the flow of economic and military benefits resulting from this contract, the administration may be giving that ally a powerful say in America's political agenda whose effect is to undermine the war against al-Qaida.
Musharraf's enlistment in the war on terrorism is an extension of Pakistan's long-established willingness to be useful to the United States for the "right price." Pakistan's first military ruler, Gen. (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan (who ruled from 1958 to 1969), told U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Henry Byroade as early as 1953, "Our army can be your army if you want us." Ever since, Pakistan's military leadership has seen its alliance with America as its meal ticket.
[.....]
As long as the U.S.-Pakistan relationship remains a single-issue alliance based on the quid pro quo of changes in Pakistani policy for U.S. money, the regime in Islamabad will continue to be tempted to take its time in finding all the terrorists at large in Pakistan. After all, most subcontractors who are paid by the hour take longer to get the job done. And while this may seem like a risky scheme for Musharraf, it conforms to the past pattern of Pakistani military regimes collecting rent from the United States for providing strategic services.
Under immense pressure from the United States, a slow and gradual operation has begun in Pakistan against the strongest political voice of Islamists and the real mother of international Islamic movements, of which Osama bin Laden's International Islamic Front is the spoiled child.From that new blog of Steve Clemons, "Who are the real neo-cons?" looking at a new book, "America Alone: The Neo-Conservatives and the Global Order" by Stefan Halper and Jonathan Clarke. Sounds excellent, but how much have I heard before? Old David Broder says that Bush has Two Albatrosses: going into the war, and not paying for it.In a surprise move this week, Pakistan's federal minister of the interior, Faisal Saleh Hayat, listed a number of incidences in which members of the Jamaat-i-Islami (JI), the premier fundamentalist party in the country, had been tied to al-Qaeda, and called on it to "explain these links".
"It is a matter of concern that Jamaat-e-Islami, which is a main faction of the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal [MMA], has neither dissociated itself from its activists having links with the al-Qaeda network nor condemned their activities," Faisal said, adding that "one could derive a meaning out of its silence".
The MMA is an alliance of six religious parties that gained unprecedented electoral victories in national elections in 2002. One of its members is the leader of the opposition in the Lower House, while the MMA controls the provincial government in North West Frontier Province. It also forms part of a coalition government in Balochistan province. The MMA has 67 seats in the 342-seat National Assembly, with just under a third of them held by the JI.
[.....]
Intelligence insiders tell Asia Times Online that initial operations are not targeted against the main JI structure, but at lower-rank workers suspected of involvement in underground militant activities. At the same time, once this operation starts, it will be inevitable that it extends to the highest level. Further, every JI leader is involved with senior army officers, both serving and retired, and they will not be spared in the process.The JI is not only the largest, most organized and most resourceful organization in the country, it has deeper roots in the establishment than any other outfit. Tackling it will surely open a Pandora's box, and at the same time create a vicious backlash.
In the tit for tat realm of punditry, I say that this actually defines Kerry's position on the war, and Cheney accuses himself of sensitivity in the war on terror. Then the Daily Howler says: Cheney, thou have flipped and flopped!
Ok then kids, my dad will be here in like 20 minutes. I have all these browser windows to clean out before I go to Utah, so this will be a little funky. But interesting stuff.
josh Marshall points out a new washington blog. this guy wrote a sweet article about think tanks.
low numbers for bush. checkpoints.
Robert Fisk says Iraq imploding. Durrr.
mccain and the swift boat veterans thing.
israel says to hell with road map, more suburbs in west bank!! interesting letters.
Alan Keyes is the Quintessential American
The internal press squabbles about WMD lameness
particles information holes etc.
After the convention, Democrats are reclaiming the center says Dionne. Right wing son of a bitch liked Obama. Explosions of applause etc. krugman on the Script. go to hell Brooks.
So then are the Dems shifting to the right on foreign policy?!
Dissection of Iraq lies from before. So then why did they go to the desert? the uprising is a test!
American prisons are horrible too.
i saw this sweet video called Spin that was made from unedited network TV satellite transitions, and people come across as racist or just batshit crazy, in Larry King's case. About Spin [1 2 3 4 5 6]
I liked Manchurian Candidate. Read Ebert's review of the classic original and the new one.
Keep reading TPM. Duhhh.
Iraq reconstruction funding has spawned 27 criminal inquiries. what the hell?!
Most important: does M. Night Shammaaaala (no time to type) suck as director?
OK I am the hell out of here!!!! Peace to y'all!!!!! Be back Sunday!
[Book of] Revelation is must reading nowadays, especially for the nonbeliever. I have returned to it, many years after abandoning the above-mentioned childhood faith, not because I think it is inspired prophecy, there being in my opinion no such thing, but because many other people (including many I'd grant are "good" people) think that it is. And because some of them think this piece of Holy Scripture somehow justifies ongoing imperialist war, which they (with their commander-in-chief) conceptualize religiously as a war of Good versus Evil. And because that conviction causes believers to support, on faith, Bush's efforts to remold the Middle East in the way the neocons (who are overwhelmingly not fundamentalist Christians, but who assiduously court them) want to do it. One should read Revelation to see how it can be used, and to see what sort of worldview the book encourages.I thought this was a striking article "Apocalypse Now: Why the Book of Revelations is Must Reading," reflecting on Bush's pandering to the apocalyptic fanatics and such. Also it linked to this insane prophetic/war type page. Also the PBS page "frontline: apocalypse!" has a number of serious scholarly perspectives. I also ended up at Frederick Engels' "On the History of Early Christianity," which had some weird excerpts:It is truly a godsend to those in the administration who want to transform the Muslim world, acquiring strategic control over Southwest Asia while enhancing Israel's security situation, that a considerable portion of the U.S. population consists of persons who take the book seriously. The neocons and patrons manipulate the Christian devout who adulate Ariel Sharon like a rock star, believe Israel (miraculously reconstituted half a century ago, in fulfillment of Ezekiel 37:12-14) can do no wrong, have little concern about Arabs' rights, and think Islam is a teaching of the Devil. Rev. Jerry Falwell calls the Prophet Muhammed a "terrorist." Rev. Franklin Graham calls Islam "a wicked, evil religion" and says its God is not the Christians' God. These reverends' followers are very useful supporters of the war on the human mind that is the "war on terrorism," the focus of which shifted so swiftly from al-Qaeda to Iraq (alike in little save their Muslimness), and could shift to Syria or Iran or Pakistan suddenly tomorrow. When you mix the anti-Islam pronouncements with Bush policy decisions and millenarian faith, you have an explosive combination.
We therefore see that the Christianity of that time, which was still unaware of itself, was as different as heaven from earth from the later dogmatically fixed universal religion of the Nicene Council; one cannot be recognized in the other. Here we have neither the dogma nor the morals of later Christianity but instead a feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for the struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the Socialists.In fact, the struggle against a world that at the beginning was superior in force, and at the same time against the novators themselves, is common to the early Christians and the Socialists. Neither of these two great movements were made by leaders or prophets -- although there are prophets enough among both of them -- they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be confused at the beginning; confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradictions, lack of clarity and lack of cohesion, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which right against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy. So it was with early Christianity, so it was in the beginning of the socialist movement, no matter how much that worried the well-meaning worthies who preached unity where no unity was possible.
[.....]
So here it is not yet a question of a "religion of love," of "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you," etc. Here undiluted revenge is preached, sound, honest revenge on the persecutors of the Christians. So it is in the whole of the book. The nearer the crisis comes, the heavier the plagues and punishments rain from the heavens and with all the more satisfaction John announces that the mass of humanity will not atone for their sins, that new scourges of God must lash them, that Christ must rule them with a rod of iron and tread the wine-press of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God, but that the impious still remain obdurate in their hearts. It is the natural feeling, free of all hypocrisy, that a fight is going on and that -- à la guerre comme à la guerre.
A peculiar antithesis to this was the religious risings in the Mohammedan world, particularly in Africa. Islam is a religion adapted to Orientals, especially Arabs, i.e., on one hand to townsmen engaged in trade and industry, on the other to nomadic Bedouins. Therein lies, however, the embryo of a periodically recurring collision. The townspeople grow rich, luxurious and lax in the observation of the "law." The Bedouins, poor and bence of strict morals, contemplate with envy and covetousness these riches and pleasures. Then they unite under a prophet, a Mahdi, to chastise the apostates and restore the observation of the ritual and the true faith and to appropriate in recompense the treasures of the renegades. In a hundred years they are naturally in the same position as the renegades were: a new purge of the faith is required, a new Mahdi arises and the game starts again from the beginning. That is what happened from the conquest campaigns of the African Almoravids and Almohads in Spain to the last Mahdi of Khartoum who so successfully thwarted the English. It happened in the same way or similarly with the risings in Persia and other Mohammedan countries. All these movements are clothed in religion but they have their source in economic causes; and yet, even when they are victorious, they allow the old economic conditions to persist untouched. So the old situation remains unchanged and the collision recurs periodically. In the popular risings of the Christian West, on the contrary, the religious disguise is only a flag and a mask for attacks on an economic order which is becoming antiquated. This is finally overthrown, a new one arises and the world progresses.
Dramatic CounterPunch stuff tonight: "The Rise of Global Resistance" by Omar Barghouti. Rather top-to-bottom leftie roundup of this that and the other thing, etc, etc....
If the fall of the Berlin Wall signaled the decisive beginning of the end of the East-West opposition, the illegal, immoral and criminal war on Iraq, waged by the new Rome of our time, might well announce the baptism of a new world community opposed to empire, any empire, and based on the precepts of evolving international law, human rights and the common principles of universal morality that are emerging.Almost everyone with conscience fears and resents the megalomaniac cult sitting on the throne in Washington. It is the product of a strategic alliance between the omnipotent military-industrial complex (with a lion's share for the oil industry), the fundamentalist-Christian and the Zionist ideologies. It is a cult that has amassed colossal financial, political and media power, enough to rekindle its deep-rooted disposition and ambition to become the master of the universe. A century and a half after officially abolishing slavery in the U.S., the new-old masters have a diabolic agenda to resurrect it, except this time on a worldwide scale.
Being able to detect this phenomenon, a great majority of nations, including an impressively increasing number of conscientious and mentally-liberated Americans, wish to see this cult of "neo-conservatives" and its agenda humbled, at the very least, if not altogether defeated.
[....]
At the very heart of this strategy is control over oil supplies. Robert E. Ebel, director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think tank whose advisers include Kissinger and Brzezinski, among other dignitaries, explains: "Oil fuels military power, national treasuries, and international politics. It is no longer a commodity to be bought and sold within the confines of traditional energy supply and demand balances. Rather, it has been transformed into a determinant of well-being, of national security, and of international power."
[...]
The rest of the world truly hopes that Americans may themselves rise up to the occasion and renounce the empire from within; that they may opt for the status of relatively less privileged citizens of a more just and peaceful world, rather than the loathed masters of a bludgeoned, bullied, and oppressed world; that they may shed their role as uncritical, even submissive, subjects of a reviled, racist and morally bankrupt empire. With conscientious Americans on board, the world has a chance to defeat the mad beast with nuclear fangs, before it takes us all under. With concerted mobilization and global activism, we may well celebrate one day the withering away of empire.
"Iraq, According to Edgar Allen Poe: Now it's coffin bombs in Baghdad," a column from Iraq by Robert Fisk. "The Dogma of Richard Perle" is an interesting piece because I have absolutely no idea why this was written, a free-floating polemic, if you will.
This article in CounterPunch poses the idea that there is no neutral position available in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I'm not sure if that's really an honest thing to say, but I can certainly see where the "neutral" media fuzzes things out and legitimizes them.
[Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun] also has a puzzling tendency puzzling for someone clinging to the middle to refer to the Palestinians as "the Other". Although he uses the term in a friendly context of having respect for "the Other" for instance the terminology actually gives away the true nature of his neutrality. No matter how conciliatory, Lerner clearly deep down thinks of himself and Israel as residing on "this" side of that imaginary middle path between "us" and "them", and therefore his first interest is Israel.I blame the media more than the activists, really. It is hard to keep perspective in such a dizzying topic, but then again, isn't this article rather dogmatically claiming that a spectrum of acceptable positions doesn't even exist, and yet again the writer is the only one who can pick out the Safe Spot?? Sounds like a copout to me.
[.....]
The immorality of the center is that this middle path has helped create a deathly silence about the destruction of lives and property that goes on every day in the occupied territories. Because they refuse to see realities on the ground, centrists cannot even imagine the scale of the oppression that Palestinians face at Israel's hands. They cannot imagine the grotesque miscarriage of justice represented by taking a middle position between the oppressor and the oppressed. The checkpoints, the roadblocks, the sniper shootings, the aerial bombardments, the assassinations, the settlements and Israeli-only bypass roads, the land confiscations, the bulldozing of olive groves, the demolition of homes and entire residential neighborhoods, the foul labyrinth of walls and fences that have imprisoned entire Palestinian villages, halted all movement, separated farmers from farmland, children from schools, the sick from hospitals, brothers from brothers: all of these separate aspects of Israel's oppressive system, and the magnitude of their totality, have escaped the rosy view of those who only follow a middle way. Their silence and averted gaze grease the wheels of oppression and are in no way balanced by the occasional suicide bombing.Their silence clears the way for ever greater Israeli violence, making it easier for Israel to swallow more of Palestine while the world looks elsewhere. Certainly the centrists are not alone responsible for enabling continued Israeli oppression; they are themselves fighting a valiant uphill struggle against vocal mainstream pro-Israeli sentiment on the near right and the far right, among Jewish organizations, Christian fundamentalists, the media, and politicians of both major parties. But the peace movement represents a substantial minority voice that could have a major place in public discourse if only it would speak out against oppression. Its determination merely to be a voice of sweetness and light, rarely criticizing, always accentuating the positive, severely diminishes its own impact and allows Israel to be wanton while the rest of the world is silent.
[....]
Public discourse in general, and many in the vocal pro-Israel community in particular, are tuning in to the public relations benefits of appearing balanced and open to the Palestinians. The rightwing pro-Israel advocacy group The Israel Project, led by Republican consultants Frank Luntz and Jennifer Lazlo Mizrahi, has recently been holding seminars to train activists in how to get the Israeli message across most effectively and is emphasizing the importance of being optimistic and not demonizing the Palestinians. It's hard to distinguish this kind of false, deliberately deceptive appearance of "balance" from the balance advocated by the centrists of the peace movement, and in terms of how the situation on the ground plays out, there is no difference. As it works out in actuality, neutrality is an endorsement, at least implicit and often explicit, of all Israel's policies; it results in a virtually total obliviousness to how those policies affect Palestinians, their daily lives, and their national prospects. Centrist peace activists have helped make this possible.
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.
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.
I was thinking about going to a camp near International Falls today, but I said I wouldn't if the weather looked terrible. Well, it does. There are tornadoes and crazy warnings all south of us, while the atmosphere has less energy and more slow moisture here.
These summer storms come zooming over us, and their power comes from the intensity of the summer heat--and how it picks up moisture. It's quite fitting that there's a movie about global warming and climate shifts, as the west dries up and the sun makes storms and tornadoes.
What is a pressure point of this global warming? Where are its effects felt the most heavily? Places in the desert that lack air conditioning. So global warming impacts Bush's policy in Iraq too.
Alison gets a lot of flack from people for the gas prices at SA. She is the last domino in a global chain of violence, market anxiety and schemery that stretches all the way to the top of the White House. Energy waves come right to the corner.
Bush is talking again tonight. Will he declare anything about Chalabi? Will he say anything about oil? Or is it just another one of those pop out of the shell for a moment, vanish, kind of things. There was a report in the NY Times today about how furious congressional Republicans are that they can't get the man's attention. If that's how their people in Congress are treated, who the hell is running this operation?
Yeah, it's the failure of a presidency before our very eyes, the rolling energy of all the horrible things he's done—all the failures to handle reality—jeopardizes the whole world. Yet that administration has christened itself. Literally, they map the situation onto theocratic ideas. Rick Perlstein reveals that they are synchronized with apocalyptic Christians in their mideast policy, in a sense. In the Village Voice:
The e-mailed meeting summary reveals NSC Near East and North African Affairs director Elliott Abrams sitting down with the Apostolic Congress and massaging their theological concerns. Claiming to be "the Christian Voice in the Nation's Capital," the members vociferously oppose the idea of a Palestinian state. They fear an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza might enable just that, and they object on the grounds that all of Old Testament Israel belongs to the Jews. Until Israel is intact and Solomon's temple rebuilt, they believe, Christ won't come back to earth.Abrams attempted to assuage their concerns by stating that "the Gaza Strip had no significant Biblical influence such as Joseph's tomb or Rachel's tomb and therefore is a piece of land that can be sacrificed for the cause of peace."
Three weeks after the confab, President George W. Bush reversed long-standing U.S. policy, endorsing Israeli sovereignty over parts of the West Bank in exchange for Israel's disengagement from the Gaza Strip.
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When Pastor Upton was asked to explain why the group's website describes the Apostolic Congress as "the Christian Voice in the nation's capital," instead of simply a Christian voice in the nation's capital, he responded, "There has been a real lack of leadership in having someone emerge as a Christian voice, someone who doesn't speak for the right, someone who doesn't speak for the left, but someone who speaks for the people, and someone who speaks from a theocratical perspective."When his words were repeated back to him to make sure he had said a "theocratical" perspective, not a "theological" perspective, he said, "Exactly. Exactly. We want to know what God would have us say or what God would have us do in every issue."
I don't know if the real world is reaching these people, or what. I don't know if they even perceive those who are dying, on all sides. What's the purpose?
Maybe Bush will announce the resignations of Douglas Feith and Rummy!!! I think he'll have to lay someone out tonight. These guys have stacked up their self-important authority so high, any fired political appointees would bring about the collapse of their whole legitimacy.
Yet they are whole, and their legitimacy has already collapsed rapidly. Where are the cracks going to come out? And what gets poured into all the policy? Religious fanaticism? Talk of "the enemy" and "terrorist clerics"? When does it end?
They've all got guns, Mr Secretary. Thanks for giving Chalabi and Iranian intelligence all of Saddam's secret files. Nice move in the war on Evil.
Its a horrible place to be for those young soldiers, and its going to get hot as the burned oil has become carbon dioxide trapping more thermal energy, where it joins the hot dust and burned substances, all heating the place, with no plan...
The former commanding general of Centcom, Mr Zinni, called it Niagara Falls. The energy waves rise and fall, dollars, gallons, bombs...
What do you do now? What can you do? Tell us, oh great secreted President, shaky and irritable.
Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, has been pegged as a possible leaker of the name of CIA operative Valerie Plame to a syndicated columnist, according to accounts in a book by former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, Plame's husband.I knew it. Libby Libby Libby!In "The Politics of Truth," to be published Friday, Wilson says Libby is "quite possibly the person who exposed my wife's identity," according to The Washington Post, which obtained an early copy.
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"The other name that has most often been repeated to me in connection with the inquiry and disclosure into my background and Valerie's is that of Elliott Abrams, who gained infamy in the Iran-Contra scandal," he writes.Another suspect named in Wilson's book: White House chief political adviser Karl Rove. "The workup on me that turned up the information on Valerie was shared with Karl Rove, who then circulated it in administration and neoconservative circles," Wilson writes.
Somewhere in Washington is the Congressional Research Service. Somehow they have produced something of great awe and mystery, just in the nick of time. It is perhaps the best (only?) study of the structure of the Coalition Provisional Authority produced by the federal government. The study cannot determine if the CPA is part of the DoD, because apparently it isn't a government agency. Also the CPA essentially has to contract out its contracting in the outlying areas, because it can't manage the process... There is direct evidence of Ahmed Chalabi's cronies getting plum contracts that later failed to adequately train the Iraqi police force.
Also note closely the description of how the Secretary of Defense can control administrative functions at all levels of the CPA, but the money pots are never clear (and apparently these people can sit in Mesopotamia for a year without spending a damned dime on irrigation projects)
The Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA): Origin, Characteristics, and Institutional Authorities" by L. Elaine Halchin, Congressional Research Service, April 29, 2004.
Enter this one under 'primary sources.' Wow. Credit where credit is due to the Federation of American Scientists and their Project on Government Secrecy!
Establishment of CPADetailed information that explicitly and clearly identifies how the authority was established, and by whom, is not readily available. Instead, there are two alternative explanations for how it was established: one version suggests that the President established CPA; the other suggests that it was established pursuant to a United Nations (U.N.) Security Council resolution. While these possibilities are not mutually exclusive, the lack of a clear, authoritative, and unambiguous statement about how this organization was established and its status (that is, is it a federal agency or not) leaves open many questions, particularly regarding the area of oversight and accountability....
....According to this excerpt, the authority is an entity of the federal government. Nonetheless, questions remain regarding how CPA was established, who established it, the precise nature of its relationship to DOD (including DOD components) and other federal entities, and whether CPA is a federal agency or some other type of government organization. Another unanswered question concerns the scope of CPA’s authority when functioning in its capacity as an entity of the U.S. government. Information provided by CPA itself indicates that its sector program management offices (SPMOs) are part of the federal government. (The CPA’s PMO is supported by six SPMOs.) In a written response to a question asked at a January 21, 2004, pre-proposal conference on contracting opportunities, the CPA stated that “the Sector Program Management Office (SPMO) is a Government entity.”
.....Lending support to the notion that the authority is not a federal agency, but instead is an amorphous international organization, are statements by the Department of the Army. In 2003, two protests were filed with the General Accounting Office (GAO) by Turkcell Consortium, which challenged CPA’s issuance of licenses for mobile telecommunications services in Iraq. GAO dismissed both protests without having to rule on the status of CPA.Given that P.L. 108-106 and other government documents state that CPA is a U.S. government entity, the Army’s response raises questions. Arguably, the Army was concerned that some would assume, precisely because of references to the authority as a government entity, that CPA is a federal agency. Another possibility is that the Army, as the executive agent for the authority (discussed below), has assumed responsibility for certain procurement activities and tasks, such as responding to protests, and thus argued strongly for excluding CPA from the GAO protest process.
Legislative language might contribute to questions about the status of the authority. The FY2004 emergency supplemental refers to CPA as “an entity of the United States Government.” 38 In the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2004, Section 1203(b)(1) mentions “civilian groups reporting to the Secretary [of Defense], including” ORHA and CPA. 39 Section 1203(b)(3) refers to the “relationship of Department of Defense entities, including” ORHA and CPA. 40 The House report accompanying H.R. 1588 (P.L. 108-136), the National Defense Authorization Act for FY2004, in its comments on the section that became Section 1203, mentioned “Department of Defense (DOD) civilian and military activities in post-conflict Iraq.” Eschewing the word “agency” in favor of “entity,” “group,” and “activities” in legislation and congressional documents could be a reflection of the Administration’s approach, an acknowledgment that CPA’s status is uncertain, or a sign that Congress agrees that CPA is not an agency.
The following description of a DOD executive agent indicates that executive agents are assigned responsibility for DOD missions, activities, or tasks:
The Head of a DoD Component to whom the Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense has assigned specific responsibilities, functions, and authorities to provide defined levels of support for operational missions, or administrative or other designated activities that involve two or more of the DoD Components. The nature and scope of the DoD Executive Agents responsibilities, functions, and authorities shall ... be prescribed at the time of assignment [and] ... remain in effect until the Secretary of Defense or the Deputy Secretary of Defense revokes or suspends them. 54This definition would arguably cast CPA as a DOD component. A broad interpretation, though, might allow the Secretary, or Deputy Secretary, to appoint an executive agent for a non-DOD entity or even a non-governmental entity.
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Another possible reason why CPA is limited to monitoring contracts may be that government officials ascertained that the authority does not have enough personnel, or enough personnel with sufficient experience in the types of work to be done in Iraq, to develop solicitations and evaluate proposals for seven major sectors, the PMO, and the SPMOs. The fact that CPA needs contractor support for its PMO and SPMOs tends to support the notion that it does not have enough resources to perform all of the necessary procurement tasks.
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CPA’s award of a contract to Nour USA to equip the Iraqi armed forces and the Iraqi civil defense corps also has been the subject of protests.... In a press release dated January 31, 2004, CPA announced that it had awarded a contract for $327 million to Nour USA.In mid-February, it was reported that two companies, Cemex Global Inc. and Bumar Group, had filed separate protests, which were combined by GAO into one protest, challenging the awarding of this contract to Nour USA. Among their concerns were (1) the relatively low cost of the Nour USA proposal, which was $231 million lower than the Bumar Group’s proposal; (2) the fact that Nour’s president is A. Huda Faouki, who allegedly is a friend of Ahmad Chalabi, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council; and (3) the belief that Nour USA, which apparently was established in May 2003, has no experience in performing the work necessary to fulfill the terms of the contract.
Perhaps this ambiguity allows the authority to perform multiple roles, each with its own chain of command, stakeholders or constituents, funding, and accountability policies and mechanisms. A statement in the FY2004 emergency supplemental — “in its [CPA] capacity as an entity of the United State government” — suggests that U.S. government entity is only one of CPA’s roles. Other roles might include temporarily aiding in the governing of Iraq and serving as part of a coalition. Possibly, the mix of arrangements allows CPA to operate with greater discretion and more authority, and have access to more resources than if it was solely a federal agency, or an arm of the United Nations. 109 CPA personnel also might be able to work more efficiently and effectively under this mix. By operating under more than one set of laws, regulations, and policies, CPA possibly could expand the scope and reach of the organization’s authority beyond what it would be otherwise......There's shell games and shell games.... I look at it this way: they stole their website from the Brookings Institution, and that's about all that needs to be said.Potential drawbacks of this arrangement are that the lines of authority and accountability could become tangled, or even obscured. CPA personnel possibly could find it difficult to understand and delineate clearly — on a daily basis — the organization’s different roles and associated funds, laws, and rules. Personnel might be hampered by this tangle of resources, laws, and documents, and could find themselves engaging in questionable, if not unethical or criminal, activities. This scenario also could prove challenging for organizations that are attempting to monitor CPA and its activities. When the authority makes a decision or expends funds, it might not be clear to external parties under what authority it is acting. Without transparency, the CPA might give the appearance of shifting funds, personnel, and tasks among different roles. Further compounding the problem, oversight initiatives might be met with the response that the activity in question was carried out under an authority over which the oversight body — Congress — has no jurisdiction.
I am really getting into term paper time here, so it's quite difficult to write a whole lot. However, I would suggest that you spend a while looking at Raed in the Middle. He has some great ideas about how to drive Iraqi reconstruction, but as a Palestinian living in Iraq he has a peculiar sense of how horrible things are becoming in Iraq and Palestine. His friend also went to Fallujah and wrote about it.
In class today some students proposed an Iraqi confederation and wouldn't you know it, here's a proposal to do just that.
Here is an old article that Raed's brother wrote about Chalabi's militia, the supposed "Free Iraqi Forces."
This is kind of cool: "Another day in the Empire: Life in Neoconservative America" by Kurt Nimmo.
Empire Notes is back in Austin, TX, rounding up what happened to him in Iraq.
Alliances are shifting dramatically. Is soft power evaporating?
Check out this sweet satirical Halliburton poster.
For the mercenary file a slightly hyperbolic piece on "the rising corporate military monster" from CounterPunch. That is what I have to go read about right now, thank you very much.
One presentation due Wednesday, one term paper draft due Friday, two papers due Monday. Here we go!
There's been a hella lotta news over the past couple days. However, Saturday is Springfest, and I fully intend to immerse myself in the music, because I haven't been keeping tabs on pop culture as well as I should be. I don't want to think about all the damn news for a little while. So let this summary suffice for Saturday; there's plenty of interesting things to look at, radical and more conservative.
Remind us why the war happened. This animation has some rather jarring imagery but nonetheless it's worth looking at. A tacky style or propaganda of the 21st century?
UN Iraq man Lakhdar Brahimi condemns Israel's policies, generating conflict with the Israelis and surely making the Pentagon a happy bunch of fellas, reports BBC.
CS Monitor reporter on the deterioration in Iraq and how it has made journalists increasingly unable to wander about the country:
The United Nations envoy to Iraq has sparked a row after describing Israeli policy towards the Palestinians as "the big poison in the region". Lakhdar Brahimi told French radio there was a link between Israeli actions and the recent upsurge of violence in Iraq. He said that the handover of power in Iraq was being complicated by Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza.UN Secretary General Kofi Annan's spokesman has reportedly described the comments as "unacceptable".
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Mr Brahimi said his job was made more difficult by Israel's "violent and repressive security policy" and its "determination to occupy more and more Palestinian territory". He added that people's perception in the region was of the "injustice" of Israeli policy compounded by the "thoughtless support" of the US.The UN secretary general's spokesman, Fred Eckhard, told Israeli radio it was not acceptable for senior UN officials to make such comments about a member nation.
In essence, I feel we've become boiled frogs. Toss the frog into boiling water, and he jumps right out again, or at least tries. But put him in lukewarm water and slowly turns up the heat and he barely notices until he's cooked. Rather than overestimate the problems (a common journalistic temptation), I've begun to wonder if we're not understating them, notwithstanding the letters from readers who accuse our paper, and many others, of being Chicken Littles.Phil Carter of Intel Dump has an insightful article on Slate about how the Iraq invasion has basically paralyzed the ability of the US military to respond to things elsewhere, crunching logistics and all that. He's a more conservative guy but he knows his stuff really well.To be sure, in a wartime environment like Iraq's there is rarely a constant arc of progress, or descent into chaos. Violence ebbs and flows, incidents flare and then almost inexplicably, vanish. This froggy is leaving on a reporting trip outside Baghdad today - the first trip out of the city in more than a week. It feels safer again.
I wanted to throw in some things from CounterPunch: this April 10 piece by Robert Fisk describing how the Bush administration attacks its critics on Iraq, this jolly rambling report on 'Pseudoconservatives' by an anonymous defense analyst. Rahul Mahajan is a very intrepid journalist that I've mentioned recently, having written this piece on a visit to Fallujah and also writing the very interesting Empire Notes from Baghdad. Also Tariq Ali weighs in with his New Leftist sort of thing on "The Iraqi Resistance: a new phase." What seems to be his key point:
Its no use for Westerners to shed hypocritical tears for Iraq or to complain that the Iraqi resistance does not meet the high stands of Western liberalism. Which resistance ever does?Then there is Fisk again on the Bush-Sharon plan, "Bush Legitimizes Terrorism." The piece is a tad overwrought, but I can only imagine how bitter someone like him would be having seen the middle east burn itself to bits for decades, never even thinking that it would come to this today. On the front page today is a humorous "Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation" by Paul de Rooij.When an Occupation is ugly, the resistance cannot be beautiful, except in a Hollywood movie or an Italian comedy.
Here are the now-famous photos of deceased American soldiers returning to Dover Air Force Base (on a fast mirror). These pictures are the rather explicit negation of a finely tuned, decade long Cheney policy to remove critical images of the reality of American warfare from the array of visual images that the public can actually see. In other words, their strategy was to prevent you from seeing these pictures. Now you can and should look at them to understand more fully the situation.
Mr Marshall is following a couple interesting developments. Firstly he says that plans to invade the southern Iraqi oilfields were ordered at the same time in the same document as the plans to invade Afghanistan in late 2001. Hot damn, cause and effect! He is also following the upcoming changes in the Iraqi government, and the apparent distancing of Ahmed Chalabi from the reins of power, both within Iraq and the ludicrous perks accorded to him by the U.S., such as his enormous personal stash of incriminating Baathist documents that by all rights should belong to the Iraqi people, not a lying, intel spoofing embezzler.
The topic is the new Iraqi government now being planned and organized jointly by the US and the UN and the fact that the decision has been made to toss overboard most if not all of the folks we put on the Interim Governing Council. At the top of the list of those to get the heave-ho is Ahmed Chalabi.According to the article, the administration is seriously considering cutting off the amazingly ill-conceived $340,000 a month subsidy we still give Chalabi. Meanwhile, his role as head of the de-Baathification committee has just been publicly criticized by Paul Bremer.
David Corn has some reactions on the administration shifting Afghanistan money getting to possibly illegal Iraq war preparations.
The Hawkington Times says that "US sees Syria 'facilitating' insurgents." Oh well.
One conservative columnist in the Chicago Tribune flames Bush to a crisp over the war. I strongly think this is worth checking out, as it is not the new leftist claptrap of Counterpunch! :) Since no one wants to register for the Tribune, why not read it on the Agonist message boards?
They repeatedly tell us, in only slightly different ways, that this leadership group--or, better said, "court"--is one of "irregulars." At every opportunity, they went around our official government, around our institutions, and likely enough around the law. Across their history from the 1970s until today, this Bush neo-conservative group, backed by elements of the radical right and American supporters of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, created alternate power centers to bypass traditional American ones. In short, they are true radicals. Think "Robespierre."Bob Woodward writes in "Plan of Attack," for instance, how Douglas Feith, one of the most radical of the Bush-Rumsfeld courtiers, lobbied for the special intelligence planning board within the Pentagon to bypass traditional intelligence that warned against going to war in Iraq. This fact is widely known, but Woodward importantly explains: "It was a different way of doing things, first because the planners would be the implementers"--they would become the "expeditionary force" within Iraq after the war. Definitely not kosher!
There is a huge feature on the public radio series Marketplace about the Spoils of War, the reconstruction cash money millionaires and all that. You can listen online, and it will certainly go in the Mercenary File as well. Speaking of mercenaries here is a feature on them from earlier in the month.
It sounds like one of the high-ranking neoconservatives is very angry with how badly the occupation was planned. He wrote a report to the CPA that was published anonymously today. According to the DKos, rumor has it that it's Micahel Rubin, an Office of Special Plans and American Enterprise Institute schemer.
The report ominously warns of civil war and points out that the setup which allowed the Governing Council to appoint ministers has led to a lot of nepotism, patronage and self-dealing, exacerbating the problem of how to manage the estimated 30 militias roaming the country. This report is very sobering since it comes from deep within the machine...
Via the Agonist some nice news bits about the terrifying road to Basra. Also a good roundup from Winds of Change about Central Asia. My favorite was this hilarious piece from Something Awful making fun of the batty dictator of Turkmenistan. Speaking of the Agonist, its main editor Sean Paul Kelley is something of an expert on Central Asia and the Caucasus region and he had an interesting report on the continuing confrontation between the US and Russia inside Georgia. Also the WindsOfChange writeup cites a report from Sgt Hook blogging in Afghanistan, where his tent city has been replaced with a hut city, much to the pleasure of our increasingly obscured soldiers there.
Bob Woodward is writing WaPo pieces extracted from his new book.
Robert Dreyfuss is a Washington journalist who's done a lot of good work exposing neo-con machinations and all that, and he now writes on TomPaine.com regularly so I would suggest you check it out.
I got up early this morning to watch the Sunday talk shows, starting with Kerry on Meet the Press and Rice on several shows. Turned out to just be a lot of talk. McLaughlin Group was all right, they played a little clip of Prof. Khalidi. However, as usual hours of network TV teach us little or nothing. Wolf Blitzer somehow forgot to ask Ehud Olmert about the settlements.
60 Minutes featuring Bob Woodward's critical new book on the drive for war is going to be published this week, and already the stuff in there about Powell is quite stunning.
This weekend I saw the new phase of the Israeli-American hegemon begin to coalesce in all its oily glory. Rita Cosby on FoxNews says that "we" took out Hamas' operational leader Rantissi, and MSNBC's Abrams' Report editorialized about how unfair it is when people say that U.S. troops--and Israeli troops--are intentionally harming civilians when they are merely going after The Terrorists.
They are trying to merge the Terror Threat into one unitary force, with us and the settlers as one spunky crew of do-gooders. It seems that Richard Perle still has some persuasive influence.
All these God damned retired military officers appearing constantly on TV scare the hell out of me... the body count is all they care about. It's appalling.
I have to run now, but please enjoy this roundup on the no-strategy strategy on Iraq, Woodward's new book and the continuing fallout from Washington's merger with Jerusalem. Also some shocking quotes on Iraq... from Timothy McVeigh?
If the invasion was an integral part of the war that began Sept. 11, then Bush will generate public support for it. The problem that Bush has -- and it showed itself vividly in his press conference -- is that he and the rest of his administration are simply unable to embed Iraq in the general strategy of the broader war. Bush asserts that it is part of that war, but then uses the specific justification of bringing democracy to Iraq as his rationale. Unless you want to argue that democratizing Iraq -- assuming that is possible -- has strategic implications more significant than democratizing other countries, the explanation doesn't work. The explanation that does work -- that the invasion of Iraq was a stepping-stone toward changes in behavior in other countries of the region -- is never given.--Stratfor (this URL will cease to work soon)We therefore wind up with an explanation that is only superficially plausible, and a price that appears to be excessive, given the stated goal. The president and his administration do not seem willing to provide a coherent explanation of the strategy behind the Iraq campaign. What was the United States hoping to achieve when it invaded Iraq, and what is it defending now? There are good answers to these questions, but Bush stays with platitudes.
This is not only odd, but also it has substantial political implications for Bush and the United States. First, by providing no coherent answer, he leaves himself open to critics who are ascribing motives to his policy -- everything from controlling the world's oil supply, to the familial passion to destroy Saddam Hussein, to a Jewish world conspiracy. The Bush administration, having created an intellectual vacuum, can't complain when others, trying to understand what the administration is doing, gin up these theories. The administration has asked for it.
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The problem that Bush has created is that there is no conceptual framework in which to understand these maneuvers. Building democracy in Iraq is not really compatible with the deals that are going to have to be cut. It is not that cutting deals is a bad idea. It is not that the current crisis cannot be overcome with a combination of political and military action. The problem is that no one will know how the United States is doing, because it has not defined a conceptual framework for what it is trying to accomplish in Iraq -- or how Iraq fits into the war on the jihadists.
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Obviously, the administration has a strategy in Iraq and the Islamic world. It is a strategy that is discussed inside the administration and is clearly visible outside. Obviously, there will be military and political reversals. The strategy and the reversals are far more understandable than the decisions the Bush administration has made in presenting them. It has adopted a two-tier policy: a complex and nearly hidden strategic plan and a superficial public presentation.
A report on the Agonist about how the new American stance on Israel and the occupation will harm efforts to stabilize Iraq: "Optional Pain: Into the abyss." According to this piece, the ceasefire in Najaf will not hold, and this week finally generated for Arabs the "linkage" between the U.S. and Israel.
Prof Juan Cole has a new piece on Salon.com, "Turning into Israel?" which everyone should read. Just sit through the Salon ad like a good child.
Neoconservatives, many of them ardent defenders of Israel with strong ties to the Likud, were among the chief intellectual architects of the war on Iraq. The American neoconservative linkage between Iraq and the Likud was first revealed in a position paper, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," written by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and other neoconservatives for incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. They advocated an Iraq war, the destruction of the Oslo peace process, the refusal ever to return territories occupied by Israel in 1967, and using a conquered Iraq as a means of pacifying the Lebanese Hezbollah.Thank you, sir.At the time, such positions were regarded as wildly radical: Today they have become U.S. policy. ....
The siege of Fallujah made the American military look to many Iraqis and Arabs as though it were imitating the tactics of the Israeli military, which had long launched punitive raids into Gaza (and before that Beirut) and targeted places like civilian apartment buildings and crowded streets with bombs and missiles from jets and helicopter gunships..... The upshot: In many minds, there are now two major occupations of Arab land by outside powers, the West Bank and Iraq. This perception is a very dangerous development for Americans seeking legitimacy in Iraq and the Muslim world.The massive U.S. assault on Fallujah created a situation in which political forces not on very good terms with one another put aside their differences to unite against the U.S. Palestinians and Iraqis tend to differ about whether the U.S. removal of Saddam Hussein from power was a good thing. Almost all Iraqis agree that it was. But both concur that Israeli occupation and punitive measures toward Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank are wrong.
Likewise, radical Sunnis and radical Shiites do not for the most part like each other very much. But they were capable of joining together to send tens of relief trucks in a convoy to aid Fallujah. This forging of new bonds among forces that reject both the now-formalized process of annexation by Israel of Palestinian territory and the continued U.S. occupation of Iraq signals that the U.S. is losing the battle for hearts and minds. Once such attitudes harden, they are extremely difficult to overturn. Fallujah may be one of those historical turning points, where the stronger power wins militarily but loses all legitimacy in the eyes of those for whom it is supposedly fighting.
It's rough in Husaybah, the last Iraqi city on the Euphrates before the Syrian border. Apparently several marines were just killed this weekend there.
Rumor has it that a Kurdish splinter group is going off to fight the Turks. Watch out for KONGRA-GEL... acronym of doom.
Spain is getting the hell out now that Aznar is gone. Bad things going to happen with the Brits in Basra? An Army think tank condemns 'war on the cheap.' Nice to know that the institutional gears are grinding.
Here is a real weird shocker: there's a new book out about Timothy McVeigh, including a number of statements from our most well-known domestic terrorist. It seems that during his service in the first Gulf War, he was deeply troubled by having killed an Iraqi from 19 football fields away:
McVeigh received a medal for his deed, but "the would-be Rambo was emotionally torn about what he had done ... as he reflected on his actions, McVeigh found that his first taste of killing left him angry and uncomfortable. The carnage and sadness he saw in the hundred-hour war left him with a feeling of sorrow for the Iraqis." It was too easy: McVeigh, who according to the authors always hated bullies, felt like one himself. In an extraordinary quote, he says, "'What made me feel bad was, number one, I didn't kill them in self-defense. When I took a human life, it taught me these were human beings, even though they speak a different language and have different customs. The truth is, we all have the same dreams, the same desires, the same care for our children and our family. These people were humans, like me, at the core.'"This is a textbook example of FOXNewspeak, "Palestinian Homicide Attack Wounds Four" at "an industrial zone between Israel and Gaza," whatever limbo space that might be. (Erez is in fact located inside Gaza; my point is that their terminology is warped)It's not easy to know what to make of this quote, which sounds like it could have been uttered by "All Quiet on the Western Front" author Erich Maria Remarque. How could the man who claims to feel no remorse after killing 168 people, including many children, suffer such conscience pangs over the killing of two enemy soldiers? But his feelings become more comprehensible when we consider that McVeigh had grave doubts about the war in the first place, because Iraq was not directly threatening the U.S. and because he was serving as part of a U.N. force "that, he feared, was eventually planning to take over the world." In any case, if we assume his statement is sincere, it becomes more difficult to picture him as an unfeeling sociopath.
EJ Dionne in the WaPo attacks the administration for multiplying radical theories atop each other in the invasion of Iraq, citing a new book Rick Atkinson's "In the Company of Soldiers" on the 101st Airborne:
...Our troops and Iraq confronted looting and chaos. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rick Atkinson's fine new book about the 101st Airborne Division in Iraq, "In the Company of Soldiers," picks up the story. Atkinson contrasts Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus surveying "a great river of loot" with Rumsfeld's denial of the reality on the ground. The television images, Rumsfeld said, were of "the same picture of some person walking out of some building with a vase."Bob Woodward is releasing a new book wherein he basically acts as an anguished Colin Powell's mouthpiece, adding further to the tumult in Washington. Woodward says that "Top administration officials barely speak to each other" now that the acrimony has reached this level, further evidence that Washington is a house divided against itself, bucking and swaying wildly... The WaPo broke some nice quotes from it yesterday although it was this exclusive AP story that broke it open.Atkinson writes: "The Pentagon press corps laughed, but Rumsfeld's remark was inane. . . . Too little thought had been given, by the Army or anyone else in the Defense Department, to securing Iraq, except for oil fields and the WMD depots, which would prove nonexistent. . . . The military had barely enough troops to wage war, much less to simultaneously put a country bigger than Montana into protective custody."
So Bush pursued one radical theory about planting democracy in Iraq and doubled our nation's bet by pursuing another radical theory that underestimated the number of troops we needed to create the order essential for democracy.
Maureen Dowd remarks on what Powell actually told Bush about taking over Iraq, 'the house of broken toys.'David Brooks finally admits that he was wrong, but he'll be proven right in 20 years. Ok then...
Marines abandon cultural sensitivity training in Fallujah. I thought the bit about "Sniper Bob" at the end was interesting.
The full text of Brahimi's plan for Iraq, and Prof Cole's view on it.
The shockwaves of Bush's declaration for the settlements continues to radiate. Egypt's president claims to be "shocked," as if he didn't see this one coming. Not surprisingly, a writer in Lebanon's Daily Star sees it as election-year pandering to fundamentalists.
"This statement secures for Bush the support of both Jewish electors and of hard core evangelical Christians," he said. But the real winner in the matter, according to him, is Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon because he will be able to make use of that position in his own favor by both appealing to the Likud Party and continuing in the construction of the controversial separation fence.Australians grumbling about the whole damn thing, as is Marwan Bishara, who if memory serves used to be in the Israeli Knesset."This position is the first American position of its kind in decades and its first beneficiary is Sharon," he said. He added that international observers were linking the developments in Palestine to those in Iraq, in that both were seen as an example of US-Israeli hegemony over the region.
Josh Marshall says in for a dime, in for a dollar with the Likud:
I think it's clear that Israel will never allow a right of return for the descendents of anyone who lived within Israel's current border before 1948, having the US rule it out altogether simply makes us the enforcer of the policies not just of Israel but of this particular Israeli government.And that brings us one step closer to the complete identity of viewpoints, interests and policies between the United States and Israel, which is really not a good thing for either Israel or the United States -- particularly not when this Israeli government is in power.
Wednesday was a very strange one. I am not sure what to make of all that's happened.
What does it mean to have a man at the helm who knows he's made mistakes, but can't recall what they are?
Where do we go from here? How will the world react to Bush and Sharon's joint declaration?
If it's now US policy to support these things, are the settlers and the White House coordinating? How is Washington-- the Pentagon and the White House, I suppose-- gauging the 'realities on the ground?' Who gets free reign to manipulate the realities?
"Bush rips up the road map" reports the Guardian today. On Tuesday, "Sharon vows to keep control of major West Bank settlements" they reported.
The rumors are getting around now that the horrible John Negroponte will be appointed to succeed Paul Bremer in the Sovereign Iraq. That man's hands are bloody from Central America, the horror of this man ruling American policy in Iraq with all these mercenaries around is too much...
Haaretz analysis on Bush's statements.
I respect Rabbi Michael Lerner writing in the Nation (and online) about the terrible synchronicities of both occupations. Lerner is among the Jewish peace movement struggling to challenge the occupation of Palestinian land. This piece is a little more radical dissention from Zionism, also the Nation.
"Saravejo on the Euphrates." Another Nation article about the wreckage of Fallujah.
I think everyone should read what Billmon wrote on the Bush-Sharon agreement today. It is a dead on expression on what we've thrown away, and what terrible risks are being gained by the moment.
Cheney's paycheck from Halliburton in 2003 was only $20,000 less than his White House paycheck.
Rep. Waxman watching the reconstruction contracts in Iraq. Good info here...
Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek: "Our Last Real Chance" featuring "The Politics of Rage: Why do They Hate Us?"
More about the devious Ahmed Chalabi from the Agonist.
What weakness, what confusion...
'Corpses lying in streets of Fallujah'
THE OTHER WAR by SEYMOUR M. HERSH: Why Bush’s Afghanistan problem won’t go away.
U.S. Workers, Lured by Money and Idealism, Face Iraqi Reality
Mr. Bush's Press Conference: The New York Times Op Ed page:
The United States has experienced so many crises since Mr. Bush took office that it sometimes feels as if the nation has embarked on one very long and painful learning curve in which every accepted truism becomes a doubt, every expectation a question mark. Only Mr. Bush somehow seems to have avoided any doubt, any change.
It has come.
Bush May Accept West Bank Plan
Sharon to ask Bush to reject any right of return
Obligatory (via Billmon)
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946
Can't keep my eyes from the circling sky / tongue tied and twisted / an earthbound misfit
--Pink Floyd "Learning to Fly" on "A Momentary Lapse of Reason"
Drawing later on a line he often slips into his campaign speeches, he reminded a global audience that "freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom."
New York Times -- April 14, 2003
He said to them, "Not yours is it to know times or eras which the Father placed in His own jurisdiction.
But you shall be obtaining power at the coming of the holy spirit on you, and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem and in entire Judea and Samaria, as far as the limits of the earth."
--So Spake The Jesus, Acts 1:7-8 (Concordant Bible).
Bush is set to meet with Ariel Sharon at the White House tomorrow during a very climactic moment. It is encouraging, I suppose, that he's offering to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, much to the fury of the settlers and Israeli right-wing parties within the government. It's nice to actually see settlers forced to protest. (The Guardian adds the context so ominously lacking in American media)
We can't underestimate the importance of the effect of Sharon's Gaza gambit on the West Bank's future. Sharon seeks nothing less than leveraging America's power to permanently secure the vast majority of the settlements, along with the seized and fenced land around them, representing somewhere between 40 to 60% of the West Bank.
On this topic, President Bush's motives have always seemed very shadowy. In his time, Poppa Bush strongly believed in checking Israel's land grab, leading to quite a bit of friction between him and the Israelis. No doubt this stemmed from his realpolitik outlook, as well as an oil-man's firm goal of maintaining decent relations with the Arab world.
So is Bush just another Christian fundamentalist, blithely unconcerned, or even pleased, that Jewish settlers are displacing Arabs and slicing up the land? I tend not to think so. In his addled life, Bush has been treated to a spectacular spiritual education from Billy Graham and the other southern Christians, but I think that Graham does not teach the sons of rulers the same sort of pap his media empire propagates. To control fundamentalists and secure their loyalty, you can't think along the same lines they do. All along Graham whispers to Bush the key slogans needed to bring them into line while the outward operation levels their minds.
I saw Graham's creepy daughter Anne Graham Lotz pimping her new fundie book, "Why?" on Hannity & Colmes and other Fox outlets for the Easter season. Besides her disturbing wrenched-facelift appearance, I was struck by her final statement that the Sept. 11 hijacking plot was essentially birthed in hell, and furthermore that those causing all the trouble in the streets of Iraq that day didn't worship the same God "as us." Both of these statements strike me as heretical and dangerous to the Christian faith, because they elevate Sept. 11 from the mundane to the spiritual or eschatological plane of existence. They reinforce Bush's false and anti-Christian notions of ultimate good, accessible at the Pentagon, pitted against ultimate evil lurking in the Arab shadows. These ideas are designed to compel Christians to throw everything away and march mindlessly to the end of the world and the All-Consuming Battle of Good and Evil.
Ultimately Lotz's declarations are heretical for the very reason that Jesus laid out: Not yours is it to know times or eras which the Father placed in His own jurisdiction. Planes flying into buildings are not the ultimate harbingers of spiritual collapse, unless we permit them to be.
If Bush has been huddled this whole Easter vacation praying at the ranch as Iraq goes up in flames, that would concern me more. And I suspect he probably has.
What kind of God resides in the infinite space between his two temples? What loosed fears and imagined demons nip at his eye sockets when he stumbles through another unnerving press conference?
The wild theories about how Leo Strauss encouraged his followers to strike a pose of prophetic piety while cynically claiming divine inspiration come to mind when consider the attitude taken by the Moralizing Mega Leaders around him. The idea that the nihilistic real leaders would lead along the naïve religious "gentlemen" of society fits over today's situation too well. But it's paranoid. Is Bush the top gentleman or the nihilist leading the other gentlemen?
Why have Israel and the West Bank become so crucial? Why does Bush go through all these hoops to protect, extend and underwrite Israel's policies? It still doesn't add up, and it probably won't until the dust settles. And the dust won't settle until the "final status agreement," so in the meantime young and confused people like me speculate endlessly.
I will add the obvious facts: support for the Israeli settlement project is close to a political freebie for right-wingers scooping up fundamentalist Christians. It's also highly profitable for the military-industrial engine, once the unchallengable priority of continuous annexation is locked into place. These are some of the prime movers, but it fails to explain why Bush thinks as he does.
In what seems like a thousand years ago, I reached the conclusion that the morality of Palestinian violence could only be judged alongside the fact that Israel's multi-party government incorporates several parties that openly advocate the ethnic cleansing of Arabs. I felt that those parties' Jewish supporters in the West Bank enjoyed a political shield and even encouragement of their aggressive activities. The Likud, as the umbrella right-wing party, is hardly innocent of prodding Israeli Jews to invest in seizing more land.
I first ran across the little Scripture quote above in some fundie literature that was of course devoted to helping the Jews settle Judea and Samaria, to ultimately bring about the end of the world and the collapse of the Jewish people, a suppressed logik bomb in the Likud-fundamentalist alliance. I've heard other fundies talk about how we should witness Judea and Samaria, and pay attention to what the (white) Christians who've been there report.
But unfortunately, I am all too aware that it in great part it is the Palestinian Christian population that bears the crushing pressure of this horrible, profitable war. Especially in Bethlehem, they are the ones squeezed between Fatah and Hamas on one side, and the expanding "suburbs" of Jerusalem upon their farmland. Hence, with what means they still have, many have chosen to leave the Holy Land for Jordan and points elsewhere.
So, in my cheeky atheist way, I took that verse of the Bible to signify that Jesus would want good people to witness all transpiring in the ancient land. Seeing past the unpredictable violence of Islamic militants, Jesus would be more than a little upset that those ancient communities are getting rolled aside for another bypass highway, another self-defeating expanse of red-roofed homes. Jesus would want us to understand that a sturdy peace, not annexing a bloc of settlements on Holy land, is the only goal that a good Christian would work towards.
If in fact the U.S. acts to secure these settlements, who can predict what the reaction will be across the Arab world? Who knows what the Iraqis will do, now that they've determined how to kill and injure the U.S. military at an unprecedented rate?
Hear Ye! The time is nigh to visit Armageddon Books. :)
The ongoing news and some opinions: As always, some of the most clear and incisive views come from within Israel. "Caving in to terror, back to 242" by Amir Oren:
It took a mere eight companies - paratroopers, Golani and Border Police. They secured the open, fragile borders of Israel in Gaza and Sinai, in the Arava and along the length of the West Bank, in the Galilee and in the Amakim region, right up to the May 1967 alert and the subsequent Six-Day War. That was the entire ground force the Israel Defense Forces was asked to commit to maintaining security along the confrontation lines with Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. There was no fenced, electronic obstacle line covered by air power.
....
Ninety-two is more than eleven times eight - and 92 companies is the force the army needed after the Six-Day War to guard the new lines and patrol the territories. That was before the number of commands was inflated, and the numbers increased even further with the intifada of the 1980s and then again with the fighting under way since September 2000.
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In a new study of the IDF from 1967-1973, recently completed by Maj. Gen. (res.) Haim Nadel, Sharon is quoted at telling a general staff meeting around the time Eshkol and Johnson were meeting: "We generals have all the full right not only to express ourselves, but to influence matters. A lot will be dictated to Israel by the IDF's position. These borders are not only borders for peace, they are borders to prevent war, borders to prevent the danger of eradication ... We are now in an ideal situation; there won't be normalcy for decades to come ... the borders to keep are the current ones, without any retreats, without any arrangement that doesn't guarantee absolutely our military control over the territory. And that means maintaining the current situation."
It would be interesting to know how Tourism Minister Binyamin Elon felt this morning. I mean, there hasn't been a Pesach like this one in years: More than a million people thronged to the countryside, hiking, picking cultivated buttercups, visiting the parks, touring archaeological sites and filling every possible hotel and guest house. Even the Negev knew joy.Here is an article from Salon about Tourism Minister Elon and his connections with American fundamentalists.
...
But from the perspective of the tourism minister, who wakes up in the morning in [West Bank settlement] Beit El, the rush to nature is somewhat one-sided. The vast majority of the hiking and traveling takes place inside the Green Line. There are a few specific sites in Yesha (the Hebrew acronym of Judea and Samaria) that are blessed with physical beauty and historical significance (national significance, too, in the eyes of many)...
....
In the Negev, Galilee and center of the country, in the parks and forests, everyone holidayed - religious and secular, hawks and doves. With their feet and tires, they marked out the Green Line.That was the strongest proof of the Israeli aspiration for normalcy. If the settlers' claim that the terrorism wiped out the Green Line were correct, and that there is no difference between Afula and Ofra, why did most families prefer to spread their blankets out in Horshat Tal, barbecue on the banks of the Yarkon River, pick cotton on a kibbutz, suntan along the shores of Lake Kinneret and put up tents in Eilat? Maybe because it's that small, old, crowded Israel, blossoming in a cornucopia of colors and the fragrances of flowers is in the hearts, and the land of messianic salvation is the one that failed?
The Palestinian Prime Minister Qureia is infuriated that this plan will help clear the way for annexation, and naturally it's Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leading the charge to demand that the Likud Party annex:
Sharon expects guarantees from Bush in support for the disengagement plan, assurances that no other plan will replace the road map, backing in the fight against terror emanating from territories from which Israel has withdrawn, and a declaration that Israel will not be required to return to the 1967 borders.On the other hand Yoel Marcus is more optimistic that the Gaza move will finally bring about an end to the occupation. Keep in mind that Benjamin Netanyahu is leading the efforts to build as much fence around settlements as possible:Meanwhile, Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia said Tuesday that Sharon's plan to retain and expand five large West Bank settlement blocs destroys any chance for peace. Qureia said the plan "may destroy the whole peace process."
"These tactics destroy any hope for peace," he said. "We will not accept any settlement blocs. And we will not accept any decisions unless the Palestinian Authority is a part of the decision-making process."
....
Hours before leaving the country at around 2 A.M. Tuesday, Sharon said the West Bank settlement of Ma'aleh Adumim would be included in the "Jerusalem envelope" section of the West Bank separation fence. The prime minister also specified five other West Bank settlement areas that would remain under Israeli rule.
....
Sharon wants the American letter to contain declarations regarding the future permanent status, which can be taken as support for the annexation of large blocs of settlement in the West Bank and the elimination of the Palestinian refugees' right of return to Israel. Sources said a final agreement may not be reached until Wednesday's meeting with Bush.Sources in Jerusalem also said the exchange of letters will not be public, but that the Americans will not be averse to Israel's publication of the letters.
PM names settlements to remain under Israeli rule: Speaking at the start of the traditional Moroccan post-Passover Mimouna festivities in Ma'aleh Adumim, Sharon said the settlement - which is adjacent to Jerusalem - was one of six areas in the West Bank that would remain under Israeli control.
"Ma'aleh Adumim will remain part of the state of Israel forever and ever," Sharon said about the largest settlement in the West Bank. "It will be included in the envelope fence around Jerusalem in order to avoid terror atacks on it and in its environs."
The prime minister also said the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, Givat Ze'ev, Ariel, Kiryat Arba, and enclaves in the West Bank city of Hebron would all remain under Israeli sovereignty. This was the first time Sharon has detailed the settlements Israel wants to keep.
"Ariel, the Etzion Bloc, Giv'at Zeev will remain in Israeli hands and will continue to develop," Sharon said. "Hebron and Kiryat Arba will be strong. Only an Israeli initiative will keep us from being dragged into dangerous initiatives like the Geneva and Saudi initiatives."
Netanyahu has no intention of supporting the disengagement plan until Sharon builds a fence around the Ariel, Gush Etzion, Maale Adumim and other enclaves.... “At the moment”, Netanyahu told his followers, “not a meter of that security barrier is being built in the direction of those enclaves. Sharon is building the fence on the Green Line, or next to it, without anybody noticing. I suggest he start taking me seriously. Only when the barrier is built, and I mean by that the route approved by the government, only after that will I get behind him. I will force him to fulfill that condition. And I’m not just saying that, not threatening. This is for real”.Tonight comes the long-belated press conference. I wonder what demons will peer out from his eye sockets this time.
For the moment, Juan Cole is suggesting that the Neocons pounced on al-Sadr when he announced his support for Hamas, and if the leader of the Shiite Marsh Arabs, who has suspended his role in the Governing Council, turns against the U.S., it could be a whole new ballgame. Neocon schemeries? Never!:
Abdul Karim al-Muhammadawi, legendary leader of the Iraqi Hizbullah, which organized the Shiite Marsh Arabs to fight Saddam, has suspended his membership in the Interim Governing Council (IGC) in order to protest American actions in attacking the Sadrist movement. Al-Muhammadawi met Friday with Muqtada al-Sadr, whom the Americans say they will arrest (according to AP). Were Muhammadawi and the Marsh Arabs to turn against the Americans, they would be formidable foes.later he suggests that the killing of Yassin and this turn in the situation are deeply connected, and I tend to agree:Although Neoconservative circles in the US continued to attempt to blame Iran for the Shiite insurgency, it is obvious that it is homegrown and that it was deliberately provoked by the Americans, perhaps by the Neocons themselves. With their typical arrogance, they vastly underestimated the support for Muqtada in the country, and underestimated the degree to which even Iraqis who do not like him would violently resist the US moving against him. The Neoconservatives, egged on by Israeli PM Ariel Sharon, want to widen the war to Iran so as to overthrow the government in Tehran, and apparently don't give a rat's ass about the American lives that would be lost attempting to occupy Iran, a country 3 times larger than Iraq.
....
American troops, which had faced heavy fighting and harassment in the Shiite slums of East Baghdad or Sadr City, gave up and withdrew from the civilian areas on Friday, according to wire service reports and the Arabic press. The US does retain control of the police stations in East Baghdad, but these are apparently isolated garrisons and the writ of US rule runs no farther than the fences around them.
This looks to me like an incipient collapse of the US government of Iraq. Beyond the IGC, the bureaucracy is protesting. Many government workers in the ministries are on strike and refusing to show up for work, according to ash-Sharq al-Awsat. Without Iraqis willing to serve in the Iraqi government, the US would be forced to rule the country militarily and by main force. Its legitimacy appears to be dwindling fast. The "handover of sovereignty" scheduled for June 30 was always nothing more than a publicity stunt for the benefit of Bush's election campaign, but it now seems likely to be even more empty. Since its main rationale was to provide more legitimacy to the US enterprise in Iraq, and since any legitimacy the US had is fading fast, and since a government appointed by Bremer will be hated by virtue of that very appointment, the Bush administration may as well just not bother.
.....
Part of what caused this incipient collapse of the US-appointed Iraqi government is that the US military decided to besiege the entire city of Fallujah to get at insurgents who killed 4 US Blackwater mercenaries last week, even though reports indicated that the guerrillas left the city after the killings. Those guerrillas, supported by civilian demonstrations and desecration of the mercenaries' bodies, announced that they were taking revenge for the Israeli murder of Hamas clerical leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Just as the Israelis and their American amen corner helped drag the US into the Iraq war, so they also have inflamed Iraqi sentiment against the US by spectacular uses of state terror against Palestinians. Both the Sunni and the Shiite uprisings in Iraq in the past week in a very real sense were set off by Sharon's whacking of Yassin, a paraplegic who could easily have been arrested. (Only once Muqtada al-Sadr announced his support for Hamas was he targeted by the Neocon-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority for arrest, convincing him that he had nothing to lose and had better launch an insurgency).
I can't believe that Bush is yet again hanging out at the GOD DAMNED RANCH. Because God knows he did such a good job managing threats from there last time.
I have found a huge array of information today, so let me summarize:
Mesopotamia Aflame: DEBKA is not my idea of a serious source, but their Iraqi battle map is what you have to look at. Don't necessarily believe their report about Sadr, (nor Hamas) but it's interesting.
There is emerging information that a U.S. translator says that the government had all kinds of 9/11 evidence in its possession. And lo and behold the U.S. media won't pick it up.
There are Sunnis and Shiites marching from baghdad to Fallujah with humanitarian supplies, and they have been overrunning American checkpoints. Could go badly.
In the Irony Department Richard Perle says there wasn't enough planning. WHAT THE HELL MAN?!
Justin Raimondo on Sadr, "The New Saddam." Because the U.S. always needs someone to hate? Hmm...
More of Asia Times: One year on, from liberation to jihad by Pepe Escobar. Meanwhile it's time to reconstruct Islam!!! The Shiite voice that will be heard. Baathists on the bandwagon! But wait, its not a second war?!?!? Ahh hell...
The very paranoid site WHATREALLYHAPPENED.COM is having a field day! (a paranoid report on whether or not a plane actually hit the Pentagon). I don't really need any more conspiracy theories, so regard these as questionable but entertaining. Pepe Escobar at Asia Times online is going off about 9/11. A mellow theological scholar publishes a book asserting that the 9/11 story was faked.
Command Post has continuing updates. More hawkish places are asserting that Iran is propelling matters. This piece does have a lot of nice background, though.
These are extremely graphic pictures of dead Iraqis in Fallujah from Al Jazeera. Asia Times on the uprising: When fear turns to anger.
Iraq Anarchy by Robert Fisk, a man whose early pessimism about the war turned out all too correct
Anarchy has been a condition of our occupation from the very first days when we let the looters and arsonists destroy Iraq's infrastructure and history. But that lawlessness is now coming back to haunt us. Anarchy is what we are now being plunged into in Iraq, among a people with whom we share no common language, no common religion and no common culture.Here is something of significance: In the former capital of the Islamic Caliphate, Samarra, the uprising has arrived, according to AFP. I have said before that Samarra is a sort of 'magic' place in the logic of Al Qaeda, in the sense that they are trying to rebuild the caliphate, which would hold a special logic within this ancient city.
...
Dan Senor, the occupying power's spokesman, wouldn't tell anyone exactly what the evidence against Sadr was - even though it has supposedly existed since an Iraqi judge issued the warrant some months ago.The US military response to the atrocities committed against four American mercenaries in Fallujah last week has been to surround the entire city and to announce the cutting off of the neighbouring international highway link between Baghdad, Amman and Damascus - thus bringing to a halt almost all economic trade between Iraq and its two western neighbours.
What good this will do "new" Iraq is anyone's guess. Vast concrete walls have been lowered across the road and military vehicles have been used to chase away civilians trying to by-pass them. A prolonged series of Israeli-style house raids are now apparently planned for the people of Fallujah to seek out the gunmen who first attacked the four Americans - whose corpses were later stripped, mutilated and hanged.
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And all this, remember, began because Mr Bremer decided to ban Sadr's trashy 10,000-circulation weekly newspaper for "inciting violence."
"I believe, first of all, that we underestimate that this war on terrorism is really a war against radical Islam. Terrorism is a tactic. It's not a war itself. Secondly, let me say that I don't think we understand how the Muslim world views us, and I'm terribly worried that the military tactics in Iraq are going to do a number of things, and they're all bad. ... I think we're going to end up with civil war if we continue down the military operation strategies that we have in place. I say that sincerely as someone that supported the war in the first place."More on this from salon.com."Let me say, secondly, that I don't know how it could be otherwise, given the way that we're able to see these military operations, even the restrictions that are imposed upon the press, that this doesn't provide an opportunity for Al Qaida to have increasing success at recruiting people to attack the United States. It worries me. And I wanted to make that declaration. You needn't comment on it, but as I said, I'm not going to have an opportunity to talk to you this closely. And I wanted to tell you that I think the military operations are dangerously off track. And it's largely a U.S. Army -- 125,000 out of 145,000 -- largely a Christian army in a Muslim nation. So I take that on board for what it's worth."
The rightwing Tacitus says something insightful, but also portentious of doom, as those hawks are wont to do:
Consider that if you are American, there is no open road to Baghdad from any of Iraq's neighboring countries. For the moment, CPA resupply is a triumph of airlift. Something to chew on. It's not the result of any one tragically wrong decision or miscalculation; rather, it's the end result of a year of accumulating bad calls and wishful thinking: disbanding the army plus not confronting Sadr plus giving the Shi'a a veto plus the premature policy of withdrawal from urban centers plus the undermanning of the occupation force (and the concurrent kneecapping of Shinseki) plus the setting of a ludicrously early "sovereignty" date plus the early tolerance of lawlessness and looting plus illusory reconstruction accomplishments plus etc., etc., etc. In short, the failure of the occupation to be an occupation in any sense that history and Arab peoples would recognize. Bad calls of such consistency are the product of a fundamentally bad system.
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As you read this in the cold, comforting, wan glow of your screen, United States Marines are adding Fallujah to the roll call of honor that stretches from our young nation's first defeat of jihad in North African sands, to the beaches of Tarawa and Saipan, to Hue, and beyond. And soon, the men and women of the United States Army will emerge from their embattled base camps to conquer the ancient valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates for the second time in a year. What they are doing is right and just; the enemy they fight is manifestly base and tyrannical. There is no question on this count, and there is no doubt of their battlefield victory. What is in doubt is whether their victory will last, and whether the price paid for it will be worthwhile. These magnificent instruments of our national will, soldier and Marine alike, are unstoppable by any insurgent, any jihadist, any fanatic, or any guerrilla.
Juan Cole on point as always. Also he illustrates the truth about the role the U.S. has played in influencing the growth of post-Saddam Iraqi militias:
Coalition Provisional Authority spokesman Dan Senor, who has often attempted to peddle frankly false stories, was at it again on Wednesday. He said Muqtada al-Sadr was targeted because he maintained a militia. Let's see: In April of 2003, the US Department of Defense flew Ahmad Chalabi into Iraq with over a thousand of his militiamen, actually transporting them in US troop carriers. They brought a militia to Iraq.
Just published, Robert Reich asks us to visualize what a second Bush administration might feel like.
A book review about The Rise of the Vulcans, a book I got but haven't read much of yet about the personal histories of Bush officials. It is not very polemical; the section about Wolfowitz's path from math to Wohlstetter's political science is quite good.
I already posted this before, but once again a book review from the Times about Bush's psychopathology:
the Schweizers quote one unnamed relative as saying that George W. Bush sees the war on terrorism "as a religious war": "He doesn't have a p.c. view of this war. His view of this is that they are trying to kill the Christians. And we the Christians will strike back with more force and more ferocity than they will ever know."
Someone advised me today to keep an eye on CounterPunch. Not a bad idea.
Riverbend in Iraq is still going. Another Iraqi blog, Iraq-Iraqis.
...A united militia with the same uniform should be created grouping all the guards and armed people from the parties’ members and the followers of the GC members to enforce order in streets. It’s their duty and our duty would be to defend our democracy and freedom against terrorists and trouble makers and kayos lovers.
Lawrence of Cyberia, another nice blog. Reading A1 is another blog that criticizes the New York Times.
I just mentioned it below, but again Billmon's Death of a Dream is worth reading for its insight on neo-cons, Israel and anti-Semitism in the Middle East. This is the Arabic blog which the original mujahideen conversation apparently comes from.
Compare this press release with what actually transpired in that poor nation.
The casualties are piling up rapidly. This site is authoritative.
NY Times reporter John Burns was briefly captured by a Shiite militia.
Michael Lind wrote this last year about "The Weird Men Behind George W Bush's War," and I might be more skeptical of it if Lind wasn't a former neocon, and editor of the National Interest, himself. (Good info about PNAC in here) I ran into some old paranoid pieces about the war running beyond control. Another old piece by a Palestinian professor about how the war is supposedly ultimately to Israel's benefit. Ah, for those heady and speculative days.
Via Atrios a stunning little letter from a contractor working in Iraq:
Discipline is slipping in the forces and it reminds one of the Viet-Nam pictures of old. Instead of a professional military outfit here we have a bunch of cowboys and vigilantes running wild in the streets. The ugly American has never been so evident. Someone in charge needs to drop the hammer on this lack of discipline, especially that which is being hown by the Special Forces, security contractors, and "other government agencies". We won the war but that doesn't mean we can treat the people of this couotry with contempt and disregard with no thought to the consequences. Those contractors, just like the last ones who were killed, were out running free with no military escort. Armed or not, that is a breach of protocol and a severe security risk. While I grieve for the families of those persons I would like to see the person who decided that it was alright for them to convoy out there without the military brought up on charges, unless of course that person was in the convoy, in which case at least he won't be getting anyone else killed.I'm angry about how we're treating peope here. I know it's not the entire military, in fact it is a very small, select group that believes they are somehow above the law of not ony this land but also the law of the military and those laws we hold dear in ouor own country. If someone were to try to treat our fellow Americans the way some of these people are treating the Iraquis the courts would certainly lock them away. I would phrase that last line harsher, but in light of recent events that would be cruel. Discipline is needed here, and I'm not certain that our current administration is prepared to take the steps necessary to crack down on all of this. In order for discipline to be restored I do believe Donald Rumsfield would have to admit that perhaps Powell's rules of war were in fact valid.
Inside the personal bubbles that the long-suffering Israeli populace inhabits:
Suicide bombings create small, self-enclosed worlds consisting of family, a few friends, and a tiny geography. You go to this supermarket which is not in a busy mall, this cafe which has an armed guard, drive your kids to school along this side road which isn't a bus route - and to hell with anyone you don't know or trust. This is your own personal bu'ah, your bubble, and no one who is not in it is above suspicion. What is happening in Gaza or Nablus - the curfews, the checkpoints, the terrifying incursions of troops, the targeted assassinations, the collapse of the social infrastructure, the malnutrition, the cages in which Palestinians are fenced off like zoo animals - could be happening in Bosnia instead of a 25-minute drive away, because no one goes there except your son the soldier or your husband the reservist, and he doesn't talk about what he's seen because he can't. He doesn't have the emotional language to express it, who among us does? He comes home and gratefully re-enters his bu'ah. If I were an Israeli businessman, I'd invest in escapism, the bu'ah's wallpaper...If you ever wanted to understand what anesthitized language about cracking down on Palestinians looks like, read this from an Israeli terror institute.
Joe Conason observed in February that the president was oblivious.
Rummy admits it's serious! "Iraq's stability crumbling at a rapid rate."
This news report from Knight-Ridder looks grim:
Marine engineers patrolling near Ramadi on Wednesday reported coming across a mass grave containing up to 350 bodies of Iraqis who appeared to have been killed in the fighting. It wasn't clear whether the bodies belonged to combatants, civilians or both.
.....
Rumors, unconfirmed and unconfirmable, heightened the tension: Those involved in the insurgency said Sunnis, Shiites and even Palestinians would gather in a war summit in Sadr City on Thursday."The Sunni people, the Shiite people, we share the same God, the same suffering under the Americans and the same goal, to end the occupation of Iraq," said Said Ammer al Husainie, the Mahdi Army leader in Sadr City. "We have been working together, and will continue to work together, to see that our aims are met.
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-The BBC reported that Shiite fighters had entered a Sunni mosque Monday, recruiting volunteers to donate blood for the resistance. Once recruited, the volunteers "together agreed on a wide-range attack in the neighborhood on the Americans," the BBC reported.-In Ramadi, a traditional Sunni stronghold, witnesses said Marines were fighting soldiers who were dressed like members of Mahdi Army.
-In southern and central Baghdad, traditional Sunni neighborhoods, pro-Sadr posters and literature were widely circulated.
Too funny to leave out: the dictator of Turkmenistan's dogmatic guide to better living: The Rukhnama. Radio Free Europe is a new news source. EurasiaNet has a lot of good news collecting going on. Don't forget the Argus.
If this whole post doesn't make any sense to you, it doesn't make sense to me, either.
On Iraq: this just rolled into my mailbox, a piece on TomPaine telling us that Chaos is the Reason All Along. Yop.
This report from Reason is pretty sharp. Also the Pandora Project is monitoring the disturbing health effects, including mutations, of depleted uranium. "Wildfire" has some further links, including a diary from an earlier trip.
Naomi Klein is apparently on the ground in Iraq now, reporting on the uprising situation.
The mentally dubious Joseph Farah explains that since al-Sadr is a Shiite with Iranian support, the US must be at war with Iran. Of course! (Never trust WorldNetDaily)
All I can tell you is we are now fighting a regional war. Our local opposition in Iraq is being trained, armed and directed with foreign support – by neighboring Iran.idiot at the New York Post, what else is new?The uprising yesterday was treated in many initial news accounts as a spontaneous uprising directed by Najaf cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
What the other news accounts left out was one significant, but well-established fact: Al-Sadr works for Iran. He is an Iranian agent. His authority comes from Iran.
Make no mistake: Just because we view restraint as a virtue does not mean our enemies share that view. The refusal to use our power in the face of defiance only makes defiance more attractive.What the hell does that mean, anyway? Evil Blonde Woman of Wrath saysWhen U.S. forces arrive in a troubled country, they create an initial window of fear. It's essential to act decisively while the local population is still disoriented. Each day of delay makes our power seem more hollow. You have to do the dirty work at the start. The price for postponing it comes due with compound interest.
.......
We broke a basic rule: Never show fear. No matter how we may rationalize our inaction, that is what we did.Instead of demonstrating our strength and resolve, we have encouraged more attacks and further brutality - while global journalists revel in Mogadishu-lite.
Of course, we're not going to flee Iraq as President Bill Clinton ran from Somalia. But our hesitation to respond to atrocities against Americans has renewed our enemies' hope that, if only they kill enough of us, as graphically as possible, they still can triumph over a "godless" superpower.
To possess the strength to do what is necessary, but to refuse to do it, is appeasement. Since Baghdad fell, our occupation has sought to appease our enemies - while slighting our Kurdish allies. Our attempts to find a compromise with a single man - the Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani - have empowered him immensely, while encouraging intransigence in others.
Weakness, not strength, emboldens opponents - and creates added terrorist recruits.
We came to Iraq faced with the problems Saddam created. Increasingly, we face problems we ourselves created or compounded.
If the administration lacks the guts to do what must be done, free Iraq will face a dismal future. As vicious as they are, our enemies have the courage of their convictions.
Do we?
I suppose it would be considered lacking in nuance to nuke the Sunni Triangle.But so goes the unanimous vote around my household - and I'm betting millions of others - in the aftermath of what forevermore will be remembered simply as "Fallujah."
Wouldn't it be lovely were justice so available and so simple? If we were but creatures like those zoo animals we witnessed gleefully jumping up and down after stomping, dragging, dismembering and hanging the charred remains of American civilians whose only crime was to try to help them.
Another blogger is attacked by rightwingers from LittleGreenFootballs.
It appears that more mercenaries from Blackwater Security Consulting have saved the day and protected the CPA's office in Najf from being overrun like the rest of the city, after a Blackwater helicopter dropped them ammo and took away a wounded Marine. Interesting... And they say we can't tell civilians and militants apart. (links via Agonist)
Juan Cole suggests that the whole storm is really due to a fractured White House. I would tend to agree, after seeing Biden complaining about the situation to Jim Lehrer:
As I read him Biden is passing on what he has heard, that the reason for this gridlock is an internal power struggle within the Bush administration, which has paralyzed decision-making.If so, it may be that certain forces within the administration took advantage of the lack of a clear reporting line to launch the assault on Muqtada al-Sadr, hoping to effect a fait accompli and forestalling any later State Department attempt to treat with him. If this interpretation is correct, the retreating Department of Defense may sow a lot of land mines for hapless State before June 30.
Biden and Lugar also made it clear that they are not being consulted by the White House on Iraq, and, indeed, it has been a year since they could even get an appointment to see Bush about it. Imagine how locked out the American public is!
The late breaking news is that 12 Marines have been killed in Ramadi. Al Qaeda is claiming responsibility for some attacks, though not from the last few days.
Hans Blix says that the war is worse than Saddam. Oh, what a naughty inspector.
The BBC reports on the nature of this spectacular and decidedly well-armed Mehdi Army. Evening Standard characterizes rising anarchy.
Wow, a lot to follow. Attacks coming all over now: can the U.S. keep it together this week? My imagination struggles with what's going on....
There's been a lot of things on the news today. Why did the CPA suddenly choose to shut down Sadr's newspaper? Perhaps it had something to do with this AP report that Sadr was declaring allegiance with Hamas and Hezbollah last Friday. Did this provide an opportunity for the Middle Eastern altruists in the Pentagon to, say, merge the threats between Israel and the U.S.? That's wild speculation!! Can't be true!
Prof. Juan Cole continues to describe things with the most clarity. He actually sounds almost as paranoid as I do sometimes:
The civilians in the Department of Defense only know how to blow things up. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith staffed the CPA with Neoconservatives, most of whom had no administrative experience, no Arabic, and no respect for Muslim culture (or knowledge about it). They actively excluded State Department Iraq hands like Tom Warrick. (Only recently have a few experienced State Department Arabists been allowed in to try to begin mopping up the mess.) The Neocons in the CPA have all sorts of ulterior motives and social experiments they want to impose on the Iraqi people, including Polish-style economic shock therapy, some sort of sweetheart deal for Israel, and maybe even breaking the country up into three parts.He informed me of people called "Palestinian-Salvadorans," quite a shock. Polls:
An opinion poll taken in late February showed that 10 % of Iraq's Shiites say attacks on US troops are "acceptable." But 30% of Sunni Arabs say such attacks are acceptable, and fully 70% of Anbar province approves of attacking Americans. (Anbar is where Ramadi, Fallujah, Hadithah and Habbaniyah are, with a population of 1.25 million or 5% of Iraq--those who approve of attacks are 875,000).But simple statistics don't tell the story. If there are 25 million Iraqis and Shiites comprise 65%, that is about 16 million persons. Ten percent of them is 1.6 million, which is a lot of people who hate Americans enough to approve of attacks on them. If Sunni Arabs comprise about 16% of the population, there are 4 million of them. If 30% approve of attacks, that is 1.2 million. That is, the poll actually shows that in absolute numbers, there are more Shiites who approve of attacks on Americans than there are Sunni Arabs. The numbers bring into question the official line that there are no problems in the South, only in the Sunni Arab heartland.
Sadr's volatile movement has seized control of the Holy Shrine of Imam Ali, one of Shiism's holiest sites. (All we need now is a(nother) Temple Mount incident)
Will the US attack the Kurds? What? This latent Kurdish nationalism seems to be emerging. It is, as they say, troublesome.
As well as an interesting report about crime and disorder thriving in Baghdad, Al Jazeera has some late breaking news, in their own unique style, from Falluja. (this city has somewhere called the "Golan District?!" Hell) Also there is a lack of food.
"We also visited the Golan district where clashes took place earlier today between fighters from Falluja and US forces," Ali said. "We saw signs of fierce confrontation. US forces have bombed the district. We saw several destroyed houses."Golan inhabitants say US forces used cluster bombs and missiles against them," he said. "Citizens of the city are completely enraged - but not afraid - waiting for the coming events," the correspondent said.
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The leaflets outlaw demonstrations and the possession of firearms and impose a 7pm to 6am daily curfew. Residents are advised that in the event of a raid by US forces, all family members should gather in a single room in the house. "This indicates that door-to-door operations will be launched by US forces," the correspondent said.Aljazeera has also received a statement issued by a group in al-Anbar province calling itself the Jihad Brigades, urging followers of the Shia leader al-Sadr to continue resisting.
"Even Falluja's main hospital is inaccessible because it is located out of the city across the Euphrates river, and the bridge is closed. Today I saw an ambulance driver negotiating with US soldiers to let him cross the bridge. They let him through after a long and tiresome argument.""Shops are closed and life in the town is paralysed. I am standing among dozens of angry Falluja people. They say they are not afraid of the US forces, they are ready to fight. The crowd was chanting 'There is no God but Allah'."
THE PREZ: No, the intention is to make sure the deadline remains the same. I believe we can transfer authority by June 30th. We're working toward that day. We're, obviously, constantly in touch with Jerry Bremer on the transfer of sovereignty. The United Nations is over there now. The United Nations representative is there now to work on the -- on a -- on to whom we transfer sovereignty. I mean, in other words, it's one thing to decide to transfer. We're now in the process of deciding what the entity will look like to whom we will transfer sovereignty. But, no, the date remains firm.
Gloom...has been building over Iraq. Increasingly, the Wise Heads are forecasting disaster. Wise Heads say they see no realistic plan, hear no serious concept to get ahead of the situation. Money, training, jobs...all lagging, all reinforce downward spiral highlighted by sickening violence. There seems to be no real "if", just when, and how badly it will hurt U.S. interests. Define "disaster"? Consensus prediction: if Bush insists on June 30/July 1 turnover, a rapid descent into civil war. May happen anyway, if the young al-Sadr faction really breaks off from its parents. CSIS Anthony Cordesman's latest blast at Administration ineptitude says in public what Senior Observers say in private...the situation may still be salvaged, but then you have to factor in Sharon's increasing desperation, and the regional impact.
WaPo says it "Marks a New Front in War." Also "Spread of Bin Laden Ideology Cited." Al Qaeda == "The Base," don't we get it yet?
I liked the NY Times story about the life of the mercenary. Google News searches for mercenaries are fruitful right now.
Here's a fun article about how religious people are turning away from the Enlightenment from the Secular Humanists.
Guardian writer grumbles about America's emerging cultural war. Is it really that polarized? I don't know if I buy it.
More paranoid things about the energy markets. I'm certainly not buying all of this one.
A few bits about Israel: Increasing anti-Semitism really concerns me, as it will likely cause the social fabric in a lot of already marginal places to fray, as well as scare the hell out of many people. Haaretz investigates something well worth reflecting on. Sharon says his hands are clean of bribes, yet no matter how much he washes, the spots, damn spots, won't come out, he says. " Less than a man of his word, Sharon's Passover Legends." Not surprisingly the Palestinian peace movement is having trouble getting traction right now. Why aren't settlers protesting more?
Christian Science Monitor says that Iraqis and Palestinians see their sufferings as a form of globalization (via Prof. Cole):
The focus on Jews and Israel reflects a wider belief among Arab Iraqis, Sunni and Shiite alike, that the US and Israeli occupations are twin Golems of a globalization that they can not resist or control, one that is causing the disintegration of the very fabric of their cultures and economies even as it offers prosperity and freedom to a fortunate few.It may be hard for Americans to understand the occupation of Iraq in the context of globalization. But Iraq today is clearly the epicenter of that trend. Here, military force was used to seize control of the world's most important commodity - oil. And corporations allied with the occupying power literally scrounge the country for profits, privatizing everything from health care to prisons, while Iraqi engineers, contractors, doctors, and educators are shunted aside.
Like economic globalization in so many other countries of the developing world, this model in Iraq is an unmitigated disaster. My visits to hospitals, schools, think tanks, political party headquarters, art galleries, and refugee camps reveal conditions clearly as bad, and often worse, than on the eve of the US invasion.
....
Iraq is sliding toward chaos; a state that many Iraqis increasingly believe is exactly where the US wants them to be. A prominent Iraqi psychiatrist who has worked with the CPA and the US military explained to me that "there is no way the United States can be this incompetent. The chaos here has to be at least partly deliberate." The main question on most people's minds is not if his assertion is true, but why?For example, many here see last week's carnage of Americans in Fallujah as suspicious. To send foreign contractors into Fallujah in late-model SUVs with armed escorts - down a traffic-clogged street on which they'd be literal sitting ducks - can be interpreted as a deliberate US instigation of violence to be used as a pretext for "punishment" by the US military.
I like last December's special Washington Monthly report on the glorious synchronicity between powerful Republican families in the U.S. and those who are somehow plucked to serve in Iraq.
When the history of the occupation of Iraq is written, there will be many factors to point to when explaining the post-conquest descent into chaos and disorder, from the melting away of Saddam's army to the Pentagon's failure to make adequate plans for the occupation. But historians will also consider the lack of experience and abundant political connections of the hundreds of American bureaucrats sent to Baghdad to run Iraq through the Coalition Provisional Authority.
Wandering around I found a piece by Manuel Valenzuela on a rather far-left site, featuring things by the "Worker's World" and others... (they are reprinting the as-yet-unconfirmed Zelikow-Israel thing, again via Cole) More than a little bloated with cliches but interesting nonetheless: "The War of Error:"
It is in the MIC’s interest to prolong this most ambiguous and marketable war for as long as possible. When the citizenry has been successfully turned to submissive sheep, ignorant as to its role as a massive pawn, primordial emotions dictating logic and common sense, the MIC is assured of ever-increasing power, control and wealth. From cradle to the grave, we are but slaves to the military-industrial complex, nothing more than puppets whose strings are attached to the massive claws of the omnipotent masters tearing us to shreds as they amuse themselves with the games of disquieting existence and rapacious divisiveness they thrust upon our oblivious selves.Greed-mongers, fear-mongers, warmongers and profiteers, the Bush administration, the Corporate Leviathan and the MIC together are annihilating our future. When greed intermingles with the almighty dollar, profit is placed above people, we become statistics in cost-benefit analysis, we are shamelessly exploited and we all become open wounds waiting to become collateral damage.
Let me just ask how Bush felt about Israel and Palestine back in those days.
Please, someone, tell me that the last three years weren't all about generating Israeli-American hegemony over the Middle East, that this whole cataclysm wasn't designed to torch the whole of Mesopotamia and issue waves of wreckage and fear among the Arab people, to the benefit of Israel's Samsonite leadership.
People find it very hard to believe that the Pentagon neo-cons really thought Israel's security policies--i.e. the West Bank occupation/settlement project-- had much to do with the need to invade Iraq. It is a radical idea.
(I posted this quick one on a DKos thread)
How many people know that Pentagon Undersecretary for Policy Douglas Feith's former law partner Marc Zell IS IN FACT a settler, and a leader of that movement?? Is this fact somehow devoid of any significance whatsoever?
Perhaps, just perhaps, it has to do with Kissinger's theory of the Revolutionary Power that seeks to flip over the whole poker table in order to get what it wants. Can the glittering prize be something as pathetic as the tiny wedge of hilly desert between Jerusalem and Jordan? Is the goal to shake the Mideast to the point that all those nations are reduced to fighting and killing among themselves?
Can their imagined key to the prize be the radicalization of relations between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds? Was the opportunity to toy with Iraq's complex inter-group plumbing the REAL PLAN? And encouraging the destruction of Iraqi ministries and illuminating government records THE METHOD?
How do you explain this in enormous gap of time between when they convinced Bush to do it--late Sept 2001--and the invasion itself, they somehow forgot to plan what would have to be done in Iraq after the invasion? That somehow they forgot to equip the army with nonlethal peacekeeping gear and, hell, any kind of civil defense plan at all??
Maybe after all this time I am still stubborn and extraordinarily paranoid. Yes, I am both of these. But WHY doesn't Bush understand that Israeli settlement construction and Arab and Palestinian democratic process are a ZERO SUM GAME? Does he not understand that his support of Sharon makes the Arabs paranoid as hell?
Furthermore, I believe that Ahmed Chalabi and his paramilitaries, who have been permitted by Feith and the gang to seize control of all of Saddam's dirty secret police files, have been running around the country killing Sunni leaders and blackmailing everyone. This has exacerbated sectarian tensions. (Was partitioning Iraq, also known as the theory of "re-Ottomanization," related to this?) Where does Chalabi stand in relation to today's magnitudinal jump in chaos? I have not a damn clue.
I wish I was not driven to make such radical statements as these above. I wish that Iraq + Israel + Palestine had some kind of easy, honorable logic that would work itself out. Yet I have searched for a long time, and I have not yet found it. So I am forced to postulate the more paranoid theories. *I WANT them to be disproved. I DO.* Yet I cannot see the way out of this dumb tunnel.
What was I supposed to think after reading The Clean Break and Crumbling States documents by the current Pentagon/Special Plans staff?
What do we do now? I am cursed to be an atheist. If I weren't, I would pray.
I am supposed to write a proposal for my final paper in International Security class tonight. But given what's been happening the last few weeks, what can I address that isn't tearing apart like wet toilet paper? Where can I stand when the sands are shifting so? Is it possible to research and write on security in this snake pit? I'm hoping you guys might have suggestions!
This deserves to go first: a report from Haaretz that America plans to make 'implied' recognition of the illegal Israeli settlements. Holy land, gotta gotta get it!
U.S. assures Israel no retreat to 1967 lineBelow is my round-up on the Iraq and the Fallujah-mercenary issue, Pakistan, military-industrial corruption, the Uzbekistan aftermath, Clarkestorm 2004 and further Israel-Palestine tidbits. (crossposted on DKOS diary)
The U.S. will assure Israel that it will not have to withdraw to the Green Line in a future permanent settlement with the Palestinians.The promise appears in a letter of guarantees drafted by the American administration in exchange for Sharon's disengagement plan.
The U.S. rejected Israel's request to recognize the future annexation of the large settlement blocs in Ma'ale Adumim, Ariel and Etzion. Instead of referring explicitly to the settlements, the Americans propose a vaguely worded letter, which Israel would be able to present as implied recognition of the settlement blocs.
My special thanks go to those following the best of mainstream and alternative media every day at WarInContext. The Agonist is a news blitz all day long--they are making a full-time go at it. New frontiers of journalism or just obsessed people?
That's Robert Fisk reporting "Things are getting much worse in Iraq" today, a brutally honest British reporter who has given a totally different slant to the war, but then again he said it would be a quagmire from the very beginning. Juan Cole is an expert who just plain gets it:
Our hands were numb, recording all this, so swiftly did General Kimmitt take us through the little uptick [in violence].
A marine vehicle blown off the road near Fallujah, a marine killed, a second attack with small-arms fire on the same troops, an attack on an Iraqi paramilitary recruiting station on the 14th July Road, a soldier killed near Ramadi, two Britons hurt in Basra violence, a suicide bombing against the home of the Hillah police chief, an Iraqi shot at a checkpoint, US soldiers wounded in Mosul ... All this was just 17 hours before Fallujah civilians dragged the cremated remains of a Westerner through the streets of their city.
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But there was an interesting twist - horribly ironic in the face of yesterday's butchery - in General Kimmitt's narrative. Why, I asked him, did he refer sometimes to "terrorists" and at other times to "insurgents"? Surely if you could leap from being a terrorist to being an insurgent, then with the next little hop, skip and jump, you become a "freedom-fighter". Mr Senor gave the general one of his fearful looks. He needn't have bothered. General Kimmitt is a much smoother operator than his civilian counterpart. There were, the general explained, the Fallujah version who were insurgents, and then the al-Qa'ida version who attack mosques, hotels, religious festivals and who were terrorists.
So, it seems, there are now in Iraq good terrorists and bad terrorists, there are common-or-garden insurgents and supremely awful terrorists, the kind against which President George Bush took us to war in Iraq when there weren't any terrorists actually here, though there are now. And therein lies the problem. From inside the Green Zone on the banks of the Tigris, you can believe anything. How far can the occupying powers take war-spin before the world stops believing anything they say?
What would drive the crowd to this barbaric behavior? It is not that they are pro-Saddam any more, or that they hate "freedom." They are using a theater of the macabre to protest their occupation and humiliation by foreign armies. They were engaging in a role reversal, with the American cadavers in the position of the "helpless" and the "humiliated," and with themselves playing the role of the powerful monster that inscribes its will on these bodies.I was disturbed by the 'frenzy of violence' in Iraq, as the Star Tribune headline put it, although perhaps I see the frenzy occurring over a longer timeframe. The images they printed had a distinct Mogadishu overtone, it's hard to deny.This degree of hatred for the new order among ordinary people is very bad news. It helps explain why so few of the Sunni Arab guerrillas have been caught, since the locals hide and help them. It also seems a little unlikely that further US military action can do anything practical to put down this insurgency; most actions it could take would simply inflame the public against them all the more.
As recounted by Clarke in his book, and confirmed by documents provided to NEWSWEEK, Emerson and his former associate Rita Katz regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the United States that appears to have been largely unknown to the FBI prior to the September 11 terror attacks.In confidential memos and briefings that were sometimes conducted on a near weekly basis, Emerson and Katz furnished Clarke and his staff with the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data they were unable to get from elsewhere in the government.
Experts say the bloodshed could signal the resurgence of the regional Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which has revitalized itself in the lawless Pakistan-Afghan border area, under the leadership of Tohir Yuldashev. Or it could point to a violent offshoot of the local, moderate Hizb-ut-Tahrir, fed up with years of brutal crackdowns by Uzbek President Islam Karimov on Islamic believers of all types.This Yuldashev character is being called the new "Al Qaeda leader" of the moment. Is he really internationally evil??
Well, that's about the most comprehensive war mosaic I can put together today.
So what the hell do I do about my final paper?
I will have some information about the Falluja incident in the next post. In the meantime, a couple stories about pre-destination in foreign policy.
Yes, the no-fly zones captured Georgie's imagination right away. Thanks, CNN:
BARBARA STARR, CNN PENTAGON CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Frustrated that Iraqi gunners were shooting at American planes, within weeks of coming into office, President Bush approved war plans for a massive retaliatory attack on Iraq if a U.S. pilot had been shot down.CNN has learned that the secret plan Operation Desert Badger called for escalating air strikes within four to eight hours of a shootdown. Pentagon sources say a long list of targets across the country would be hit, crippling Iraqi air defenses and command and control. The plan went far beyond the Clinton administration's 1998 Operation Desert Fox, which hit 100 targets in four days.
President Bush revealed Desert Badger's existence in January, responding to criticism he planned to invade Iraq from the beginning.
GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Like the previous administration, we were for regime change. And in the initial stages of the administration, you might remember, we were dealing with Desert Badger or flyovers, and fly-betweens and looks.
And so we were fashioning policy along those lines.
This says that the guy chairing the 9/11 commission, Zelikow, said that Israel's security was a prime motive in the decision to invade Iraq. Come again!?!?War Launched to Protect Israel - Bush Adviser::
Iraq under Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to the United States but it did to Israel, which is one reason why Washington invaded the Arab country, according to a speech made by a member of a top-level White House intelligence group.WASHINGTON, Mar 29 (IPS) - IPS uncovered the remarks by Philip Zelikow, who is now the executive director of the body set up to investigate the terrorist attacks on the United States in September 2001 -- the 9/11 commission -- in which he suggests a prime motive for the invasion just over one year ago was to eliminate a threat to Israel, a staunch U.S. ally in the Middle East.
Zelikow's casting of the attack on Iraq as one launched to protect Israel appears at odds with the public position of President George W. Bush and his administration, which has never overtly drawn the link between its war on the regime of former president Hussein and its concern for Israel's security.
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Zelikow made his statements about ”the unstated threat” during his tenure on a highly knowledgeable and well-connected body known as the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which reports directly to the president.He served on the board between 2001 and 2003.
”Why would Iraq attack America or use nuclear weapons against us? I'll tell you what I think the real threat (is) and actually has been since 1990 -- it's the threat against Israel,” Zelikow told a crowd at the University of Virginia on Sep. 10, 2002, speaking on a panel of foreign policy experts assessing the impact of 9/11 and the future of the war on the al-Qaeda terrorist organisation.
”And this is the threat that dare not speak its name, because the Europeans don't care deeply about that threat, I will tell you frankly. And the American government doesn't want to lean too hard on it rhetorically, because it is not a popular sell,” said Zelikow.
The statements are the first to surface from a source closely linked to the Bush administration acknowledging that the war, which has so far cost the lives of nearly 600 U.S. troops and thousands of Iraqis, was motivated by Washington's desire to defend the Jewish state.
The administration, which is surrounded by staunch pro-Israel, neo-conservative hawks, is currently fighting an extensive campaign to ward off accusations that it derailed the ”war on terrorism” it launched after 9/11 by taking a detour to Iraq, which appears to have posed no direct threat to the United States.
I just placed an order for a nice little program called ecto that helps me work on the website far more efficiently than through a browser. It is only $18, and as I rarely buy software unless it's really top notch, this was a considered purchase.
Interesting things, then:
1. The Richard Clarke terrorism fiasco. I am overjoyed that everyone is watching this now, and the Administration is finally getting exposed as the Office From Hell that we sensed it always was. I want to pick up his fine book. Condi Rice has been brutally forced to testify publicly, and Bush and Cheney will appear sparkin' an L--I mean, jointly--before the committee. These are Good Things.
Finally, Sen. Tom Daschle is showing a little guts. Today he really spoke out against their political assassinations:
Mr. Clarke's personal motives have been questioned and his honesty challenged. He has even been accused, right here on the Senate floor, of perjury. Not one shred of proof was given, but that wasn't the point. The point was to have the perjury accusation on television and in the newspapers. The point was to damage Mr. Clarke in any way possible.This is wrong-and it's not the first time it's happened.
.....
There are some things that simply ought not be done - even in politics. Too many people around the President seem not to understand that, and that line has been crossed. When Ambassador Joe Wilson told the truth about the Administration's misleading claims about Iraq, Niger, and uranium, the people around the President didn't respond with facts. Instead, they publicly disclosed that Ambassador Wilson's wife was a deep-cover CIA agent. In doing so, they undermined America's national security and put politics first. They also may well have put the lives of Ambassador Wilson's wife, and her sources, in danger.
...
This is not "politics as usual." In nearly all of these cases, it's not Democrats who are being attacked.Senator McCain and Secretary O'Neill are prominent Republicans, and Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay, Joe Wilson, and Eric Shinseki all worked for Republican Administrations.
The common denominator is that these government officials said things the White House didn't want said.
The response from those around the President was retribution and character assassination -- a 21st Century twist to the strategy of "shooting the messenger."
If it takes intimidation to keep inconvenient facts from the American people, the people around the President don't hesitate. Richard Foster, the chief actuary for Medicare, found that out. He was told he'd be fired if he told the truth about the cost of the Administration's prescription drug plan.
This is no way to run a government.
The White House and its supporters should not be using the power of government to try to conceal facts from the American people or to reshape history in an effort to portray themselves in the best light.
......
Senator McCain, Senator Cleland, Secretary O'Neill, Ambassador Wilson, General Shinseki, Richard Foster, Richard Clarke, Larry Lindsay ... when will the character assassination, retribution, and intimidation end?When will we say enough is enough?
The September 11 families - and our entire country - deserve better. Our democracy depends on it. And our nation's future security depends on it.
2. The emerging situation in Uzbekistan, Pakistan and Afghanistan. There was a massive bombing at a central market in Tashkent where my Geography professor used to go every day. The Argus is a fine site that's been closely following the Uzbekistan story as it's unfolded. There's a little speculation the whole thing was a "wag the dog" type incident invented by their President, but who knows? By all accounts, he is a wicked, tottering Soviet holdover who has been abusing Muslims left and right. Why wouldn't he generate an excuse to repress further?
3.Wal-Mart offers Nazi propaganda films, but refuses to stock a film critical of the government's role in Iraq. Thanks, Wal-Mart, you sure know how to be morally authoritative! (via the hilarious Jesus General and Atrios) See also Republican Jesus!
4. Obviously things are still going badly for Israel and Palestine. Ariel Sharon may finally have to bow out, and we'll probably be reintroduced to that paragon of integrity, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I suggest the following opinion pieces from Haaretz. They capture the mood that many Israeli s feel :
Haste is not waste: The suspicion that Sharon's actions are linked to the indictment hanging over his head is giving the country nightmares about the free-for-all at the top and the way decisions are made around here. Were the considerations behind the assassination of Sheikh Yassin, with the bloody revenge that is bound to come, cold and disinterested? Or was Sharon trying to hint to the attorney general how absolutely essential his leadership is at this time?A civilized country cannot be run by a leader living under the dark cloud of criminal allegations like bribery and breach of trust. But in the nightmare existence we live, it is happening. Stalling is no longer an option. If an indictment is brought against him, Sharon will be forced to resign, in keeping with the Deri precedent.
Why is the country striding along on a march of folly which has seen few precedents in human history? Why is it being swept from one idiotic decision to another? Why does it repeatedly act in explicit contradiction to the interests of its inhabitants? In these past three years in particular, there is no mine that Israel has failed to step on, no opportunity it hasn't missed, no path it hasn't embarked on in the certain knowledge that it will be harmful.
.....
The attempt to explain rationally and conventionally the dynamics at work here has long since failed. So much so, in fact, that the only explanation the political and military analysts on television could come up with this week was: "They're doing XXX and hoping something good will come of it."
....
Maybe there's a mole. Yes, a mole. A kind of planted spy - a destructive worm virus, a Trojan horse.Let's put it this way: We have here a march of folly that is so systematic, so consecutive and so determined that there's no way it's happening by itself. Because if it were accidental, wouldn't there have to be the occasional random success as well? So maybe it's really not accidental. Maybe there's someone who's running the show - craftily, brilliantly.
At every stage, our friend will ask himself: How else can I be harmful? What haven't I done yet? What extra dimension can I inject into the conflict? What new layer can be added to it? We succeeded in elevating the conflict from a territorial dispute into a war of chaos involving decentralized communities and organizations. Well done, yes, but now it's time to elevate it to the religious plane, the apocalyptic level, so that the damage will extend not only into the next generation, but for untold generations down the line.
Our friend looks around and asks himself: What single action can I take in order to place Israel at the cutting edge in the war of civilizations against the whole of Islam? How can I upgrade the existential threats: from mere bombs and shooting by local ragamuffin groups to the gunsights of Al-Qaida? And how can I, by the same twist of the blade, cause the most effective publicity damage? His eye catches sight of the most adored religious leader, who is also old, sick and crippled. And the rest is the un-end of history: today the war of Gog and Magog; tomorrow the Apocalypse.
....
And again he looks around: what else, what else ... A mischievous glint in his eye: the Temple Mount?
....
Who's the mole? And furthermore: why is he doing it? In whose service is he operating? A messianic organization? Spectra? Smersh? The cult of the devil? The angels of hell? One might think he's working in the service of the Palestinians, were it not for the suspicion that an equally malicious mole is operating at their highest levels, too, and is constantly undermining their best interests.So, who is he? And, above all, what's his motive? What's he after? It's not clear. It might all really be just an unfounded theory, a ridiculous thesis with no foundation of any kind. But tell me, in the light of what's going on, does anyone have a better explanation?
There are some days when you wish that they would just put out the real damn story for a change. But now, let's go to the Laci Petersen case. You can always tell when the narrative is dissolving, because somehow Scott Petersen's symbolic crucifixion becomes the hottest thing in American cable news. *CLICK*
While the Bush administration visibly flakes into a dozen pieces on TV under fire from the Clarke Battleship, we have a whole menu of items from the post-9/11 bloodsphere. From the furthest 'Bled al-Siba' (Lands of Insolence), we learn that the wicked Governor of Herat in western Afghanistan has regained control of his city, after someone killed the Aviation Minister and everyone ran a little amuck. Roughly 50 to 100 factional warlord fighters were killed fighting each other over this historic (formerly besieged) gateway to Persia. See it fall again next Thursday on live satellite!!
The problem with Afghanistan is that it's more an aggregate of ethnically jarred city-states than a coherently governed nation. The U.S. plan pretty much hyper-Balkanized it by installing worthless factional warlords with no oversight in every major city, kind of a government glued together like toothpicks. Wildly xenophobic, tribal toothpicks.
Meanwhile the hi-value baddies got away and Pakistan's military took quite a toll (roundup) in the mountain campaign. Strong counterattacks from guerillas, and it seems Muslim leaders there are quite angry, reports the Asia Times:
Flames of war loom large The present offensive in South Waziristan is not merely a hunt for a few fugitive guerrilla fighters (including Osama bin Laden and his number two, Ayman al-Zawahri). It is a fight to control their bases in the whole eastern tribal belt that borders Afghanistan. Any ceasefire, therefore, assuming even that it holds, will be temporary at best, and a prelude to the next battle.On Sunday, 70 of the country's most popular religious clerics, in a religious ruling issued from the federal capital Islamabad, called the Wana operation (Wana is the headquarters of South Waziristan agency) an "unjustified war" by the Pakistan army on their Muslim brothers. The clerics said that since the war had been unleashed on the mujahideen in support of the US cause in the region, anyone who died resisting the Pakistani forces would be a martyr, and any Pakistani soldiers killed would die "Motul Haram" - in other words, they would go to hell. The ruling also prohibits funeral prayers for soldiers killed in the conflict.
The ruling is a major setback for the Pakistani ruling class, and even information minister Sheikh Rasheed, who is famous for his outspoken nature, has refused to comment.
What began, therefore, as an operation to force al-Qaeda and the Afghan resistance from their base in Shawal - a no man's land .... is rapidly escalating into a major crisis for the whole country.
Meanwhile in Iraq, it is interesting that despite all the professed technocratic skill of the new administration, somehow they cannot supply the military and police equipment necessary to police and defend Iraq from hostile forces and secure the Syrian border. Among the missing items include "Life Saving Body Armor" of talking points fame, guns, radios, etc.
I find it incomprehensible that in today's titanic military-industrial complex, with its many satellites and airplanes and assorted schemers, it cannot fill in a few thousand police stations and medium-level military divisions with some kind of expediency. If this were the Roman days, you would just shoot a few pokey arms traffickers and things would move along.
14 British soldiers in Basra, Iraq were injured when 'petrol bombs,' as they call them, were launched during a protest over jobs, although some protesters supported the late Sheik Yassin or Saddam Hussein, as well. The Guardian says, "One soldier was seen with his head and shoulders covered in flames." The British forces, having a modicum of rigour about their techniques, claim to have fired only baton rounds but not live ammo or tear gas.
Among the wake of the Madrid bombings, the 9/11 commission's tidbits, the Afghans riding every which-way, and an expanding inquiry into Ariel Sharon's shady finances, Israel somehow saw the time was right to wipe out HAMAS' Sheik Yassin. Why not round out this curious March with a good heap of civil disorder moving into an April of profound anarchy in the Holy Land?
The latest spot reports from a constantly updating page at the Israeli paper Haaretz, which unlike other Israeli media tends not to become totally anesthetized when Israel launches major operations. It is 11 AM there now, but today will surely hold more news.
Five Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, were killed and dozens injured, Palestinian sources said, in riots that broke out in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip...Also Monday, Palestinians fired a series of mortar shells and rockets at Gaza Strip settlements and the Negev. Four Qassam rockets fell in the Negev Monday evening. Palestinians also fired several home-made rockets at an IDF checkpoint in Gaza, two mortar shells at a settlement in the Gush Katif settlement bloc, and an anti-tank rocket at an IDF outpost near Rafah in the south of the Strip, close to the Egyptian border. Two apartments in the Gaza settlement of Neveh Dekalim were damaged due to rocket attacks earlier in the day.
IDF tanks moved into northern Gaza late Monday, Israeli security officials said. Palestinian security officials said the tanks were moving toward the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
In the Khan Yunis refugee camp in southern Gaza, IDF soldiers shot and killed three Palestinians, including a 13-year-old boy, during clashes with hundreds of angry protesters. The demonstrators flocked to a roadblock west of the refugee camp, near [Jewish settlement] Neveh Dekalim, and threw stones at the soldiers guarding it. Witnesses said the soldiers fired live ammunition at the crowd, which consisted mostly of schoolchildren.
In the West Bank refugee camp of Balata in Nablus, hospital officials said soldiers shot dead a Palestinian journalist. They said Mohammed Abu Khalimi, a 22-year-old reporter for Al Najah University radio, had just broadcast a report about the army entering the camp when he was shot. They said he was standing near a group of stone-throwing youths.
Some 15,000 people, including more than 40 armed men, gathered in the center of Nablus. About 15 armed men, wearing masks and Hamas headbands, fired shots into the air.
"Dozens of people came to us this morning volunteering to be suicide bombers," said one masked militant. "We will send them in the right time."
A Palestinian man was shot and wounded in the West Bank city of Bethlehem after throwing firebombs at IDF troops, Army Radio reported.
In Jenin, another militant stronghold in the West Bank, more than 10,000 people demonstrated. Several dozen armed men from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades joined the crowd.
"Dozens of people came to us this morning volunteering to be suicide bombers," said one masked militant. "We will send them in the right time."
Ten Palestinians were injured in the West Bank city of Hebron in clashes with IDF troops. Soldiers fired tear gas and rubber bullets at protesters. Twelve demonstrators were injured in Bethlehem during clashes with IDF forces near the Tomb of Rachel near the city.
Calls for revenge emanated from mosque loudspeakers. One Hamas activist said that a new phase in the Israeli-Palestinian fighting had begun.
Shopkeepers called a one-day strike throughout the West Bank, closing virtually all stores. Palestinian schools were closed.
Jerusalem Post analyst simply says "Assassination will increase anarchy."
The settlers have an ethical code. Yay. Thanks, guys.
Hezbollah attacked Israeli positions from Lebanon.
Now Hamas could align with Al-Qaida.
Israel is barring journalists with Israeli citizenship from the Gaza Strip.
I am on a few odd Israeli e-mail lists, but one of the most interesting is surely GAMLA, a settler newswire featuring the insights of DEBKAfile. There's a certain direct style in today's analysis:
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon has fired the Israel-Palestinian war up to a new plane. The targeted assassination of Hamas founder, leader and moving spirit, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, Monday, March 22, was the prime minister's thunderous reply to the critics who argue that his disengagement strategy would hand the Gaza Strip over to Hamas control. It signals his determination to purge Gaza of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists ahead its evacuation. Yassin's death is but the precursor to liquidating the violent movement he founded in 1987 to "cleanse" Middle East of Jewish sovereignty and replace it with an Islamic republic.This cleanout of Hamas strength will take time. Until it is done, Israel cannot pull out of the Gaza Strip or even begin the process of disengagement.
Nothing else is quite as wretched today as David Brooks: "Understanding what the phrase 'one nation under God' might mean -- that's the important thing. That's not proselytizing; it's citizenship."
You wanted a Global War on Terror, Mr President.
You got one.
Everything got pretty risky there for a little while, and many bits of the system were fouled up, including important Perl files. I decided to install OS X fresh on the machine, and in turn rebuild all the site's MySQL hookups, Perl modules and everything. Fortunately it somehow only took about 90 minutes to do all this. Is it flawless? I'm not sure, but it should work.
On Friday I am flying off to England. How sweet.
There has been a ton of news lately about the spoofed Iraq intelligence I love so dearly. Finally, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski (Ret) has written her definitive expose on what she witnessed in the Pentagon and around the Office of Special Plans. Everything here reinforced what I have been saying all along. I am really happy that the Kwiatkowski is living up to the exacting standards of personal integrity that all armed services people should strive for, and not enough have in this time of lies.
I have heard about her story for quite some time, and she has been referred to in a few stories I've linked to. A key passage from "The Lie Factory" which Senator Kennedy recently repeated on the Senate floor:
"It wasn't intelligence-it was propaganda," Kwiatkowski says. "They'd take a little bit of intelligence, cherry-pick it, make it sound much more exciting, usually by taking it out of context, often by juxtaposition of two pieces of information that don't belong together." It was by turning such bogus intelligence into talking points for U.S. officials-including ominous lines in speeches by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell's testimony at the U.N. Security Council last February-that the administration pushed American public opinion into supporting an unnecessary war.
I am eagerly looking forward to spring break this year. For the first time, I'll fly over the big pond to Europe and hang out with Nick Petersen in London for a week. That's this Friday.
During that time I'll leave the site turned on, and I'll probably find some time to post back to here, but it can't be frequent.
This week, I have several mid-term exams and a giant group paper to contend with, so I can't spend a great deal of time writing here.
On the plus side, I realized that the Apache server which comes with OS X has a built-in Perl module (mod_perl), but deactivated. The Perl module runs the site's Perl code much more quickly than a server without the module. To turn it on I just had to enable it in the configuration files and restart the server. *Bingo*, just like that my site's dynamic stuff runs about 3x-4x faster. It was really necessary, and I only put it off because I was too busy and I thought I would have to go through the mess of recompiling Apache. So far I am using Apple's default Apache server with no problems.
This week I am experimenting with a slick program called ecto which allows me to write entries without using a web browser.
As far as the news is concerned, those new Bush ads are just so marvellous I don't really need to add anything. But imagine if Lincoln or FDR had tried to exploit similar images. This site is run by a legal professor with a spectacular sense of humor. (via the DKos)
The NY Times is running a huge Kerry op-ed blitz today. Maureen Dowd is clearly sugar-coating a nice image of a candidate with rich interests. A DLC totem suggests that "reform" should be Kerry's word of the campaign. A Clinton-Gore poll guru says that Kerry can take Bush on all kinds of issues.
For now, however, only 40 percent of voters think the country is headed in the right direction. According to nearly all public polls, Mr. Kerry is the preferred choice for president, and that prospect may well keep Mr. Kerry from focusing on the larger choice before America. That would be a shame, because voters would respond to such a challenge.The choice is between an America inspired by John F. Kennedy and one shaped by Ronald Reagan. When the alternatives are framed this way, Americans choose the Kennedy vision by a striking 53 percent to 41 percent. It brings increased support for Democrats among voters from across the political spectrum — in small towns and rural areas, in older blue-collar communities, among low-wage and unmarried women as well as young voters and women with a college degree.
Rather than simply criticizing specific policies of the Bush administration, Mr. Kerry should emphasize the worldview it represents. Mr. Bush favors tax cuts for business and the wealthy as the best way to bring about prosperity. He heralds individualism as the key to a healthy community. In his tenure America has retreated at home before our shared problems, but advanced alone abroad. If Mr. Kerry challenges this worldview, Mr. Bush will be forced to defend it.
For more election news, Electablog is pretty darn good.
There is some weird stuff going on in Afghanistan, as the long-awaited Spring Offensive between the allies and the Taliboid forces (al-Qaeda types, probably ISI people, who knows?) springs into action. Bin Laden may have narrowly avoided a Pakistani raid. US snipers killed a bunch of "suspected Taliban."
I never thought the Republicans were 31337 hax0rs, but apparently they can steal filez and r00t a judicial computer system better than anyone thought. Their head judicial aide apparently helped steal around 4,670 secret Democratic documents. As the trolls on Fox News have been commanded to point out, many memos indicated the D's were working with outside groups to keep conservatives off judicial panels for specific cases, a hoorrrible, oh so hoorrible, infringement of judicial power. Or something like that.
I don't quite understand what D's were legitimately doing, except considering impact the judges will have on cases!!! Bad Democrats! Thinking about the effect of judges!! Bad!
Kerry beats Bush by a few points, 49-43, in Florida!!! Time to purge the voter rolls again!
Many Palestinians killed, including 4 children, in massive Gaza raids supposedly designed to draw militants out. What the hell is the point? Apparently Sharon's credibility with the abused Israeli public is at a new low, so this, like many Sharon initiatives, probably has a wag-the-dog logic to it. There is also word that the Israelis may have been asked by the Bush administration to avoid withdrawing from Gaza before the elections because of the potential instability. Uhm, Israeli occupation ==Bush political power? What? This is worth following.
Finally, at long, long last, the pervasive sense of the everlasting nightmare has softened. Yet now we have VP speculations. Bill Richardson or John Edwards seem good right now. Alison caught the McLaughlin Group this morning and McLaughlin predicted that the search for VP would go for ethnic, not regional, balance. We could do worse than Richardson, a popular southwestern Hispanic governor with tons of executive and international experience. Or on SNL, the skilled Darrell Hammond as Clinton put forth his own VP candidacy. He asked how awesome it would be to have him around again with even less responsibility. He said could put the Vice back in Vice President, although Cheney's done pretty well by that measure.
Ok, so now I will say it. My optimism about the outcome of the election and the future of the country has finally shot above 50%.
The glass is indeed half full.
The word is that Richard Perle got tossed on his butt from the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, supposedly for calling for the firing of the Pentagon's in-house spy agency's chief. The agency, the DIA or Defense Intelligence Agency, is somewhat more towards the "rational" side of intelligence gathering. That is, they were not the ones principally responsible for silly WMD intelligence. Yet Perle blames them for messing it up.
Too much for Rummy, finally at long last.
Pat Buchanan predicted on the McLaughlin group on Sunday morning that he would not be the last kicked out before the election. Ahh Pat.
Aside from that I should explain why I often miss posting Wednesdays on the site. The problem is that I have creative writing from 7 to 10, and of course last week I had to cover the Kerry rally and write the story, which took hours.
Midterms are right in my face here. It's going to be a hella lot of work. I covered the caucus story this week. it was altogether messy but interesting, as Kucinich overwhelmingly won our precinct, and we found out Edwards was dropping out while filling out ballots.
I am going to visit NickP in London in a week!! This is so damn cool, I've never been across the big ocean. Really. (Cheng has just gone the other way to Tokyo. He may make contact one of these days)
Thats about all I have the energy left about right now. Night.
There have been a lot of stories flying today about the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Seymour Hersh released a major article stating that the U.S. is going into the remote Hindu Kush areas with possibly thousands of troops to seek out Bin Laden. This article is worth reading in its entirety.
Hindu Kush means "Hindu Killer," and as Hersh pointed out today, Alexander the Great lost a division up here to the harsh conditions. These are highly tribal areas, and most people are well-armed.
The problem is that for a lot of the hard-core Islamists in the Pakistani security services--mainly the ISI--the entry of US troops into Pakistan is the real red line, the breaking point. Musharraf has already narrowly avoided death several times.
Should it be a red line for us? As Andy put it, this is massive intervention into a nuclear power we are talking about. Does this kind of thing have to be voted on somewhere? What can this lead to? (What might the North Koreans do?)
Stop.
Ok, alternatively, none of this madness is going on. It's all fiction and spy yarns. Sometimes I worry I am over-reacting, but then I think about how scary nuclear weapons seemed to me back in the day. Back then, we had huge states looking out for their crown jewels, but now its more of an virtual Persian bazaar of clandestine WMD trafficking and shady deals.
Besides that, Reuters reports NATO is planning to sweep through Afghanistan, taking security control of continuous areas in a grand sweep. Yet the Taliban has control of Zabul province now, according to one Pakistani article. The NGOs have been brutally driven off in these parts and the central government, corrupt in many places, is out of reach.
The Pakistani military killed some people a little ways inside Pakistan, in an area they are searching through.
There is an interesting story in the WaPo that the Palestinian Authority might crumble, too.
Something less terrifying about other fuzzy borders in Central Asia. Seems Uzbekistan, kind of a troll state, has been laying landmines well beyond its boundaries. Meanwhile Tajiks have been wandering into Kyrgyzstan and taking resources. It's a very nomadic place, which is part of the reason the land mines are such a problem.
Interesting campaign blog with the Columbia School of Journalism.
I TOLD you that Ahmed Chalabi was dirty dirty stuff, selling bad intel via the neo-cons. The investigations are piling up. Hurrah!
While reporting for the Mac Weekly, I located myself in the audience near the "stage entrance" of the campaign rally. Senator Kerry moved down the line, shaking hands and signing things. With a huge crush of people and cameras all around, I asked Kerry if the investigation into intelligence distortions on Iraq should be a criminal matter. We reported his answer in the Mac Weekly story. (not yet online).
Kerry responded: "I have no evidence yet that it should be, but I think that we need a much more rapid and thorough investigation than the administration is currently pursuing. I think that this idea of doing it by 2005 is a complete election gimmick. It ought to be done in a matter of months, and that will determine what ought to be done."
The campaign story was a very tough one for us to write, and the session well into the early morning left me tired for days afterward. It is damn hard to write the Weekly and look sane the next day, as the editors know all too well.
The newspaper is in sweet sweet color on the cover. I'm really happy I snagged a candidate's quote, but I wish that more of what other people said at the rally could have been put in. Unfortunately, the paper a huge crush for space this week.
I have to find some birthday presents for the Chunkies this afternoon, and I'm still struggling to get HongPong.com's photo album software I want. The Edwards slideshow is coming along nicely so far, though. Hopefully later today, and I'll send out some notifications to all who might be interested...
One of the big questions around the war is whether or not the "terror states" of Iran and Syria might be impelled to help Iraqis strike US forces, thusly proving QED for the neo-cons that they are all EvilDoers Waiting to Strike Against Us. TIME reports that it's really a locally-based thing, not foreigners pulling strings. But now comes a Guardian report that Syria and Iran have been helping some groups. (WiC again)
Senior Iraqi intelligence officers believe an Islamic militant group which has claimed responsibility for two suicide bombings in Irbil and a spate of deadly attacks in Baghdad, Falluja and Mosul is receiving significant help from Syria and Iran.The officers, who have been tracking the activities of domestic and foreign jihadists in northern Iraq, claim that members of Jaish Ansar al-Sunna (the army of the supporters of the sayings of the prophet) have been "given shelter by Syrian and Iranian security agencies and have been able to enter Iraq with ease".
The group is suspected of training suicide bombers and deploying them against US forces in Iraq and Iraqis considered to be collaborating with the US-led authorities.
For Iraqis already in, or thinking about joining, one of the Iraqi security forces -- such as the Iraqi Civil Defence Corp (ICDC), the border guards or the police -- the dangers were made all too clear last week. Instead of being viewed by insurgents as people protecting their country, or simply needing a job, Iraqi police or corps members are simply labelled "collaborators", aiding and abetting the US occupation. Over 100 people were killed in Iskanderiya and Baghdad in two car bombings over two days, both targeting Iraqis signing up to join security forces.
.....
Standard operating procedures for troops stationed in Iraq have changed in such a way as to avoid lethal engagements. US soldiers in Iraq have told Al-Ahram Weekly that, for example, if a patrol comes under fire, the usual response is to leave the area rather than counterattack, unless absolutely necessary. As the US makes plans to pull troops out of cities to bases on the edges of urban centres, Iraqi security forces are being trained and deployed at a break-neck pace, often without proper vehicles or communications and security equipment. The goal is to hand over all security positions to the Iraqis, and damn the consequences.Existing resistance activities, like the prison raid in Fallujah, could be an example of the chaos that may erupt this summer. Take the already volatile tensions between the Sunni, Shi'ites and Kurds, and the fact that some of these groups have their own militias -- like the Kurdish peshmergas or the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq's Badr Brigade and Muqtada Al-Sadr's Mahdi Army -- then add some foreign fighters intent on inflaming those tensions and an elections showdown sure to make either Shi'ites or Sunnis very upset: we have the perfect ingredients for a civil war. If that happens, the US seems to be the only force in the country with the capability to keep the peace, but ironically they have not accomplished that even without widespread sectarian violence.
Confronting problems on critical fronts, the CIA recently removed its top officer in Baghdad because of questions about his ability to lead the massive station there, and has closed a number of satellite bases in Afghanistan amid concerns about that country's deteriorating security situation, according to U.S. intelligence sources.The previously undisclosed moves underscore the problems affecting the agency's clandestine service at a time when it is confronting insurgencies and the U.S.-declared war on terrorism, current and former CIA officers say. They said a series of stumbles and operational constraints have hampered the agency's ability to penetrate the insurgency in Iraq, find Osama bin Laden and gain traction against terrorism in the Middle East.
One former officer who maintains close ties to the agency said it was stretched to the limit. "With Afghanistan, the war on terrorism, with Iraq, I think they're just sucking wind," he said.
But the officers also said the latest problems point to a deeper problem with the CIA leadership and culture. Some lamented that an agency once vaunted for its daring and reach now finds itself overstretched and hunkered down in secure zones.
....
Since Sept. 11, 2001, the agency has brought back hundreds of retirees, dubbed "green-badgers" for the color of the identification cards issued to those who return to the fold under contract. The agency has also turned to young officers without any overseas experience.New agency recruits with military backgrounds are being sent to Iraq as soon as they emerge from the CIA training academy in Virginia, said one former agency official. "They don't speak the language, don't know how to recruit," the official said. "It's on-the-job training."
...
The problems [with turnover] also extend to Afghanistan, sources said. One CIA veteran said he recently spoke with an officer who had served as a base chief in Kandahar for 60 days, an unusually brief tenure for such an important assignment.The base in Kandahar is one of five or six the CIA established in Afghanistan after the U.S. invaded the country in 2001, all reporting to the agency's primary station in Kabul, the capital. But a number of those remote bases have been closed in recent months, according to current and former CIA officials.
...
The CIA has struggled to fill high-ranking posts in other countries, sources said. Four former CIA officers with close ties to headquarters said in separate interviews that the agency struggled to fill its top post in Pakistan last year, that at least five candidates turned down the job of station chief in Islamabad before the agency found an officer willing to take it.
It was Mary Vargas, a 44-year-old engineer in Renton, Wash., who carried U.S. therapy culture to its new zenith. Explaining why the war in Iraq was no longer her top election issue, she told the Internet magazine Salon that, "when they didn't find the weapons of mass destruction, I felt I could also focus on other things. I got validated."Yes, that's right: war opposition as self-help. The end goal is not to seek justice for the victims, or punishment for the aggressors, but rather "validation" for the war's critics. Once validated, it is of course time to reach for the talisman of self-help: "closure." In this mindscape, Howard Dean's wild scream was not so much a gaffe as the second of the five stages of grieving: anger. The scream was a moment of uncontrolled release, a catharsis, allowing U.S. liberals to externalize their rage and then move on, transferring their affections to more appropriate candidates.
Right now I am working on a paper about international security, an exploration of various theories such as neo-realism and critical theory critiques of international relations. Here I'm dumping some stories I found which are tied to the issues:
Ariel Sharon's new proposal to "unilaterally" withdraw from much of Gaza with a good chomp of the West Bank in exchange gets a lot of news. The Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly features Jonathan Cook, saying its another Dead End:
A [PLO] statement issued on Friday ... rejected the "unilateral disengagement" plan. "The plan is a recipe for a takeover of most of the territories of the West Bank," the statement read.Such fears are not an over-reaction. On the heels of Sharon's announcement, the prime minister's office revealed that the plan involved transferring the Gaza evacuees to the West Bank to "consolidate" settlement blocs such as Maale Adumim, east of Jerusalem, Ariel near Nablus, and Gush Etzion south of Bethlehem. Israeli media soon became rife with rumour that Sharon would suggest to the White House that the price of evacuation would be the annexation of several large settlement blocs in the West Bank.
One source in the prime minister's office was quoted in Ma'ariv as saying, "We are putting out feelers, to see what the Americans will agree to."
The damaging effects of Israel withdrawing from Gaza unilaterally -- without a final peace deal establishing a sovereign Palestinian state -- are not hard to predict. Even if the army does pull back, it will simply be withdrawing to a new line around Gaza. The Strip would be effectively besieged, with no Palestinian control over entry or exit... It would be a settler-less occupation, but a continuing occupation nonetheless. That is hardly likely to dampen the flames of anger sweeping through Gaza's refugee camps.
Counter-intuitively, here perhaps lies some of the appeal of a Gaza evacuation for Sharon. The plan is soaking up headlines that should be reminding readers of the corruption scandal ensnaring Sharon. It ... turns the hostile gaze of the world away from the apartheid wall under construction in the West Bank. But watching from the sidelines as Palestinian political factions, along with the population of Gaza, descend into civil war may be the biggest prize of all.
The first signs of where Gaza is heading may have appeared last Thursday when a half-hour gun battle raged outside the headquarters of Razi Jabali, supreme commander of the police in Gaza. Amid rumours of treachery, betrayal and assassination attempts by the Preventive Security Organisation, one policeman was killed and 11 others wounded. Hatem Abdul-Qader, a senior Fatah member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, warned, "A withdrawal based on bad intentions and without coordination with the PA will transform Gaza into a living hell."
South Lebanon became the Hezbollah state, and a similar situation is liable to develop in the Gaza Strip. The point is that Israel is in the process of creating two Palestinian states, one in Gaza and the other in the West Bank. In Gaza, it is conducting its major military campaign against one organization, Hamas; it is proposing to withdraw from that organization's territory, evacuate settlements and demarcate a perfect boundary line with an enemy state. At the end of the process, Gaza is liable to become an entity cut off from the main Palestinian system, the autonomous province of an organization and not a separate section of the Palestinian state.The signs that this is happening are already discernible on the ground. Hamas is presenting Israel's declaration of withdrawal from Gaza as its military and political victory, and not that of the Palestinian Authority or of the organizations associated with Fatah. Islamic Jihad has been shunted aside by Hamas, which is unwilling, for the time being, to incorporate it into one organizational framework... At the moment, Hamas does not consider a hudna (cease-fire) to be a Palestinian interest - meaning a Hamas interest - and its representatives are explaining that the organization is in a state of momentum that must not be broken off by a cease-fire.
The formulations being used by Hamas leaders to describe their "victory" are amazingly like the ones we heard from the heads of Hezbollah after the IDF withdrawal from Lebanon. But that is as far as the resemblance extends. Because even if there is a full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, its 1.25 million inhabitants will continue to be under Israeli responsibility. In contrast to South Lebanon, Gaza will have no economic hinterland... The result is liable to be another huge Palestinian diaspora, like the one in Lebanon, but without its civilian infrastructure.
There is no dispute that Israel needs to withdraw from Gaza, and fast; but it also has to find a new landlord for Gaza, just as fast. That can only be the Palestinian Authority, which in the meantime is not enthusiastic about the idea of the unilateral withdrawal. "Gaza and Jericho first" was a good proposal for another period, when an economic infrastructure still existed in the Gaza Strip and Hamas was a limited organization, fighting for its status. For the PA to be able to accept control of Gaza now, it will have to wage a tremendous struggle with Hamas. However, Israel's continued war against Hamas, and the showcase manner in which it is being waged, with the large number of Palestinian casualties it is exacting, is only enhancing the organization's status and will make it even more difficult for the PA to rehabilitate its status in the Gaza Strip.
You, the people of Yesha [Judea, Samaria, Gaza], are leading ... You are responsible for your lives and you must prepare. The government is handing over the settlers to the armed Palestinian gangs ... They have already betrayed Jews to others in the past ... To be a betrayer and an `informer' is part of the spiritual way of life of the left ... This pathological government is collaborating twice: once with a terrorist organization, a second time against Jews ... What haven't we done - we explained, we voted no-confidence numberless times. Nothing helped, they are determined. So the time has come to stop talking, the time has come to act.
Reversing a trend that predicated the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. has increased its military budget to more than $400 billion and its intelligence budget to more than $40 billion. Current projections point to a defense budget of more than $500 billion before the end of the decade, with another $50 billion for the intelligence community. Led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense has moved aggressively to eclipse the State Department as the major locus of U.S. foreign policy, arrogating management of the intelligence community, and abandoning bipartisan policies of arms control and disarmament crafted over the past four decades. Funding cuts have prompted the Department of State to close consulates around the world and assign personnel of the well-funded CIA to diplomatic and consular posts. Though current defense costs represent nearly 20% of Washington?s expenses, less than 1% of the federal budget is devoted to the needs of the State Department.
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The militarization of the intelligence community has been particularly profound. Nearly 90 % of the $40 billion budget for intelligence activity is allocated to and monitored by the Pentagon, and more than 90 % of all intelligence personnel report to the Pentagon. The Pentagon controls the tasking, collection, and analysis of all satellite photography. Moreover, such key intelligence bodies as the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (formerly the National Imagery and Mapping Agency), and the National Reconnaissance Office are designated as ?combat support? agencies. This is exactly what President Harry S. Truman was trying to avoid in 1947 when he created the Central Intelligence Agency separate from the Pentagon, and made the CIA director of central intelligence as well.Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has gone further than any other defense secretary to control intelligence collection and analysis. He created the position of undersecretary of defense for intelligence without vetting this move with the Senate intelligence committee. In preparing the case against Iraq, he created the Office of Special Plans, which collected specious intelligence and misused intelligence community collection to justify the war and to create a congressional consensus in favor of war. Rumsfeld?s moves received rubber stamp approval from the Senate Armed Forces Committee, undermining the oversight roles of the Senate and House intelligence committees.
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The doctrinal policies of the Bush administration have helped to make the international arena a more dangerous place. In his commencement address at West Point in June 2002, President Bush endorsed preemptive attacks, and several months later, the White House issued its National Security Strategy, which discarded the policy of détente and containment and endorsed preemptive or preventive military actions against states with which the U.S. is at peace. Ominously, the strategy report warned that the U.S. would ?make no distinction between terrorists and those who knowingly harbor or provide aid to them.? The Pentagon?s Defense Planning Guidance and the Quadrennial Defense Review projected an indefinite future of continuous and worldwide war, endorsed the policy of regime change, and championed preemptive attack as the means for securing peace through international acceptance of U.S. hegemony. The Nuclear Posture Review of 2002 lowered the threshold for using nuclear weapons, and the 2003 defense bill eliminated restrictions on researching low-yield nuclear weapons...
A confidential report prepared by the US-led administration in Iraq says that the attacks by insurgents in the country have escalated sharply, prompting fears of what it terms Iraq's "Balkanisation". The findings emerged after a rocket-propelled grenade attack on the top US general in Iraq, John Abizaid, on Thursday."January has the highest rate of violence since September 2003," the report said. "The violence continues despite the expansion of the Iraqi security services and increased arrests by coalition forces in December and January."
The report makes clear how dependent Iraq's stability is on investment in the country's economy. "A fear of some is the 'Balkanisation' of Iraq if security, economic and infrastructure situations do not improve," it says.
It attributed much of the civilian violence to rising ethnic tensions between Kurds, Shias and Sunnis, noting that several bodies were found in the south "with hands bound and bullet wounds to the head".
Lewis Libby, Cheney's chief of staff and a serious neo-con, has been named as the target of agents investigating the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity. Crucial. I did hypothesize a while ago that he might have been one of them, because he seems foul, corrupt and powerful. Hooray that I guessed right. But were they channeling the spoofed intel??
There is a very exciting article from Mother Jones detailing the many exciting intrigues concerning the neo-conservatives, the Pentagon and the rest of the mess.
How fitting that the investigation into the intelligence failure cracked open today. As Jon Stewart put it tonight, "Conspiracy theorists, start your websites!!!" Ahh, Jon...
The Lie Factory:Until now, the story of how the Bush administration produced its wildly exaggerated estimates of the threat posed by Iraq has never been revealed in full. But, for the first time, a detailed investigation by Mother Jones, based on dozens of interviews-some on the record, some with officials who insisted on anonymity-exposes the workings of a secret Pentagon intelligence unit and of the Defense Department's war-planning task force, the Office of Special Plans. It's the story of a close-knit team of ideologues who spent a decade or more hammering out plans for an attack on Iraq and who used the events of September 11, 2001, to set it into motion.The reports, virtually all false, of Iraqi weapons and terrorism ties emanated from an apparatus that began to gestate almost as soon as the Bush administration took power. In the very first meeting of the Bush national-security team, one day after President Bush took the oath of office in January 2001, the issue of invading Iraq was raised, according to one of the participants in the meeting-and officials all the way down the line started to get the message, long before 9/11. Indeed, the Bush team at the Pentagon hadn't even been formally installed before Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of Defense, and Douglas J. Feith, undersecretary of Defense for policy, began putting together what would become the vanguard for regime change in Iraq.
The Bush Administration will probably attempt to dump all the blame for the WMD fiasco on the CIA. As many are saying, this move is highly ironic. Every evidence is that Doug Feith and his Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon made an end run around the CIA and the DIA, cherry-picked intelligence, and funneled it to Cheney, who then manipulated Bush with it. (W. admits to not reading the newspapers, so he is at the mercy of his close advisers for information, for all the world like an illiterate medieval king with crafty ministers!)To make George Tenet take the fall for all this, when his analysts were relatively careful in their assessments, and to let Feith and Cheney off the hook, would be the height of injustice. Ironically, Feith leaked some of the most damaging evidence against him to the The Weekly Standard...
Yes, we are gearing up for another full season of good things at HongPong.com. Later I'll have to look at how this all correlates.
Josh Marshall points out that Bush is in a February slump and goes on to score a double play with lots of information about Bush's mysterious AWOL time.
And then there is the idiot David Brooks, praising the Illuminati's wisdom and blaming the CIA:
When it comes to understanding the world's thugs and menaces, I'd trust the first 40 names in James Carville's P.D.A. faster than I'd trust a conference-load of game theorists or risk-assessment officers. I'd trust politicians, who, whatever their faults, have finely tuned antennae for the flow of events. I'd trust Mafia bosses, studio heads and anybody who has read a Dostoyevsky novel during the past five years.Most of all, I'd trust individuals over organizations. Individuals can use intuition, experience and a feel for the landscape of reality. When you read an individual's essay, you know you're reading one person's best guess, not a falsely authoritative scientific finding.
Even more CIA guys piling onto the Bush Administration.
The primaries are so much fun!! Dean has all but washed out now, sadly. Oh well. Joe Trippi has been slurped up by MSNBC, and I'm lookin forward to seeing him and Buchanan get crazy. More tomorrow!
Cheney's favorite leak: Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that a magazine article, based on leaked and unevaluated intelligence, definitively proved links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden has triggered a new round in the Bush administration's conflict with the intelligence community."It's disgusting," said Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA chief of counter-terrorism. "It's bullshit," said Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who served in the agency's Near East division....
The conservative Weekly Standard published its article on the Saddam-al-Qaida connection, "Case Closed," by Stephen Hayes, in its Nov. 24, 2003, issue. The piece, released on Nov. 14, was instantly promoted as providing proof for the Bush administration's assertion that Saddam was long involved with Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization. Weekly Standard executive editor Fred Barnes trumpeted the article on Fox News. "These are hard facts, and I'd like to see [skeptics] refute any one of them," he said.
But the Department of Defense did just that. On Nov. 15, the next day, the Pentagon issued an extraordinary statement calling the story "inaccurate" and explaining it was based on raw intelligence ... that had not been evaluated.
The assertion that Saddam and al-Qaida were in league was a major justification for the Iraq war. Indeed, a majority of Americans came to believe the alliance was real as a result of the administration's persistent suggestion that Saddam was behind 9/11, and it was the reason they gave for supporting the war.
However, no proof was ever offered, and the administration's continuing effort to press the point led the press corps to question President Bush about it. "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al-Qaida ties," Bush said on Nov. 18, 2003. But he added, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11" attacks. Yet on Jan. 9, Cheney, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, spontaneously lauded the discredited Weekly Standard article and described it as "the best source of information." ....
The Weekly Standard article was drawn from a "top secret U.S. government memorandum" that the magazine depicted as proving bin Laden and Saddam had an "operational relationship" that dated back nearly a decade. The memo was written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, who also oversaw the unique Office of Special Plans within the Pentagon. This small office of handpicked operatives was created under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to act as a counter to the CIA and other intelligence agencies that were seen as insufficiently loyal in providing material to help make the administration's case about Saddam's imminent threat. Since its inception, the OSP has worked outside established intelligence channels, rarely sharing its intelligence information for peer review, and has been a direct source of information, often faulty, for the White House.
Following Feith's testimony about alleged ties between Saddam and external terrorist groups before Congress last July 10, he was pressed in a follow-up letter from Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., and Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., respectively the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, to provide the evidence that backed up his assertions. In response, Feith's office cited 50 instances of raw intelligence that suggested ties between Iraqi dictator and the al-Qaida leader. Meanwhile, Feith's report also found its way to the Weekly Standard.
The article, which gave credence to Feith's report and suggested it had conclusively confirmed the Saddam-al-Qaida connection, never informed its readers that the report was simply a laundry list of uncorroborated data.
Former CIA counter-terrorism chief Cannistraro explains that hundreds, if not thousands, of raw reports from first-, second- and third-hand sources flood into the CIA offices around the word every day. But these are of little or no use until they can be analyzed...Cannistraro is stunned that Feith's office, out to prove linkage between Saddam and bin Laden, relied on raw intelligence summaries and not evaluated intelligence. "It's just amazing, because it's the antithesis of the intelligence process," he said.
I am making some progress on this new website idea but it has been slow going with finals. Fortunately that ends Wednesday. Unfortunately I have a TERM PAPER about THE WAR that has been rather disrupted. And it's also due Wednesday.
Here is a screenshot chunk of what I've put together for HongPong.com so far. This information will be strung together and turned into nice chunks of HTML information. I just found out how to import the WHOLE old HongPong.com right into it, but it will be tricky. These notes haven't been filled in for the most part, but pieces are getting added as I come across them. Think of it as sort of a topical filing cabinet with links and groups. Or something... It hasn't totally come together, that's for sure. And hurray, the Neo-cons will all be bright red!
So yesterday was the burning of books. First came the looters, then the arsonists. It was the final chapter in the sacking of Baghdad. The National Library and Archives – a priceless treasure of Ottoman historical documents, including the old royal archives of Iraq – were turned to ashes in 3,000 degrees of heat. Then the library of Korans at the Ministry of Religious Endowment were set ablaze.Amid the ashes of Iraqi history, I found a file blowing in the wind outside: pages of handwritten letters between the court of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who started the Arab revolt against the Turks for Lawrence of Arabia, and the Ottoman rulers of Baghdad. And the Americans did nothing.... I was holding in my hands the last Baghdad vestiges of Iraq's written history.
But for Iraq, this is Year Zero; with the destruction of the antiquities in the Museum of Archaeology on Saturday and the burning of the National Archives and then the Koranic library, the cultural identity of Iraq is being erased. Why? Who set these fires? For what insane purpose is this heritage being destroyed?
When I caught sight of the Koranic library burning – there were flames 100 feet high bursting from the windows – I raced to the offices of the occupying power, the US Marines' Civil Affairs Bureau. An officer shouted to a colleague that "this guy says some biblical [sic] library is on fire". I gave the map location, the precise name – in Arabic and English – I said the smoke could be seen from three miles away and it would take only five minutes to drive there. Half an hour later, there wasn't an American at the scene – and the flames were shooting 200 feet into the air.
But what is the next move for Saddam? Even in a cell the man still has a power, in no small part the ability, and the will, to tell all about how the Reagan administration helped him with all those well-demonized episodes of genocide and mayhem. There is that. But there is also Osama bin Laden about, and he's no bit player right now. As they cheered everywhere from FOX News to the foxholes to the streets of Iraq, I posted this comment about everyone's favorite evildoer. Yes, Saddam's capture helps things come together, perhaps. But who else benefits?
(Fri. Dec. 12)
In the last week, right in the middle of finals, I submitted an opinion about the Middle East (Who? Me?!) to this year's final Mac Weekly.
The United States finds itself at an ultimate nadir. We occupy hundreds of thousands of square miles of central Asia?s most historically fractious territory. The nearly-forgotten Taliban has sprung back from Pakistani strongholds, and Saddam is finally free to join the audiotape-jihadist club.Mesopotamia, the valley where the party started, is a smoldering, fourth-world ruin, flooded with a mixture of suspicious military-industrial corporations and mujahideen. The army?s mass arrests, its deployment of armor in urban areas, the razing of homes, and encircling towns with razor wire echo the terrible confrontation around Jerusalem that Bush has defiantly refused to confront. America grows inured to the daily violence and tragedies facing both Iraqis and American troops as young as first-years.
Nothing can shake this eerie sense that it is not just that Bush has failed us; rather, it is the whole underpinning of civilization itself, past and present, which has been shaken from its foundations.
It is not merely the museums of early history plundered, but the sites of our very genesis that lie destroyed. In those looted ruins, what was once knowable about our original nature has been smashed into darkness. We can never recover this loss.
The anarchy that transpired was not just an obscenity to today?s Iraqis; it was an attack on every ancient people there, and all their descendants. It destroyed our link with history, a knife in our collective soul more damaging than any crime humanity has yet witnessed. America still struggles to control a land it barely understands.
A stunning report by Seymour Hersh in this week?s New Yorker spells out the path America now seeks. The Pentagon will escalate their operations against Iraqi militants, using Special Forces hit squads to assassinate those whom our new reconstituted Baathist security forces point fingers at, Vietnam?s Phoenix Program for the 21st century.
Who better to train U.S. troops than their Israeli counterparts? Happy to build their occupation assassins into our expanding War on Terror, Israeli ?consultants? have already visited Baghdad. But which American general is putting the project together? None other than William Boykin, who publicly equates the Muslim world with the devil. According to reports, speaking before fundamentalist church audiences that ?Satan wants to destroy this nation, he wants to destroy us as a nation, and he wants to destroy us as a Christian army.?
Bush, insensitive to Boykin?s hate, is a special kind of leader. He is afraid of newspapers. He told Fox a little while ago, ?I glance at the headlines. I rarely read the stories. I understand that a lot of times there?s opinions mixed in with news. And I appreciate people?s opinions, but I?m more interested in news. And the best way to get the news is from objective sources. And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what?s happening in the world.?
Yet his objective sources keep ducking the important questions. They didn?t send enough troops to Iraq. Why? Why was there no peacekeeping plan for the Iraqi cities? Why didn?t the Pentagon plan to defend the Iraqi government ministries? Why do they forbid Iraqis from unionizing? Why can?t they control the enormous caches of captured arms around the country?
Is their goal chaos in the name of order? Pain and death in the service of defending our freedoms? Democracy, or Michael Ledeen?s ?creative destruction??
Their special plans have unfolded. Now the abyss between America and the Arabs has busted wide open. It is well past time to get rid of Rumsfeld and the incompetents who have botched the occupation. We must go hat in hand to the UN and ask the world to repair the political catastrophe we?ve sown at its root. If we quietly accept this path, we will never know peace again.
I'm trying to get ahold of this sudden turn of events in the war, this monster that keeps crashing one way and another. The daylight savings time change has extended the everlasting winter night, which easily turns into brooding sort of time which gave us Bob Dylan, for example. I'm watching the elections though, and it would be so much more enjoyable if things weren't going wrong all over. At least I've got some more time to hide at college until things blow over, unlike these poor bastards who have to work for a pittance at department stores and other shitty service jobs. Then there's the whole strike over at the U, and the ongoing madness elsewhere in the world...
As an ardent atheist, religiously motivated violence bothers me, beause it clearly stems from factors besides the religion. The violence can reveal intractible spiritual illnesses, and the choices that Bush makes are somehow never capable of containing the sickness. The whole Boykin "smash their idols" thing, who could possibly say anything more foolish while handling the Pentagon's counter-terror agency?
More waves of ghastly violence sweep Iraq on the first day of Ramadan. The hated Baghdad curfew was finally eased for after-dark ceremonies. The day after trying to kill Wolfowitz with a barrage of rockets (and a helicopter shot down), someone bombed four police stations and the Red Cross headquarters, killing at least 30 and wounding around 200 Iraqis, including plenty of police. That's about as horrible as anything I could possibly imagine...
Salam Pax said Oct. 19 that
Iraqi Police kick major ass. Much respect. Wherever you go now and open up that subject you will see a lot of sympathy with those brave men and women and a total incomprehension to what this so called resistance is doing. They are killing Iraqis now. They say Jihad against the Infidel Occupier and they go kill those Iraqi police men. The Baghdad Hotel, the Turkish embassy and many more.Besides the 25 attacks on American forces a day, what about the growing violence between religious sects?It is not the Infidel the attackers are killing but Iraqis and this just might be good because the general sentiment now is "what the fuck do the Jihadis think they are doing?". I wrote or said some time ago that most Iraqis are just sitting on the fence, well the last couple of attacks are tipping the balance against the Jihadis because they are killing all those Iraqis, they are putting bombs in streets and in front of schools, threatening to bomb banks where Iraqis are standing in line waiting to get their new Iraqi Dinars.
So as we say here [biha saleh ? something good will come out of it] maybe the people who are dying in those attacks are helping us understand that what those saboteurs are doing is just pure evil, telling people they are Muslim Jihadis doesn?t cut it anymore because they are killing civilians indiscriminately.
"We've seen many similar cases in this area," says Saddam hospital doctor Muhammad Dahham. [but] "It has never reached the level of murder before this morning." Dr Dahham is referring to the simmering inter-sect tensions in the teeming slums of western Baghdad, which in the last week appear to have taken a bloody new turn....Newsweek is now reporting that Mr. Douglas Feith, Neo-con Pentagon baller, has been kicked out of Iraq reconstruction meetings. The CPA, on the whole, does not measure up too well today. (DKos)The two bodies in the freezer belong to Sheikh Ahmed Khudeir and his brother Walid Khudeir, who were killed walking back home in the Washash neighbourhood early on Sunday morning after dawn prayers. The dead teenager - Taisir Falih - used to act as eyes for the 40-year-old sheikh, who was blind. Brother Walid was also disabled....
The deaths have shocked the poverty-stricken Washash slum, but the manner of their killing has added to their anguish. Fifteen Kalashnikov rounds for the sheikh, 13 for his brother and nine for the young boy, according to people in Washash who had gone with the bodies to Saddam hospital. "The gunmen killed them first and then emptied the magazines into the dead bodies," said one resident....
As far as the mosque faithful are concerned, there is only one explanation for what happened on Sunday morning. Ahmed Khudeir was a Sunni sheikh at a Sunni mosque and he was killed by members of the local Shia militia, they believe. The militia they have in mind - the Badr brigades - belongs to a leading Shia political party which has a seat on the US-appointed Governing Council.
...contractors in Iraq complain that the CPA?s staff consists largely of political appointees who don?t understand the process. "CPA is run by a bunch of political hacks and incompetents who have no idea what they?re doing," said a project manager for a firm working on a major USAID contract. "Every time we turn around there's a new order coming from CPA, 'Do it this way?no, do it that way instead.' It?s just unbelievable." Privately, some CPA officials admit the staff is less than the best the United States has to offer. Right now, "we're not talking A-team, even B-team. We?re talking C-team," says one official with the CPA. The Bush administration denies that any major changes are afoot, but all these problems have prompted a new reckoning back in Washington: Douglas Feith, Rumsfeld?s policy chief and a key official involved in postwar planning, is no longer sitting in on reconstruction meetings, NEWSWEEK has learned, and the White House has wrested oversight from the Pentagon.Prof. Juan Cole speculates on Ramadan and possible bombers:
US officials actually came out and said that progress in Iraq cannot be measured by a few bombs going off! Uh, without security nothing else follows, friends. Not financial investments, not NGO aid, not more troops sent by allies. The Red Cross is needed for Iraq's reconstruction, but it is likely more or less to get out of Iraq now. The UN has already largely been chased out....On the topic of Wolfowitz, he points out that Wolfie's visits always have overtones of political domination, as he deems it necessary to visit touchy cities like Tikrit and Najf, rather than stick to real military business.That the driver was foreign indicated to some observers that the attack was pulled off by al-Qaeda-linked foreign Mujahidin. It is also often alleged that Ramadan is seen by Muslim radicals as a particularly auspicious time to attack. Of course, I do not have any idea who planned the car bombings on Monday, but I don't think this reasoning resolves the problem. The regime of Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen is Arab nationalist; so is that of Syria. There are lots of Arab nationalists in both countries. Arab nationalism is not dead as a sentiment, and for those devoted to it, going to Iraq to fight now makes as much sense as defending Abdel Nasser during the Suez Crisis of 1956. That is, the Western press equates foreign fighters with Sunni radicalism, but Arab nationalism is international, too.
As for Ramadan, I'd be interested in knowing if Sunni radicals have actually ever struck then. In Arabian society Ramadan was a truce month... It is not as if there is any mandate that one must or ought to fight in Ramadan; quite the opposite, the default would be to avoid fighting in that month and spend it on spiritual meditation. On the other hand, a secular Arab nationalist like Sadat was perfectly happy to fight the 1973 war during Ramadan.
I suspect that Sunni Arab nationalists are actually the most logical suspects, as they have been all along. The Coalition forces don't have a single proven al-Qaeda operative in custody in Iraq, but have lots of ex-Baathists.
Wolfowitz's trip was an unadulterated disaster. His announcement that he was sleeping in Tikrit was clearly a dig at Saddam and the Baathists; but then a Blackhawk was downed there while he was at the US base in Tikrit (one US soldier was wounded). And then his hotel was struck in Baghdad, with a US colonel killed and 17 other persons wounded, several of them military. Wolfowitz was visibly shaken, his voice quavering, immediately after the attack. US personnel were forced out of the hotel, perhaps permanently. The colonel was probably the highest ranking officer killed in Iraq so far.The Red Cross may pull out much of its foreign staff, like the UN did.....The last time Wolfowitz went to Iraq, he inadvertently provoked huge demonstrations in Najaf and Baghdad by followers of Muqtada al-Sadr, who feared that the extra security measures in Najaf preparatory to Wolfowitz's arrival indicated that al-Sadr was going to be arrested. Wolfowitz got out of Najaf just ahead of the demonstrations.....
The problem with Wolfowitz's trips to Iraq is that they are clearly political, requiring visits to touchy places such as Najaf and Tikrit, to make political points about US dominance of the country. But the Deputy Secretary of Defense should only be visiting Iraq for military reasons, and his visits should be conducted secretly so he can see military commanders and troops. If Wolfowitz goes on campaigning to be mayor of Tikrit, he is liable to get himself killed.
Before they attacked the Red Cross, the story was the awful treatment of wounded Americans, whose numbers the Pentagon avoids talking about. There are now about 2,000 injured American troops. Apparently Cher anonymously called in to a show on CSPAN today and the host figured out it was her. Cher went to Walter Reed hospital and was terribly upset that Bush tries to hide the wounded. Fortunately someone has already made the Cher CSPAN T-shirt. That's what I call news cycle culture.
Today in Iraq, a site which links every violent incident reported in the media, is staggeringly awful to look at.
Will this new month of violence taper off in a few days? Could the toll on local people weaken their support for resistance activities?
Can the U.S. handle things this month, or will chaos rule Iraq's long November nights?
They love the taste of blood
I don't know what that means, but I know that I mean it
Maybe they're as evil as they seem
Or maybe I only look out the window when it's scenic
The first lines from Atmosphere's new album. Suits my mood just right... the video of this song (their first music video) "Trying to Find a Balance"(QT) (realmedia) is good, and it struck me that at last section of the melody shows US soldiers rushing into Iraq.
God Bless America, but she stole the B from 'Bless' (Accept it!)
Now I'm too fucked up to dance
So I'ma sit with my hand down the front of my pants
You can't achieve your goals if you don't take that chance
So go pry open that trunk and get those amps
The Atmosphere video moves back and forth, from domestic harmony to civil disorder, the LA riots, US weapons. How do we maintain the balance? How do we keep it together?
I'm about to attack these midterm essays for Contemporary Political Theory. The questions: What is one-dimensional society? and, What is the difference between Critical Theory, orthodox Marxism and social positivism? Ahh, the simple things...
At first when investigating these kinds of things, you feel damn worried when you start to believe things that 99% of America would never buy. But pieces start coming together, and the Rational Official Story becomes pretty tissue paper. When you punch through it, you fear the madness that lies on the other side.
I'm not insane
In fact I'm kind of rational
Here's some suitable reading for the wee hours of the night, when the outside world fades and the intrigues begin. and what better way to get in the mood to think about how people are manipulated than a little more on that strange philosopher, Leo Strauss.
The more you peer into these things, the worse it gets. Look at this marvellous interview with leading Strauss critic Shadia Drury on OpenDemocracy.net (a site which impresses me often). Snips:
The effect of Strauss?s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception ? in effect, a culture of lies ? is the peculiar justice of the wise... Nihilistic philosophers, he believes, should reinvent the Judaeo-Christian God, but live like pagan gods themselves ? taking pleasure in the games they play with each other as well as the games they play on ordinary mortals.There's a hell of a lot more! And all of it will make you feel better about reality! Especially when you think about Straussians' mad intelligence manipulations going on at the Pentagon. Seymour Hersh at the New Yorker has been doing a damn fine job looking at this mess. Hersh's "The Stovepipe" (referring to channeling spurious intel up the chain) was just posted on their website: (Agonist on the link)There is no doubt that Strauss?s reading of Plato entails that the philosophers should return to the cave and manipulate the images (in the form of media, magazines, newspapers). They know full well that the line they espouse is mendacious, but they are convinced that theirs are noble lies.
There are three types of men [to Strauss]: the wise, the gentlemen, and the vulgar. The wise are the lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth. They are capable of looking into the abyss without fear and trembling. They recognise neither God nor moral imperatives. They are devoted above all else to their own pursuit of the ?higher? pleasures, which amount to consorting with their ?puppies? or young initiates. The second type, the gentlemen, are lovers of honour and glory. They are the most ingratiating towards the conventions of their society ? that is, the illusions of the cave. They are true believers in God, honour, and moral imperatives. The third type, the vulgar many, are lovers of wealth and pleasure. They are selfish, slothful, and indolent.
Like Plato, Strauss believed that the supreme political ideal is the rule of the wise. But the rule of the wise is unattainable in the real world. The real Platonic solution as understood by Strauss is the covert rule of the wise. This covert rule is facilitated by the overwhelming stupidity of the gentlemen. The more gullible and unperceptive they are, the easier it is for the wise to control and manipulate them.
For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed.
The point is not that the President and his senior aides were consciously lying. What was taking place was much more systematic?and potentially just as troublesome. Kenneth Pollack, a former National Security Council expert on Iraq, told me that what the Bush people did was "dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them."There's lots on the Niger stuff, including new details about the unknown Italian source. Imagine if those fake Niger uranium documents (Yellowcake-Wilson-Plame Affair) had actually been produced by retired CIA agents because they were pissed off at the hawks for using such terrible intelligence! Theoretically the ex-CIA were hoping someone would catch the hawks selling the lies. And then they saw the State of the Union, and Things took a Turn.The people in the policy offices didn?t seem to care [that they might be wrong about Iraq plans]. When the official asked about the analysis, he was told by a colleague that the new Pentagon leadership wanted to focus not on what could go wrong but on what would go right. He was told that the study?s exploration of options amounted to planning for failure.
....As the campaign against Iraq intensified, a former aide to Cheney told me, the Vice-President?s office, run by his chief of staff, Lewis (Scooter) Libby, became increasingly secretive when it came to intelligence about Iraq?s W.M.D.s. As with Wolfowitz and Bolton, there was a reluctance to let the military and civilian analysts on the staff vet intelligence.
"It was an unbelievably closed and small group," the former aide told me. Intelligence procedures were far more open during the Clinton Administration, he said, and professional staff members had been far more involved in assessing and evaluating the most sensitive data.
...Senior C.I.A. analysts dealing with Iraq were constantly being urged by the Vice-President?s office to provide worst-case assessments on Iraqi weapons issues. "They got pounded on, day after day," one senior Bush Administration official told me, and received no consistent backup from Tenet and his senior staff. "Pretty soon you say ?Fuck it.?" And they began to provide the intelligence that was wanted.
[a source said] that a small group of disgruntled retired C.I.A. clandestine operators had banded together in the late summer of last year and drafted the fraudulent documents themselves.Just to round things out, it turns out that Saddam never had any damn WMD."The agency guys were so pissed at Cheney," the former officer said. "They said, ?O.K, we?re going to put the bite on these guys.?" My source said that he was first told of the fabrication late last year... "Everyone was bragging about it??Here?s what we did. It was cool, cool, cool.?"
"They thought that it was the only way to go to nail these guys who were not practicing good tradecraft and vetting intelligence... They thought it?d be bought at lower levels?a big bluff." The thinking, he said, was that the documents would be endorsed by Iraq hawks at the top of the Bush Administration, who would be unable to resist flaunting them at a press conference or an interagency government meeting. They would then look foolish when intelligence officials pointed out that they were obvious fakes. But the tactic backfired, he said, when the papers won widespread acceptance within the Administration. "It got out of control."
The following instructions [were sent] from the Top Man [Saddam]?"give [UNSCOM] everything... I know all the scientists involved, and they chat. There is no W.M.D."Hot damn! Which suggests another possibility: Saddam planned for this sort of invasion a long time ago, and stashed stuff all over the desert.Jafar explained why Saddam had decided to give up his valued weapons: Up until the 91 Gulf war, our adversaries were regional... But after the war, when it was clear that we were up against the United States, Saddam understood that these weapons were redundant. "No way we could escape the United States." Therefore, the W.M.D. warheads did Iraq little strategic good.
Right now I've just sat down to write this major midterm paper for International Politics class, but I thought I ought to update the site quickly before I dive in. Fall break is coming right up, fortunately, and we are going to see Atmosphere at First Ave. this Friday, which should be excellent.
A significant event: Atmosphere makes a music video! You can see it here on Quicktime or via links on their site.
The big deal for me this week has been my Mac Weekly interview with Middle East expert, Columbia history professor and occasional Palestinian diplomat Rashid Khalidi, who presented his paper "The Past and Future of Democracy in the Middle East" at this year's Macalester Roundtable. I thought that he was an excellent and informed speaker, and it rather made my day when he spoke at length about the significance of that neo-con document, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," and how for him, it described a "template" for American-Israeli hegemony over the Middle East. This is decidedly a minority viewpoint today but I strongly believe it. When the history of the neo-con parlor game which produced the Iraq war is written, Khalidi's angle will be profoundly valuable. He also told me that Ahmed Chalabi is trying to purge Sunnis in Iraq and provoke a civil war. Also he told me that the Revisionist Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky provides much of the philosophical basis of neoconservatism. Want more?
Please look at my interview with Khalidi and the Roundtable story, which due to space had to be too short to provide details on his talk.
Also look at this collection of Iraqi children's drawings, which I found profoundly moving. (link Schwartz :)
Additionally there is Josh Marshall's review of "America Unbound," with an extensive critique of the neoconservative foreign policy experience, online now.
Soo now it's back to work. Damn midterms.
The big news this week is Israel's surprise attack on an adandoned Palestinian militant camp in Syria. I am working on a big analysis of that situation which will be here in a bit. In all the hubbub, I just ran across this piece in the Guardian which clarifies how closely important neo-cons are linked to the Israeli settler movement, and hence have an incentive to perpetuate the occupation.
For those of you who are still comfortable with neocons, you might want to avoid this Guardian article which reports that Doug Feith's law partner Zell is a ardent supporter of the settler Gush Emunim movement and an Israeli living in the West Bank.
Hence, Zell has a personal stake in continuing the occupation, and like Feith has used his legal training to argue in favor of expanding West Bank settlements. He is the Zell of "Fandoz.com," the one working with that greaseball Chalabi's nephew to hook international businesses into Iraq. This ought to be bigger news, but of course anything involving settlers gets muted in the media...
Zionist settler joins Iraqi to promote trade: Chalabi's nephew and US lawyer turned rightwing Israeli activist offer help and advice on doing business with Baghdad
An ultra-Zionist Israeli settler has joined forces with the nephew of the Iraqi leader Ahmad Chalabi to promote investment in Iraq.The venture - which has excellent connections with the Pentagon and the new Iraqi government - is the first joint Israeli-Iraqi business project publicly documented since the fall of Saddam Hussein.
Sam Chalabi's "partner for international marketing" is Marc Zell, a rightwing Zionist lawyer who has offices in Jerusalem and Washington and previously ran a legal practice with Douglas Feith - now a leading Pentagon hawk with responsibility for the reconstruction of Iraq.
Until recently, Mr Zell - an Israeli citizen - was the registered owner of the Iraqi firm's website. Registration was transferred to Sam Chalabi's name on September 25 - the day after Mr Zell's ownership of the site was revealed by an article on Guardian Unlimited.
Data buried in the "Iraqi" website's source code has not been changed, however, and shows that the content was produced by a member of Mr Zell's Jerusalem office staff.
American-born Mr Zell, 50, became interested in Zionism in the mid-1980s and made several trips to Israel - one of them sponsored by the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, which claims the territories occupied in 1967 were given to Israel by God.
In 1988, at the start of the first Palestinian uprising, Mr Zell moved with his family to the Jewish settlement of Alon Shevut on the West Bank, acquiring Israeli nationality.
The settlement was surrounded by barbed wire and sometimes came under attack, but the Zells said it was an ideal place for children. "It's like a small town in Iowa," they told Jewish Homemaker magazine.
In the 1996 Israeli election Mr Zell campaigned for the rightwing Binyamin Netanyahu and was also at one time a member of the Likud party's central committee and policy bureau.
Since then, he has been a frequent spokesman for settlers.
In a recent law journal article, written with a colleague, Mr Zell argued that the right of return for Palestinian refugees "is not only ungrounded as a matter of law, but also unjustified in historical retrospective".
I've been quite busy this week, and if you're like me then now, finally, it might be safe for us to breathe again. Through all those Clinton years we were treated to one smear incident after another, Travelgate, Watergate, Monicagate... all these inconsequential scandals with one special prosecutor after another.
And now this Administration, with its 'crown jewels' of 'credibility and integrity' or whatever they call it, now finally has that unmistakeable tarnish of a real political disease upon it. The schism between the government agencies (the CIA never really bought this bullshit all along) has exploded all over the cable news, months after it should have...
Actually that's one interesting aspect. Novak wrote his column back in mid-July, and Bush only publically said anything about this national security crisis a few days ago. One guy points out that's 75 days of sitting on his ass. True.
What to make of this? What damage? Who's spinning?
FOX News has been hilarious the last few days. First, they didn't want to talk about it. They avoided noting the Justice investigation for quite a while. Brit Hume disparaged the whole thing, anchors noted that 'nothing ever comes of these things, why bother?' Silliest of all, one rightie after another has said Wilson was some partisan peacenik yahoo, who existed to hassle the Bush administration. This doesn't quite fit with Wilson's work around the first Gulf war, where he was the US unofficial ambassador to Iraq, and the last American to meet with him prior to the war. He received much praise from Poppa Bush for his work. He also has given money to Republican candidates recently. No one's partisan, really.
I also like the line of reasoning which claims that because 'all he did was sip tea' in Niger rather than, I don't know, break into offices and kidnap officials, he could never have done a thorough job investigating the uranium story. (this is what Brit Hume and resident AEI Neo-con bitch Reuel Marc Gerecht talked about, because they didn't want to talk about the leak itself) But these fools don't know how the uranium business works. The mine is run by a large European conglomerate licensed under the IAEA. It's on the level. Really.
Novak himself is putting out all kinds of nonsense, but it's like he's compelled to share national security secrets with the public. for one thing, he said that she was known as an agent to insiders and "well known" in Washington, so it's not a big deal that he ran her name. What the hell is he talking about? So just now he decided to tell the name of her CIA front company. Good, that will help destroy their cover overseas. On CNN he said:
"Joe Wilson, the -- everybody knows he has given campaign contributions in 2000 to both Ford -- I mean to both Gore and to Bush. He gave twice as much to Gore, $2,000, $1,000 over the limit. The government -- the campaign had to give him back $1,000. That very day, according to his records, his wife, the CIA employee gave $1,000 to Gore, and she listed herself as an employee of Bruster, Jennings and Associates (ph).The Washington Post now reportsThere is there no such firm, I'm convinced. CIA people are not supposed to list themselves with fictitious firms if they're a deep cover. They're supposed to be real firms, or so I'm told. So it adds to the little mystery."
After the name of the company was broadcast yesterday, administration officials confirmed that it was a CIA front... The inadvertent disclosure of the name of a business affiliated with the CIA underscores the potential damage to the agency and its operatives caused by the leak of Plame's identity. Intelligence officials have said that once Plame's job as an undercover operative was revealed, other agency secrets could be unraveled and her sources might be compromised or endangered.Thanks, Novak! You're a great journalist! These clips come via DailyKos.
There is one piece of fallout from the crime we can't deny: whoever was ever associated with agent Plame overseas is in danger. What remains in question is what, exactly, Plame did. Calpundit piles up the public facts so far. It seems to be emerging that Plame ran networks of foreign informers who passed on information about biological, chemical, and nuclear material. Let me say that again: Plame's job was to collect intelligence on weapons of mass destruction, to monitor and prevent them from being used against the United States. Now anyone who can be tied to her can be compromised.
That's something that is really a disaster for everyone. That's the central point. Politics don't enter into calculating this.
Yet it is political. The leaker went after Wilson to intimidate anyone else who might attack the Bush folks falsification of war intelligence.
Let me offer a prediction about who was probably behind the leak: the Vice President's Chief of Staff, Scooter Libby. There have been insiders saying that the bad guy works in the Executive Office Building, where Cheney's people are. If I'm right about this, I definitely win a cookie.
On a related topic, you need to see this report which says that FOX News watchers were the most likely to believe in misinformation about the war, namely that WMD have already been found, and Saddam was acively engaged with Al-Qaeda. Fair and Balanced!
In following these developments, naturally the Internet is the best source. Lately my reliable wisdom has come from the Daily Kos, Eschaton and The Agonist. If you keep an eye on these then you'll probably catch most of what's going on. Also much respect is due to Washington reporter Josh Marshall, who writes the Talking Points Memo, and kept the story alive since July. Marshall also has recently interviewed Wilson and Wesley Clark.
Actually, Clark told Marshall something important about neoconservatives:
TPM: I noticed that Doug Feith, who's obviously the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, had a statement a while back saying that the connection between terrorist organizations and state sponsors was, I think he said, the principal strategic thought behind the administration's policy.This whole statement that the neo-cons actually used the PNAC to undercut the administration's options is a kind of inverted view of issue advocacy (and it's fun to tie them to Carter). Marshall strongly agrees with the idea, and it got a bunch of nasty feedback from neocons. Very interesting. I am happy Clark is on the right page with neo-con deviousness, because that would be so fun to see him go off about in the democratic debates.CLARK: It's the principal strategic mistake behind the administration's policy. If you look at all the states that were named as the principal adversaries, they're on the periphery of international terrorism today. Syria -- OK, supporting Hezbollah and Hamas -- yeah, they're terrorist organizations. They're focused on Israel. They're getting support from Iran. It's wrong. Shouldn't be there. But they're there. What about Saudi Arabia? There's a source of the funding, the source of the ideology, the source of the recruits. What about Pakistan? With thousands of madrassas churning out ideologically-driven foot soldiers for the war on terror. Neither of those are at the front of the military operations. ...
The ability to conduct foreign policy draws not only on the president himself but on the leadership of the administration. If you were to start here and work backwards, you'd say this administration was doctrinaire. You'd say that it didn't have a real vision in foreign policy. It was reactive. Hobbled by its right-wing constituency from using the full tools that are available -- the full kit-bag of tools that's available to help Americans be in there and protect their interests in the world.
Clinton administration: broad minded, visionary, lots of engagement. Did a lot of work. Had difficulty with two houses in congress that [it] didn't control. And in an odd replay of the Carter administration, found itself chained to the Iraqi policy -- promoted by the Project for a New American Century -- much the same way that in the Carter administration some of the same people formed the Committee on the Present Danger which cut out from the Carter administration the ability to move forward on SALT II.
TPM: This being the same neo-conservatives that people hear about in the press today?
CLARK: Right, some of the same people. And then, you know, if you go back to the Bush administration, they were there when the Berlin Wall fell.
I suggest everyone sit back and watch the fireworks. This mess has just begun to unfold.
So what is this neoconservatism anyway? Is it militancy, an 'inverted Trotsyism,' 'creative destruction,' or just following through on 'Moral Clarity'? While the neocons were in the background during the Reagan years, they pretty much ran the Iraq show, and people are gradually sifting through this puzzle to shake out how it's a movement distinct from the usual in American politics.
To begin with look at an article by neocon 'Godfather' William Kristol, "The Neoconservative Persuasion," a rather subtle and crafty piece of writing.
This story is a collection of lengthy ideological screeds which aren't mine, so I put it off the front page. Hit "read more" to follow along. Or don't, if you think it doesn't matter.
One can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism....
Neocons do not like the concentration of services in the welfare state and are happy to study alternative ways of delivering these services. But they are impatient with the Hayekian notion that we are on "the road to serfdom." Neocons do not feel that kind of alarm or anxiety about the growth of the state in the past century, seeing it as natural, indeed inevitable. Because they tend to be more interested in history than economics or sociology, they know that the 19th-century idea, so neatly propounded by Herbert Spencer in his "The Man Versus the State," was a historical eccentricity. People have always preferred strong government to weak government, although they certainly have no liking for anything that smacks of overly intrusive government. Neocons feel at home in today's America to a degree that more traditional conservatives do not.In a direct response to this piece, the old-school American conservative and adamant pacifist Justin Raimondo points out a variety of the neocon's dangerous, hidden views.But it is only to a degree that neocons are comfortable in modern America. The steady decline in our democratic culture, sinking to new levels of vulgarity, does unite neocons with traditional conservatives--though not with those libertarian conservatives who are conservative in economics but unmindful of the culture. The upshot is a quite unexpected alliance between neocons, who include a fair proportion of secular intellectuals, and religious traditionalists. They are united on issues concerning the quality of education, the relations of church and state, the regulation of pornography, and the like, all of which they regard as proper candidates for the government's attention. And since the Republican party now has a substantial base among the religious, this gives neocons a certain influence and even power. Because religious conservatism is so feeble in Europe, the neoconservative potential there is correspondingly weak.
AND THEN, of course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy, only a set of attitudes derived from historical experience. (The favorite neoconservative text on foreign affairs, thanks to professors Leo Strauss of Chicago and Donald Kagan of Yale, is Thucydides on the Peloponnesian War.) These attitudes can be summarized in the following "theses" (as a Marxist would say): First, patriotism is a natural and healthy sentiment and should be encouraged by both private and public institutions. Precisely because we are a nation of immigrants, this is a powerful American sentiment. Second, world government is a terrible idea since it can lead to world tyranny. International institutions that point to an ultimate world government should be regarded with the deepest suspicion. Third, statesmen should, above all, have the ability to distinguish friends from enemies.
Finally, for a great power, the "national interest" is not a geographical term, except for fairly prosaic matters like trade and environmental regulation. A smaller nation might appropriately feel that its national interest begins and ends at its borders, so that its foreign policy is almost always in a defensive mode. A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns. Barring extraordinary events, the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces, external or internal. That is why it was in our national interest to come to the defense of France and Britain in World War II. That is why we feel it necessary to defend Israel today, when its survival is threatened. No complicated geopolitical calculations of national interest are necessary.... This [American military] superiority was planned by no one, and even today there are many Americans who are in denial. To a large extent, it all happened as a result of our bad luck. During the 50 years after World War II, while Europe was at peace and the Soviet Union largely relied on surrogates to do its fighting, the United States was involved in a whole series of wars: the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, the Kosovo conflict, the Afghan War, and the Iraq War. The result was that our military spending expanded more or less in line with our economic growth, while Europe's democracies cut back their military spending in favor of social welfare programs. The Soviet Union spent profusely but wastefully, so that its military collapsed along with its economy.
The idea that America has "ideological interests" that are in any way "like the Soviet Union of yesteryear" is certainly repulsive to most conservatives, and to most Americans: which is why all the sound and fury about how neoconservatism is from the native soil sprung comes across as completely phony. Beyond the Beltway, the number of Americans who believe that we are destined to spread our system by force of arms around the world is minuscule, because nothing could be more un-American...The more anonymous Michael Tennan adds that the neocons are cramming an unconstitutional attitude down the nation's throat.How the man glories in war: that is the leitmotif of the neocons. Lovingly he ticks off what he regards as the high points of human history in the modern era: World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Gulf War II. There is something distinctly weird, and unhealthy, in this litany of mass slaughter. Aside from that, however, there are a few problems with the Kristolian analysis: The Soviet Union was too wasteful, he avers, but how wasteful is the American occupation of Iraq? No one should be surprised that Kristol considers the U.S. to be an "ideological" superpower in the old Soviet sense: that is precisely the essence of the neoconservative vision. The neocon project of forcibly "transforming" and "democratizing" the Middle East is a perfect replica of the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. Soviet satellites were so many millstones around the Kremlin's neck: eventually, the burden dragged them down into a terminal decline. The same fate awaits us if we are so unwise as to ignore the bones of our predecessors lining the side of the road to empire.
Krstol's essay is suffused with a sense of power, and an implicit threat to "the older, traditional elements in the Republican party" who "have difficulty coming to terms with this new reality in foreign affairs, just as they cannot reconcile economic conservatism with social and cultural conservatism." These reactionaries, we are assured, will be swept aside by the new order ushered in by the President, whose top officials "turn out to be quite at home in this new political environment, although it is clear they did not anticipate this role any more than their party as a whole did."
The gloating is unmistakable, as if to say: 9/11 caught you unawares, but now you're cooperating, as you should have been all along. "As a result," avers Kristol triumphantly, "neoconservatism began enjoying a second life, at a time when its obituaries were still being published."
Yes, the neocons certainly have thrived since 9/11, unlike the rest of us, but surely this is nothing to advertise. To do so seems unnecessarily provocative, and in poor taste, to say the least. But conceit is pointless if it can't be openly displayed. Wrapping himself in the mantle of presidential power and favor, invoking the full might and majesty of the rising American Empire, Kristol is telling conservatives to ditch their entire program of rolling back an overgrown and often tyrannical federal government, in favor of perpetual war ?"the new reality in foreign affairs."
Yes, says Kristol, we neocons exist. Not only that, but we have the power ? and won't shrink from using it. So get with the program, buster, or get out. That is the chief theme and the whole point of Kristol's essay.
Says Kristol, "one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.? It?s easy to see the liberal?and, indeed, Straussian, as Kristol claims Leo Strauss as one of the forerunners of neoconservatism?mind at work here. We, the enlightened ones, will "convert" you, the unenlightened, from your backward, parochial ways to our progressive, global ways; and we will do so against your will, by deception if possible, by force if necessary.What's interesting about these attacks on the neocons is that to a great extent they stem from the right, not the left. I think this is because all the 'lefties,' those who opposed the war because they were liberals, have yelled themselves hoarse. Meanwhile the many and varied strands of conservatives out there are getting anxious about a collection of clever, ex-Marxist Straussians who actually want to obliterate traditional conservatism against their wills. Along these lines is another right criticism from the interesting site LEWRockwell.com. DiLorenzo describes "'Godfather' Kristol?s Statist/Imperialist Manifesto" as follows:...Now for the big subject of the day: "foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention," as Kristol puts it. That, of course, is because neocon foreign policy is exemplified by precisely the foreign policy that the Bush administration has implemented, contrary to Bush?s paean to a "humbler" foreign policy while campaigning. It seeks to dominate the world at any cost, sending troops to far-flung countries ( Afghanistan , Iraq , Liberia ) in pursuit of, well, hegemony, in the guise of bringing liberation and democracy to the oppressed of the world. It is completely contrary to the vision of the Founding Fathers and to the American tradition, which is why it had to be imposed on us against our will as well.
Essentially, neocon foreign policy is that might makes right. Oh, Kristol doesn?t come right out and say this, but his words add up to the same thing. For "a great power," he writes, "the ?national interest? is not a geographical term." That is, U.S. foreign policy should not be confined to safeguarding the territorial United States . Oh, no. We must be concerned with the entire world. "A larger nation has more extensive interests. And large nations, whose identity is ideological, like the Soviet Union of yesteryear and the United States of today, inevitably have ideological interests in addition to more material concerns." Yes, according to Irving Kristol, neocon foreign policy applies equally to the Soviet Union and the United States, both of whom have (or had, in the case of the Soviets) "ideological interests" which trump mere territorial concerns. Kristol further notes that since the U.S. "will always feel obliged to defend...a democratic nation under attack from nondemocratic forces," the neocons thus "feel it necessary to defend Israel today." Apparently only the holding of elections, not what those elected governments? policies are, matters to neocons, and even then they?re more than willing to give some leeway to cooperative dictators. Once again, I must give Kristol credit for being accurate in his assessment that no central principles (other than the one left unmentioned, spelled p-o-w-e-r) guide the neocons in their quest for "national greatness" (as Kristol?s equally arrogant son, William, put it). It?s clear, though, that this power-grubbing, world-dominating foreign policy is certainly not in the interest of the average American, which is why he has to be converted against his will by the neocons.
Kristol continues to celebrate the power of the U. S. , and he notes that "[w]ith power come responsibilities, whether sought or not, whether welcome or not. And it is a fact that if you have the kind of power we now have, either you will find opportunities to use it, or the world will discover them for you." The neocons, of course, are not content to let the world find uses for the power they?ve worked so hard to achieve. As a matter of fact, they?re more than happy to "find opportunities to use it." Whether those "opportunities" are in the best interest of the country or the world is irrelevant; all that matters is that the neocons are the ones finding the opportunities and wielding the power.
[T]he historical task and political purpose of neoconservativism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy (emphasis added).Heh, as long as we're on the topic of getting told to march off to the quicksand for other people's interests, lets look at what Irv Kristol's son William (the editor of key neo-con instrument Weekly Standard) said about the brilliant idea of War with Iran in mid-May, in a tasty piece "The End of the Beginning" (of the war on All Who Annoy):Like all neocons, Kristol claims to be a champion of democracy, but his words and actions often contradict this claim. Consider the language in the above quotation, "against their respective wills." According to the traditional theory of democracy, the role of competing ideas in politics is supposedly a matter of persuasion. Political debates are supposedly aimed at persuading voters that you are right and your rival is wrong. But Kristol will have none of this. He is the "Godfather," after all. What he apparently means by transforming traditional conservatives against their will is not to attempt to persuade them to become statists and imperialists like himself, but to intimidate and censor them by conducting campaigns of character assassination against anyone who disagrees with the neocon agenda. He means to purge all dissenters, Stalin style.
Kristol claims that the three biggest neocon idols are Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, and Ronald Reagan; all other Republican party worthies are "politely ignored." Teddy Roosevelt, whom the neocons affectionately call "TR," was simply nuts. Mark Twain, who met him twice, called him "clearly insane." In any number of "TR" biographies we learn that after an argument with his girlfriend as a young man he went home and shot his neighbor?s dog. When he killed his first buffalo ? and his first Spaniard ? he "abandoned himself to complete hysteria," as biographer Edmund Morris recounts.
Like Kristol, Max Boot, Charles Krauthammer, and many other neocons, Teddy Roosevelt was infatuated with war and killing. A college friend of his wrote in 1885 that "he would like above all things to go to war with some one. He wants to be killing something all the time." As president, he constantly announced that America "needed a war," which is exactly what the neocons of today believe. War - any war - the neocons tell us, gives us "national unity."
TR was a statist in domestic policy, a foreign policy imperialist, and an inveterate warmonger. He was, in other words, the real "Godfather" of neoconservatism.
As for FDR, the neocons idolize him as well because the older ones like Kristol are all former leftists - like FDR - and they have never abandoned their statist beliefs. Further evidence of this lies in the one reason Kristol gives for why neocons idolize Ronald Reagan: Although they had nothing to do with initiating the "Reagan tax cuts," neocons supported them because they believed they would spur economic growth, which in turn would enable them to fully fund the welfare state. (In this regard California gubernatorial candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is a neocon: In his initial press conference announcing his candidacy he said he wanted to "bring business back to California" so that the Golden state?s massive welfare entitlement bureaucracy could be fully funded).
In foreign policy Kristol says neocons are, well, imperialists. For a "great power" there are no boundaries to its pursuit of "national interest." He says we have an "ideological interest" to defend, and that means endless warfare all around the globe to ostensibly "defend" that ideology. (And Mark Twain thought TR was insane.) Of course, someone has to decide for us what that "ideological interest" is, and then force the population, with the threat of imprisonment or worse (for nonpayment of taxes, for instance) to support it.
In Kristol?s case, his primary ideological rationale for military intervention is: "We feel it necessary to defend Israel today" in the name of democracy. Well, no we don?t. If Irving Kristol wants to grab a shotgun and take the next flight to Tel Aviv "to defend Israel" then Godspeed, and I will offer to buy him a first-class plane ticket. But leave me and my family out of it.
Translating "we feel it necessary to defend Israel" from neoconese, we get this: "Young American soldiers must die in defense of Israel." Like hell they must. Young Americans who join the military for patriotic reasons do so because they believe they are defending their country. It is a fraud and an abomination to compel them to risk their lives for any other country, whether it is Israel, Canada, Somalia, or wherever.
the war in which we are presently engaged is a fundamental challenge for the United States and the civilized world. It is a defining moment for America and American foreign policy. The victory in what the president called Thursday night "the battle of Iraq" is, perhaps, the end of the beginning of this larger war. President Bush understands that we are engaged in a larger war. His opponents, on the whole, do not, and this accounts in large measure for the yawning gulf between the supporters and critics of the Bush Doctrine. It is unclear, to say the least, what actual policies most of Bush's critics would follow. Different opponents would presumably embrace differing combinations of the sporadic use of American force, wishful exercises in appeasement, and endless negotiations at the United Nations and elsewhere.But what Bush's opponents have in common is a refusal to come to grips with the fundamental character of the war on terror: the fact that it is a war, of which Afghanistan and Iraq, as the president said, are merely battles. Thus they refuse to embrace the president's ambitious agenda, eloquently reiterated aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, of targeting all terrorist groups and the states that support them, of confronting outlaw regimes that seek weapons of mass destruction, and of standing with the friends of freedom around the world....
The liberation of Iraq was the first great battle for the future of the Middle East. The creation of a free Iraq is now of fundamental importance, and we must do what it takes to make a decent, democratic Iraq a reality. But the next great battle--not, we hope, a military battle--will be for Iran. We are already in a death struggle with Iran over the future of Iraq. The theocrats ruling Iran understand that the stakes are now double or nothing. They can stay in power by disrupting efforts to create a pluralist, non-theocratic, Shia-majority state next door--or they can fall, as success in Iraq sounds the death knell for the Iranian revolution.
So we must help our friends and allies in Iraq block Iranian-backed subversion. And we must also take the fight to Iran, with measures ranging from public diplomacy to covert operations. Iran is the tipping point in the war on proliferation, the war on terror, and the effort to reshape the Middle East. If Iran goes pro-Western and anti-terror, positive changes in Syria and Saudi Arabia will follow much more easily. And the chances for an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will greatly improve.
As I'm wont to do when there's nothing going on at work, I searched for our great deputy defense secretary Douglas Feith on Google News. Today, journalists around the world are picking up on the fact that US intelligence agencies (CIA, DIA, State-Intel) already knew that Saddam Hussein represented no real threat to American interests, so in order to have a war, those agencies would have to be caught in a 'web of lies' within the government, which would remove their ability to challenge the legitimacy of the war. (This was duplicated for the public via organs like the Murdoch-neocon Weekly Standard which forbid dissenting comment) The neocon Pentagon civilians under Wolfowitz, namely Douglas Feith in this case, had to create an ad-hoc executive apparatus to subvert the intelligence functions of the agencies and replace their intelligence with falsehoods drawn from neo-con ideology. The intelligence agencies of Europe are pretty aware of this now. So when you search for Mr Feith in the online news, you will run into a wealth of research into this. For example here is a report in the Asia Times, The Twin Towers and the Tower of Babel Part 2 : The roadmap of human folly. Also check out Part 1 of the report, which has more to do with the Bush administration abandoning its proclaimed rejection of the Baathist (Mukhabarat) security services. A little of the goods:
...Intelligence and scientific inspectors proved almost beyond reasonable doubt that Iraq did not possess any weapons of mass destruction. This raised the question of which of the Bush neo-conservatives came up with the false evidence to support the war, which Paul Wolfowitz, the Pentagon number 2, cynically claimed on the record was to "secure a consensus for the war policy". European intelligence confirms that a group of "unofficial" political advisers appointed and controlled by Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith and Donald Rumsfeld in the Office of Special Planning (OSP) were the source of the false claims.Here is a long-deleted Fox News story about an Israeli spy ring in the US, which might have had some foreknowledge of the 911 attacks. This is not closely related to the story but still entertaining. What is interesting is that 'Bush Knew' conspiracies still float around, but this crazy line of investigation has been totally squashed.Wolfowitz and Feith, the Pentagon number 3, were responsible for setting up the OSP. Its director was Abraham Shulsky. The OSP included other neo-cons with no professional qualification whatsoever in intelligence and military affairs. It came as no surprise that Shulsky is a protege of the "Prince of Darkness" Richard Perle - who resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board before the war (a job he got via Wolfowitz). The OSP also included Elliot Abrams (who supported the Guatemalan genocide of the 1980s), a senior director for Middle East affairs for the National Security Council. These neo-cons intimately connected with the Zionist lobby, even issued reports on Iraq totally contradicting those from the Israeli Mossad, which did not believe that Iraq represented any threat, either to the US or to Israel.
The OSP is just one more arm of the neo-cons - especially Wolfowitz and Feith - in a central strategy of supporting Ariel Sharon's hardcore policy against the Palestinians. Sharon was never interested in the success of the Middle East roadmap to peace - which would imply painful concessions from Israel towards the Palestinians. It's no surprise that Perle, Feith and Wolfowitz are now targeting Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia with a vengeance - with the same barrage of fake "intelligence reports" accusing Arab countries of funding, protecting and promoting terrorism, and now sending terrorists to Iraq. All the fake intelligence is provided by OSP operatives and their elaborate networks....
Also here is a representation of the famous report made to the Defense Policy Board about the need to destroy the government of Saudi Arabia (or 'taking the Saudi out of Arabia').
Well those are just some of the random things I've looked at this afternoon. It's mostly all old news except the Asia Times story.
The first week at Macalester has been going off pretty well. I am in a couple very good politics classes, a computer hardware class and urban geography. It should be challenging this year but enlightening. One of my politics classes focuses on the field known as 'critical theory' as put forth by the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, etc. Kind of psycho-social neo-Marxism, it could be described as. That's interesting... Besides that everything is excellent here at the house on Grand, despite the occasional weird incidents like the raving drunk who came up to us on the porch at 3 AM last night.
The word of the weekend I say goes to Maureen Dowd who sugggested that
Does Mr. Bush ever wonder if the neocons duped him and hijacked his foreign policy? Some Middle East experts think some of the neocons painted a rosy picture for the president of Arab states blossoming with democracy when they really knew this could not be accomplished so easily; they may have cynically suspected that it was far more likely that the Middle East would fall into chaos and end up back in its pre-Ottoman Empire state, Balkanized into a tapestry of rival fiefs -- based on tribal and ethnic identities, with no central government -- so busy fighting each other that they would be no threat to us, or Israel.Also check out a disturbing report in the Observer UK about how Iraqis randomly killed by the US are barely noted officially.The administration is worried now about Jordan and Saudi Arabia in the face of roiling radicalism.
Some veterans of Bush 41 think that the neocons packaged their "inverted Trotskyism," as the writer John Judis dubbed their rabid desire to export their "idealistic concept of internationalism," so that it appealed to Bush 43's born-again sense of divine mission and to the desire of Mr. Bush, Rummy and Mr. Cheney to achieve immortality by transforming the Middle East and the military.
What is perhaps most shocking about their deaths is that the coalition troops who killed them did not even bother to record details of the raid with the coalition military press office. The killings were that unremarkable. What happened in Mahmudiya last week should not be forgotten, for the story of this raid is also the story of the dark side of the US-led occupation of Iraq, of the violent and sometimes lethal raids carried out apparently beyond any accountability.Everyone should look at this really amazing interview with Jason Burke, someone who has examined Islamic militancy closely. (Link via Altercation) For those of you who believe that al-Qaeda is a self-contained, concrete organization rather than a loose network of militants, consider:
There?s an understanding among the Western public that Al-Qaeda is a coherent, organized terrorist network with a hierarchy, a command and control structure, a degree of commission and execution of terrorist acts by a few individuals.There was a pretty wild story in the Washington Post on Sunday about al-Qaeda setting up a front in Iraq (which of course it didn't have before) to cause havoc etc. The article also has a lot of speculations about Al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Iran after the Afghanistan war, and plotting the recent Riyadh bombings. This article in turn sparked a lot of disagreement in part because it was written by somewhat discredited WaPo reporter Sue Schmidt, who might be more ready to jump on Iran with unproven allegations drawn from the Iranian exiles who hate their government. That site, Talking Points Memo, points to a good blog kept by a middle east studies professor who also debunks aspects of the story.That simply isn?t the case. The biggest myth is that all the various incidents that we are seeing are linked to some kind of central organization. One of the reasons the myth is so prevalent is that it?s a very comforting one.
Because if you clearly get rid of that central organization, if you get rid off, particularly bin Laden?and a few score, a few hundred people around him?then the problem would apparently be solved. Unfortunately, that idea is indeed a myth and bears very little resemblance to what?s happening on the ground.
Talking Points Memo is written by Josh Micah Marshall, who writes on Salon, the Washington Monthly and a Washington newsletter The Hill. I really like his writings on various topics around Washington, such as this new piece detailing how the Bush administration hates experts who they see as controlled by a 'namby-pamby' liberal ideology, and hence disregards real facts:
By disregarding the advice of experts, by shunting aside the cadres of career professionals with on-the-ground experience in these various countries, the administration's hawks cut themselves off from the practical know-how which would have given them some chance of implementing their plans successfully. In a real sense, they cut themselves off from reality. When they went into Iraq they were essentially flying blind, having disengaged from almost everyone who had real-world experience in how effective occupation, reconstruction and nation-building was done. And much the same can be said of the administration's take on economic policy, environmental policy, and in almost every sort of policy question involving science. Muzzling the experts helped the White House muscle its revisionist plans through.In August 2002, Marshall wrote a fascinating piece in Salon about how a schism exists in the Rumsfeld Pentagon between the brass and the top civilians (i.e. the Neocons):
The Bush administration's most right-leaning political appointees are concentrated at the Pentagon. And nowhere is that tilt more evident than in its Middle East policies. The Bush appointees have not just ignored recommendations from military advisors and civil servants but have often ousted or sidelined those who have had the temerity to offer any policy advice. Over the last 18 months, there has been an exodus of career civil servants leaving the Pentagon policy shop for stints on Capitol Hill or with other Defense Department-affiliated institutions, according to a half-dozen such departees who spoke to Salon -- far more than is normally the case when administrations change from one party to the other. Many of those slots have been filled by ideologues and think-tank denizens who can be relied on to serve up the right kind of advice to their superiors.He also wrote a great article in the January Washington Monthly about how terrible Dick Cheney is at making decisions.When most people think of neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, they think of men like Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, and Richard Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy Board. But the second tier of civilian appointees at the Pentagon is stacked with Wolfowitz and Perle proteges who are in many ways even more conservative in their views than their mentors and -- as the Rhode incident shows -- a good deal more hotheaded...
In the minds of these second-tier appointees, taking out Saddam Hussein is only part of a larger puzzle. Their grand vision of the Middle East goes something like this: Stage 1: Iraq becomes democratic. Stage 2: Reformers take over in Iran. That would leave the three powerhouses of the Middle East -- Turkey, Iraq and Iran -- democratic and pro-Western. Suddenly the Saudis wouldn't be just one more corrupt, authoritarian Arab regime slouching toward bin Ladenism. They'd be surrounded by democratic states that would undermine Saudi rule both militarily and ideologically.
As a plan to pursue in the real world, most of the career military and the civilian employees at the Pentagon -- indeed most establishment foreign policy experts -- see this vision as little short of insane. But to Bush's hawkish Pentagon appointees the real prize isn't Baghdad, it's Riyadh. And the Saudis know it.
As far as the resignation of the Palestinian Prime Minister is concerned, that was unfortunate but really it was the poor man's only card to play. What, precisely, was he supposed to do? Buy off a few armed gangs and make them sit tight as Israel failed to relax the occupation (as well as cease constructing settlements as the Road Map demanded)? It should be remembered that he only could have moved against that 'terrorist infrastructure' in the cities where he controlled Palestinian security forces (he only controlled a few of these groups anyway). It was a pointless venture because Israel and the U.S. never gave him any slack. Israel didn't even stop trying to kill Hamas members. Well, that's one way to do a cease-fire. Finally, Ariel Sharon is safe from peace, as one Israeli put it. Israel, by the way, did bomb Lebanon a little bit this week, but that's how it goes these days. And a panel found that the Israeli police treated Israeli Arabs as 'the enemy' in a riot just after the beginning of this Intifada.
Naturally Bush didn't address the dramatic Palestinian peace plan failure, or the economy, in his barrage of platitudes this evening. His polls are falling and this whole conflagration is such a marvelous. $87 billion, money well spent. Mr Marshall says this evening:
We went into Iraq to eliminate Saddam's stock of weapons of mass destruction, to depose a reckless strongman at the heart of a vital region, and to overawe unfriendly regimes on the country's borders. Agree or not, those were the prime stated reasons. Now we've got a deteriorating security situation and a palpably botched plan for reconstruction. And our effort to recover from our ill-conceived and poorly-executed policy is now the 'central front' in the war on terror, which is among other things extremely convenient.The president has turned 9/11 into a sort of foreign policy perpetual motion machine in which the problems ginned up by policy failures become the rationale for intensifying those policies. The consequences of screw-ups become examples of the power of 'the terrorists'.
We're not on the offensive. We're on the defensive. A bunch of mumbo-jumbo and flim-flam doesn't change that.
ut This War Had a Much Deeper Significance than Reported! according to a marvelous book I received on Friday. Beyond Iraq: The Next Move, is selling well on Amazon and Barnes and Noble, where it is listed under the 'non-fiction' and 'biblical prophecy' categories. I got my copy the only honest way, through Armageddon Books (order form: "Thanks again for selecting Armageddon Books as your supplier of end-time materials"). Evans' key points:
As I stood and shook Mayor Giuliani's hand, all I could see in my mind's eye were the two 189-ton bombs in the form of fully fueled Boeing 767s hitting the World Trade Towers just as my friend [Mossad director] had foretold. No one could have known that on that Tuesday, the 11th of September 2001, the first war of the 21st century would begin--a war against terror that may well draw the line in the sand, , forever dividing light from darkness, proclaiming like a trumpet a spiritual battle of monumental proportions. Who would have wondered at the time, that the epicenters of this battle would center on ancient Babylon (biblical Iraq) -- the spiritual center of darkness -- and Jerusalem -- the spiritual center of Light... Iraq will become the US base from which the war on terrorism is fought. From there it will only be a short reach to the throat of Syria and Iran and the terrorist networks.Ahh, sweet sweet Christian evangelistic eschatology. It's the end of time and we have front row seats for the showdown of good and evil. What actually egged me to put down $11 on this book is how much it's getting promoted, at least on MSNBC. On Hardball the other day, the host (a sub for Mathews) introduced Evans without putting him into the context of his evangelical beliefs. He just rambled on (the host asked him if he was drunk, after blurting "Sugarcoating Sinai") about the "t" word, terror, being the issue. The issue of the end of the world never entered the discussion, and suddenly the discourse in the book becomes normal. Who is reading up on stuff this way, who sees the world through this lens? What do they believe about Palestinians?
Ahmed Chalabi, the chairman of the Iraqi National Congress, is claiming that Saddam is hiding out, paying bounties for killing American soldiers, and with him are the answers about weapons.
Chalabi, 58, the leader of the Pentagon-backed Iraqi National Congress, insisted that U.S. authorities would find the former Iraqi government's hidden weapons once they locate Hussein. Chalabi maintained that Hussein is still alive and directing attacks against U.S. soldiers...So who is this marvellous Chalabi? He is derided as a "hapless strutting tool of US imperialism", as Edward Said put it. An old friend of Wolfowitz and generally someone who has taken their paychecks from the CIA. Consider this article "Tinker, Banker, NeoCon, Spy" from last November:The role of Chalabi and other former Iraqi exiles in helping to build the U.S. case for war has been scrutinized recently in Washington, particularly since U.S. inspectors have not provided substantial evidence of Iraqi chemical, biological and nuclear weapons....
Chalabi is a longtime favorite of Pentagon hawks, and he traveled on a U.S. military transport plane with the U.S.-trained 700-member Iraqi Free Forces to southern Iraq during the war. But he has criticized the U.S. military for not anticipating the extent of chaos after the fall of Hussein's government. He said he had repeatedly pleaded with U.S. officials to train a force of Iraqi military police to "go in with the American force" and halt the "looting" and the "acts of disorder."
Chalabi said that the capture of Hussein and his younger son, Qusay, could still hold the key to discovering Iraq's banned weapons: "The weapons and Saddam are one and the same thing."
If T.E. Lawrence ("of Arabia") had been a 21st-century neoconservative operative instead of a British imperial spy, he'd be Ahmed Chalabi's best friend. Chalabi, the London-based leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC), is front man for the latest incarnation of a long-time neoconservative strategy to redraw the map of the oil-rich Middle East, put American troops -- and American oil companies -- in full control of the Persian Gulf's reserves and use the Gulf as a fulcrum for enhancing America's global strategic hegemony. Just as Lawrence's escapades in World War I-era Arabia helped Britain remake the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the U.S. sponsors of Chalabi's INC hope to do their own nation building....There is absolutely no food for thought whatsoever in that article. None.In Washington, Team Chalabi is led by Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, the neoconservative strategist who heads the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board. Chalabi's partisans run the gamut from far right to extremely far right, with key supporters in most of the Pentagon's Middle-East policy offices -- such as Peter Rodman, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser and Michael Rubin. Also included are key staffers in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, not to mention Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former CIA Director Jim Woolsey.
The Washington partisans who want to install Chalabi in Arab Iraq are also those associated with the staunchest backers of Israel, particularly those aligned with the hard-right faction of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chalabi's cheerleaders include the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). "Chalabi is the one that we know the best," says Shoshana Bryen, director of special projects for JINSA, where Chalabi has been a frequent guest at board meetings, symposia and other events since 1997. "He could be Iraq's national leader," says Patrick Clawson, deputy director of WINEP, whose board of advisers includes pro-Israeli luminaries such as Perle, Wolfowitz and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.
There is a frightening level of general violence in many central Iraqi cities, as skilled guerillas probe coalition defenses. In Fallujah, there have been frequent attacks.
The hostility to U.S. forces appears to be most intense in a region west and north of Baghdad dominated by Sunni Muslims who were at the core of the Baath Party and Hussein's government. Cities such as Baqubah, Samarra, Habaniyah, Khaldiya, Fallujah and Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town, have been particularly dangerous for U.S. troops.So here's the question: is this going to get better or worse? Easier or more dangerous? Will a pattern emerge in these guerilla attacks, or would the Bush administration prefer for now that you believe this is random flak from an unstable nation? The Times also reports on this tale of terror, "G.I.'s in Iraqi City Are Stalked by Faceless Enemies at Night":"These are military-type attacks," said Capt. John Ives, of the 3rd Infantry Division's 2nd Brigade in Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad. "It could get worse before it gets better. It's a matter that some people want us dead. We're just going to have to take them out." The division was recently dispatched from Baghdad to reinforce the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in west central Iraq.
In Fallujah, there are also signs of increasing organization and tactical efficiency of resisters, U.S. officers said. Some groups have begun to give themselves names -- things as simple as "The Fighters," according to graffiti on the walls in the town. Gunmen are using spotters placed along the roads or in mosques to signal the arrival of U.S. troops, Capt. Ives said. Once, someone cut electricity to a neighborhood as U.S. forces were approaching....
In Fallujah early today, a convoy of seven U.S. Humvees was attacked as the vehicles moved down Old Cinema Street, a main commercial thoroughfare. The vehicles were ambushed by rifle fire from four sides. The Americans fired at buildings on both sides of the street, chipping concrete off the facades. No one on either side was injured.
There have been attacks on U.S. forces every night in Fallujah since Wednesday, when Iraqis fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a group of soldiers positioned at a ruined police station, killing one. The assailants escaped. Fallujah has been embittered since U.S. forces killed 17 Iraqis during two separate protests in April. U.S. authorities said the soldiers fired in self-defense.
"We've got to be on our toes all the time. Eyes open, scanning the buildings. It's not tanks and infantry we're fighting anymore. It's something more hidden," said Staff Sgt. Fred Frisbie, a military policeman.
Since the American command quadrupled its military presence here last week, not a day has gone by without troops weathering an ambush, a rocket-propelled grenade attack, an assault with automatic weapons or a mine blast.American forces seem to be battling a small but determined foe who has a primitive but effective command-and-control system that uses red, blue and white flares to signal the advance of American troops. The risk does not come from random potshots. The American forces are facing organized resistance that comes alive at night...
Specialist William Fernandez experienced the enemy tactics firsthand while on patrol on Sunday night. Fernandez, a computer engineer in civilian life, was operating the radio.
When he saw a red flare he sensed his patrol was about to be attacked. Suddenly, a grenade exploded directly behind the column of six Humvees, a move he believed was intended to encourage the Americans to drive forward into the kill zone.
Automatic-weapons fire erupted from several rooftops. The Americans fired at the muzzle flashes and left the scene after several minutes. Most of the Humvees had bullet holes, but the soldiers somehow escaped injury.
"It is a miniwar," Specialist Fernandez said.
I hit the road with the troops the next day. The Spartan Brigade was like a band of nomads. They took the furniture, light fixtures, anything to make their stay in Falluja more bearable. Some soldiers even took the toilets and sinks from a bombed-out palace. They figured that the palace was a total loss and that the items could be put to better use in their new quarters, which seemed to me an eminently sensible calculation.Can we say 'freedom fighters'? Can we call this crew those magic words: a P-R-O-X-Y F-O-R-C-E against Iran? A press release of the Iranian government news agency is quite annoyed with the Bush administration for threatening to interfere with Iranian politics. These are useful to look at because they indicate Iran's basic public claims. (link: Agonist)But what were the new quarters? As the brigade arrived, it turned out that it would be setting up camp in a compound built by the Mujahadeen Khalq, an Iranian resistance group that the Clinton administration put on its terrorist list but that asserts it does not support terror attacks against the United States and wants to make common cause against the Iranian government...
The resistance movement assumed that it could stay on the sidelines during the American-led attack on Iraq and had sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin L. Powell indicating that it had no intention of opposing the American invasion. The United States bombed their bases anyway.
After the war, the United States concluded an agreement with the group, which resulted in the handing over of its tanks, artillery and other weapons. They are stored at a camp under American supervision. Thousands of the group's fighters and supporters live at a camp at Ashraf, north of Baghdad.
But at the sprawling compound here, where the Spartan Brigade was setting up Camp, the American military presence was their immediate concern. The compound was the resistance movement's rear logistics base and includes a 100-bed hospital for women, including female fighters, that had been stripped bare by looters after the war. It also has an underground bunker system that is outfitted with a filtration system, a precaution that they say is against an Iranian missile attack.
The movement says it spent $15 million building the complex, using funds donated by Iranian businesspeople within Iran and in exile. The compound was abandoned after the Americans bombed part of it during the war to topple Mr. Hussein, but now the Iranians want to move hundreds of its women here.
"If the United States desires friendship with Iran, it would naturally be expected not to interfere in Iranian domestic affairs and show respect for the decisions of the Iranian people and their values," Kharrazi said in response to Powell's statement that the US is not an enemy of Iran.So is the United States after Iran? That's the question in the Senate right now. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee is addressing this, and there seems to be great confusion and 'no debate' according to Condi, simultaneously. There hasn't been that much debate lately... (Link: Agonist)He said that Washington should be familiarized with Iranian history which proves that the people become even more united whenever the country is exposed to foreign interference. Kharrazi noted that the US secretary of state was aware as gathered from his message that the Iranians will not accept foreign interference in the affairs of their country.
The Iranian foreign minister blasted Powell for calling on Iranians to stand up against their government officials and interact freely with the outside world. Powell's latest statement hints at a desire on the part of Washington to resume friendship with Iran, but ironically not a single day passes without a new conspiracy emerging to tarnish the image of the Islamic Republic before the international community.
Moreover, since the victory of the Islamic Revolution in Iran the United States has spared no effort at blocking Iran's economic progress on various pretexts.
Judging by several interviews of committee members from both parties, a consensus seems to have emerged that President Bush has yet to formulate a clear-cut policy toward Iran, which has been seen as a hostile power since the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy compound in Tehran....Thousands of students protested in Tehran yesterday, getting angry about their government. The demonstrators were dispersed by riot police. (Link: Agonist)"I don't think they have a policy," said Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), ranking member of the foreign-relations panel, last week. Biden was reacting to unconfirmed intelligence reports that suggested al Qaeda operatives in the Islamic republic had helped plan the May 12 suicide bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
"I think it's kind of loose talk to be talking about fomenting a revolution in Iran because I think it undercuts the very people in Iran that we should be giving support to ? that is the moderates, who are not necessarily pro-Western, pro-American, but they are democrats with a small d," Biden said...
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer described Iran?s efforts [to stop developing nuclear tech] so far as insufficient, while one administration official questioned why a country with state-owned oil would need nuclear energy. "Why would they need to develop nuclear fuel for a reactor?" he asked.
Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has said that the administration has no intention of debating the future of U.S. policy in Iran. "There really isn?t a debate on this issue," she told Reuters.
To round out a lot of good news, Bush is going to cause the biggest budget deficit in the history of the United States. A liberal complaint is all I have, a criticism, if you will, of the 'conservative' party and their proven fiscal agility. Do they really always have to run the tab up so much every time they get into the White House? This red ink is not just an abstraction, it's a burden of debt that my generation will have to manage. When will they start to tack it down? 2008?
?The problem is that the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But, we go where the business is." ?Dick Cheney the Experienced Liberator, 1996. (Quote from the excellent collection of war-related documents and evidence, cooperativeresearch.org. Thx to Schwartz)
The war plows on as Americans are forced away from every major Iraqi city. Lacking the popular favor to safely attack ancient Arab cities, they have been forced into waiting and firing blind missiles and bombs... You can say they are smart and that they minimize civilian casualties. ONLY PEACE minimizes civilian casualties.
So how can we perceive what is going on? Media chickens ride along with the American troops, unable to describe the random tactics of the Anglo-Saxon "coalition." They cannot directly expose the flip side, the lives of people who are actually getting the life bombed out of them by American planes. The media plays elusive games, obsessing over rumors of Saddam's duplication while ignoring what he has to say. With all these reporters driving around the desert in humvees, there have often been vast stretches of time where human interest stories flood out everything else. Because Iraq is not turning over like the neocon 'idealists' predicted. So what do you do to get the real story? One excellent site is The Agonist, with constant news updates from all sides. Want to know how smart YOU are? Take the Iraq quiz. Thx again to Schwartz!
Un-embedded and longtime war reporter Robert Fisk covers Baghdad, outside the walls of media censorship. From the scene of at least 20 dead innocent Arabs in Baghdad:
It was an outrage, an obscenity. The severed hand on the metal door, the swamp of blood and mud across the road, the human brains inside a garage, the incinerated, skeletal remains of an Iraqi mother and her three small children in their still smoldering car. Two missiles from a single American jet killed them all ? more than 20 Iraqi civilians, torn to pieces before they could be ?liberated? by the nation which destroyed their lives.It is all too likely that we have stumbled badly in managing the political climate of the Middle East prior to engaging Saddam. Robert Fisk reported yesterday from outside Baghdad:Who dares, I ask myself, to call this ?collateral damage?? Abu Taleb Street was packed with pedestrians and motorists when the American pilot approached through the dense sandstorm that covered northern Baghdad in a cloak of red and yellow dust and rain yesterday morning. It?s a dirt poor neighborhood ? of mostly Shiite Muslims, the same people whom Messers Bush and Blair still fondly hope will rise up against Saddam ? a place of oil-sodden car repair shops, overcrowded apartments and cheap cafes.
A senior Iraqi business executive wanted to explain how slender was the victory the Americans were claiming. "Throughout history, Iraq has been called Mesopotamia," he said. "This means 'the land between the two rivers'. So unless you are between the two rivers, this means you are not in Iraq. General Franks should know this." Alas for the businessman, the US Marines were, as we spoke, crossing the Euphrates under fire at Nasiriyah yesterday as hundreds of women and children fled their homes between the bridges. But still, by yesterday evening, only 50 or so American tanks had made it to the eastern shore, into "Mesopotamia". It didn't spoil the man's enthusiasm.Fisk also had an excellent interview with Democracy Now on March 25th. How experienced do TV reporters sound, really? How much do they bother considering a history that is longer than 12 years?"Can you imagine the effect on the Arabs if Iraq gets out of this war intact?" he asked. "It took just five days for all the Arabs to be defeated by Israel in the 1967 war. And already we Iraqis have been fighting the all-powerful Americans for five days and still we have held on to all of our cities and will not surrender. And imagine what would happen if Iraq surrendered. What chance would the Syrian leadership have against the demands of Israel? What chance would the Palestinians have of negotiating a fair deal with the Israelis? The Americans don't care about giving the Palestinians a fair deal. So why should they want to give the Iraqis a fair deal?"
This was no member of the Baath Party speaking. This was a man with degrees from universities in Manchester and Birmingham. A colleague had an even more cogent point to make. "Our soldiers know they will not get a fair deal from the Americans," he said. "It's important that they know this. We may not like our regime. But we fight for our country. The Russians did not like Stalin but they fought under him against the German invaders. We have a long history of fighting the colonial powers, especially you British. You claim you are coming to 'liberate' us. But you don't understand. What is happening now is we are starting a war of liberation against the Americans and the British."
....As the Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz said a few hours ago, I was listening to him in person, the Americans expected to be greeted with roses and music- and they were greeted with bullets. I think you see what has happened is that -- and as he pointed out -- the American administration and the US press lectured everybody about how the country would break apart where Shiites hated Sunnis and Sunnis hated Turkmen and Turkmen hated Kurds, and so on. And yet, most of the soldiers fighting in southern Iraq are actually Shiite. They?re not Sunnis, they?re not Tikritis, they?re not from Saddam?s home city. Saddam did not get knocked off his perch straight away, and I think that, to a considerable degree, the American administration allowed that little cabal of advisors around Bush- I?m talking about Perle, Wolfowitz, and these other people?people who have never been to war, never served their country, never put on a uniform- nor, indeed, has Mr. Bush ever served his country- they persuaded themselves of this Hollywood scenario of GIs driving through the streets of Iraqi cities being showered with roses by a relieved populace who desperately want this offer of democracy that Mr. Bush has put on offer-as reality.In a critical development, an Iraqi Shi'ite leader declared that the United States must leave the country immediately after Hussein is toppled, or they will soon face armed resistance. The leader of the Iraqi Shiite Supreme Assembly of the Islamic Revolution of Iraq, Ayatollah Mohammad-Baqer Hakim, declared that "The world does not approve of any colonialism or occupation, and we will take peaceful measures in this respect at the beginning but we will use force later." So much for those multi-year Halliburton contracts that have already been signed.And the truth of the matter is that Iraq has a very, very strong political tradition of strong anti-colonial struggle. It doesn?t matter whether that?s carried out under the guise of kings or under the guise of the Arab Socialist Ba?ath party, or under the guise of a total dictator. There are many people in this country who would love to get rid of Saddam Hussein, I?m sure, but they don?t want to live under American occupation...
...Very soon, the Americans are going to need the United Nations as desperately as they wanted to get rid of them. Because if this turns into the tragedy that it is turning into at the moment, if the Americans end up, by besieging Baghdad day after day after day, they?ll be looking for a way out, and the only way out is going to be the United Nations at which point, believe me, the French and the Russians are going to make sure that George Bush passes through some element of humiliation to do that. But that?s some way away. Remember what I said early on to you. The Americans can do it- they have the firepower. They may need more than 250,000 troops, but if they?re willing to sacrifice lives of their own men, as well as lives of the Iraqis, they can take Baghdad; they can come in.
But, you know, I look down from my balcony here next to the Tigris River- does that mean we?re going to have an American tank on every intersection in Baghdad? What are they there for- to occupy? To repress? To run an occupation force against the wishes of Iraqis? Or are they liberators? It?s very interesting how the reporting has swung from one side to another. Are these liberating forces or occupying forces? Every time I hear a journalist say ?liberation?, I know he means ?occupation?. We come back to the same point again which Mr. (Richard) Perle will not acknowledge; because this war does not have a UN sanction behind it?I mean not in the sense of sanctions but that it doesn?t have permission behind it, it is a war without international legitimacy, and the longer it goes on, the more it hurts Bush and the less it hurts Saddam. And we?re now into one week, and there isn?t even a single American soldier who has even approached the city of Baghdad yet. And the strange thing, looking at it from here in Baghdad, is the ad hoc way in which this war appears to be carried out.
You need to read this: Thank God for the Death of the United Nations by Richard Perle:
...For Lady Williams (and many others), the thumb on the scale of judgment about this war is the idea that only the UN security council can legitimise the use of force. It matters not if troops are used only to enforce the UN's own demands. A willing coalition of liberal democracies isn't good enough. If any institution or coalition other than the UN security council uses force, even as a last resort, "anarchy", rather than international law, would prevail, destroying any hope for world order.Yes, if you believe that 3 of 5 permanent members of the Security Council will never agree to your aggression and advocacy of military hegemony, then the UN has little value. But is Perle after Israel's regional hegemony, or America's? Is there a difference these days?This is a dangerously wrong idea that leads inexorably to handing great moral and even existential politico-military decisions, to the likes of Syria, Cameroon, Angola, Russia, China and France. When challenged with the argument that if a policy is right with the approbation of the security council, how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent, she fell back on the primacy of "order" versus "anarchy"....
This new century now challenges the hopes for a new world order in new ways. We will not defeat or even contain fanatical terror unless we can carry the war to the territories from which it is launched. This will sometimes require that we use force against states that harbour terrorists, as we did in destroying the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
The most dangerous of these states are those that also possess weapons of mass destruction. Iraq is one, but there are others. Whatever hope there is that they can be persuaded to withdraw support or sanctuary from terrorists rests on the certainty and effectiveness with which they are confronted. The chronic failure of the security council to enforce its own resolutions is unmistakable: it is simply not up to the task. We are left with coalitions of the willing. Far from disparaging them as a threat to a new world order, we should recognise that they are, by default, the best hope for that order, and the true alternative to the anarchy of the abject failure of the UN.
