Dan Feidt's log on Minnesota, Information Operations, spinstorms and latent contradictions.
"Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels asking the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the air force 'why isn't NORAD scrambling jets? and he said 'we received an order to stand down''. And that just perplexed everybody."
-- Sgt. Lauro Chavez
There are various competing conspiracy theories offered about 9/11. One of the more widely offered ones is the claim that military war game exercises on September 11 were used as a way to conceal The Conspiracy (as told, usually orchestrated by Cheney). There is evidence the wargames occurred, but they got very scant mention in the official story and the 9/11 Commission's report. Vigilant Guardian is one of these 'wargames', and now a member of the military is openly claiming that Vigilant Guardian was planned as a Top Secret exercise on the morning of 9/11. (graphic from oilempire.us)
Lauro Chavez also claims that he knows how 'blips' can be inserted by the military onto civilian air traffic control systems, to mark planes that are involved with simulated exercises. According to some 'conspiracy theorists'/'truth movementarians'/etc , such as Michael Ruppert, technology such as PROMIS or other systems allowed Cheney and his buddies to hide the real hijacked planes among false signals.
More evidence has been released recently of control tower recordings during September 11 that indicate something at least sort of big was going on. "Is this real world or exercise?" as one guy asked. See the Alex Jones explanation of this and reaction to more recent NORAD releases. This should help put his argument here into better context.
On the other hand, there is a whiff of something too good to be true about all of this. The guy's name is Chavez, he's telling something just before October (surprise!) that meshes like a jigsaw with The Theory Out There So Far. Could Mr. Chavez be a Karl Rove-style plant, a grifter with a tale tailor-made by the RNC to sucker in the skeptics – and then suddenly expose Chavez as a liar? This would discredit the rest of the increasing dissent around the offical explanation of September 11 right at the election? Or perhaps insulate the White House from damaging, authentic revelations from the Democrats and whistleblowers? The Sibel Edmonds story, too, promises a big punch, but it could really be a sucker punch. (this is called 'poisoning the well' by planting silly stories and crazy witnesses to discredit investigations, like Garrison in the JFK case... something silly about a poison dart gun in the umbrella...)
Beware of things that sound too good to be true in an election season. Sweep up all things, related and not...
CENTCOM Sergeant Details Traitorous Stand Down Orders On 9/11
Military whistleblower comes forward with key information
Steve Watson / Infowars | September 26 2006
Alex Jones was joined on air yesterday by a former Sergeant in the United States Army named Lauro "LJ" Chavez. Chavez was stationed at MacDill AFB where he claims he witnessed unusual preparations for a potential airplane hitting the base on the morning of 9/11 and distinctly heard officers talking about a stand down. This has led him to go public in questioning the NORAD stand down and the demolition of the twin towers.
In a letter that first appeared on the 9/11 Veterans For Truth Website, Sergeant Lauro "LJ" Chavez responds to a Cincinnati Post hit piece article by outlining his own doubts about the official version of 9/11 and his personal experiences of the strange prelude to the events of that morning.
Despite early (and healthy) reactions claiming this may be a hoax designed to poison the well of the 9/11 truth movement, Sergeant Chavez has now provided us with evidence of his credentials, his honorable discharge documents showing the military installations he was located inside. The last station he held was inside United States Central Command in Tampa - the pdf can be viewed here.
Mr Chavez was quick to point out that he does not have all the answers, but does have what he feels is vital information regarding the events of 9/11:
''I'm in no way in a position to tell people that 'this is the official story so believe me', no, I want to give people the information so they can go away and look for themselves and formulate a logical decision with all the evidence." Chavez said.
Mr Chavez worked within CENTCOM, one of the five American regional unified commands consisting of Marines, Navy and air force officers. CENTCOM's area of jurisdiction is in the Middle East, East Africa and Central Asia. CENTCOM has been the main American presence in many military operations, including the Persian Gulf War, the United States war in Afghanistan, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Chavez was stationed at CENTCOM's headquarters at MacDill AFB, in Tampa, Florida. His commanding officer was Four Star General Tommy Franks.
Chavez worked in the J6 department that was in charge of all the computer systems, the network backbone of CENTCOM. Chavez ran a team of six soldiers on the helpdesk network side. He was personally responsible for the maintenance of commanding officers computers, including those of General Tommy Franks. He has letters of recommendation from Franks and even went to Franks' house to work on his computers.
Chavez described how the military has a ring of computer networks according to different security clearance levels. Chavez worked only with systems classified as top secret or higher.
On the morning before 9/11 Chavez was in the Secure Compartmented Information Facility, the secure bunker at the base of CENTCOM HQ which is populated by high ranking military intelligence personnel. This is a facility that requires a top secret gamma clearance. Inside are systems that can monitor weather systems and flight paths of all aircraft within the country.
That day he was involved with supporting computer equipment being used in the Vigilant Guardian exercise and another exercise based in Egypt. On this day Chavez got to see information that he wasn't supposed to see.
"I was working on psyops commander's computer and next to his PC was a top secret document that was open, his neglect was my ally, I was sitting there working on his computer and was waiting for some passes to download and I look over and I'm reading the document, and it's the off order for the exercise that they are participating in."
This raises major questions because normally wargames or exercises are not classified as top secret as it is a requirement to let some information be public, especially if the exercise is taking place in a populated area.
Chavez continued:
"So I'm reading this document and it's giving proposed situations for scenarios for this wargame the scenarios include a hijacked plane, most of them were hijacked planes, I saw one that was like a car bomb trying to blow up something, but one of them was a hijacked plane crashing into a nuclear power plant in California, the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center, The Pentagon obviously, the White House, our building was one of the targets as well."
Chavez went on to describe how CENTCOM HQ was being heavily fortified the day before 9/11 and access to the base was restricted to top secret personnel only. This ties in with a declaration of Martial Law by Jeb Bush two days previously throughout the entirety of Florida.
Chavez also described how during the exercises the aerospace grid with "enemy" blips on it has to be piped in to the air traffic controllers of all the airports in the affected area so they know there is a military exercise going on. This ties in with the released NORAD/NEADS and FAA tapes and accounts that are riddled with references to the drills and exercises taking place on 9/11.
Chavez described the plot as "genius" and stated:
"If you want to crash planes into a building, and you've got the aerospace grid at your beckoning call, so you put a bunch of blips on it so no one knows which ones are real and which ones are fake... All you have to do is have someone in charge of the computer systems to put the blips on the screen and then you can do whatever you want."
Chavez proceeded to detail the key discussions that he heard inside the bunker on the day of 9/11:
"I didn't get to see tower one hit, I was in there talking with individuals and i was tired, I'd been there since four in the morning. Then all of a sudden everybody started hustling and bustling. it was like NASA when Apollo 13 was about to crash, everybody running around, and then they put it on the big screen, CNN with the tower on fire.
Then we see the other plane come in and hit it and at that point everybody is standing up. The air force had commanders in contact with NORAD. The plane, or whatever, hit the Pentagon and then we were like 'Why aren't they scrambling jets?' We were asking, there was eight or nine people... Colonels and Lieutenant Colonels asking the Lieutenant Colonel in charge of the air force 'why isn't NORAD scrambling jets? and he said 'we received an order to stand down''. And that just perplexed everybody."
Mr Chavez did not know the Lieutenant Colonel and so does not know his name, yet if he can be identified, then we have uncovered a direct link to the stand down order. If that man or any others who were present at CENTCOM on 9/11 can be identified and made to testify under oath, then the whole cover operation could be blown. A real independent investigation would have secured this.
The entire riveting interview is freely available online at Prisonplanet.tv now. Please spread this information far and wide.
Mr Chavez has since been informed that the computer company he now works for, as information security manager, has been receiving threatening phone calls demanding his dismissal. Mr Chavez is another example of someone who is bravely putting his career, reputation and life on the line to get the truth out about the 9/11 cover up.
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INFOWARS: BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
"When I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me."
--Indira Singh
The 9/11 terror plot itself, intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a "crystal clear" picture of what was going on -- to quote Sibel Edmonds.
Fintan Dunne, Editor BreakForNews.com (at this link, Daniel Ellsberg's support of Edmonds is noted - Ellsberg was cool on Colbert Report this week)
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.
Now THIS is what I call a map. This comes directly from the National Drug Intelligence Center in the Department of Justice, National Drug Threat Assessment 2006, January 2006. Today I'm going to post a lot of stuff that I certainly don't consider the Gospel Truth. It's purely for your careful consideration with barrels of salt. So let's kick things off with the DOJ:
And this is just funny. I suspect the purple patches are notorious 'rebel zones' in the War on Drugs, where the federal and state government policies have split apart entirely. But they forgot eastern Tennessee... and of course everywhere else.
We will be returning to the one about the Russian-Israeli crime organizations. Florida drug money is connected to some of the loose ends around 9/11. The 9/11 drug money connection has many potential angles, but first note here that the DEA marks Miami as a key heroin and cocaine distribution area.
Now we're going into stuff that seems hard to believe, and beyond here, I don't claim that any of these people are telling the truth.
This is just a small slice of the material on the internet about how the rich & powerful skim huge amounts of cash out of the addicted masses of America through the profitable geopolitics of illicit drugs. Some people claim there is a strong connection between drug trafficking and 9/11 financing. Certainly all the players in Afghanistan since 1979 have been up to their ears in it, including the CIA and its favored contractors (who make up around half the CIA personnel these days).
This is certainly part of a trend towards the criminalization of war, which corresponds to the increasing privatization of war. We will have more on this angle in the coming days. Even if there are no operational links to the real September 11 conspiracy itself, the drug-militarization angle really needs to be investigated seriously, perhaps by a Democratic Congress with subpoena and immunity powers. Even snooping at possible loose 9/11 connections immediately reveals a world awash in drug money, with Bush and the Establishment generating vast cash flows from conflict zones - and enforcing loyalties among players from Afghanistan to South America by aligning these cash flows with military force. Sometimes privatized paramilitary forces. Why not?
"Kill the Messenger:" Sibel Edmonds is on the radar a bit more than usual, as they have apparently whipped up a documentary to expose more of her surreal role in the weird world of intelligence after 9/11, named appropriately enough, Kill the Messenger. (perhaps she shouldn't be trusted, one guy suggests) A blog supporting Edmonds' film, sibeledmonds.blogspot.com is operated by Lukery at wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, who has covered her case in detail. To recap what I have posted before, Edmonds worked as a translator at the FBI, where she discovered a conspiracy within her unit to cover up a Turkish espionage ring in the United States. One of her co-translators was spoofing the wiretaps for FBI agents, and when Edmonds tried to bring this to her superiors, they suppressed the whole thing. Also Dennis Hastert was taking big bribes from the Turks, and there is some kind of global nuclear parts trafficking conspiracy connected to the AQ Khan network and some Israeli mobster types - probably Marc Rich type guys. The guys running the secret nuclear trafficking network were enemies of the CIA's Brewster-Jennings counter-proliferation operations and Valerie Plame, adding yet another twisted concourse to that scandal. And the AIPAC stuff and Chalabi are laterally related, since so much of it revolves around the same neo-con cats in DC and their foreign allies.
Lukery summarized:
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."
After a mere 3 months in the FBI, Edmonds publicly claims that all this stuff was going on, covered up at numerous levels in the federal government – though Ashcroft-era gag orders prevent her from sharing many aspects of the story. A virtual hailstorm of individual criminal conspiracies, involving top neo-cons, drug trafficking, all kinds of crazy shit. She has mentioned Coleen Rowley as an ally in the whistleblower field.
There is another potential side to this: Edmonds is herself possibly a red herring, a player or a dupe in the conspiracy, posing as an opponent. Conspiracy gurus suggest she might be a "limited hangout," or a channel to expose parts of the story, and fill other parts with disinformation. Edmonds comes from a prominent family in Turkey, so perhaps she has a bit of Turkish partisanship against some groups back home. One blogger named xymphora suggested she speaks the conspiracy-ese a bit too well:
"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 she gives interviews with patently crazy people like Tom Flocco. Here is a fragment tying some of the neo-cons to some nasty shit:
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.
Grossman is definitely part of the Valerie Plame scandal, no doubt.
Well, it all still makes her story worth adding to the mixture. Here is the documentary trailer. Please let's take some bets if this will be aired in the United States.
Florida drug money angles (and there are many!) There was this funny story about one of the flight school proprietors in Florida who trained the 9/11 hijackers. The flight school owner was caught with 43 pounds of heroin just after the 9/11 hijackers got to his school, and somehow this story never got fully explored. See MadCowProd.com for a lot of amusing tales of south Floridian drug trafficking. It's worth considering what the site's proprietor Daniel Hopsicker says, "THE 9.11 HEROIN CONNECTION" is "The Biggest Censored Story of the 21st Century." He cites Thomas Pynchon: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers."
More recently, and quite funny, is the "SkyWay Aircraft" case, where Tom DeLay's buddy + Homeland Security defense contractor accidentally getting busted with 5.5 tons of cocaine on a DC9 connected with the Titan defense contractor. Naturally, the DEA ducking and covering from obvious political pressure ensued. Good times. And perhaps this link is connected to Zacharias Moussaoui and 9/11 financing. (Bonus: MadCowProd says Adnan Kashoggi finances the 9/11 Truth Movement? Now that's what I call a conspiracy!)
Ruppert on Hawalas, PTECH, PROMIS, 9/11 and some heroin networks, BCCI-style. From Mike Ruppert's FromTheWilderness.com last year, "PTECH, 9/11, and USA-SAUDI TERROR: PART II" which offers some evidence that PROMIS software connected to 9/11, and possible narcotics / heroin money connections to 9/11. Ruppert himself offers a theory that advanced software like PROMIS was capable of manipulating computers throughout the financial sphere and the federal government. Ruppert's book Crossing the Rubicon suggests that Dick Cheney could have executed 9/11 himself by using PROMIS and other whizbang technologies to, for example, insert extra radar blips in air traffic control towers across America. It seems kind of like a Deus Ex Machina conspiracy argument to me, but it is still an interesting, if far-fetched hypothetical argument that raises serious questions about how PROMIS and the rest of the fed's information technology really is run. At a dense 675 pages, crossing the Rubicon is one hell of a book, summarized thusly:
"In my book I make several key points:
1. I name Vice President Richard Cheney as the prime suspect in the mass murders of 9/11 and will establish that, not only was he a planner in the attacks, but also that on the day of the attacks he was running a completely separate Command, Control and Communications system which was superceding any orders being issued by the FAA, the Pentagon, or the White House Situation Room;
2. I establish conclusively that in May of 2001, by presidential order, Richard Cheney was put in direct command and control of all wargame and field exercise training and scheduling through several agencies, especially FEMA. This also extended to all of the conflicting and overlapping NORAD drills -- some involving hijack simulations -- taking place on that day.
3. I demonstrate that the TRIPOD II exercise being set up on Sept. 10th in Manhattan was directly connected to Cheney's role in the above.
4. I also prove conclusively that a number of public officials, at the national and New York City levels, including then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, were aware that flight 175 was en route to lower Manhattan for 20 minutes and did nothing to order the evacuation of, or warn the occupants of the South Tower. One military officer was forced to leave his post in the middle of the attacks and place a private call to his brother - who worked at the WTC - warning him to get out. That was because no other part of the system was taking action.
5. I also show that the Israeli and British governments acted as partners with the highest levels of the American government to help in the preparation and, very possibly, the actual execution of the attacks."
"There is more reason to be afraid of not facing the evidence in this book than of facing what is in it."
Approach #2: Peter Dale Scott's "The Global Drug Meta-Group: Drugs, Managed Violence, and the Russian 9/11". haven't looked through all of it, but it seems an interesting source to begin looking at how the gears really turn in Central Asia and thereabouts.
it also seems possible that the U.S. government might contemplate using Hizb ut-Tahrir and the meta-group for political changes in Russia itself, even while combating the Islamism of al-Qaeda elsewhere. This would be far from the first time that the U.S. Government had used drug-trafficking proxies as assets, and would do a lot to explain the role of the U.S. in 2001 in restoring major drug traffickers to power in Afghanistan. Dubious figures like Nukhaev, Khodorkovskii, and Khashoggi have already shown their interest in such initiatives; and western business interests have shown their eagerness to work with these allies of the meta-group.
It is fitting to think of most U.S. intelligence assets as chess pieces, moved at the whim of their controllers. That is however not an apt metaphor for the meta-group, which clearly has the resources to negotiate and to exert its own influence interactively upon the governments it works with.
Since first hearing about the meta-group's role in the Russian 9/11, I have pondered the question whether it could have played a similar role in the American 9/11 as well. At this point I have to say that I have found no persuasive evidence that would prove its involvement. The fact remains that two informed and credible witnesses, Sibell Edmonds and Indira Singh, have spoken independently of the importance of international drug trafficking in the background of 9/11.
The Bush Administration has paid Sibell Edmonds the tribute of silencing her on the grounds of national interest. She has nonetheless made it clear that what she would talk about concerns that part of the world where the meta-group has influence:
SE [Sibel Edmonds]: It's interesting, in one of my interviews, they say "Turkish countries," but I believe they meant Turkic countries – that is, Turkey, Azerbaijan, and all the 'Stans, including Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, and [non-Turkic countries like] Afghanistan and Pakistan. All of these countries play a big part in the sort of things I have been talking about.
CD [Chris Deliso]: What, you mean drug-smuggling?
SE: Among other things. Yes, that is a major part of it. It's amazing that in this whole "war on terror" thing, no one ever talks about these issues.[120]
Indira Singh, who lost her high-tech job at J.P. Morgan after telling the FBI about Ptech and 9/11, was even more dramatic in her public testimony at a Canadian event:
I did a number of things in my research and when I ran into the drugs I was told that if I mentioned the money to the drugs around 9/11 that would be the end of me.[121]
The False Dilemmas of 9/11 Theories
I said earlier that by suppressing awareness of the role of drug-trafficking in our society, we give drug traffickers a de facto franchise to exert political influence without criticism or opposition. An example of this is the discussion of 9/11 in America, which usually fails to consider the meta-group among the list of possible suspects.
I have tried to suggest in this paper that in fact the meta-group had both motive – to restore the Afghan opium harvest and increase instability and chaos along the trade routes through Central Asia – and opportunity – to utilize its contacts with both al-Zawahiri in al Qaeda and the CIA in Washington. It is furthermore the best candidate to explain one of the more difficult anomalies (or indeed paradoxes) of the clues surrounding 9/11: that many of the clues lead in the direction of Saudi Arabia, but some lead also in a very different direction, towards Israel.[122]
Here it is worth quoting again the well-informed remark of a Washington insider about the meta-group's predecessor, BCCI: "Who else could wire something together to Saudi Arabia, China, Israel, and the U.S.?"[123] The current meta-group fills the same bill, for it unites supporters of Muslim Salafism (Saidov) with at least one Israeli citizen (Kosman).
The meta-group's involvement in the Russian 9/11 of course does nothing to prove its involvement in the American one. However awareness of its presence – as an unrecognized Force X operating in the world – makes previous discussions of 9/11 seem curiously limited. Again and again questions of responsibility have been unthinkingly limited to false dilemmas in which the possible involvement of this or any other Force X is excluded.
An early example is Michael Moore's naïve question to President Bush in Dude, Where's My Country: "Who attacked the United States on September 11 – a guy on dialysis from a cave in Afghanistan, or your friends, Saudi Arabia?"[124] A far more widespread dilemma is that articulated by David Ray Griffin in his searching critique of the 9/11 Commission Report:
There are two basic theories about 9/11. Each of these theories is a "conspiracy theory." One of these is the official conspiracy theory, according to which the attacks of 9/11 were planned and executed solely by al-Qaeda terrorists under the guidance of Osama bin Laden....Opposing this official theory is the [sic] alternative conspiracy theory, which holds that the attacks of 9/11 were able to succeed only because they were facilitated by the Bush administration and its agencies.[125]
Griffin of course is not consciously excluding a third possible theory – that a Force X was responsible. But his failure to acknowledge this possibility is an example of the almost universal cultural denial I referred to earlier. In America few are likely to conceive of the possibility that a force in contact with the U.S. government could be not just an asset, but a force exerting influence on that government.
My personal suggestion to 9/11 researchers is that they focus on the connections of the meta-group's firm Far West, Ltd. – in particular those which lead to Khashoggi, Berezovskii, Halliburton and Dick Cheney, and Diligence, Joe Allbaugh, and Neil Bush.
As a grain of salt, we should remember that Florida is so thoroughly laden with drug money that it is quite likely people would catch false leads to September 11 among the huge forest of shady people getting rich from the Business. The loose end about how the DEA was tracking Israelis who lived virtually around the corner from the 9/11 hijackers is an interesting one, but perhaps the density of shady business in Hollywood, Florida is just that high, one block of criminal enterprises after another. This IS Florida we're talking about.
The Israeli 9/11 angles are still worth checking out – the supposed Mossad front company Urban Moving Systems and the rest. From one of America's most respected Jewish periodicals, Forward:
Spy Rumors Fly on Gusts of Truth: Americans Probing Reports of Israeli Espionage
MARCH 15, 2002
By MARC PERELMAN, FORWARD STAFF
"Despite angry denials by Israel and its American supporters, reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth, the Forward has learned.
However, far from pointing to Israeli spying against U.S. government and military facilities, as reported in Europe last week, the incidents in question appear to represent a case of Israelis in the United States spying on a common enemy, radical Islamic networks suspected of links to Middle East terrorism.
In particular, a group of five Israelis arrested in New Jersey shortly after the September 11 attacks and held for more than two months was subjected to an unusual number of polygraph tests and interrogated by a series of government agencies including the FBI's counterintelligence division, which by some reports remains convinced that Israel was conducting an intelligence operation. The five Israelis worked for a moving company with few discernable assets that closed up shop immediately afterward and whose owner fled to Israel.
Other allegations involved Israelis claiming to be art students who had backgrounds in signal interception and ordnance. (See related story, Page 8.)
Sources emphasized that the release of all the Israelis under investigation indicates that they were cleared of any suspicion that they had prior knowledge of the September 11 attacks, as some anti-Israel media outlets have suggested.
The resulting tensions between Washington and Jerusalem, sources told the Forward, arose not because of the operations' targets but because Israel reportedly violated a secret gentlemen's agreement between the two countries under which espionage on each other's soil is to be coordinated in advance.
Most experts and former officials interviewed for this article said that such so-called unilateral or uncoordinated Israeli monitoring of radical Muslims in America would not be surprising. In fact, they said, Israeli intelligence played a key role in helping the Bush administration to crack down on Islamic charities suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups, most notably the Richardson, Texas-based Holy Land Foundation last December.
"I have no doubt Israel has an interest in spying on those groups," said Peter Unsinger, an intelligence expert who teaches justice administration at San Jose University. "The Israelis give us good stuff, like on the Hamas charities." According to one former high-ranking American intelligence official, who asked not to be named, the FBI came to the conclusion at the end of its investigation that the five Israelis arrested in New Jersey last September were conducting a Mossad surveillance mission and that their employer, Urban Moving Systems of Weehawken, N.J., served as a front.
After their arrest, the men were held in detention for two-and-a-half months and were deported at the end of November, officially for visa violations. However, a counterintelligence investigation by the FBI concluded that at least two of them were in fact Mossad operatives, according to the former American official, who said he was regularly briefed on the investigation by two separate law enforcement officials.
"The assessment was that Urban Moving Systems was a front for the Mossad and operatives employed by it," he said. "The conclusion of the FBI was that they were spying on local Arabs but that they could leave because they did not know anything about 9/11."
However, he added, the bureau was "very irritated because it was a case of so-called unilateral espionage, meaning they didn't know about it."
Spokesmen for the FBI, the Justice Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to discuss the case. Israeli officials flatly dismissed the allegations as untrue. However, the former American official said that after American authorities confronted Jerusalem on the issue at the end of last year, the Israeli government acknowledged the operation and apologized for not coordinating it with Washington.
The five men — Sivan and Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Omer Marmari and Yaron Shmuel — were arrested eight hours after the attacks by the Bergen County, N.J., police while driving in an Urban Moving Systems van. The police acted on an FBI alert after the men allegedly were seen acting strangely while watching the events from the roof of their warehouse and the roof of their van............
A retired corporate lawyer, Gerald Shea, put together all the government reports on Israeli DEA groups he could find, and corroborated the locations of Israeli groups the DEA monitored and where in Florida the 9/11 hijackers lived when they were training. The results had interesting geographic distribution (which correlates with the Russian-Israeli organizations in Florida admittedly monitored by the Department of Justice as I noted above). These maps are from the Shea's PDF file:
All righty then. That's a lot of heady stuff to consider. I'll note again that I am not a true believer in anything in today's post. I just want to offer some of the interesting things out there on the internet today. I strongly believe that the Republican establishment in America today is very complicit in international drug trafficking – especially since we've got a lot of the same guys who ran cocaine angles in Central America during the Iran-Contra affair. Past behavior is a guide towards future actions, if not ironclad proof.
Arbitrage is power: the buying and selling of goods across geographic space supports the global "shadow economy" that makes up a huge proportion of economic activity. Whoever controls the space, controls the money. Half of Afghanistan's economy is heroin production, for example. Follow the cash: it's one heck of a loose end of September 11, and the war on terror.
My perspective on Thailand is filtered by my dad's experience in Chile, when he was hitchiking after college in the summer of 1973. There were CIA guys hanging around Santiago bars, and he recalled US Navy ships stationed offshore. The evidence is pretty clear that Nixon and Kissinger were supportive of the plot. My dad, sensing trouble, cleared out of there around Sept. 3 or so, a week before the Pinochet's coup.
My point here is to wonder about the links between the Thai coup leaders today and the U.S. unified combat command of the region, AKA USPACOM. What messages went between PACOM and Thailand this week as the Prime Minister was in New York? It wouldn't be the first time that a PM was at some American-related function as gears suddenly spun to get rid of him.
As the relative influence of the State Department and ambassadors has waned, the relationship between PACOM, CENTCOM, the other COMs and various local militaries has deepened. The link between our generals and the elite generals of other nations might be seen in the neocon worldview to be the ultimate safe power link, not subject to those pesky "election" thingies. The "New World Order" could be a tier of global generals tacitly allowed to overthrow democracies, with PACOM et al. handling the details and perhaps planting pretexts and back-stories, the information operations required to slot it into American discourse.
I recall an disturbing episode of "E-Ring" that featured a South American republic overthrown by a glorified general with Swift Return to Elections Promised Right Away, leaving Dennis Hopper as a proud American who preserved our all-important bauxite concession.
I don't know much (anything) about Thai politics, so I don't know if this coup was carried out by factions with tacit American support, like Rummy's recent attempt in Venezuela. However, I suspect a major element of global securitization trend, i.e. the political-military structures set up for "the war on terror", is to create security arrangements that supercede democratic structures. A tonic of temporary military fascisms and martial laws, normalized by "war on terror" ideology. (not that they would dare try it here.... ...)
Robert Kaplan is one of the President's favorite geopolitical writers, and his piece called "Supremacy by Stealth" (Atl. Monthly, July/Aug. 2003) suggests a secretive network of self-sustaining military leadership cells in nations around the world that can intervene when local democracy makes problems for the United States. Sort of a decentralized shadow military dictatorship kinda thing. I don't know if that's Thailand now, but when they claim a "good coup," this I suspect is the implementation of the theory. Of course, the private military corporations - mercenary corporations like DynCorp and MPRI, full of retired American officers - are an ideal organizational glue for this whole approach.
Kaplan: (prolly should read all of it!)
Precisely because they foment dynamic change, liberal empires-like those of Venice, Great Britain, and the United States-create the conditions for their own demise. Thus they must be especially devious. The very spread of the democracy for which we struggle weakens our grip on many heretofore docile governments: behold the stubborn refusal by Turkey and Mexico to go along with U.S. policy on Iraq. Consequently, if we are to get our way, and at the same time to promote our democratic principles, we will have to operate nimbly, in the shadows and behind closed doors, using means far less obvious than the august array of power displayed in the air and ground war against Iraq. "Don't bluster, don't threaten, but quietly and severely punish bad behavior," says Eliot Cohen, a military historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington. "It's the way the Romans acted." Not just the Romans, of course: "Speak softly and carry a big stick" was Theodore Roosevelt's way of putting it.
..........
The United States has set up military missions throughout the formerly communist world, creating situations in which U.S. majors, lieutenant colonels, and full colonels are often advising foreign generals and chiefs of staff. Make no mistake: these officers are policymakers by another name. A Romanian-speaking expert on the Balkans, Army Lieutenant Colonel Charles van Bebber, has become well known in top military circles in Bucharest for helping to start the reform process that led to Romania's integration with NATO. Such small-scale but vital relationships give America an edge there over its Western European allies. One of the reasons that countries like Romania and Bulgaria supported the U.S. invasion of Iraq is that they now see their primary military relationship as being with America rather than with NATO as such.
..........
Rule No. 4
Use the Military to Promote Democracy
In an age of expanding democracy, military and intelligence contacts are more important than ever. Civilian politicians in weak and fledgling parliamentary systems come and go. But leading military and security men remain as behind-the-scenes props, sometimes even getting themselves elected to high office-as has happened in Nigeria, Venezuela, and Russia. "Whoever the President of Kenya is, the same group of guys run their special forces and the President's bodyguards," one Army Special Operations officer told me. "We've trained them. That translates into diplomatic leverage."
The U.S. military's bilateral relationships with foreign armies and their officer corps play a substantial role in safeguarding democratic transitions. Militaries have been the pillars of so many Third World societies for so long that the advent of elections can scarcely make them politically irrelevant, especially in Africa and Latin America. In some places, such as Turkey and Pakistan, the military and security services have at times actually enjoyed a reputation for greater liberalism than the civilian authorities. In Colombia in the mid-1990s the civilian government was tainted by drug money; the military police, who were seen to be less corrupt, helped to save our bilateral relationship.
......
Our strategy in Colombia and Yemen is unspoken but simple: establish not a totally reformed military but a self-sustaining structure of a few specialized units.That's the best we will be able to do, and it will not require a heavy American military presence.
.......
Rule No. 6
Bring Back the Old Rules
Refer to the pre-Vietnam War rules by which small groups of quiet professionals would be used to help stabilize or destabilize a regime, depending on the circumstances and our needs. Covert means are more discreet and cheaper than declared war and large-scale mobilization, and in an age when an industrial economy is no longer necessary for the production of weapons of mass destruction, the American public, burdened with large government deficits, will demand an extraordinary degree of protection for as few tax dollars as possible. Impending technologies, such as bullets that can be directed at specific targets the way larger warheads are today, and satellites that can track the neurobiological signatures of individuals, will make assassinations far more feasible, enabling the United States to kill rulers like Saddam Hussein without having to harm their subject populations through conventional combat.
.......
As shocking as some of the above may sound, much of what I advocate is already taking place. The old rules, with their accent on discretion, were on the way back even before 9/11. Witness the increasing use of security-consulting firms and defense contractors that employ-in places as diverse as South America, the Caucasus, and West Africa-retired members of the U.S. military to conduct aerial surveillance, to train local armies, and to help struggling friendly regimes. Consider Military Professional Resources, Inc. (MPRI), of northern Virginia, which during the mid-1990s restructured and modernized the Croatian military. Shortly afterward Croatian battlefield success against the Serbs forced Belgrade to the peace table.
Encouraging an overall moral outcome to the Yugoslav conflict involved methods that were not always defensible in narrowly moral terms; the Croats, too, were murderers. And moral ambiguity is even greater in protracted wars, such as the Cold War and the war on terrorism, in which deals will always have to be struck with bad people and bad regimes for the sake of a larger good. The war on terrorism will not be successful if every aspect of its execution must be disclosed and justified-in terms of universal principles-to the satisfaction of the world media and world public opinion. The old rules are good rules because, as the ancient Chinese philosophers well knew, deception and occasional dirty work are morally preferable to launching a war.
*****
Wikipedia quotes:
* "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end, utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG and American hand be well hidden..." — A communique to the CIA base in Chile, issued on October 16, 1970
* "[Military rule aims] to make Chile not a nation of proletarians, but a nation of entrepreneurs." — Augusto Pinochet
* "We didn't do it. I mean we helped them. [Garbled] created the conditions as great as possible. — Henry Kissinger conversing with President Nixon about the coup.
There are some things that should set off the old alarm bells. As PrisonPlanet put it in their usual understated way, Military-Industrial Complex Kingpins Call For Genocide To Kick-Start World War Three. But that would appear to be the plan:
"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
This scheme published in a Pentagon periodical is one of the more wicked things imaginable:
The pathway to the apocalypse lies in grand plans...
Armed Forces Journal: Blood borders: How a better Middle East would look
By Ralph Peters
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
........Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.
Begin with the border issue most sensitive to American readers: For Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders — with essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single overstudied issue and turn to those that are studiously ignored.
Well, ducking the nuclear reactor of tension that is the West Bank settlement complex is one way to help yourself along to a greater ethnic cleansing project, especially one that would "work" so well.
From time to time, other people have developed maps to represent reorganizing the regions they deem to be inherently subordinate. Thanks to Wikipedia for noting Reichskommissariat Ostland: The Ostland was the "East Land" of Poland that the Nazis wanted to reshuffle - with ethnic Germans in the western sector, Poles in the center, and the Jews pushed off to the east, destination unresolved. The Jews were first detained into camps or executed at random by Einsatzgruppen SS units.
As time went on, methods became available for generating the correct ethnic balance. Some used railroads:
The result was rationalized annihilation:
"Ethnic cleansing works."
We need to listen very carefully to what they say. To which we can only reply:
NEVER AGAIN.
Not even in "free Baluchistan".
Above all, they are making a $1200 Swiss Army knife with every single tool. Yes. 85 tools including screwdrivers, a laser and a flashlight. And a "fine fork for watch spring bars."
Dig the Bush BeatBox video. Diabolical orange cat Jeff has a blog of what things he's killed.
Check out AllPeers: A new plugin for Firefox on Linux, Windows and OS X that combines buddy lists and BitTorrent, allowing people to share files at high speed with their friends. It's in beta now, and there could be security holes, but I really want to try it. I am registered at feidt@macalester.edu so shoot me a message if you want to try it. It has just been released to Public Beta. A review notes it has 'performance issues:'
As I write this, the beta is just a day old, and the company is still ironing out some server issues. Initially, I had a problem actually downloading the tool, and once I did get it installed, performance was spotty. I had trouble signing up to the service, and the service itself went down several times while I was testing it. When it did work, the speed was acceptable.
In theory, performance should eventually be quite good. AllPeers uses a customized version of BitTorrent to swap files. So if you're sending the same file with multiple people, once others receive the file—or just parts of the file—they can help you send it to everyone else. Let's say I decide to share a file to my colleagues Sean Carroll and Lance Ulanoff. Once Sean downloads the file from my machine, AllPeers can use both his copy and mine to send it quickly to Lance. Some of the bits will come from my machine even as other bits are coming from Sean.
Despite current performance I like the basic design. It's simple—and that's what you want from a tool like this. It integrates completely with Firefox, adding a toolbar and various browser "panes" that open and close as need be. Simply by keying in e-mail addresses or AllPeers user names, you add friends and family to a contacts list, and once you've chosen a name from the list, you can start sending files via drag-and-drop (or good old-fashioned dialog boxes).
Russia and Central Asian countries nervous about US military action, conducting training exercises. Michel Chossudovsky writes that Russia and Central Asian Allies Conduct War Games in Response to US Threats, including Taijikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. Things are also moving with China and India. Quoted:
"The growing militarisation is connected with mutual mistrust among countries in the region, say analysts. Iranian media have speculated that the United States is using Azerbaijan to create a military counterweight to Iran on the Caspian. It is possible that the exercise conducted by the CSTO – in which Russia is dominant – represents a response to concerns about United States involvement in developing Kazakstan’s navy. Observers say Russia is leaning more and more towards the Iranian view that countries from outside should be banned from having armed forces in the Caspian Sea."
Experts say the US is trying to step up the pressure on Iran, as well as to defend its own investments in Azerbaijan and Kazakstan. It is also trying to guarantee the security of the strategically vital Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline.
A military presence on the Caspian would give the United States an opportunity to at least partially offset its weakening influence in Central Asia, as seen in the closure of its airbase in Uzbekistan, the increased rent it is having to pay for the Manas base in Kyrgyzstan, and the diplomatic scandal that resulted in the expulsion of two Americans from Kyrgyzstan.
According to analysts, genuine security in the region can be achieved only if the military interests of all five Caspian countries are coordinated. At an international conference in Astrakhan in July 2005, Russia proposed the formation of a Caspian naval coordination group, but to date the initiative has not had much of a response.
And this is alarming:
The entire region seems to be on a war footing. These CSTO war games should be seen in relation to those launched barely a week earlier by Iran, in response to continued US military threats. These war games coincide with the showdown at the UN Security Council and the negotiations between permanent members regarding a Security Council resolution pertaining to Iran's nuclear program. "They are taking place within the window of time that has been predicted by analysts for the initiation of an American or an American-led attack against Iran" (see Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, Global Research, 21 August 2006):
"War games and military exercises are now well underway within Iran and its territory. The Iranian Armed Forces—the Regular Armed Forces and the Revolutionary Guards Corps—began the first stage of massive nationwide war games along border areas of the province of Sistan and Baluchistan1 in the southeast of Iran bordering the Gulf of Oman, Pakistan, and NATO garrisoned Afghanistan to the east on Saturday, August 19, 2006. These war games that are underway are to unfold and intensify over a five week period and possibly even last longer, meaning they will continue till the end of September and possibly overlap into October, 2006".
Neo-cons are trying to hype up an Iran war, of course. Neo-cons looked foolish when the apocalypse didn't happen August 22nd like they predicted. Old Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan said Israel should be prepared for an attack by Iran.
Raw Story: Less than half of Americans satisfied with 9/11 investigations. The NIST is going to probe if WTC 7 was brought down by bombs.
Is Cartoon Network making light of the Illuminati? A little bit...
Moral quagmire and moral clarity, based on this good bit by James Dobbins on Moral clarity in the mideast. More on this.
From the Daily Show, Bush's desperate soundbites:
According to WWTDD.com, Saddam Hussein got a personal screening of the South Park movie.
A Lockheed Martin engineer used YouTube to put his whistleblower message out, covered by the Washington Post. Check the video:
The Israel Lobby matter churns on: with the AIPAC espionage trial around the corner and a disastrous war between Israel and Lebanon, the underpinnings of the 'special relationship' between Israel and the United States seem to be front and center.
On Antiwar.com, Justin Raimondo looks at "Two Elephants in the room: Israel and its amen corner", looking at how the Washington Post's high-handed reporter Dana Milbank attacked top international politics professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt for speaking at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. Mearsheimer and Walt have sparked big controversy by writing on the influence of what they termed "the Israel Lobby" on America's foreign policy. I would call it "the right-wing Israel Lobby" since there are Jewish groups like Peace Now and Tikkun who are silenced, gagged and marginalized in Washington by AIPAC and its neoconservative allies. One purpose of what they call the "Israel lobby" is to silence the more liberal Jewish lobby. (Antiwar is messed up so try this printable version)
Reporters like Milbank generally speak in favor of the corrupt neo-con foreign policy establishment, denigrating anyone looking critically at the fake Iraq war intelligence, and the role of AIPAC in influencing America's middle east policy. Milbank's mockery of Democratic hearings on the Downing Street Memo is a truly disgusting piece of reporting. For a background on AIPAC, look at AIPAC's Overt and Covert Ops by Juan Cole from 2004.
Other randomness: Israeli-style air security may head west.
Godwin's Law strikes again: Islamo-fascism: It is suddenly trendy to call America's opponents "Islamic fascists" that we can't "appease". Right now on MSNBC one of Bush's toadies is telling the Hardball host that they are basically the same as Nazis. It reminds me that political identities are shaped by words, and merging ethnic or religious words with menacing political formations is an effective way to demonize enemies. Terms like "Islamofascist" cut off critical thinking and processing actual reality, hoping to replace thought with emotional cues. This is why the real Nazis called the Jews "Judeo-Bolsheviks" – "one of the central themes of fascist ideology" as a paper on the official site of Israel's Holocaust museum puts it. "Islamofascist" is just the Judeobolshevik of the 21st century, and it serves pretty much the same purpose: to rationalize annihilation.
Local trickle-down: This is becoming a more-than-latent issue in local political campaigns, especially Keith Ellison's primary contest in Minnesota's Fifth Congressional District. Ellison is a Black Muslim, and the strongly Jewish St. Louis Park composes a large chunk of the Fifth District. While Jewish folks, like any other identified voting 'bloc', have a variety of views on the race, there were a lot of awkward stories about Ellison and the Nation of Islam, tying Ellison to the rather anti-semitic organization. I don't really know if these stories have stuck, but it certainly was a story that the anti-Ellison parts of the establishment latched onto.
Today, Ellison has been markedly more sympathetic to Lebanon than his primary opponents, which seems reasonable to me, but this promises to bring out the wrath of the hard core of the Israeli government's supporters. Stand by for what that's going to add up to by the September 12 primary...
Well that's all for now. Catch ya on the flip side. I'm going to the fair tomorrow.
I have heard there are some odd things about 9/11. I am not a big believer in the grand conspiracy theories out there, but I do think that there ought to be a fresh investigation. These days, they are going after soldiers who actually try to address the '9/11 skeptics' or '9/11 truth' movement, whatever you want to call it. It's a little bit weird, and it's tougher for the media to deal with the issue of '9/11 skepticism' than the average person. Your everyday guy still knows that politics is theater and that they should take all this shit with a grain of salt to begin with. That's why half the country thinks the government concealed something about that day:
In the telephone survey of 1200 individuals, just 47% agreed that "the 9/11 attacks were thoroughly investigated and that any speculation about US government involvement is nonsense." Almost as many, 45%, indicated they were more likely to agree "that so many unanswered questions about 9/11 remain that Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success."
.....
This rough balance in opinions is itself a striking finding. It suggests that doubts about the officials accounts of 9/11, far from representing an extreme fringe position, have become a standard component of anti-establishment attitudes.
When asked specificially if they thought there had been a government coverup of evidence that contradicts the official story, the results were again not far from an even split, with 48% rejecting the idea of a deliberate coverup and 42% supporting it. Belief in a coverup was the majority position among Democrats, 18-29 year olds, and a few other groups.
In an attempt to focus more specifically on the attitudes of those who were best informed about the events of 9/11, the poll asked its responders if they were aware of WTC Building 7, whose collapse on September 11 for no obvious reason was not investigated by the 9/11 Commission. Only 52% answered that they were aware of the collapse of Building 7, but out of that subgroup, 73% believed it should have been investigated.
On a related topic, those polled were asked if they felt the Bush Administration had exploited the September 11th attacks to justify the invasion of Iraq or if Bush had been right to go into Iraq because Saddam Hussein supported terrorism. Here the country was divided exactly, 44% to 44%, with the answers following party lines more closely than those to the 9/11 questions. Among Republicans, 72% felt the invasion was appropriate, while among Democrats 69% felt it was not.
A whole range of weird things have yet to be explained about the day which justified virtually everything that came after.
Perhaps all the 9/11 skepticism is more about blowback about how its meaning has stretched from Tax Cuts to threatening Syria. If the sheer evilness of 9/11 encompasses the All-Meaning of All-Politics, its been stretched too far, all the way to the Eschaton in symbolic logic. The logical break of 9/11 felt apocalyptic, but it actually wasn't the apocalypse. However, as a 'pretext,' a political object that constructs morality for the EveryDay Joe, it is like this infinite pool of power. The Bush Administration's representation of 9/11's symbolic force is supposed to overwhelm everything else.
Since this is totally impossible, everyday folks are going to nitpick at how loose a weave the official story really is.
If September 11 is supposed to be some unprecedented historical Leviathan around which all politics and morality revolve, more people are going to suspect that its innards, its Official Story of Total Victimization, might be false as well.
In any case, I think that everything should be rehashed in a complete investigation of primary evidence sources from the top down, starting with NORAD and the war games that day. There should be a bullet list of 40 things that a new investigation should specifically answer. Oh wait, that spooky list already exists.
Power is a shady thing, but people in this country aren't going to buy a really complex theory, with unclear motives and a mishmash of silly shit. Or are they? This seems to be DaVinci Code America now, anyway. The competing cases ought to be made all over again, official and the constellation of 'conspiracy theories'.
What the major media portrays as "Conspiracy theories" are often just interpretations of evidence, and naughty, improper questions. Throughout history, conspiracy theories have featured ethnic stereotypes, psychological projection of fear and chaos onto other groups, illusions of loss of autonomy, centrality, messianism, and connecting pieces that just plain aren't really connected. Oh wait, that does sound a bit like the official story...
So don't leap onto any quick and easy explanation of some event, Loose Change or otherwise. The official story came pretty quick and easy, then they stonewalled real investigations for a long time. And of course destroyed the evidence of the WTC rubble itself. But besides that, everything is Kosher as Cecil's Deli.
Loose change controls the demolition of the Man's official version of 9/11?
There is a slightly newer version of 'Loose Change', the premiere 9/11 conspiracy video, freely available now via Google Video. Or you can see it embedded below. It is the "2nd edition recut", and as an interview posted on Alternet talked about, the producers of this tiny video, done on less than $10,000, have managed to get a pretty damn amazing amount of buzz for their little Final Cut Pro project. (I recognize those FCP filters & transitions. Anyway...) They basically just put together stories that were floating around the Internet, shot a couple interviews and got some really excellent DJs. This version is different than v2-original, with some nicer map backgrounds and animated scenes. Some lines have been changed, and I think the narrator's voice might be someone else, though that may be a sound codec issue.
The spookiest addition was a little more footage of the sudden 'crimping' of the WTC structure itself, and there's a sweet new song at the end. It also has a long bit with that University of Wisconsin professor against Hannity on FOX, and a much extended version of an interview they shot with a WTC maintenance guy who talks about the continuous explosions he heard during the attack.
Here are direct links to some good bits of the movie using Google Video time-bookmarks: the animation of the plane intersecting the Pentagon. Even better, spotting the 'controlled demolition' of the WTC, marked by nifty little brackets. This is the new bit with 9/11 skeptic U/W prof Barrett vs Hannity. Conclusion with sweet new song. Not that I am a believer, but it is all presented quite well. Embedded here for ya:
SFC Buswell:
I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn’t. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.
The Lone Star Iconoclast Online: (nice name for a site!) Under Fire! U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Targeted For Suggesting New Independent 9/11 Investigation
Monday, August 21, 2006 - By Stephen Webster, Investigative Reporter
Army: Doubting Official 9/11 Story Is ‘Disloyal To The United States’
FT. SAM HOUSTON, Texas — Forty-one-year-old Sergeant First Class Donald Buswell is a hero. Having served over 19 years in the United States Army, Buswell has seen a lot of terrain. On April 15, 2004, he was injured in a rocket attack while serving a tour in Iraq. For this, SFC Buswell was given a Purple Heart. And until recently, Buswell was an Intelligence Analyst stationed at Ft. Sam Houston, Texas.
But if one were to ask Buswell’s Commanding Officer what he thinks of the Sergeant, the response would likely sound a little bit more like, "No comment."
Such were the words given to The Iconoclast by Lieutenant Colonel Jane Crichton after inquiring why SFC Buswell is the focus of an investigation initiated by Colonel Luke S. Green, Chief of Staff at Fifth Army in Ft. Sam Houston.
According to unnamed military sources contacted by The Iconoclast, SFC Buswell "used his Government issued email account to send messages disloyal to the United States …" Because of these statements, SFC Buswell could soon find himself dishonorably discharged, court marshaled, or worse.
It all started as a simple response to a common, unsolicited mass email, sent to 38 individuals at Ft. Sam Houston on Aug. 2, 2006. The message, as well as Buswell’s response, is among documents obtained by The Iconoclast. The sender of the first message is identified as "Anderson, Larry Mr JMC". It reads:
This is being sent more as assurance for what happens when a plane hits a nuclear site more so than in response to that German website alleging a government conspiracy related to the 9/11 Pentagon plane crash (though the website does present an interesting perspective) – LarrySubject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall
Take a look at this clip [not included] and you’ll get a good feel for what happens to an airplane when it hits a concrete wall. Many of you have seen the produced (but not factual), Michael Moore-esque website that asks the question; "If it’s true that a Boeing airliner hit the Pentagon, what happened to all the parts of it? Why do we not find more pieces of it?
Where did all that mass GO???" (Therefore, the paranoid loony liberal reasoning, 9-11 must have been a US gov’t conspiracy!) Well, for those who question what happened to "all the mass of that airplane".......watch this clip.
It’s the old Air Force engineering tests of the concrete barrier that surrounds nuclear reactor domes —tests to see if it will indeed survive an aerial attack. With the hi-speed cameras rolling, they accelerated an F-4 Phantom to 500mph and.........
Recall: "What happens when an ‘Unstoppable Force’ meets an ‘Immovable Object’???" (Remember, as you watch in slow motion as the F-4 turns to vapor, the Phantom was one of the toughest airplanes ever built).
SFC Buswell responded later that day, saying:
Subject: F-4 vs. Concrete Wall Hello,
I receive many unsolicited e-mails daily, this one I chose to respond to. The below mentioned premise that an F4 Phantom fighter jet hitting that hardened concrete barrier is akin to the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon is like oil and water; they don’t mix, and they serve to muddy the issue. The issue is 911 was filled with errors in the ‘official report’ and ‘official story’ of that day, and, what happened that day. We all know and saw 2 planes hitting the WTC buildings, we didn’t see the 757 hit the Pentagon, nor did we see the plane crash in Shanksville PA. Both the PA and Pentagon ‘crashes’ don’t have clues and tell-tale signs of a jumbo-jet impacting those zones!
The Pentagon would have huge wing impacts in the side of the building; it didn’t. Shanksville PA would have had debris, and a large debris field; it didn’t.
Getting back to the F4...The Pentagon isn’t a nuclear hardened structure, so I can’t follow your weak logic that since an F4 vaporized itself in a test impact on a nuclear hardened structure that the alleged 757 hitting the Pentagon should have exhibited the same characteristics!
I say Occums razor is the best way to deduce this ‘day of infamy’; if you weigh all options, do some simple studying you will see 911 was clearly not executed by some arabs in caves with cell phones and 3 day old newspapers! I mean how are Arabs benefiting from pulling off 911? They have more war, more death and dismal conditions, so, how did 911 benefit them? Answer: It didn’t. So, who benefited from 9-11? The answer is sad, but simple; The Military Industial [sic] Complex.
It’s not a paranoid conspiracy to think there are conspiracies out there...and, it’s not Liberal Lunacy either, nor is it Conservative Kookiness! People, fellow citizens we’ve been had! We must demand a new independent investigation into 911 and look at all options of that day, and all plausabilities [sic], even the most incredulous theories must be examined.
Upon returning to his office the next day, Buswell discovered the locks had been changed, his security clearance was revoked, and an investigation had been launched. Buswell’s commanding officer, Colonel Luke Green, drafted a letter assigning Major Edwin Escobar to the investigation. According to sources, Colonel Green has asserted that SFC Buswell failed to obey Army regulations when he used his government issued email account to send what have been termed as messages disloyal to the United States with the intent of stirring up disloyalty, in a manner that brings discredit upon the United States Army.
It has been reported that Colonel Green also wrote that SFC Buswell claims to have information proving a conspiracy on the part of the United States Military Industrial Complex to attack targets within the United States, e.g., The Pentagon. Officials have suggested that the email response sent by SFC Buswell may be in violation of CFR 2635.705(a ), DoD-R 5500.7, and Joint Ethics Regulation paragraph 2-301b. These rules SFC Buswell is said to have perhaps violated regulate how soldiers utilize government resources, how they use their off-duty time, and how they use their official time.
[........]
"That is so ridiculous," said Winthrop Buswell. "[To say he is disloyal to the United States] is totally ridiculous. And the discourtesy was, ah, very apparent at that particular time. … I’ve always thought the American way is this: to disagree is important. To dissent is important. And my son simply said, without any fanfare, ‘Look, let’s take a look at the whole picture. If you want to take a look at that, maybe there are a few paragraphs that a Michael Moore might want to emphasize.’ That is all that my son has said. Never, however, to at all disparage the country and the patriotism that is so necessary for all of us. But, patriotism, as suggested by FOX News’ [Bill O’Reilly], is following the line of George W. Bush and cohorts completely! All my son is saying is, ‘Hey, maybe there’s a what if.’ Never, though, did he get sidetracked from the fact that [he loves his] country."
"What disturbed him more than anything else, I think, was the fact that the Iraqi citizens suffered so much and are suffering so much now," said Winthrop Buswell. "The time that he was injured, there were several Iraqis burning to death in front of him. He tried to put out the fire. It was a traumatic experience for him. … He spoke about that a number of times, and how terrible that was to see the citizenry being killed and suffering so much."
"One of his heroes is Abraham Lincoln," Winthrop Buswell continued. "And Abraham Lincoln said many things, but one of the things he said - and I’m paraphrasing - was, ‘I may disagree with the fellow who’s speaking, but I will stand and defend his right to speak.’ That’s my son’s position. He does look at the what if’s. But that doesn’t take away from his dedication and his patriotism. I don’t know a fellow who gets more chills running up and down his spine when he sees the flag flying."
"As a boy, [Donald was] always a very curious fellow," he added. "Very daring, but never risking anything or stepping over the line. He loved motorcycles, but was always very cautious about it, always wearing proper clothing, always wearing a helmet. Also, he was very active in little model racing cars. He was in Cub Scouts. I remember walking to the gymnasium with him and having wonderful conversations with him years ago. His mother and I went through a divorce, and that is never easy for anyone. My son was also very close to his grandfather on his mother’s side, and also his grandfather and grandmother on my side. Donald loves railroading, and my father has the best job that anyone could ever have. He’s a locomotive engineer, and my son related to that. My son also has a strong belief in a power greater than ourselves."
"But one of the things that stands out … is his love and his caring," said Winthrop, choking back tears. "He loves children. He’s just the greatest guy, as far as I am concerned. He walks into a room with a big smile on his face. … He’s like my dad – he makes you feel like, you know … I … I care for you. Ah, he’s … He’s my son …"
Via the Loose Change official blog, a sweet flyer. Click the thumbnail for high-resolution, print quality. There will obviously be a big event at ground zero, so these guys are gonna paste flyers and all that, all over NYC. Is that guy towards the right supposed to be Alex Jones?
FOX News: Could Aug. 22 Be the End of the World Thanks to Iran?
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
This is a partial transcript from "Hannity & Colmes," August 8, 2006, that has been edited for clarity.
ALAN COLMES, CO-HOST: Should the United States and Israel be on high alert? Two weeks from today, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has implied that he will give his final answer to the U.S. about his country's nuclear program by August 22nd.
Now, August 22nd also has great significance on the Islamic calendar. It's a day when Muslims believe that Prophet Muhammad road a winged horse, first to Jerusalem and then to Heaven and back.
So is it possible that Iran will flex its nuclear muscles on that date? Joining us now is FOX News military analyst Colonel David Hunt.
And, Colonel Hunt, do you place any significance on that date? Do we believe that Iran will take action based on the date, August 22nd?
COL. DAVID HUNT, FOX NEWS MILITARY ANALYST: I think Iran, Alan, has taken action for years. They've taken it with Hezbollah against Israel, they've taken it against us everyday. They've killed Americans in Iraq. So, yes, I take everything that wing nut says very seriously, whether it's the 22nd — but we've been at this World War III for a long, long time. It's time that the rest of us woke up. So high alert, I'm afraid, is going to be here for a while, and this war we're in with terrorists, like the nation — like Iran, is here to stay.
COLMES: I keep hearing this inflamed rhetoric, like World War III. When you say that, it implies as though the United States somehow has to be involved in a ground or air war when you say World War III. Are you suggesting that the United States is just weeks or months away from being a participant in a world war?
HUNT: I think we have been. I'm not talking about attacking all the nations of the world, Al. I am saying this: The War on Terror is a world war. It involves nations all other the world, like Syria, and Iran. It involves the Russian mafia, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah. It's a different type of war. It doesn't mean we have to invade all these countries. We've got a lot more killing of bad guys to do and a lot more recognition of what this about, holy war, in countries sponsoring terrorism.
SEAN HANNITY, CO-HOST: Hey, Colonel, welcome back to the program. It's amazing to me how many people don't understand the nature of Islamic fascism and how widespread this movement is and how they want to destroy Israel, Europe and the United States.
The Iranians we now discovered today — from the capture of one of the people responsible for the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers, Iranian trained — we now know Iran is supplying the weaponry to Hezbollah. So this really — they're using Hezbollah as a proxy for them to wage their own war, isn't that true?
HUNT: Yes, and they're also running Hamas. They're the ones — there's $100 million a year going into Hezbollah out of Iran. Iran, as we know, are killing American soldiers in Iraq, and they're controlling a militia. They're controlling Muqtada al-Sadr there. So they have very bad guys, and they're doing it by proxy. You're right, Hezbollah is just one of their main armies, and they're well trained and well financed.
HANNITY: How naive is this notion — The New York Times editorial today — that the idea that we can talk to Syria, talk to these terrorist regimes. Can you talk to Ahmadinejad? Can you talk to an Assad? Can you talk to Usama bin Laden? Can you get anywhere? Is that an...
HUNT: I think we can talk to them when we line them up and kill them. The only reason to talk to some of these guys is to just do that. However, we're not going to wipe out, as we talked offline, the entire country, but we have to directly talk to these guys to find out what they want. If they're not going to cooperate, yes, they have to go.
HANNITY: Regime change.
HUNT: Absolutely, 100 percent.
HANNITY: All right, thanks. Good to see you, Colonel.
COLMES: All right, Colonel, we thank you very much, Colonel.
Iraqi intuition: As Joe Biden and Chris Matthews talked about on Hardball the other night, apparently President Bush did not expect Iraqi Shiites to support Hezbollah. This is the shrewd leadership of the War on Terror, folks. Sy Hersh was talking about how Cheney's office spoofed the intelligence on Lebanon and Israel. Again, the rosy shock-and-awe type scenarios failed tactically and stategically, as they always do. Strategic bombing never really works.
Apparently, The Pentagon's Air Force types were convinced Israel's planned tactical air campaign (long planned) would work. According to Hersh and others, the Marines and the Army are very skeptical about attacking Iran, since they would get sent in to invade Iran when the Air Force plan fails. It turns out that the intuitions of the Pentagon skeptics were right, not surprisingly. Any kind of military action on Iran would make our whole Middle East situation completely fall apart – and yes, the Iranians have a lot of fancy missiles they've bought with all the oil money. Iran's mountainous terrain makes South Lebanon look like a golf course.
This image comes from former Defense Intelligence Agency officer Pat Lang's blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis, which has had some of the best commentary on the tactics between the IDF and Hezbollah.
Various commentaries: "How I found myself with the Islamic fascists" by Jonathan Cook. This essay would make Bill O'Reilly's head explode. "Israel, Defeated: Round one: Lebanon, 1 – Israel, 0" by Justin Raimondo at AntiWar.com.
Huzzah for Shias: Check out the book review of The Shia Revival.
Hezbollah's suicide bombers in past campaigns were mostly not Shiite: this is fascinating because it indicates that 'religion' per se is not the motivating factor for suicide attacks. What is? Foreign military occupation. Evidence: Professor Robert Pape found this, posted in the Guardian: What we still don't understand about Hizbollah, August 6:
This week, world terrorism expert Robert Pape will share with the FBI the findings of his remarkable study of 462 suicide bombings. He concludes that such acts have little to do with religious extremism and that the West must engage politically to halt the relentless slaughter: Israel has finally conceded that air power alone will not defeat Hizbollah. Over the coming weeks, it will learn that ground power won't work either. The problem is not that the Israelis have insufficient military might, but that they misunderstand the nature of the enemy.
In terms of structure and hierarchy, it is less comparable with, say, a religious cult such as the Taliban than to the multi-dimensional American civil rights movement of the 1960s. What made its rise so rapid, and will make it impossible to defeat militarily, was not its international support but the fact that it evolved from a reorientation of pre-existing Lebanese social groups.
Evidence of the broad nature of Hizbollah's resistance to Israeli occupation can be seen in the identity of its suicide attackers. Hizbollah conducted a broad campaign of suicide bombings against American, French and Israeli targets from 1982 to 1986. Altogether, these attacks, which included the infamous bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, involved 41 suicide terrorists. Researching my book, which covered all 462 suicide bombings around the globe, I had colleagues scour Lebanese sources to collect martyr videos, pictures and testimonials and biographies of the Hizbollah bombers. Of the 41, we identified the names, birth places and other personal data for 38. We were shocked to find that only eight were Islamic fundamentalists; 27 were from leftist political groups such as the Lebanese Communist Party and the Arab Socialist Union; three were Christians, including a female secondary school teacher with a college degree. All were born in Lebanon. What these suicide attackers - and their heirs today - shared was not a religious or political ideology but simply a commitment to resisting a foreign occupation. Nearly two decades of Israeli military presence did not root out Hizbollah. The only thing that has proven to end suicide attacks, in Lebanon and elsewhere, is withdrawal by the occupying force.
Previous analyses of suicide terrorism have not had the benefit of a complete survey of all suicide terrorist attacks worldwide. The lack of complete data, together with the fact that many such attacks, including all those against Americans, have been committed by Muslims, has led many in the US to assume that Islamic fundamentalism must be the underlying main cause. This, in turn, has fuelled a belief that anti-American terrorism can be stopped only by wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, which helped create public support of the invasion of Iraq. But study of the phenomenon of suicide terrorism shows that the presumed connection to Islamic fundamentalism is misleading.
There is not the close connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism that many people think. Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Most often, it is a response to foreign occupation.
Understanding that suicide terrorism is not a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the US and its allies should conduct the war on terrorism. Spreading democracy across the Persian Gulf is not likely to be a panacea as long as foreign troops remain on the Arabian peninsula. The obvious solution might well be simply to abandon the region altogether. Isolationism, however, is not possible; America needs a new strategy that pursues its vital interest in oil but does not stimulate the rise of a new generation of suicide terrorists. The same is true of Israel now.....
The backdrop is energy resources, and water too. From The Wilderness teased a pay story:
AS THE WORLD REELS FROM ISRAELI ATTACKS ON INNOCENT CIVILIANS DURING THE PAST THREE WEEKS, CULMINATING IN THIS WEEKEND'S ATROCITIES AT QANA, WE HEAR LITTLE ABOUT THE PIPELINE POLITICS AND WATER ISSUES BEHIND THE SCENES. BUT ISRAEL'S DESPERATE MILITARY MADNESS CANNOT BE FULLY UNDERSTOOD WITHOUT GRASPING THE FRANTIC RESOURCE WARS THAT FORM THE BACKDROP OF THE CURRENT MIDDLE EAST CARNAGE.
True enough. Encircling the Shiite's area of oilfields is important to guys like Dick Cheney. The situation in Iraq is fueled by the conflict over Iraq's oil revenue, of course. That crazy relief map is from here. It shows the Rumaila and other key oilfields around the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border. Rumaila was one of the key reasons Saddam invaded Kuwait. He claimed they were slant-drilling under the border, which was probably true since the Kuwaitis are dickheads.
Here is a map of the Sunni-Shiite distribution. In my opinion it actually doesn't show the Shiites of eastern Saudi Arabia correctly, but oh well... Shiites are darker.
And here is the famous Iraq oil map (PDF) from Cheney's energy task force:
There is this kind of strategy to encircle the general area... The Christian Science Monitor had this badass map showing where American troops are, relative to the pipelines: (more on this here)
I don't know what the hell this is, some kind of "heat map", but it looks cool from a cool-looking site:
The Israelis are holding the Golan Heights because of water, as they tell you, and the West Bank wall is laid out to cut off many wells from Palestinian access. The largest settlement in the West Bank, Ariel, is situated on a ridge area in the north, directly above the main aquifer. One wonders why the Litani River is such a big deal anyway. More on Ariel.
I recommend reading this page about Israel's water wars. It's very relevant. For your comparison here, the 'nose' of the West Bank that juts just outside of the red mountain aquifer is Kalkilya - the northern West Bank's westernmost Palestinian city. Ariel, the most horizontal blob, is centered on the red aquifer, as you can see with the power of imagination (since the American media is never going to fucking tell you this).
Iran noise: so we've gathered that this whole thing was an overture to a war in Iran (aka "World War III"). As one pretty pissed off international studies professor, Alon Ben-Meir put it:
The war of perception: Israel`s failure will undoubtedly embolden Iran to challenge it at a different time and circumstance, while Syria may decide that Israel is not such a formidable military after all and resort to more aggressive tactics to regain the Golan.
Hamas` resolve to resist Israel may harden, and Hezbollah which, by every objective military standard, suffered a strategic defeat, has already emerged as triumphant in the eyes of the Arab world for having withstood the Israeli onslaught with valor, may be emboldened to lie in wait for the next confrontation.
Having lost the war of perception Israel must be careful not to translate this into real strategic losses in dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict or with Iran.
.......
The real danger in the future comes from Iran, and it looms extremely large. If it is to respond effectively, Israel must develop strategies that deny Iran not just the opportunity to meddle in the Arab-Israeli conflict but make Tehran fear for its very existence, and so refrain from even contemplating any act of hostility against Israel.
An Israel that is, rightly or wrongly, perceived as weak, will simply invite more serious military challenges because Israel`s real enemies like Iran are relentless, and now they smell blood.
That's all for now. I really like maps!
Now that the dust is settling, we are hearing reports from the field about what exactly Hezbollah was doing down in South Lebanon. For more military analyses look at this excellent thread on Agonist.org Lessons Learned. Guys like William Lind have good stuff too.
For the moment, we are going to post a big chunk of Anthony Cordesman's summary of the whole damn thing. The press conference is here (PDF), the actual doc is here.
Center for Strategic and International Studies
1800 K Street, N.W. • Suite 400 • Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 1 (202) 775-3270 • Fax: 1 (202) 457-8746
Web: http://www.csis.org/burke/
Preliminary “Lessons” of the Israeli-Hezbollah War (PDF)
Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy acordesman@aol.com
Working Draft for Outside Comment, Revised: August 17, 2006
[Page 16]....
Lessons and Insights into Various Tactical,
Technological, and Other Military Aspects of the War
Once again, it is important to stress that many key details of the tactics, technology, and
other aspects of the fighting are not yet clear. There are, however, several additional
lessons that do seem to emerge from the conflict.
High Technology Asymmetric Warfare
There is virtually no controversy over whether the fighting with the Hezbollah shows just
how well a non-State actor can do when it achieves advanced arms, and has strong
outside support from state actors like Iran and Syria. Top-level Israeli intelligence
personnel and officers stated that most aspects of the Hezbollah build-up did not surprise
them in the six years following Israel’s withdrawal in Lebanon.
Mosad officials stated that they had tracked the deployment of some 13,000 Katyushas,
far more sophisticated Iranian medium and long-range artillery rockets and guided
missiles (Zelzal 3), better surface-to-air missiles like the SA-14, SA-16, and possibly SA-
8 and SA-18, the CS-801 anti-ship missile, and several more capable anti-tank weapons
like the AT-3 Sagger Two and Kornet. They also identified the armed UAV the
Hezbollah used as either the Iranian Mirsad-1 or Ababil-3 Swallow.
Israeli intelligence officials also stated that they knew some 100 Iranian advisors were
working with the Hezbollah, and that they knew Iran not only maintained high volumes
of deliveries, but also had created a Hezbollah command center for targeting and
controlling missile fire with advanced C2 assets and links to UAVs. They noted that they
had warnings of better sniper rifles, night vision devices, and communications as well as
of technical improvements to the IEDs, bombs, and booby traps that the Hezbollah had
used before the Israeli withdrawal.
Israeli officials and officers were not consistent about the scale or nature of the
technology transfer to the Hezbollah or of how many weapons they had. In broad terms,
however, they agreed on several points.
Hezbollah Rocket and Missile Forces
Israel faced a serious local threat from some 10,000-16,000 shorter-range regular and
extended range versions of the Kaytusha. These are small artillery rockets with individual
manportable launchers. The rockets have small warheads and ranges of 19-28 kilometers
(12-18 miles) that can only strike about 11-19 kilometers (7-12 miles) into Israel unless
launched right at the border. They can easily be fired in large numbers from virtually any
position or building, and the Hezbollah had a limited capacity for ripple fire that partly
made up for the fact that such weapons were so inaccurate that they hit at random, could
only be aimed at town-sized targets, and had very small warheads. They were, however,
more than adequate to force substantial evacuations, paralyze local economic activity,
and drive the Israelis that remained to shelters.
Israeli officers and officials made it clear that Israel’s real reason for going to war,
however, was the steady deployment of medium and longer range systems, and the
potential creation of a major Iranian and Syrian proxy missile force that could hit targets
throughout Israel.
This force included Syrian 220mm rockets and systems like the Fajr 3, with ranges of 45-
75 kilometers, capable of striking targets as far south as Haifa and Naharia. The IAF was
able to destroy most of the Iranian Fajr 3 launchers the first night of the war, but the IDF
did not know the Syrian rockets were present.
The Fajr 3, or Ra’ad, has a range of 45 kilometers, a 45-kilogram warhead, a 240-mm
diameter, a 5.2-meter length, and a weight of 408 kilograms.
A total of some 24-30 launchers and launch vehicles, carrying up to 14 rockets each, seem to have been present.
The IAF feels it destroyed virtually all launchers that fired after the first few days, but
Israeli officers did not provide an estimate of how many actually survived.
They also included the Syrian 302-mm artillery rockets and Fajr 5, with ranges of 75 and
higher kilometers. The IAF again feels that it was able to destroy most of the Iranian Fajr
5 launchers the first night of the war, but the IDF again did not know the Syrian 302-mm
rockets were present.
The Fajr 5 is launched from a mobile platform with up to four rockets per launcher, and
has a maximum range of 75 kilometers, a 45-kilogram warhead, a 333-mm diameter, a
6.48-meter length, and a weight of 915 kilograms.
A total of some 24-30 launchers and launch vehicles seem to have been present. Again, the IAF feels it destroyed virtually all
launchers that fired after the first few days, but Israeli officers did not provide an estimate
of how many actually survived.
The level of Hezbollah capabilities with the Zelzal 1, 2, and 3 and other possible systems
has been described earlier. These missiles have ranges of 115-220 kilometers. The Zelzal
2 is known to be in Hezbollah hands and illustrates the level of technology involved. It is
a derivative of the Russian FROG 7, and has a range in excess of 115 kilometers. It has a
610-mm diameter, a 8.46-meter length, and a weight of 3,545 kilograms.
It requires a large TEL vehicle with a large target signature.
Anti-Ship Missiles
The Hezbollah C-802 missile that damaged an Israeli Sa’ar 5, one of Israel’s latest and
most capable ships, struck the ship when it was not using active countermeasures. It may
or may not have had support from the coastal radar operated by Lebanese military fires
destroyed by IAF forces the following day.
According to Global Security, the Yingji YJ-2 (C-802) is powered by a turbojet with
paraffin-based fuel. It is subsonic (0.9 Mach), weighs 715 kilograms, has a range 120
kilometers, and a 165 kilogram (363 lb.). It has a small radar cross section and skims
about five to seven meters above the sea surface when it attacks the target. It has good
anti-jamming capability.
Anti-Armor Systems
The IDF faced both older anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) threats like the AT-3 Sagger,
AT-4 Spigot, and AT-5 Spandrel—each of which is a wire-guided system but which
become progressively more effective and easier to operate as the model number
increases.
The IDF also faced far more advanced weapons like the Russian AT-13 Metis-
M which only requires the operator to track the target, and the AT-14 Kornet-E, a third
generation system, that can be used to attack tanks fitted with explosive reactive armor,
and bunkers, buildings, and entrenched troops. Many of these systems bore serial
numbers that showed they came directly from Syria, but others may have come from Iran.
The AT-14 is a particularly good example of the kind of high technology weapon the US
may face in future asymmetric wars. It can be fitted to vehicles or used as a crew-portable
system.
It has thermal sights for night warfare and tracking heat signatures, and the
missile has semi-automatic command-to-line-of-sight laser beam-riding guidance. It flies
along the line of sight to engage the target head-on in a direct attack profile. It has a
nominal maximum range of 5 kilometers. It can be fitted with tandem shaped charge
HEAT warheads to defeat tanks fitted with reactive armor, or with high
explosive/incendiary warheads, for use against bunkers and fortifications. Maximum
penetration is claimed to be up to 1,200mm.
Other systems include a greatly improved version of the 105.2-mm rocket-propelled
grenade called the RPG-29 or Vampire. This is a much heavier system than most
previous designs. It is a two-man crew weapon with a 450-meter range, and with an
advanced 4.5-kilogram grenade that can be used to attack both armor and bunkers and
buildings. Some versions are equipped with night sights.
The IDF saw such weapons used with great tactical skill, and few technical errors,
reflecting the ease with which third generation ATGMs can be operated. They did serious
damage to buildings as well as armor. The Hezbollah also showed that it could use the
same “swarm” techniques to fire multiple rounds at the same target at the same time often
used in similar ambushes in Iraq. As of August 11th, however, a total of 60 armored
vehicles of all types (reports these were all tanks are wrong) had been hit. Most continued
to operate or were rapidly repaired in the field and restored to service. Only 5-6 of all
types represented a lasting vehicle kill.
Anti-Aircraft
The IDF estimates that the Hezbollah at least have the SA-7 and SA-14 manportable
surface-to-air missile system, probably have the SA-16, and may have the SA-18. The
SA-14 and SA-16 are much more advanced than the SA-7, but still possible to counter
with considerable success. The SA-18 Grouse (Igla 9K38) is more problematic.
According to the Federation of American Scientists, it is an improved variant of the SA-
14 that uses a similar thermal battery/gas bottle, and the same 2 kilogram high-explosive
warhead fitted with a contact and grazing fuse. The missile, however, is a totally new
design and has much greater operational range and speed. It has a maximum range of
5200 meters and a maximum altitude of 3500 meters, and uses an IR guidance system
with proportional convergence logic, and much better protection against electro-optical
jammers.
It is possible that it may have been given a few SA-8 Gecko (Russian 9K33 Osa) SAM
systems that are vehicle mounted, radar-guided systems with up to a 10-kilomter range,
and six missiles per vehicle.
The IDF is concerned that these systems would allow the Hezbollah to set up “ambushes”
of a few IAF aircraft without clear warning—a tactic where only a few SA-8s could
achieve a major propaganda victory. This concern, coupled to the risk of SA-16 and SA-
18 attacks, forced the IAF to actively use countermeasures to an unprecedented degree
during the fighting.
Low Signature; Asymmetric Stealth
One key aspect of the above list is that all of the systems that are not vehicle-mounted
are low signature weapons that very difficult to characterize and target and easy to bury
or conceal in civilian facilities. Stealth is normally thought of as high technology. It is
not. Conventional forces still have sensors geared largely to major military platforms and
operating in environments when any possible target becomes a real target. None of these
conditions applied to most Hezbollah weapons, and the problem was compounded by the
fact that a light weapon is often easier to move and place without detection in a built-up
area than a heavy one.
This signature issue applies to small rockets like the Qassam and Kaytusha that require
only a vestigial launcher that can be place in a house or covert area in seconds, and fired
with a timer. Israeli video showed numerous examples of Hezbollah rushing into a home,
setting up a system, and firing or leaving in a time in less than a minute.
It also applies to UAVs. Israel’s normal surveillance radars could not detect the Iranian
UAVs, and the IDF was forced to rush experiments to find one that could detect such a
small, low-flying platform. (This may be an artillery counterbattery radar but Israeli
sources would not confirm this.)
Technological Surprise
Israeli officers and experts did indicate that the IDF faced technological surprise and
uncertainty in some areas.
Syria evidently supplied nearly as many medium range artillery rockets—220 mm and
302 mm—as Iran, and a major portion of the Katyushas. The RPG-29 anti-tank weapon
and possible deployment of more advanced anti-tank guided weapons was not
anticipated. It was not possible to determine how advanced the surface-to-air missiles
going to Hezbollah forces were. It was not possible to determine the exact types and level
of capability for Iran’s long-range missile transfers because the three types of Zelzal are
so different in performance, and other Iranian systems (including ones with much better
guidance) are similar to what Israel calls the Zelzal 2 and 3.
The fact Israel faced some degree of technological surprise should not, however, be a
source of criticism unless there is evidence of negligence. If there is a lesson to be drawn
from such surprise, it is that it is almost unavoidable when deliveries are high and many
weapons are small and/or are delivered in trucks or containers and never seen used in
practice.
It is even more unavoidable when rapid transfer can occur in wartime, or new facilities
are created, such as the joint Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah intelligence (and advisory?) center
set up during the fighting in Damascus to give the Hezbollah technical and tactical
intelligence support. The lesson is rather that the war demonstrates a new level of
capability for non-state actors to use such weapons.
Cost
The US and Israel quote figures for the cost of these arms transfers that can reach the
billions, and talk about $100-$250 million in Iranian aid per year. The fact is that some
six years of build-up and arms transfers may have cost closer to $50-$100 million in all.
The bulk of the weapons involved were cheap, disposable or surplus, and transfers put no
strain of any kind on either Syria or Iran.
This is a critical point, not a quibble. Playing the spoiler role in arming non-state actors
even with relatively advanced weapons is cheap by comparison with other military
options. The US must be prepared for a sharp increase in such efforts as its enemies
realize just how cheap and easy this option can be.
Reevaluating the Level of Tactical and Technological Risk in the Forces of
Asymmetric and Non-State Actors
Experts like Sir Rupert Smith have already highlighted the risk posed to modern military
forces and states by opponents that fight below the threshold in which conventional
armies are most effective. Iraq has shown that even comparatively small transfers of
technology like motion sensors, crude shaped charges, and better triggering devices can
have a major impact in increasing the ability of insurgents and terrorists.
The Hezbollah have raised this to a whole new level, operating with effective sanctuary
in a state and with major outside suppliers—which Al Qa’ida has largely lacked. It is also
only the tip of the iceberg. It does not seem to have used the advanced SAMs listed
above, but the very threat forces IAF fighters and helicopters to constantly use
countermeasures. The use of ATGMs and RPG-29 not only inhibits the use of armor, but
sharply reduces the ability to enter buildings and requires dispersal and shelter.
The simple risk of long-range rocket attacks requires constant air and sensor coverage in
detail over the entire Hezbollah launch front to be sure of hitting launchers immediately.
The IDF’s task also could grow sharply if Iran/Syria sent the Hezbollah longer-range
rockets or missiles with precision guidance—allowing one missile to do serious damage
to a power plant, desalination plant, refinery/fuel storage facility with little or no warning.
The lesson here is not simply Hezbollah tactics to date. It is the need to survey all of the
weapons systems and technology that insurgents and terrorists could use in future strikes
and wars with the thesis that technology constraints are sharply weakening, and the US
and its allies face proliferation of a very different kind. It is to explore potential areas of
vulnerability in US forces and tactics non-state or asymmetric attackers can exploit,
carefully examine the holdings of state sponsors of such movements, and reexamine web
sites, training manuals, etc, to track the sharing or exploration of such technology.
Like Israel, the US and its other allies face long wars against enemies that have already
shown they are highly adaptive, and will constantly seek out weaknesses and the ability
to exploit the limits to conventional warfighting capabilities. The US must anticipate and
preempt when it can, and share countermeasure tactics and technologies with its allies.
Informal Networks and Asymmetric "Netcentric Warfare"
Like insurgent and terrorist groups in Iraq and Afghanistan—and in Arab states like
Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other states threatened by such groups—the Hezbollah
showed the ability of non-state actors to fight their own form of netcentric warfare. The
Hezbollah acted as a "distributed network" of small cells and units acting with
considerable independence, and capable of rapidly adapting to local conditions using
media reports on the, verbal communication, etc.
Rather than have to react faster than the IDF's decision cycle, they could largely ignore it,
waiting out Israeli attacks, staying in positions, reinfiltrating or reemerging from cover,
and choosing the time to attack or ambush. Forward fighters could be left behind or
sacrificed, and "self-attrition" became a tactic substituting for speed of maneuver and the
ability to anticipated IDF movements.
Skilled cadres and leadership cadres could be hidden, sheltered, or dispersed. Rear areas
became partial sanctuaries in spite of the IDF. Aside from Nasrallah, who survived, no
given element of the leadership cadre was critical.
A strategy of attrition and slow response substituted for speed and efficiency in command
and control. The lack of a formal and hierarchical supply system meant that disperse
weapons and supplies—the equivalent of "feed forward logistics"—accumulated over six
years ensured the ability to keep operating in spite of IDF attacks on supply facilities and
resupply.
The ability to fight on local religious, ideological, and sectarian grounds the IDF could
not match provided extensive cover and the equivalent of both depth and protection. As
noted earlier, civilians became a defensive weapon, the ability to exploit civilian
casualties and collateral damage became a weapon in political warfare, and the ability to
exploit virtually any built up area and familiar terrain as fortresses or ambush sites at
least partially compensated for IDF armor, air mobility, superior firepower, and sensors.
The value and capability of such asymmetric "netcentric" warfare, and comparatively
slow moving wars of attrition, should not be exaggerated. The IDF could win any clash,
and might have won decisively with different ground tactics. It also should not be
ignored. The kind of Western netcentric warfare that is so effective against conventional
forces has met a major challenge and one it must recognize.
Well that sounds like some badass shit. More later, but for now, dig the asymmetrical networkality of the low apogee swarm missile strategy. It delivers the goods!
The next point is worthy of special note, and of imitation by others; I don't want to pass lightly over it. When the duke [Cesare Borgia, aka Duke Valentino - pic via Wikipedia] took over Romagna, he found it had been controlled by impotent masters, who instead of ruling their subjects had plundered them, and had given them more reason for strife than unity, so that the whole province was full of robbers, feuds, and lawlessness of every description.
To establish peace and reduce the land to obedience, he decided good government was needed; and he named Messer Remirro de Orco, a cruel and vigorous man, to whom he gave absolute powers. In short order this man pacified and unified the whole district, winning thereby great renown. But then the duke decided such excessive authority was no longer necessary, and feared it might become odious; so he set up a civil court in the middle of the province, with an excellent judge and a representative from each city.
And because he knew that the recent harshness had generated some hatred, in order to clear the minds of the people and gain them over to his cause completely, he determined to make plain that whatever cruelty had come not from him [the Duke], but from the brutal character of the minister.
Taking the proper occasion, therefore, he had him placed on the public square of Cesena one morning, in two pieces, with a piece of wood beside him and a bloody knife. The ferocity of this scene left the people at once stunned and satisfied.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince (written 1513). Part VII: About New States Acquired with Other People's Arms and By Good Luck
Operation Northwoods - this is a completely real primary source document - the PDF
So I caught the end of 'V for Vendetta' back home this weekend, and I remembered that despite typically wooden Wachowski brothers dialogue, it had a lot of useful things to teach us. My favorite character was the police detective, because he was the one who drove the story forward, he's the one who the decision rests on, at the end... But the movie explained pretty damn clearly the concept of 'synthetic terror', or 'false flag' terrorist attacks, as well as making clear why a government would want to generate fear among its own people.
Things seem weird right now. Tensions are real high. The White House just ordered up the killing of a good thousand Lebanese, and it makes you feel like they'd kill us too. (Besides through pollution and debt) A lot of sacred cows have croaked lately and they're afraid of losing power. How is this system going to show its cracks? Strange times where Spike Lee implies that the levees in New Orleans were sabotaged. What is going on here (and what's Lee's film gonna say)?
Then I ran across this the next day:
Where Politics and Terror collide: I am a skeptic of all these kinds of intriguing internet conspiracy theories, but I do believe in offering what is floating around for your consideration, because here Nothing is True, and Everything is Permissible. Operation Northwoods was one hell of a plan, but it's a little unrealistic to believe that every damn terror scare is really staged by the High Chancellor. However, when something of a real, actual threat occurs, the politicians are going to grand-stand and fear monger. That's what Hannity and Gingrich do. If you are in mortal fear, you are going to support authority to save you. That's a handy political tactic called 'terror management theory', and it's expressed as a 'terror alert poll bounce'.
But there were those stories about British SAS operatives caught with all kinds of explosives in Iraq, though.
The Lebanon war, which Sy Hersh made clear was planned and coordinated by Cheney and the gang months ago, really scares the everyday American, I think. Hezbollah sucks, they say, but what's gonna happen with this creepy blitzkreig + quagmire ideology still banging around the White House? Those Arab kids caught reselling cell phones had their terrorism charges dropped, another timed and trumped-up case. The Liquid Bomb scare, with all the accompanying visual packaging on cable news, sort of seems to be bouncing off people. The Daily Show makes fun of the Fear Music and Fear Fonts. Everyone seems skeptical now. Some are scared, but I just keep hearing about why it seems like bullshit.
Conspiracists unleashed: There's a sense in the air that Republican dominance is going to fall apart in November, but they are going to go deep into the endless bag of dirty tricks to battle the Democrats one final time. The time is right to suspect an October Surprise, and in the latest mode of conspiracy theories, terror attacks staged by the government are a key way to paralyze the sheep-like public, send them flocking towards anything that looks strong. Alex Jones is of course the internet's premiere conspiracy guy, and he is issuing a full government synthetic terror alert for the rest of election season, which you can check out on YouTube:
Alex Jones' Warning: A CALL TO ACTION!
Alex Jones predicted the 9/11 attacks stating "Osama Bin Laden would be blamed for flying planes into buildings including the WTC". He made this warning during the months of July and August of 2001... He is now stating for the fist time since 9/11, that all indicators suggest a massive terror attack is imminent, facilitated by corrupt rogue elements in western governments, possibly before October.
Indeed, he did claim the government was going to stage attacks in July 2001 - watch the clip there, it's weird.
There's a sense that something against Iran will happen soon: "The Pentagon's "Second 911": "Another [9/11] attack could create both a justification and an opportunity to retaliate against some known targets"": by Michel Chossudovsky of the CRG:
In the month following last year's 7/7 London bombings, Vice President Dick Cheney is reported to have instructed USSTRATCOM to draw up a contingency plan "to be employed in response to another 9/11-type terrorist attack on the United States". Implied in the contingency plan is the certainty that Iran would be behind a Second 9/11.
This "contingency plan" uses the pretext of a "Second 9/11", which has not yet happened, to prepare for a major military operation against Iran, while pressure was also exerted on Tehran in relation to its (non-existent) nuclear weapons program. What is diabolical in this decision of the US vice president is that the justification presented by Cheney to wage war on Iran rests on Iran's involvement in a hypothetical terrorist attack on America, which has not yet occurred: ......
Are we to understand that US, British and Israeli military planners are waiting in limbo for a Second 9/11, to extend the war beyond the borders of Lebanon, to launch a military operation directed against Syria and Iran?
Cheney's proposed "contingency plan" did not focus on preventing a Second 9/11. The Cheney plan is predicated on the presumption that Iran would be behind a Second 9/11 and that punitive bombings could immediately be activated, prior to the conduct of an investigation, much in the same way as the attacks on Afghanistan in October 2001, allegedly in retribution for the alleged support of the Taliban government to the 9/11 terrorists. It is worth noting that one does not plan a war in three weeks: the bombing and invasion of Afghanistan had been planned well in advance of 9/11. As Michael Keefer points out in an incisive review article:
"At a deeper level, it implies that '9/11-type terrorist attacks' are recognized in Cheney’s office and the Pentagon as appropriate means of legitimizing wars of aggression against any country selected for that treatment by the regime and its corporate propaganda-amplification system. . . ." (Keefer, February 2006 )
On the way less paranoid side, it also might be helpful to call a terror alert when the Democrats and your own incompetence are getting too much buzz in the media. This is now an old pattern familiar to progressives now, as someone said to me yesterday. I was really impressed by this segment on MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's Countdown. It's 10 minutes recounting 10 separate "Anti-Bush news shattered by well-timed terror alert" media moments since 2002, featuring the Blackwater Contractors in Fallujah, Colleen Rowley and the Democratic National Convention. Really impressed with the Nexus of Politics and Terror (transcript):
Britons widely suspect "Liquid Airplane Bomb" terrorist threat was fabricated by Blair government: for some reason they have a keener nose for 1984 over there, probably since the government watches them on CCTV constantly. "Blair Government Concocts Terror Threat - Scares British People Into Silence:"
Yawn! Even if I wasn't actually tired, that would still be my response to the latest "terror alert" from the UK government office of Machiavellian nonsense. I mean, seriously, at what point do people start to smell a rat? Is the mass mind of the British public destined to be forever child-like and easily scared, or does the threat of the boogeyman eventually wear off? I mean, how many times can you arrest a group of patsies and claim that they were planning to attack the British public before people begin to wonder if you are just making it up?
Pieces like this are getting propagated on services like Shoutwire, a social hyperlinking service. Another skeptic: The UK Terror plot: What's Really Going On? by Craig Murray, at the Center for Research on Globalization:
We then have the extraordinary question of Bush and Blair discussing the possible arrests over the weekend. Why? I think the answer to that is plain. Both in desperate domestic political trouble, they longed for "Another 9/11". The intelligence from Pakistan, however dodgy, gave them a new 9/11 they could sell to the media. The media has bought, wholesale, all the rubbish they have been shovelled.
We then have the appalling political propaganda of John Reid, Home Secretary, making a speech warning us all of the dreadful evil threatening us and complaining that "Some people don't get" the need to abandon all our traditional liberties. He then went on, according to his own propaganda machine, to stay up all night and minutely direct the arrests. There could be no clearer evidence that our Police are now just a political tool. Like all the best nasty regimes, the knock on the door came in the middle of the night, at 2.30am. Those arrested included a mother with a six week old baby.
For those who don't know, it is worth introducing Reid. A hardened Stalinist with a long term reputation for personal violence, at Stirling Univeristy he was the Communist Party's "Enforcer", (in days when the Communist Party ran Stirling University Students' Union, which it should not be forgotten was a business with a very substantial cash turnover). Reid was sent to beat up those who deviated from the Party line.
We will now never know if any of those arrested would have gone on to make a bomb or buy a plane ticket. Most of them do not fit the "Loner" profile you would expect - a tiny percentage of suicide bombers have happy marriages and young children. As they were all under surveillance, and certainly would have been on airport watch lists, there could have been little danger in letting them proceed closer to maturity - that is certainly what we would have done with the IRA.
In all of this, the one thing of which I am certain is that the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted.
Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet asserts that British Intelligence was not going to intervene! British Intel Wanted To Bust Liquid Bomb Terrorists After Attack: MI5 Had Agent Inside Bomb Squad
Plot 'almost allowed to come to fruition' - putting 3,000 lives at risk - intelligence agencies wanted to arrest suspects after alleged date of mass attack: Paul Joseph Watson/Prison Planet.com | August 15 2006
According to news reports the British government and MI5 wanted to wait at least a week before busting the liquid terror cell that their agents had fully infiltrated, including planting a mole within the bomb squad. From the acknowledged timeline and admission that the real attack was scheduled for August 16th - little else can be deduced but the shocking fact that MI5 wanted the bombings to go forward - arresting the perpetrators only after the attack.
It has been revealed that the alleged terrorist cell who planned to blow up ten planes using liquid explosives had been completely infiltrated for weeks before the announcement of the foiled plot by British intelligence. From the evidence at hand allied with past history - it can be reasonably claimed that an MI5 mole within the group orchestrated the entire operation.
This is compared to an MI5 agent who infiltrated an IRA bomb cell, and was apparently allowed to carry out bombings in 1998. If we are looking at "network warfare" then the 'good guys' who are supposed to catch them have to be enmeshed with the 'bad guys'. Very weird indeed. See also a little more on their "red alert."
9/11 conspiracy theories keep gaining adherents: Even SNL's Horatio Sanz knows about Loose Change! There is a reason that people are talking about the weirdness of 9/11. Aside from the curious fact that 30% of Americans apparently don't know what year 9/11 happened, around half the public believes that the government covered up major elements of 9/11. Since I doubt those groups overlap, that leaves 20% of the American public who know the year AND believe everything the government has told them! Check out the top 40 list of reasons to doubt the official story. Recently, spooky stuff around the Pentagon and the 9/11 Commission have gotten as far as the Washington Post:
"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North American Aerospace Command] told us what they told us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey Republican governor who led the commission. "It was just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those loose ends that never got tied."
Anomalies in NORAD's reactions to the hijacked planes have finally been revealed. Stuff like 9/11 podcasts offer continuing pieces of 'the case' from 911blogger.com. A former CIA analyst says that: Stop Belittling the Theories About September 11 by Bill Christison
"After spending the better part of the last five years treating these theories with utmost skepticism, I have devoted serious time to actually studying them in recent months, and have also carefully watched several videos that are available on the subject. I have come to believe that significant parts of the 9/11 theories are true, and that therefore significant parts of the “official story” put out by the U.S. government and the 9/11 Commission are false."
Even Lou Dobbs got pissed off about this!
For some evangelicals, Mideast war stirs hope:
BY ALEXANDRA ALTER, Miami Herald. August
The Rapture Index -- a popular evangelical Christian Web posting that calculates a global rise in natural disasters, war and inflation -- bills itself as "a Dow Jones industrial average of end-time activity.''
An index below 85 signifies a week of ''slow prophetic activity.'' Anything above 145 signals the apocalypse is near.
The Rapture Index this week: 158. The spike reflects many U.S. evangelicals' view that growing conflict in the Middle East signals the start of a global struggle leading to Christ's return.
''We believe 100 percent what the Scripture has to say about this,'' said Jack Heintz, a South Florida businessman and president of the Christian group Peace for Israel, who recruited 23 evangelical Christians to join a July telephone fundraising event for Israel. "There's going to be a total battle, the battle of Armageddon, and I believe that's very close to happening.''
False Christs are only at 2 right now. Gog and Persia are at 5 though.
Nuke Hawaii conspiracy: Other websites, such as Total411.info, are trying to warn people about a Synthetic Terror Alert for Hawaii:
A nuclear attack is the only way to successfully conquer Iran -- and a false-flag nuclear attack is the only way the neocon war cabal can justify a nuclear attack on Iran. Such false-flag attacks are regularly bootlegged through military drills and wargames so the warmakers can confuse good people inside the military and divert resources as needed.
Last August this site was instrumental in shutting down the Sudden Response '05 drill. Sudden Response was a mock nuclear drill based in Charleston, South Carolina. The general in charge of the operation had been fired just weeks before and various military flacks were caught in equivocations about the nature of the drill. This site and others pegged the drill as having a high danger of "going live," like drills conducted on 9/11 and in London on 7/7/2005.
These guys claim that one General Fridovich will be the guy to execute a nuclear blast in Hawaii... Since it's now the 17th, I guess it's gonna happen today. General Fridovich,
....head of Special Operations Command, Pacific (SOCPAC), also based at Camp Smith. Fridovich's background raises red flags for students of false flag terror. Fridovich was Commander of Special Operations Task Force-Philippines in 2002 when an undercover British-American agent in the Philippines, Michael Meiring, blew himself up constructing a terrorist bomb.
As USPACOM Deputy Director for Operations Gen. Fridovich, continued to "coordinate" with the Philippine military in 2003, hundreds of soldiers, led by scores of Philippine officers, rebelled, asserting that two so-called "terror bombings' were in fact false-flag inside jobs orchestrated inside the armed forces. Unsurprisingly, Fridovich -- a graduate of the British Forces' Royal College of Defence Studies -- has continued to rise in the ranks of the Bush/Rumsfeld military through all of this.
Hawaiians, Americans, and humans seeking to thwart false flag terror attacks should ask each other, the media, and public servants the following questions.....
Interesting point about the Philippines. Anyway... Somehow I doubt anything's going to happen, but attempting to intervene against False Flags sounds like an interesting hobby....
Wayne Madsen, a guy I refer to as a weird conspiracy theorist type, or whatever to be taken with many grains of salt, offers us a pretty complete conspiracy tying together Rupert Murdoch wiretapping Prince Charles, a Blair Cabinet shattered by the political pressure of the Lebanon disaster. It's pretty cool-sounding, but is Madsen's story real-world or exercise?
Murdoch uncovered Prince Charles-Gordon Brown plot to oust Blair. Phony terror plan cooked up to derail political coup plans.
Aug. 11, 2006 -- UPDATED. According to knowledgeable sources in the UK and other countries, the Tony Blair government, under siege by a Labor Party revolt, cleverly cooked up a new "terror" scare to avert the public's eyes away from Blair's increasing political woes. British law enforcement; neo-con and intelligence operatives in the United States, Israel, and Britain; and Rupert Murdoch's global media empire cooked up the terrorist plot, liberally borrowing from the failed 1995 "Oplan Bojinka" plot by Pakistan- and Philippines-based terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef to crash 11 trans-Pacific airliners bound from Asia to the United States. In the latest plot, it is reported that liquid bombs were to be detonated on 10 trans-Atlantic planes outbound from Britain to the United States.
The London terror plan was "known" last Sunday by British and American authorities, according to the Indian press. American Airlines flight 109 from London Heathrow to Boston boarded a family of five, however, after the plane left Heathrow authorities determined that the father appeared on a British suspect list drawn up after the 7/7 London transit attacks. At first, the pilot was instructed to fly all the way to Boston where U.S. authorities could claim credit for apprehending the suspect. However, the pilot, fearing for the safety of his passengers and crew, refused and quickly returned to Heathrow without informing the passengers. Once on the ground, it was discovered that the male had in his carry-on baggage the type of combination liquid explosive and electronic device now being hyped by the British and American media.
British sources report that the reason for the delay in informing the airlines and traveling public about the liquid bomb on the American flight was to maximize the beneficial political impact for Blair and George W. Bush, both plummeting in the polls from the situations in Iraq and Lebanon.
Earlier this week, two employees of Murdoch's London tabloid, News of the World, were charged with hacking into the voice and text cell phone messages of three members of the staff of Clarence House, the residence of Princes Charles, William, and Harry. One of those charged with the wiretapping was Clive Goodman, the Royals editor of the News of the World. The same paper earlier tried to politically damage two anti-Iraq war British politicians -- Scottish Socialist Tommy Sheridan and Respect Party MP George Galloway. The paper charges that Sheridan was unfaithful to his wife by going to swinger's clubs. He won a quarter million dollar lawsuit against the paper. Galloway was confronted by Mazher Mahmood, an individual who uses the moniker "Fake Sheik," who posed as a wealthy Arab businessman and tried unsuccessfully to get Galloway to accept cash and make anti-Semitic remarks. In fact, Mahmood was and continues to be a reporter for News of the World, his continued employment approved by Murdoch. Goodman has merely been suspended by Murdoch but he has not been fired.
However, what prompted Murdoch and Blair to hype a new global "terror" threat was what Murdoch learned from eavesdropping on the phone calls of Prince Charles' staff at the future king's office, home, and limousine. The eavesdropping revealed that Charles was working with Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, who is to the left of Blair, to conduct the same type of political maneuver that John Major used to oust Margaret Thatcher from office. London's left-wing Mayor, Ken Livingston, was also in on the Charles-Brown plan and it was expected that in return for his support, Livingston would get a senior position in a Brown cabinet -- a development that sent shock waves through the neo-con circles in London, Washington, and Jerusalem, including British Home Secretary John Reid and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. The Charles-Brown plan was briefed by Blair to Bush during the former's recent visit to Washington. However, because the phony terror plot was known to both leaders -- they decided to be away on vacation when the terror plot was "uncovered." Bush is vacationing at his Crawford, Texas "ranch," while Blair is on vacation in Barbados, staying at Sir Cliff Richard's luxurious villa.
After Blair met with Bush in Washington, he flew to California where on July 30 he attended Murdoch's News Corporation private corporate executive conference at the posh Inn at Spanish Bay golf resort in Pebble Beach. Blair met with Murdoch, Israeli former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Newt Gingrich, and various Fox, Star, and Sky News executives. The final touches were agreed to by Blair and Murdoch on how the fake terror plot would play out in Murdoch's media empire.
Blair told Bush that a Brown government would move to withdraw British troops from Iraq, break the "special relationship" with the Bush White House, and move closer to the European Union and the United Nations.
The Israeli attack on Lebanon created a rift within Blair's Cabinet with some former Blair loyalists signaling their support for the political coup against Blair. As a result, a suspect passenger was permitted to board an American aircraft at Heathrow with a liquid bomb to lay the groundwork for the media and travel hysteria five days later.
The wiretapping of Charles' messages also indicated that he has weighed in with various European royal families to discourage them from inviting Bush on state visits to their nations. This, reportedly upset the Bush and Blair regimes, who were working together to improve Bush's image in Europe. The White House's displeasure with the monarchies in Spain, Belgium, Sweden, Luxembourg, and Norway are a direct result of the Murdoch eavesdropping on Charles' staff.
Not surprisingly, after Galloway tore into a Sky News reporter on a recent televised interview, The Sun, a Murdoch paper, is now reporting that one of the 24 British aircraft liquid bomber suspects now under arrest, Waheed Zaman, met with Galloway "many times." The paper quotes the sister of the suspect. A Galloway spokesman denies that Galloway knows the suspect. What is suspect is the Murdoch media empire that makes up news and commits illegal acts to provide cover for the false flag operations being conducted by Britain, the U.S., and Israel.
Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency has helped provide the cover story for the alleged liquid bombers. Working with British and U.S. intelligence, the ISI says it broke up the plot after arresting terrorist suspects in Lahore and Karachi. However, the ISI claims that the men were affiliated with the Kashmiri terrorist group Lashkar-e-Toiba, a group that is run and funded by the ISI itself.
The disclosure of the Charles-Brown plot has already created a backlash from the neo-cons. The Murdoch media is already floating the rumor that Home Secretary Reid is now Blair's chosen successor, while there will be an effort to scandalize Charles in an effort to convince the British public that it would be best to skip over him and have Prince William assume the throne upon Queen Elizabeth's death or abdication.
British commentators are noting that it is Reid, a noted neo-con, who is chairing national security "Cobra" meetings in Blair's absence. Blair bypassed Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott and many political observers believe that Prescott was passed over because of evidence that he was involved in supporting the Charles-Brown coup. Prescott chaired Cobra meetings in the wake of the July 7, 2005 (7/7) London transit bombings.
Meanwhile, Republican governors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Mitt Romney used the occasion to boost their sagging popularity by placing their states' National Guardsmen at major airports in their states.
Aug. 14, 2006 -- There is an increasing body of evidence on both sides of the Atlantic that Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation has engaged in a pattern of news manufacturing and illegal activities to hype the "liquid bomb" aviation threat and influence political developments. ....... The police investigation of that incident has now, according to Time Europe, has now graduated from the London Metropolitan Police to the department's anti-terrorism unit, the same unit that is investigating the liquid bomb hoax perpetrated on global air travelers by Murdoch and a vacationing Blair and Bush. The anti-terrorism probe is now focused on British cell phone companies Vodaphone and O2 and is expanding to investigate whether the News Corporation eavesdropping project was also directed against the reported major plotters against Blair: Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, Leader of the House of Commons Jack Straw, Northern Ireland Secretary Peter Hain, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, Environment Secretary David Miliband, and Home Affairs Committee Chairman John Denham, all to the left of Blair and all critical of Blair's close relationship with Bush and Blair's acquiescence to Israel's invasion of Lebanon.
In reaction to the plot against Blair, Home Secretary John Reid, who has now supplanted Brown as the neo-con's heir apparent to Blair and who is a firm supporter of the Bush administration, and members of the British security services took over the "investigation" of the liquid bombing "plot," working closely with their counterparts in the Bush administration. Reid, not Deputy Prime Minister Prescott, took over as chair of the Cabinet Office Briefing Room-A (Cobra) meetings during Blair's absence in Barbados.
We can't forget Michael Ruppert's site FromTheWilderness.com on this one: OPERATION “SLOW BURN?” U.K. Terror Conveniently Forces Demand Destruction:
Cusp of Liquid Fuel Crisis: Social Engineering? Politics as Usual
by Michael Kane, Staff Writer. Research Contribution, by Jenna Orkin
August 15th 2006, 2:40 PM[PST] – For those interested in critically thinking the lastest terror plot, the very best place to do your homework on 9-11 is to thoroughly read Mike Ruppert’s CROSSING THE RUBICON:THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE AT THE END OF THE AGE OF OIL. When 9-11 is adequately researched, it is clear that all world events must now be viewed through the lens of Peak Oil. So from here on, we must ask ourselves what Peak Oil has to do with anything that happens geopolitically. Now ask yourself this question: Over 500 flights were cancelled last week. How much fuel was saved? With the Alaska pipeline down and the U.S. losing 8% of its oil, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela cutting back production dramatically, the world is beginning to feel the pain of Peak Oil. Moreover, the airlines are making it almost impossible to fly, unless passengers want to fly next-to naked. This is only happening in the U.S. and UK—the two nations that consume the most airline fuel. The terror hoax serves many purposes: Distract attention from the Middle East war, perpetuate the myth of a war on terror, make the Bush Administration look virile, reinforce the criminal violations of civil liberties in the U.S., but very, very importantly, destroy the demand for airline fuel consumption.
Alright no big damn conclusion, just a batch of the internet's latest and greatest explanations for what Operation Northwoods calls the "logical build-up of incidents to be combined with other seemingly unrelated events to camouflage the ultimate objective." I'm impressed you made it this far without having a stroke. Information warfare gives me a headache.
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...
The test of the Zionist left. By Yossi Beilin (Haaretz)
There are those who expect the Zionist left to join in the revelry of war, in the pathetic slogans such as "We will win" and in the fiery comments such as "Nasrallah will remember who Amir Peretz is."
There are those who expect us to join the non-Zionist left, which is calling for a unilateral cease-fire, accuses Israel of war crimes, demands that Hamas and Hezbollah be given what they want, and opposes all use of force. Both sides say this is the test of the Zionist left - and they are right.
We have a deep belief in the right of the Jewish people to a democratic and secure state, which has a stable Jewish majority: the state of the Jewish people and all of its citizens. We are convinced our national interest is in completing the moves toward peace with the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon, and that there is no alternative to an agreement.
I am not gonna feel like writing tomorrow, so it's either now or the weekend. Here are a lot of bits from the past couple weeks in the Lebanon-Israel conflict. The window after the first two weeks was Israel's chance to capture the initiative against Hezbollah and attempt to achieve their hazily articulated goals in this vicious little war. It's a big war, but the space is very small.
Escalations for the weekend: Haaretz: Security cabinet okays decision to expand ground operation in Lebanon:
.......PM wavered on expansion decision
Olmert was hesitant prior to the meeting on whether to approve the proposed expansion of the IDF ground operation in south Lebanon.
Olmert was concerned that the plan presented by the defense establishment would result in hundreds of casualties, and therefore, wanted to subject it to a careful cost-benefit analysis. In Tuesday's fighting in Lebanon five soldiers were killed and 23 others wounded, two of them seriously. According to a government source, Olmert had also asked the army to present him with several different options for a ground operation.
A decision to send troops deeper into Lebanon is fraught with considerable risk. In doing so, Israel could set itself up for new criticism that it is sabotaging diplomatic efforts. Also, a wider ground offensive might do little to stop Hezbollah rocket fire on Israel, while sharply increasing the number of casualties among Israeli troops.
While most of the cabinet was expected earlier to back whatever Olmert decides, sources in the Prime Minister's Office said that three to four ministers were likely to oppose a large-scale ground operation regardless of Olmert's position. The IDF's proposal was for a two-week ground operation that would involve conquering the entire area south of the Litani River, and even a few areas north of it, in order to reduce Hezbollah's short-range rocket launching capabilities.
IDF Chief of Staff Dan Halutz said Tuesday that such an operation was necessary "in order to end this war differently." People who participated in discussions of the plan with him said they had never heard him speak as forcefully in favor of anything as he did in favor of the proposed ground operation. Peretz fully supports the army's plan, which he considers essential for Israel to achieve its diplomatic goals.
Nine paratroopers killed in attack on home in Dibel; 15 soldiers killed Wednesday in south Lebanon
By Amos Harel and Eli Ashkenazi, Haaretz Correspondents, and Agencies Last update - 01:59 10/08/2006
Fifteen Israel Defense Forces troops were killed on Wednesday, the IDF announced late Wednesday night, as fierce fighting with Hezbollah guerillas raged in the southern Lebanon villages of Ayta al-Shaab and Debel.
The 15 IDF soldiers were killed in a series of firefights across the front. In the most serious incident, nine reserve paratroopers were killed and 11 wounded by antitank missiles fired on a house in the village of Debel, in the central sector. Four reservists from an armored brigade were killed in a tank explosion, apparently caused by antitank missiles, in the town of Ayta al-Shaab. An infantryman was killed late Wednesday when he was hit by a mortar in Marjayoun.
DEBKAFile: Israeli official spokesman say deep ground push into Lebanon approved Wednesday to reduce rocket attacks is put on hold for 48 hours to give more time for diplomacy August 10, 2006, 9:26 AM (GMT+02:00)
DEBKAfile adds: On the ground, the first troop and tank elements of the advance began moving Wednesday overnight and are continuing Thursday, Aug. 10.
The decision Wednesday, Aug. 9, by 9 votes, none against and 3 abstentions, includes areas up to the Nabatea plateau and Arnoun beyond the Litani River. The objectof the extension is to reach and eliminate Hizballah's rocket-launch centers. It deepens Israel's thrust to some 45 km from the border and calls for a further large influx of army reserves.
DEBKAfile’s military sources add the extended operation does not promise the total stoppage of all rocket fire against Israel, but could potentially bring about a sizeable reduction from up to 200 a day to some 30 or 50.
Also: The stakes of the Lebanon War have shot up with the expansion of the Israeli offensive up to the Litani and Nasrallah’s rejection of diplomacy in favor of battle
Israel's military of old was specialized in quick, mechanized warfare. As they settled into the occupied territories, despite all the heavy weapons, the IDF reoriented itself to battling Palestinians, typically armed with rifles, handguns or machine guns. The Palestinians have some rocket-propelled grenades, as well, but they lack advanced infantry weapons. So the IDF has phased away from preparing for war with real infantries, and instead play supercop on the hapless residents of the West Bank.
They really thought that Hezbollah was only as "thick" as HAMAS, I guess. The Israelis went storming in without realizing that Hezbollah had lots of anti-tank missiles - on rocky terrain that doesn't give a lot of space for tanks. The IDF doctrine failed in the face of a new kind of conflict.
Right now we are watching a turning point in the nature of warfare. Everything from pack mules to to hacking to encrypted satellite feeds fits into fourth-generation warfare (pdf). Sub-state actors will basically be able to fight a top-notch modern army.
ANALYSIS: IDF still not in control of strip along Lebanon's border By Ze'ev Schiff, Haaretz Correspondent 08:57 10/08/2006
The large number and the location of the casualties that the Israel Defense Forces sustained Wednesday indicate that the army does not yet control the narrow strip along the border, although this stage of the ground operation was supposed to have been completed already.
The two battles also reveal a great deal about Hezbollah's method of fighting. They took place in two relatively small communities, Ayta al-Shab and Debel, close to the international border, on territory that until May 2000 was in Israel's Security Zone.
The ground operation, dubbed "Change of Direction 8," was intended to conquer this border strip. First it was to be a two- to three-kilometer strip. Then it was expanded to five to six kilometers, including numerous Lebanese villages and towns. The mission was to blow up all Hezbollah's outposts in this strip and drive its forces out.
What happened in Bint Jbail recurred in Ayta al-Shab. Although it seemed that the town had been conquered, it transpired again and again that there were still Hezbollah men in it. Once again, clashes and battles took place, and again, the IDF suffered dead and wounded. Although the army had conquered the town, Hezbollah men were hiding in underground bunkers well camouflaged from the outside. The bunkers had been stocked with large quantities of food, enough to last for weeks, and ammunition, including antitank missiles and, in several cases, short-range rockets.
The bunkers are connected to electricity and, according to one report, are air conditioned. When the fighting dies down, Hezbollah fighters emerge from the bunkers and set up ambushes for IDF soldiers and armored vehicles. That is why soldiers are hit repeatedly in the same places.
On several occasions, there have been difficulties evacuating wounded soldiers under fire. At times, Hezbollah fighters have fired rockets at Israel from areas close to the border that the IDF had supposedly conquered already. The means available to flush the guerrillas out of their underground shelters are not always employed.
Senior officers have suggested, inter alia, that the army bombard these towns heavily and even destroy them. But in any case, a decision has been made not to reenter them at this stage. The IDF could forge ahead, as it has done in the last two days in the Marjayoun area. But even after such an incursion, Hezbollah fighters who remain in the bunkers could continue launching rockets. In other words, they could fire toward Israel from behind the lines of IDF forces that have progressed deep into Lebanon. It is clear that the Hezbollah men who stayed behind are equipped with two-way radios and receive information from scouts hiding near the border. This explains the difficulties in managing the fighting in south Lebanon, which the IDF has not encountered before.
Even if Hezbollah "loses", the writing is on the wall. In the 21st century "the State" itself is weakening. Sub-national organizations like Hezbollah, with economic, military, political, social, educational, medical (and often spiritual) branches are displacing the State.
One should remember that the Middle East's artificial European-drawn boundaries have left many overlapping ethnic groups. The Pashtuns now at the core of the Taliban straddle Afghanistan/Pakistan. The Kurds are organized a bit like Hezbollah, and the ruthless pursuit of the Kurds' interests has rewarded them well since the US toppled Saddam. But they too are divided between parties that ruthlessly fight each other.
In Syria, only a few dozen miles east of Israel's bombing campaign lie many major Arab Sunni tribes like the Dulaimis, who especially live in cities along the river into Iraq, where their cousins' tribes live, sparring with Kurds and Shiites.
In this kind of region, everyday people are going to direct their primary loyalties towards sub-national groups that they believe represent their interests. By the early 1990s, Hezbollah, which the Iranians helped create by binding together different Lebanese Shiites, was seen as something of a successful model – social, political, military: robustly structured to resist political pressure, infiltration and military assaults from the Israelis and others.
Before Saddam fell, The Iranians used the Lebanese sub-state model inside Iraq, to lay the framework for the Shiite rise to power. Very quickly, SCIRI, Muqtada Sadr's people, and the Dawa Party all had organized cadres of armed guys, but more importantly, social services and methods for trying to restore any sense of law and order shattered with the US invasion. If the guys on the block with guns keep the thieves away, then they are pretty much your state, even if they don't report to Baghdad.
The news in Israel right now is that 15 reservists got killed in Lebanon, with heavy fighting around Bint Jbail, a site the IDF captured and subsequently evacuated. As the maps made clear, Bint Jbail is not more than a few kilometers from the border, yet the Israeli forces, despite all the bombing and everything, have not been able to hold that area, once they reached it and tried to occupy.
Reports in the Israeli media indicate that Hezbollah is able to keep attacking in areas the Israelis have already 'captured.' I think it's pretty likely that Hezbollah has drilled tunnels hundreds, if not thousands of meters long, attached to deeply hidden bunkers with all the necessary weapons and supplies. It is an amazing intelligence failure that the Israelis didn't anticipate this, and still, within a very small space the IDF has not been able to block out Hezbollah. The tempo of rocket attacks has not been curtailed in any serious way, and Israeli military analysts don't really think it can be shut down without a wide invasion. Hezbollah is winning the tactical situation by playing very hard-core defense with lots of anti-tank missiles. So far, it's mostly been a successful military strategy.
This is in keeping with the local style: in the good old days of the Seljuk Empire (c. 1100), the Hashshashin, or Assassins, would hang out somewhere between Damascus and Antioch - the home of the Holy Hand Grenade. The map's white spot shows a patch of mountainous land where the Assassins held sway. Mountainous redoubts are easier to defend, and such clever methods have migrated about 200 miles south, where nearly a millennia later, some pretty insane shit is going down.
Well then, thats enough rambling background. Here's some damn links.
The rockets keep coming: Hizbollah rockets kill 15 in northern Israel. Hapless reservists. An ugly scene. IDF Raids near Tyre.
Emotional reaction in Israel propels poor policy:
`Peace' is a term not used in the public space in Israel anymore...No one expects any dialogue on a real practical level. The military always offers a shortsighted immediate way out. The wish to identify with the power of the gun and the uniform is still alive in Israeli tribal DNA. Revenge is a word not used in the open; it is there in the undercurrent of the emotions expressed by the public, our bombardment of Gaza had the same motive behind it.
UK Guardian: Israeli pilots 'deliberately miss' targets: Fliers admit aborting raids on civilian targets as concern grows over the reliability of intelligence
You need to give money to AntiWar.com. Their work is important and kinda spooky. Rumors that apocalyptic Christian writers are visiting the White House. Stratfor has free podcasts. Updates on the Tikkun Olam blog (תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place).
Iranian dimensions:
Haaretz: Nasrallah's dilemma By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff
As the war progresses, the depth of Iranian involvement in Hezbollah activity is increasingly being revealed. Hezbollah has established a Tehran-sponsored forward outpost here, under the noses of the Israelis. When the war ends, Iranian soul-searching will include the question as to whether the activity here was not premature: whether the strategic card of the rocket battery was not revealed too early, for the sake of a negligible goal like the release of the four prisoners, instead of saving it for the day of judgment, for the eruption surrounding its nuclear program.
The Iranians are involved up to their necks in Hezbollah activity: Their advisers participated in the firing of the missiles at Israeli ships and in the firing of Strela (SA-7) antiaircraft missiles at Israeli planes and helicopters. During Israel Defense Forces operations in the south, sophisticated listening rooms were discovered, via which the Iranians eavesdropped on Israeli communications and telephone networks, both civilian and military.
Guardian: Bloody night in Beirut as Israel intensifies aerial bombardment: IDF warns UN troops will be attacked if they repair bridges (aug 8)
Information warfare sector: Olmert meets with spokespeople to sharpen PR message. PrisonPlanet says: Another Israeli Myth Exposed: There Were No Hezbollah Rockets In Qana but Israeli media alleges Qana killing was staged, dubbing this pattern Hezbollywood. With a certain sense of weird horror, Haaretz features "Where there's smoke, there's liars": "1. The Muslim Lie Mode, or The Dead as Visual Aid (When Arabs report what Israel has done) 2. The Israeli Lie Mode, or The Dead as Enemy Weapon (When Israelis report what Israel has done). 3. The American Lie Mode, or The Dead as Nonexistent." Anyway, Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD.
The US-Israeli link: this looks at Condi and an IDF spokesperson as two flipsides: Between two friends by Tom Segev:
During the past 39 years since the Six-Day War, the United States did not force Israel to pull out of the West Bank, but more than once acted to block Israeli military actions. Over time, we have grown accustomed to the Americans saving us, not only from the Arabs, but from ourselves too. Not in this war. It is still unclear whether this war was coordinated with the United States; only the release of government records of the past three weeks will shed light on this. Whatever the case may be, the impression is that the Americans are linking the events in Lebanon to their failing adventure in Iraq.
Israel's elites, in all fields, are made up of people who spent a number of years in the United States and returned with not only professional skills but also an appreciation for the value of the individual and basic freedoms. For the most part, this was a useful process, even though it did contribute to a fading of social compassion. This process of Americanization has led Israel in recent years to covet a role in what Bush has described as a war on the "axis of evil."
As such, Israel has adopted the moral values of Hezbollah: Whatever they are doing to the residents of northern Israel, we can also do to the citizens of Lebanon, and even more. Many Israelis tended to look at the Qana incident primarily as a media disaster and not as something that imposed on them any ethical responsibility. After all, the restrictions of humanitarian warfare are not applicable to the "axis of evil." Just like in Iraq, the lessons of Vietnam have been forgotten. It is hard to avoid the impression that the routine brutality of oppression in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank is also reflected in the unbearable ease with which Israel has forced out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and bombed civilians.
Tense situation with Israel's own Arab population (20%): Border Police search Israeli Arab homes without warrants.
Loss of Momentum by Amir Oren (Haaretz):
The IDF's greatest loss was momentum. The first week of the campaign went reasonably well, borne on the wave of the stunning success of the attack of Hezbollah's long-range rockets. Between the middle of the second week and the middle of the third week the IDF lost a week, not least because of its reaction to the eight Golani Brigade soldiers who were killed in Bint Jbail. That lost week, as the rain of Katyusha rockets continued to fall from on high, undermined the army's self-confidence and thrust it into a posture of public self-defense. It shifted into recovery mode only because of the time it was granted by Washington. Fear of a large number of casualties was the major factor in the government's hesitations, for almost a week, about whether to send more divisions into the fray, entailing a call-up of reserve units.
The General Staff admitted the IDF did not work fast enough. They did not grasp the fact that the context had changed and that this was not just one day of battle or a routine-security incident, but a war, which has its own laws. Commanders who were used to operations in the territories did not internalize the need for speed, persistence and continuity.....
The sweeping criticism did an injustice to Division 91 and to the "hunt" concept in the air force. A colonel in the division said this week that for months the division's senior command "drove officers crazy with alerts to prevent abductions, turned over every stone and laid down new stones in order to turn them over, too." The abduction, the colonel noted, was comparable to a special operation by an IDF commando unit, which, in the absence of precise intelligence, is difficult to thwart even after all the preparations across the sector.
Various people yelling at each other: ADL: Hugo Chavez comparison of IDF and Hitler is Outrageous. Yesha (settler) Rabbinical Council objects to ridicule of Chief IDF Rabbi.
Hawks crow: Win that war! (Haaretz). Peace Index: July 2006 / Support for the war and the IDF holds up.
A final batch: I got nothing left after these Haaretz bits: ANALYSIS: There appears to be a command problem in the north. From war, an opportunity. Snatch a possible victory. Down but not out. Little Satan has big teeth. ANALYSIS: Deployment of Lebanese army may be good for both sides.
Well, that's all for a while. Enjoy.
Armies are criticized because the excess of power that they accumulate enables them to dictate steps of political significance during a time of crisis. In these situations, military contingency plans become the principal alternative available to the politicians, which is why they tend to accept the army's viewpoint. But this time we have before us a particularly extreme case. Not only was the military plan the only one, but the political leadership voluntarily relinquished its duty to discuss it thoroughly. This places political thinking, to which military thinking is supposed to be subordinate, in a particularly inferior situation.
A voluntary 'putsch' By Yagil Levy - Haaretz
"The enemy is deceiving its own people and the world by presenting the occupation of Maroun al-Ras as a great military achievement," a Hizbullah statement said. "An army using its elite forces and tanks backed by its air force that can enter a frontier village only after days of fighting ... is a defeated and useless army."
Lebanon Daily Star, July 24, 2006
Major diplomatic movement on all fronts as Israel finds itself in the middle of a sputtering yet shockingly ugly military campaign. However, Hezbollah has apparently said they will become an entirely defensive force if Israel vacates the small Shebaa Farms area, which is considered either part of Lebanon or Syria, depending on whose map you go with. (that link was pro-Israel, here's a Wikipedia one and one from Joshua Landis at SyriaComment.com) Blame this particular line in the sand on the French. Anyway... It's all up in the air, but it's clear that Israel's more fanciful goals have fallen flat, yet they may still get some sort of international armed force involved, but probably only if Hezbollah permits it.
Phosphorus chemical weapons used by Israel, alleges Lebanese Prime Minister, doctor on CNN: Story on RawStory, a segment on CNN placed on YouTube: Very graphic - actually showing injured, severely burned Arabs, which I thought had been banned on American television:
Reuters: Lebanon president says Israel uses phosphorous arms 24 July 14:16:57 GMT
There have been previous reports of white phosphorus chemical weapons use in Fallujah... The irony of these methods is not subtle. Naturally, when the regular weapons aren't getting it done, the dirty stuff becomes appealing...
Anti-Iranian war propaganda: The same shady Iranian neo-con guy, Amir Taheri, who made up the fake "yellow stars for Jews in Iran" story is now visiting the White House. It's guys like him that are grooming Bush, telling him what he wants to hear, playing the new Chalabis, expecting to stir up trouble, TPMmuckrakers report. It's Taheri's little cronies that are going to spoon-feed the damn corporate media with stories about WMD or whatever else to scare the shit out of America again, likely right before the election. This guy Taheri is in with Ledeen and the rest of them. Taheri proclaims:
"The mini war that is taking place between Israel and Hezbollah is, in fact, a proxy war in which Iran’s vision for the Middle East clashes with the administration in Washington."
And who's gonna play the proxy? Ahmed Chalabi Amir Taheri. The Iran propaganda spigot is on full until election day. Meanwhile...
How the Israeli military manipulated policy to start the war: As the kidnapping's fallout unfolded inside Israel, the top military echelon's off-the-shelf plans to bomb the shit out of Lebanon were quickly approved and put into execution, superseding any grand political process to evaluate the consequences and prepare alternative choices. Prime Minister Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz, lacking a certain respect because they aren't generals but "civilians," deferred to the IDF's plans. This is not a portrait of a rational decision-making process:
Haaretz: A voluntary 'putsch' By Yagil Levy:
In Israeli historical memory, two incidents have been metaphorically defined as a military "putsch": the pressure applied by Israel Defense Forces generals on then prime minister Levi Eshkol to embark on the Six-Day War in 1967, and the "quiet putsch" as journalist Ofer Shelach termed the behavior of the army at the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada. Nevertheless, neither of these resembles the move that led to the start of "Lebanon War II."
On July 12, 2006, the Israeli government decided to bring about "a new order in Lebanon" by means of a massive military attack, which would cause the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, or at least to remove it from the border with Israel and to deploy the Lebanese Army in its place. Like the expanded goals of "Lebanon War I," an attempt is being made here to reshape Lebanon's fragile political order by means of force.
In the history of the relationship between the political and military leaderships of Israel, the government has never made such a significant decision so quickly, operating in crisis mode just a few hours after the kidnapping of the soldiers. Under these circumstances, the military contingency plan was the main plan presented to the ministers, if not the only one. As absurd as it may sound, the government decision to embark on the Lebanon War I in 1982 was the result of a longer and more orderly decision-making process.
An expedited discussion in the cabinet does not enable an examination of non-military options - or, alternatively, a discussion of the full significance of a military operation and a positing of realistic political goals. The accelerated process did not enable the ministers to discuss the practicality of the demand to deploy the Lebanese Army, part of which is Shiite, along the border, as a force that is capable of imposing its authority on the independent Shiite militias that will remain after the dismantling of Hezbollah, if it is in fact dismantled.
It is doubtful whether the significance of the two possible results of the Israeli military blow - a change in the fragile inter-ethnic balance of power in Lebanon as a result of the disintegration of Hezbollah as the center of power that will not be replaced by another, or, alternatively, its success in surviving the attack - could be discussed in such a pressured time framework.
.......Armies are criticized because the excess of power that they accumulate enables them to dictate steps of political significance during a time of crisis. In these situations, military contingency plans become the principal alternative available to the politicians, which is why they tend to accept the army's viewpoint. But this time we have before us a particularly extreme case. Not only was the military plan the only one, but the political leadership voluntarily relinquished its duty to discuss it thoroughly. This places political thinking, to which military thinking is supposed to be subordinate, in a particularly inferior situation.
This inferiority stems, paradoxically, from the "civilian" label of the present leadership. The term "civilian" does not relate in this case only to the biography of the leaders, but to their political agenda as well - i.e., the convergence plan. A civilian leadership often tends to increase the army's freedom of operation, particularly when it operates in a cultural-political environment in which half of the voters favor the use of force to solve political problems. Under these circumstances, the civilian leadership needs the army as a political instrument for the purpose of implementing the civil agenda. After all, the "disengagement" plan was implemented thanks to the support of the army, and the same will be true of the convergence plan in the future.
This dependence makes it difficult for the political leadership to hold the army back in times of crisis - not to mention the fear of losing legitimacy by demonstrating "hesitancy" as compared to the determination of the army. Political leaders with a military past, or "hawkish" civilian leaders, have a greater ability to restrain the army in similar circumstances, as seen in the difference between former prime ministers Yitzhak Shamir (the Gulf War) and Benjamin Netanyahu (the Western Wall tunnel episode), on the one hand, and Moshe Sharett (the retaliatory operations), Levi Eshkol (the Six-Day War) and Shimon Peres (Operation Grapes of Wrath), on the other. Prime Minister Olmert now joins the second group.
Haaretz opinion: Stop now, immediately By Gideon Levy:
This war must be stopped now and immediately. From the start it was unnecessary, even if its excuse was justified, and now is the time to end it. Every day raises its price for no reason, taking a toll in blood that gives Israel nothing tangible in return. This is a good time to stop the war because both sides can claim they won: Israel harmed Hezbollah and Hezbollah harmed Israel. History shows that no situation is better for reaching an arrangement. Remember the lessons of the Yom Kippur War.
Israel went into the campaign on justified grounds and with foul means. It claims it has declared war on Hezbollah but, in practice, it is destroying Lebanon. It has gotten most of what it could have out of this war. The aerial "target bank" has mostly been covered. The air force could continue to sow destruction in the residential neighborhoods and empty offices and could also continue dropping dozens of tons of bombs on real or imagined bunkers and kill innocent Lebanese, but nothing good will come of it.
Those who want to restore Israel's deterrent capabilities have succeeded. Hezbollah and the rest of its enemies know that Israel reacts with enormous force to any provocation. South Lebanon is cleaner now of a Hezbollah presence. In any case, the organization is likely to return there, just as it is likely to rearm. An international agreement could be achieved now, and it won't be possible to achieve a better deal at a reasonable price in the future.
.......Now Israel is hoping for the elimination of Nasrallah. That's an atavistic impulse, even if understandable, which seeks the head of the enemy in order to prove our victory over him. There's no wisdom or practicality in it. Once again it is worth reminding ourselves of the dozens of people Israel assassinated in Lebanon and the territories, from Sheikh Abbas Mussawi to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, each replaced by someone new, usually more talented and dangerous than the predecessor. The goals of the war should not be dictated by dark impulses, even if they come in response to the wishes and demands of the mob. The only advantage that would benefit Israel from the elimination of Nasrallah would be that maybe it would bring about an end to the warring. But it can be halted even without that. The other desired goal, the return of the prisoners, will anyway only be achieved through negotiations to release prisoners. Israel could have done that before the war.
It is still too early to weigh out the balance of achievements and failures of this war. The day will come when it will become clear that it was purposeless, as are all wars of choice. Ceasing it now guarantees a limited achievement at a limited price. Continuing it guarantees a heavy price without any guarantee of a suitable reward. Therefore, Israel must cease and desist. The president of the United States can push us to continue the war all he wants, the prime minister of Britain can cheer us in parliament, but in Israel and Lebanon, the blood is being spilled, the horror is intensifying, the price is rising and it is all for naught.
Billmon is top notch these days, observing plates shifting throughout the Mideast in, as always, unlikely yet ugly ways: The All Against the All:
I've been waiting to see whether the Turks are going to flatter the Israelis by imitating their invasion of neighboring country -- Kurdistan, in this case. So far, there've been no official cross-border troop movements (although Turkish special forces have been operating inside Iraq since just after our cross-border troop movement, if not before.)
But today the Kurds accused the Iranians of intervening in their internal affairs, with a cross-border movement of artillery shells:
"A senior Iraqi-Kurdish official accused Iranian forces on Thursday of shelling Kurdish guerrillas in northern Iraq.
"Othman Mahmoud, interior minister of the Kurdish regional government in the north, said shelling was going on along the border about 170 km (105 miles) north of the city of Sulaimaniya....."
......So many hatreds, so little time!
Let's see. We've got: Israeli Jews fighting Lebanese Shi'a and Palestinian Sunnis; Palestinian Fatah militants who've stopped fighting Hamas militants, but only because they're both fighting the Israelis; Saudi Sunni fundamentalists issuing fatwas against Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Egyptian Sunni fundamentalists backing those same Hezbollah Shi'a fundamentalists; Iraqi Sunnis killing Iraqi Shi'a and vice versa; Iraqi Shi'a (the Mahdi Army) jousting with Iraqi Shi'a (the Badr Brigade); Iraqi Kurds trying to push Sunni Arabs and both Sunni and Shi'a Turkomen out of Kirkuk; Turks threatening to invade Kurdistan; Iranians allegedly shelling Kurdistan, Syrian Kurds rebelling against Syrian Allawites who are despised by Syria's Sunni majority but allied with the Lebanese Shi'a who are hated and feared by the House of Saud and its Sunni fundamentalist minions. Oh, and American and Israeli neocons threatening to bomb both Syria and Iran......
......There is a passage in Kanan Makiya's book Republic of Fear that has haunted me ever since I read it. I've quoted it before to explain why I expected nothing but horror from the "liberation" of Iraq. It describes what happened in the summer of 1959 in the city of Mosul (a patchwork of ethnic, religious, tribal and class distinctions, then and now):
"For four days and four nights Kurds and Yezdis stood against Arabs; Assyrian and Aramean Christians against Arab Moslems; the Arab tribe of Albu Mutaiwat against the Arab tribe of Shammar; the Kurdish tribe of al-Gargariyyah against Arab Albu Mutaiwat; the peasants of the Mosul country against their landlords; the soldiers of the Fifth Brigade against their officers; the periphery of the city of Mosul against the center; the plebians of the Arab quarters of Al-Makkawi and Wadi Hajar against the aristocrats of the Arab quarter of ad-Dawwash; and within the quarter of Bab al-Baid, the family of al-Rajabu aggainst its traditional rivals, the Aghawat. It seemed as if all social cement dissolved and all political authority vanished."
Did you get that?? You better...
You also might be interested on Antiwar.com: July 25: Syria Emerges Front and Center by Pat Buchanan and Israel Is Winning the Battle, but Not the War by Ivan Eland.
July 25: Haaretz: ANALYSIS: The road to peace runs through Shaba Farms By Zvi Bar'el
The Lebanese government is pleased with itself, and Syria, too, has reasons to smile. As the fighting continues, Lebanese government officials are coming up with new definitions for what is known as "the complete arrangement," the one that is supposed to replace the arrangement that existed before July 12.
And so July 12 is joining the long line of historical dates that mark the stages of Lebanon's "new" independence just like February 14, the date of Rafik Hariri's assassination in 2005; or May 25, the date of the Israel Defense Forces withdrawal from Lebanon.
Saturday saw another development in the status of Fuad Siniora's government versus the strength of Hezbollah. After the government received "a franchise" to enter into negotiations on a prisoner-exchange deal, Energy Minister Mohammed Fneish, a Hezbollah representative, announced that once the IDF withdrew from the Shaba Farms area, Hezbollah's role as a "liberating" army would be over, and it would stick to a purely a defensive role.
This is a very significant statement, because it begins to define the conditions for Hezbollah's disarmament.
The government of Lebanon, Hezbollah, the United States, France and the United Nations have all realized now that the key to achieving a long-term and sustainable cease-fire by means of the deployment of the Lebanese Army in the south lies in a resolution to the Shaba Farms dispute.
At this stage, however, it is not enough for only Hezbollah and the Lebanese government to agree that the return of the Shaba Farms area would spell an end to the movement's "liberating" role. Syria is no less an important player in this regard. In keeping with maps approved by the UN, the Shaba Farms area lies in Syrian territory, so an official document in which Damascus relinquishes the area would be required too. For years now, Damascus has refused to provide such a document.
Will Syria agree to grant one now? An agreement to this end may be reached later in the week, when Syria learns both that it is the only one standing in the way of a settlement, and more importantly, according to Lebanese sources, that Washington is likely to offer Damascus a generous benefits package and a warm return to the "family of nations."
The next stage would have to be securing Israel's consent to withdraw from the Shaba Farms area, as this would then be a withdrawal from Lebanese territory; and only then could the Lebanese Army take up positions in the south, perhaps with the assistance of a multinational force if Hezbollah gives its okay.
The Lebanon Daily Star is a badass paper, no doubt.
Hizbullah gives government negotiation power
Daily Star staff: By Nada Bakri and Mohammed Zaatari
Monday, July 24, 2006
BEIRUT/SIDON: Israeli warplanes continued their bombardment of Lebanon on Sunday, killing at least eight and wounding 45, as Hizbullah gave the Lebanese government the green light to negotiate on its behalf for a prisoner swap with Israel. Any swap would include the two Israeli soldiers captured by Hizbullah in a cross-border raid on July 12, and Lebanese and Arab prisoners in Israeli jails.
"The Lebanese government will lead the exchange through the intermediary of a third party. This has been accepted by Hizbullah," Speaker Nabih Berri said Sunday.
It was not immediately known who the third party would be. Foreign Minister Fawzi Salloukh said Sunday that the two Israeli soldiers were "in good health" and called on "the United Nations or any third friendly party to engage in discussions of a prisoners' exchange."
"Germany has played an important and prominent role between Lebanon and Israel in the past, and it can play a similar role now," Salloukh said after a meeting with Peter Witteg, the head of international affairs at Germany's Foreign Ministry.
Meanwhile the Israeli offensive continued for the 12th straight day, bringing the overall death toll to at least 380 with over 1,000 wounded, according to Lebanese authorities.
A Lebanese press photographer, Layal Najib, 23, was also killed when an Israeli missile struck near her car on the road between the villages of Qana and Siddiqine. Najib worked at Al-Jaras (The Bell) magazine and was also a freelance photographer for AFP and several other news outlets.
Israel on Saturday attacked telecommunications installations in the North of Lebanon, killing a technician with the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation, Suleiman Chidiac, and wounding two others. The station's signal was cut in several areas across the country. The destroyed relay stations were used by TeleLiban, LBCI and Future TV, and several radio stations.
Israeli air strikes also hit a mini-bus carrying 16 people fleeing the village of Tairi as it worked its way through the mountains from the Southern port city of Tyre.
A missile hit the bus near the village of Yaatar, killing three and wounding the rest of the passengers, who were taken to hospitals in Tyre. The Israeli military had told residents of Tairi and 12 other nearby villages Saturday to evacuate by 7 p.m. The villages form a corridor about 6 kilometers wide and 18 kilometers deep, believed to be the "buffer zone" desired by Israel.
At least four other people were killed by Israeli strikes in the South, Lebanese television reported, but the deaths could not be confirmed. Some 45 people were wounded in Israeli air raids that targeted villages and towns around Tyre on Sunday, security and hospital officials said.
Israeli warplanes also targeted Hizbullah strongholds in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
On Sunday, Israel hit the Southern port city of Sidon for the first time, destroying a religious complex linked to Hizbullah and wounding four people. More than 5,000 people have sought refuge in the city from other Southern villages. Four people were wounded in the strike. Israel also targeted Hizbullah's power base in the Bekaa Valley, hitting three factories, a house and bridges and roads. The air strikes ignited large fires, killed at least one civilian and wounded two others.
Three rescuers from the Civil Defense personnel of the Islamic Scout Mission, an association affiliated with the Amal Movement, were wounded after Israeli air raids struck their ambulance as it transported wounded civilians to nearby hospitals, according to Hassan Hamdan, the association's official in the South. "After the rescuers succeeded in crossing the fields and arrived in Bourj Rahal, Israeli warplanes launched missiles, leaving three of them wounded," he added.
Israeli troops continued to hold a Lebanese border village that they battled their way into the day before, but did not appear to be advancing, Lebanese security officials said. But warplanes and artillery were battering areas across the South. Hizbullah confirmed on Sunday that Israeli forces had occupied a key Lebanese frontier village and said three of its fighters had been killed there.
"The enemy is deceiving its own people and the world by presenting the occupation of Maroun al-Ras as a great military achievement," a Hizbullah statement said. "An army using its elite forces and tanks backed by its air force that can enter a frontier village only after days of fighting ... is a defeated and useless army."
"Our steadfast fighters have presented through the Maroun al-Ras confrontations and the losses of the enemy - in troops, tanks and helicopters - an example of what the confrontations will be in every town, village and position," it said. A spokesman for UN peacekeepers stationed along the Blue Line between Lebanon and Israel confirmed for AFP the Israeli advance. "Israeli troops and tanks are now inside Maroun al-Ras," said UNIFIL adviser Milos Strugar.
In the latest salvo into Israel, Hizbullah launched rocket attacks across northern Israel, including Haifa. Some of the rockets slammed into a house, an apartment building and a major road, killing at least two people, Israeli police said.
With the attacks Sunday, a total of 17 civilians have been killed by Hizbullah rockets over the past 12 days and 19 Israeli soldiers in fighting in Lebanon. - With agencies
Meanwhile, in Gaza a prisoner deal may be afoot as well. Perhaps the realists around the world's governments are actually motivated to help put something together before the neo-cons start armageddon.
Haaretz: IDF artillery shelling kills 2 children, 4 others in northern Gaza Strip
Gaza groups ready to deal on cease-fire, release of Shalit
Last update - 05:36 25/07/2006 By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent
All groups in Gaza, including Hamas, would now accept a cease-fire deal with Israel which would include releasing Gilad Shalit, according to the Palestinian Agriculture Minister, who also heads the coordinating committee of Palestinian organizations there.
Ibrahim Al-Naja said the factions were ready to stop the Qassam rocket fire if Israel's ceased all military moves against the Palestinian factions in Gaza. They are also ready to release Shalit in exchange for guaranteeing the future release of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas leaders did not confirm this report on Monday, but if it is true, then this is the first time that Hamas has indicated its acceptance of the Egyptian proposal to solve the crisis.
Egypt's proposal did not include an Israeli commitment to the immediate release of Palestinian prisoners, only guarantees for their future release. Al-Naja said the Palestinian faction's conditions were that the cease-fire would be mutual and Israel would stop all its actions against the Palestinians.
He also said Israel must provide clear guarantees to free veteran prisoners, minors and female prisoners incarcerated in Israel. "This initiative was presented in an attempt to alleviate Palestinian suffering, but now it depends on Israel, which is showing no indication yet of its willingness for a cease-fire," he said.
PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas will present the understandings among the Palestinian factions to U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at their meeting on Tuesday, Palestinian sources said.
It looks like, well, everyone is refactoring... Tuesday's gonna be interesting.
In any event, the present IDF effort to "cleanse" the south of guerrillas by fire will fail. The IAF and its associated heavy artillery simply lacks the weight of fire needed to drive this enemy from its prepared positions in the stony ground of South Lebanon.
Col. Pat Lang (retired) - former top Middle East guy at the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency
We'll have a little more later from Haaretz about how, from the start of this war, the Israeli military establishment, led by Dan Halutz (pictured, thanks Wikipedia), basically cut off Israel's political options, dumped the blitzkreig plan on the heads of Olmert and Defense Minister Peretz, who, in turn, needed to 'look tough' to them... but first, the problem with Air Power.
Bombing the shit out of people can produce a good tactical situation sometimes, but as a military strategy it only makes sense if it's backed up with appropriate ground forces, and since war is an extension of politics by other means, a political strategy. The problem is that the U.S. Air Force strategic thinking that produced the carpet bombing of Vietnam is at work again in the halls of the Israeli Defense Force headquarters.
This way of thinking believes that dropping enough bombs is enough to evaporate enemy will. There is supposed to be a folding of the enemy's hand, since booms from the sky are sort of perceived like God's unavoidable vengeance, or something.
Donald Rumsfeld suffers from this badly – he was an Air Force boy, he never had to get neck deep in the Vietnamese mud. After Vietnam the U.S. Army had to rebuild its whole doctrine to never get bogged down on land like that again. The Air Force, on the other hand, thought it kicked a lot of ass in Vietnam, since you can make a metric out of identified targets destroyed. This, of course, leaves out the part where the surviving people on the ground are still willing to die fighting you, and they will still be able to get guns from somewhere and mess up your political agenda.
It is also plainly obvious that "shock and awe" was supposed to cause Iraqi will to evaporate from the beginning, and it didn't. Now, sadly, the chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force is an Israeli Air Force propeller-head who never had to slog around and get sniped at around Ramallah, Nablus or Gaza.
Instead, like Rummy, he thinks he can bomb his way through. And this never really takes care of the problem. Now, the Israeli ground forces are flailing around in far too small of numbers, barely able to get a few hundred yards into Lebanon, and shitloads of airstrikes all over the hapless Lebanese North are supposed to prove the brilliance of this strategy?
Mark my words, the people of this world will have some kind of reckoning with the use of air forces once the dust settles on this round of shit. Killing civilians by the dozen from planes is equal in morality to killing them with suicide bombers. You can say the policy is better or worse in its goals, but in death, the morality of the act has the same balance. Innocent blood remains so, even when spilled from a flying object.
So we will add these words from an old hand in America's intelligence community, Pat Lang.
Now, I "get it."
Dan Halutz is the first IDF chief of staff who is not a soldier. He is a military aviator. I had missed that, but a statement attributed to a "senior officer" of the IDF in a New York Times story today caused me to look at IDF leadership. The "scales" have fallen from my eyes. "I believe in AIR POWER," the officer told the Times and Halutz is likely to be the officer who was interviewed
He has no ground forces experience at all. He reminds me a bit of Rumsfeld, the one time naval aviator and opponent of the use of sizable ground forces. Like Rumsfeld he is a proponent of "modern" warfare, gee-whiz techno- equipment and disdainful of big, heavy armored forces. He has re-organized the armed forces so that the ground forces no longer report directly to him.
Someone will say that Chaim Laskov had been head of the Israel Air Force (IAF) before becoming chief of staff in the early '50s. This is essentially irrelevant as a comparative situation. Laskov was not a pilot and was a ground force commander and a founder of the IDF Armored Corps before he became head of the air force.
Halutz is an ally of right wing political forces in Israel and an extreme proponent of the "Air Power" ideology that has been an active force in military affairs ever since it was enunciated by the Italian fascist Giulio Douhet in the '20s. The doctrine was taken up by Hugh Trenchard in Britain, Mitchell in the U.S., and the pre-war 2 German Luftwaffe. It persists in many air forces today.
The "Air Power" ideology in its purest form holds that ground forces have largely been made obsolete and useless by the invention and development of aircraft and other air delivered weapons, missiles, etc. "Air Power" theorists believe that this is true at the tactical, operational and strategic levels.
In Lebanon the IDF appears to be following a strategy at all levels that is entirely dictated by "Air Power" theory.
At the tactical and operational levels of war, Israel seems to be intent on destroying Hizballah south of the Litani River and north of Metulla to some unknown depth. Thus far, just about all the attacks against Hizballah have been made by air weapons and artillery. These weapons are inherently indiscriminate in their application, especially in the hands of "Air Power" theorists who typically want to "make the rubble bounce." This is especially true if the aforesaid airplane enthusiasts see that their theories are not yielding the desired result. If you still believe in "surgical strikes," look at the pictures from Lebanon. The IAF is "leafleting" all of south Lebanon urging citizens to leave their homes and flee northward. They appear to be intent on "herding the cats" away from their border through the use of aerial firepower. They know that Hizballah is a LEBANESE Shia guerrilla army with its roots in the Shia portion of the Lebanese population. Most of the people of the south are Shia, and the IDF knows that if they remain where they are they will support the Hizballah guerrillas both now and in the future. Indeed, the guerrillas, are, in many cases, villagers from this area. In any event, the present IDF effort to "cleanse" the south of guerrillas by fire will fail. The IAF and its associated heavy artillery simply lacks the weight of fire needed to drive this enemy from its prepared positions in the stony ground of South Lebanon. The actual ground maneuver attempted thus far is a joke and typical of the role imagined by "Air Power" advocates for ground forces. "Maroun al-Ras" is a tiny village less than a mile from the Israeli border, and no amount of fancy graphics on TV "gushed" over by retired generals can alter the fact that its capture is an insignificant achievement that has had and will have no effect on the amount of fire going into northern Israel.
At the strategic level, the IDF under Halutz is following classic "Air Power" theory which holds that crushing the "Will of the People" is the correct objective in compelling the acceptance of one's own "will" by an adversary or neutral. With that objective in mind, all of the target country is considered to be one, giant target set. Industry, ports, bridges, hospitals, roads, you name it. It is all "fair game." In this case the notion is to force the Lebanese government and army to accept a role as the northern jaw in a vise that will crush Hizballah and subsequently to hold south Lebanon against Hizballah. Since Lebanon is a melange of ethnic and religious communities of which Shia LEBANESE are a major element and since many Lebanese Shia are supporters of Hizballah, the prospect of getting the Lebanese government to do this is "nil." As for the Lebanese Army, the US attempted for two years (1982-84) to re-structure and re-train the Lebanese Army to make it a "national" non-sectarian force only to learn when this army was committed to battle in 1984 against Druze and Christian forces, that it simply fell apart. The US then abandoned the effort. Nothing much has changed in Lebanon since then.
Bottom Lines:
-Air Power and artillery will not decisively defeat Hizballah or force it to withdraw from rocket range of Israel.
-The Lebanese government and army are not what the Israelis have once again dreamt of and they should have known that. The policy that Israel is following is truly a triumph of hope over experience.
-An international force that will fight Hizballah in the south to disarm it is a pipe dream. Who will do that? The only realistic candidate would be France in terms of military capacity. This would be a major irony of history.
Bottom Line Advice for Israel: Occupy the ground or expect to suffer the effects of failure.
Seems sort of obvious, doesn't it?
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.
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
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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!
"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.
Billmon tells a quality story about catching the Cairo-Luxor train on his trip to cover economic fora in Egypt.
I liked Alternet's Top 10 Signs of the Impending U.S. Police State, especially, well, comprehensive domestic monitoring and "the Long War."
Andy Rooney can't handle Ali G.
I am posting some goofy stuff to spice your Thursday. Take it with triple grains of salt. Aside from the Zogby Poll, most everything below is basically fruitbat tinfoil stuff, the skimmings of the crazy paranoid side of the internet.
Empirical 9/11 skepticism: Zogby Poll: Over 70 Million American Adults Support New 9/11 Investigation:
May 22, 2006 -- Although the Bush administration continues to exploit September 11 to justify domestic spying, unprecedented spending and a permanent state of war, a new Zogby poll reveals that less than half of the American public trusts the official 9/11 story or believes the attacks were adequately investigated.
911Truth.org Urges 2006 Reform Candidates to Recognize a Powerful New Constituency
The poll is the first scientific survey of Americans' belief in a 9/11 cover up or the need to investigate possible US government complicity, and was commissioned to inform deliberations at the June 2~4 "9/11: Revealing the Truth, Reclaiming Our Future" conference in Chicago. Poll results indicate 42% believe there has indeed been a cover up (with 10% unsure) and 45% think "Congress or an International Tribunal should re-investigate the attacks, including whether any US government officials consciously allowed or helped facilitate their success" (with 8% unsure). The poll of American residents was conducted from Friday, May 12 through Tuesday, May 16, 2004. Overall results have a margin of sampling error of +/- 2.9. All inquiries about questions, responses and demographics should be directed to Zogby International.
According to Janice Matthews, executive director of 911truth.org, "To those who have followed the mounting evidence for US government involvement in 9/11, these results are both heartening and frankly quite amazing, given the mainstream media's ongoing refusal to cover the most critical questions of that day. Our August 2004 Zogby poll of New Yorkers showed nearly half believe certain US officials 'consciously' allowed the attacks to happen and 66% want a fresh investigation, but these were people closest to the tragedy and most familiar with facts refuting the official account. This revelation that so many millions nationwide now also recognize a 9/11 cover up and the need for a new inquiry should be a wake up call for all 2006 political candidates hoping to turn this country around. We think it also indicates Americans are awakening to the larger pattern of deceit that led us into Constitutional twilight and endless war, and that our independent media may have finally come of age."
(The poll sponsors see knowledge of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 as a bellwether issue, because if people do not know this elementary fact, they have probably not been exposed to any independent 9/11 research at all. Because the number of respondents who support a new investigation of 9/11 (45%)) is roughly the same as the number who knew about the collapse of Building 7 (52%), it can reasonably be extrapolated that if the entire public were exposed to independent 9/11 research, about 90 percent would support a new investigation of the events of that fateful day.)
Wow. No wonder Loose Change is a top Google Video download. Scholars for 9/11 Truth have had trouble with their Wikipedia entry.
Internet dudes find link between Titan Corporation defense contractor and massive 5.5 ton cocaine bust. On my birthday no less: San Diego Defense Contractor Linked to Company in 5.5 Ton Cocaine Bust:
The MadCowMorningNews has uncovered evidence implicating a San Diego defense contractor, The Titan Corporation, in fraud involving the shadowy St. Petersburg FL company involved in last month’s mysterious 5.5 ton cocaine seizure in Mexico.
Titan is already embroiled in major scandals which include the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison and conviction and a $28 million fine for fixing a Presidential election in the African state of Benin. The company is also receiving attention for its role as the biggest campaign contributor of disgraced former Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.
A MadCowMorningNews investigation of Titan Corp. also revealed that the firm has a curious and so-far unexplained connection to Makram Chams, a mysterious Lebanese man who provided assistance to Mohamed Atta and other terrorist hijackers in Venice Florida before the 9.11 attack.
Chams, who owned a convenience store in Venice, befriended and assisted the terrorist hijackers before disappearing after the 9.11 attack, leaving behind a thriving Kwik-Check mini-market which has since stood abandoned in the heart of the Venice business district.
Evidence in SEC filings recently brought to our attention reveal what happened to Chams: he went to work for Titan. According to documents filed by the company, Chams was a contractor working for Titan Corp in Saudi Arabia as recently as last year.
This was posted on some site called LibertyPost with a lot of strange comments afterwards.
A little more silly conspiratoria: France saves us from British terror bombing: I ended up with some more wild conspiracy stories and I will post them in the name of Thursday afternoon boredom. The idea is floated around paranoid corners (cloakanddagger.de) that last Thursday's Amtrak powerdown was in fact a narrowly averted "false flag" terrorist attack that "Dunblaine Pedophile Tony Blair" and "N.S.A. British-Mossad" nearly pulled off, but a French/American team killed the power to prevent trains sailing into government-planted bombs (noted on Alex Jones' PrisonPlanet). And former Illinois governor George Ryan and Fidel Castro are both Mossad agents. I really really don't believe it - in fact it is sort of an obvious inversion and the silly writing style doesn't enhance the entertainment value. But there you are. There were also theories that the London bombing was staged by the Brits. Check Total Information Analysis for more along these lines.
Obligatory scheming shadow powers note: The Bilderberg Group is meeting in Ottowa, Canada June 8-11 according to AmericanFreePress.net. They are "especially concerned about Venezuela" right now according to the strange AFP.
Some vet named Patrick Briley: CHERTOFF CREATED TERROR PRETEXTS FOR US POLICE STATE and Did the Fed's Cover Up Oklahoma University Bombing?
There Is No Conspiracy - Only Official Policy. Mostly related to Chavez. Sure, whatever.
The Late Great Sherman Skolnick: An oddball Chicago guy named Sherman Skolnick passed away at 75 after decades of messing with the notoriously corrupt Illinois legal system through the "Citizen's Committee to Clean Up the Courts." Here's part 29 of his "Overthrow of the American Republic", Coca-Cola, the CIA and the Courts, part 16. Here's the Cloak and Dagger Obit. This really weird biography from DailyCatholic.org says he managed to get a federal judge thrown in jail, which is quite impressive.
PP also has paranoid things to say about mysterious Mexican separatists that wish to secede from the southwest US and form "Aztlan". Here's what Aztlan say today about Sensenbrenner's anti-immigrant proposals. I guess they are playing into his hands. I have heard that the NSA, FBI, etc. monitor these sorts of secessionist groups, which I would say is probably a logical thing to do.
Of course you can trust this man - Jeff Rense
I had an argument about skim vs 2% milk the other day, then ran into this milk conspiracy on arch-conspiracy theorist Jeff Rense's site, Rense.com: The Pus-Bacteria Moustache Marketing Milk And Disease and more "truth" about milk. Rense has plenty of other weird stuff like UFOs, and this thing about how AIDS was created by the government as they engineered a "Gay Cancer". (check out the shady polio vaccine site too). 9/11 was a Cheney-orchestrated Reichstag Fire type event. Ok fine.
Well that is all from the crazy paranoid side for now. I don't really know how to lend coherence to this post and I sort of feel like a bastard for even writing it. Go back to your fucking cable news now!
I wandered off and didn't feel like writing on Memorial Day. However the many sacrifices of America's soldiers, sailors and Marines should be noted. Before this strange and dark administration took the helm, I had a pretty serious view of what service in the military meant. In part this was because there were two other Daniel Feidts who fought for the United States.
Daniel S. Feidt Sr., my grandfather, enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II, even though he could have avoided service since he was an elected Minnesota state senator, more than 30 years old, and color-blind. He went into the intelligence section and planned raids against the Axis from Britain, Egypt and late in the war, at the Poltava air base in recaptured Ukrainian territory. At one point there was a Nazi air raid and a bomb whizzed through his tent and out the other side. He eventually reached the rank of major, and since he was a lawyer, they asked him to go work at the Nuremberg trials, but he declined because it was time to go back stateside and start a family.
Another interesting story was the one of Daniel Feidt of the Pennsylvania Dutch, who fought in the Civil War. We have transcripts of his letters home, which really would be interesting to put up here. I am not certain if he is my direct ancestor, though.
But the Daniel Feidts had the good fortune to survive their brushes with war. Not so for my dad's cousin, Bruce William Heskett, who was killed in a tank in Quang Tri, South Vietnam on 29 June, 1970. He was born 20 April 1945 and came from Spokane. He was a first Lieutenant, cut down only a few months into his tour that commenced on the 8th of February that year. He served in the 5th Infantry Division, A Company, 1st Battalion. His official death code was "Hostile, Died; Ground Casualty; Gun, Small Arms Fire". The summer after 7th grade during our trip to Washington I took an etching of his name on the Vietnam memorial.
Quang Tri province, near the DMZ and the Ben Hai river that divided the country, saw nine years of fighting, intense bombing, free fire zones, and extensive land mine and Agent Orange contamination. Of the 3,500 villages, only 11 remained by the end of the Vietnam war. (see a 1975 Army study of the Northern Provinces)
Just in time for Memorial Day, a batch of Henry Kissinger's old documents have been released by the National Security Archives. Almost two years to the day after my dad's cousin fell in central Vietnam, Kissinger had a charming and 'loquacious' conversation (PDF)with the Chinese Prime Minister at the Great Hall of the People. It's interesting for a lot of reasons, but this passage got news coverage:
If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.
Some folks couldn't live with it. These, and a few million more from Southeast Asia. Words can't really wrap around the reality of it. There were worthwhile ventures in the World Wars, perhaps Korea, maybe a bit of the Balkans. And of course keeping the Confederates down. Our citizens (and immigrants trying to become citizens) who stick it out are braver than my imagination can handle. But their commanders are only carrying out the policies of the generals, and the generals are (hopefully) only developing policies under orders from the civilian leadership, with transparent oversight from Congress. These days several links in that chain seem to be shattered, and the result are dead-end policies in places that American troops shouldn't be, and autonomous actions that don't support any kind of realistic goals.
They go without body armor so that privatized military firms can make off with fabulously lucrative contracts. The brass cower under Rumsfeld and look the other way when units in places like Abu Ghraib and Haditha go crazy under the stress and lack of support, among a confusing labyrinth of enemies, spies, mercenaries, contractors and the hapless local population.
The responsibility falls to those of us state-side to go after the military's uniformed and civilian leadership for its policies of deploying depleted uranium and caustic white phosphorus, private mercenaries instead of body armor, picking fights with clans instead of negotiating, its alarmingly delusional pattern of planting Psy Ops fake news stories (such as "Zarqawi's" February 2004 letter) instead of taking responsibility for their failed policies.
The good and honorable folks in uniform are getting left to twist in the wind not by us, but by a leadership that has failed to deploy them responsibly, provision them properly, hand down realistic policies, accept blame for failures or plan adequately. It's on us to fish a way out of this, if Memorial Day means anything at all.
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
Iran shady business: This is an encouraging chart:
It comes via Steve Soto at TheLeftCoaster, who writes on The Economy and Iran that retired Colonel Sam Gardiner has offered an outline of the opening moves of an Iran war. Gardiner thinks its a terrible idea, and recently said on CNN that a covert war is already underway. His latest:
I. Period of Building Pressure: This could be 60 days or even six months in which the US and European leaders continue to talk to their publics on the failure of the Iranians to comply with "the wishes of the international community." There will be talk and work on sanctions but those, will be for the purpose of building US and international support; they will not be done with any hope of changing Iranian behavior. We should see the US surface a smoking gun during this phase. (Note: this has already happened with the recent “revelation” about Iran’s uranium possession in excess of what was anticipated) Some military deployments might take place. Most visible would be three aircraft carriers in the vicinity.
II. Initial Strike: This would last 36 to 48 hours. It would only be moderately visible to the global publics. Most of the attacks would take place at night. To prevent retaliation, most targets would be other than nuclear facilities.
III. Pause: The strikes would stop. Iran would be warned that if it were to retaliate the strikes would resume. The pause would probably not be long, maybe 72 hours. Either Iran would conduct an operation against US or Israeli targets, or there would be an event that is blamed on Iran. (Note: Gardiner says that it is very likely, especially in the wake of last week’s announcement from Iran that any strike by Bush against Iran would be considered as an attack from Israel also, that Iran will hit Israel in response to any attack from America)
IV. Regime Change Targeting: The attacks from this point would shift to targets that could cause the regime to fall. It would include direct attacks on the leadership of Iran.
Gardiner adds that the pressure is being increased:
In the phase of building pressure, I see two indicators. I called one of them the "smoking gun." By that I mean the Administration will reveal that Iran is farther along in its nuclear program than we originally thought. This will most likely be some evidence that AQ Kahn, the Pakistani, sold more to Iran than we knew.
Late Friday we read a leak from a diplomat with the International Atomic Energy Agency that new enriched uranium evidence has been found. This could be the emergence of the smoking gun.
The second indicator in the pressure-building phase was the position of aircraft carriers. The Reagan is in the Gulf Region. The Enterprise left Norfolk for the ME (Middle East) on May 2. The Lincoln did a port call in Singapore on April 30, apparently moving in the direction of the ME.
In October 2004, I had the bizarre experience of having lunch with that leading neoconservative Michael Ledeen, who is continually obsessed with Iran, and I wrote the following in "Lunch Beyond Good and Evil: Around a Table with Michael Ledeen":
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.
This appears to be exactly what is going on now, by some reports, as I noted earlier. On my birthday, Raw Story's Larisa Alexandrovna published a pretty disturbing report about how the situation is getting geared up:
US military, intelligence officials raise concern about possible preparations for Iran strike
Concern is building among the military and the intelligence community that the US may be preparing for a military strike on Iran, as military assets in key positions are approaching readiness, RAW STORY has learned.... Retired Air Force Colonel and former faculty member at the National War College Sam Gardiner has heard some military suggestions of a possible air campaign in the near future, and although he has no intimate knowledge of such plans, he says recent aircraft carrier activity and current operations on the ground in Iran have raised red flags.....
Advance teams under way; Congress ‘bypassed’
As previously reported by Raw Story, a terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) is being used on the ground in Iran by the Pentegon, bypassing US intelligence channels. The report was subsequently covered by the Asia Times (Article). Military and intelligence sources now say no Presidential finding exists on MEK ops. Without a presidential finding, the operation circumvents the oversight of the House and Senate Intelligence committees.
Congressional aides for the relevant oversight committees would not confirm or deny allegations that no Presidential finding had been done. One Democratic aide, however, wishing to remain anonymous for this article, did say that any use of the MEK would be illegal. In addition, sources say that a March attack that killed 22 Iranian officials in the province of Sistan va Baluchistan was carried out by the MEK.
According to a report by Iran Focus filed Mar. 23, the twenty-two people killed in the ambush included high ranking officials, including the governor of Zahedan. "Hours after the attack took place, Ahmadi-Moqaddam announced there was evidence the assailants had held meetings with British intelligence officers," the Iranian news service reported. "Radical Shiite cleric Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi also claimed the people behind the attack were the same as those behind a spate of bombings in Iran’s south-western province of Khuzestan earlier this year and in 2005," it added.
Military and intelligence sources say that MEK assets were responsible for this attack, but did not know if the US military was involved or if US military assets were part of the ambush. One former high ranking US intelligence official described the use of MEK as more of a "Cambone" operation than a "Department of Defense operation." Undersecretary of Defense Intelligence Stephen Cambone, a stalwart neo-conservative, is considered by many to be Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s right-hand man.
During a White House briefing in early May, outgoing press secretary Scott McClellan denied that the administration was using MEK, among several other terrorist organizations named, for ground activity in Iran....
Here is a lot of background on the shady, shady Mr Cambone. More on this at WotIsItGood4. You need to read Iran Freedom and Regime Change Politics by Tom Barry at the International Relations Center's Right Web site for more on how AIPAC and other nasty foreign policy lobbies are ginning up the Iran war:
While AIPAC is the most powerful group advocating a tougher U.S. policy toward Iran, numerous other pressure groups calling for regime change in Iran have emerged over the past several years. One of the earliest, the Coalition for Democracy in Iran (CDI), formed in late 2002, ceased functioning in mid-2005. Operating out of the office of Morris Amitay, the former director of AIPAC, CDI worked closely with AIPAC to encourage Congress to pass resolutions condemning Iran. The CDI principals continue their efforts to promote regime change in Iran through other organizations, including the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Committee on the Present Danger, and the American Enterprise Institute.
Raymond Tanter, one of the original members of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, founded the Iran Policy Committee (IPC) in January 2005. Tanter, who was a senior staff member of the National Security Council during the Reagan administration, is also associated with several other right-wing policy organizations, including the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Institute, and the Committee on the Present Danger. Since its founding the Iran Policy Committee has sponsored conferences and policy briefings on the Hill, and has also published four policy papers—a common theme being that the U.S. government should declassify the People's Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK) as an international terrorist organization and recognize it as being the “indisputably largest and most organized Iranian opposition group.”
Tangent: Using soccer to kick Iran.
The Pentagon released some new video footage of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon on September 11, which provoked reaction from the usual quarters of the Internet. Oddly, it seems like the "Pentagon missile theory" is actually being promoted in the major media. But in a sublime twist that some expect in the near future, this theory would be promoted as the "keystone" of all 9/11 conspiracies, and then suddenly debunked with a future release of crystal-clear footage of the real damn plane hitting that five-sided building. This, in turn, would discredit all the other arguments that something fishy was going on 9/11.
And then of course, the government confiscated security tapes from a gas station next to the Pentagon, which in all likelihood captured the crash really well. Where is that fucking tape?
I feel dubious about Loose Change, the 9/11 conspiracy video (watch here) that is wildly popular on the Internet, but hey, they're going to get a chunk of the British Parliament to watch it in June.
To be perfectly clear, I am skeptical about everything around 9/11, all the explanations, official and otherwise. I like to post them on my website because they seem controversial and intriguing, but I don't stand for one school of thought or the other. It is a hell of a lot easier to offer questions, then blockquote various theories, rather than determine who was actually on the Grassy Knoll. Make your own damn judgments – and always be skeptical of the authority structure of information. I like to offer our casual readers a broad selection of the latest and greatest theories around the Internet, but I won't claim that any of them are true.
Alex Jones is basically the dean of 9/11 conspiracies, so why not offer their take on it:
Release Of Pentagon Images Direct Assault On 9/11 Truth Movement Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | May 16 2006
The release of new video images of Flight 77 hitting the Pentagon is both a direct assault against a 9/11 truth movement that has flourished in recent months and an attempt to reinforce the attendant propaganda of 9/11 in light of Bush's 29% approval rating.
Before the release of the new frames news networks immediately went on the attack, saying that the images finally put to rest "conspiracy theories" and questions about the official story. In addition, Fox News commentators related with pensive looks and pursed lips that this footage answers the furore over secret NSA wiretaps and surveillance by 'reminding Americans why it was being done'.
Fox anchors also attacked Charlie Sheen's 'ridiculous assertions' after the actor went public with his 9/11 doubts in late March. News networks hyped the video as some kind of hot tip yet when it was played the anchors looked disappointed because it barely shows anything we haven't already seen, a grainy shot spoiled by sun glare of a blurry object and then a fireball....
Alex Jones and this website have always approached the Pentagon subject with caution because we were wary that it was a potential honey pot that would be used to distract and later discredit the 9/11 truth movement. We asked why mainstream hit pieces always seemed to obsess over the Pentagon issue while ignoring other far weightier facets of the 9/11 inside job evidence. The tactic has always been to create a straw man argument that can be set up and knocked down at a convenient time.
This is also a political boon for President Bush. The timing is precise and has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the Moussaoui trial has ended. Bush's approval ratings are at 29% and his administration is being battered from pillar to post over the NSA spying scandal. What better time to replay the horror of 9/11 and attempt to reinforce fealty to the government's lauded efforts to keep us all safe from terrorists by taking our rights away?
The release of these images comes at a time when the 9/11 truth movement is at its most prominent. This is a targeted assault intended to quash questions about 9/11 and discredit the movement. TV news anchors are already uniform in their talking points in using the video images to attack 9/11 skeptics.
What remains clear is the fact that news networks are steadfast to ask questions about the real issues surrounding 9/11, such as the implosion of Building 7, the NORAD stand down and the fact that all the evidence points towards the hijackers being US government agents.
Such other 9/11 [truth/conspiracy] sites as WhatReallyHappened.com suggest that the missile angle is a form of "poisoning the well," a misdirection, which a reader's letter compared to strange testimony in the JFK assassination:
During the Jim Garrison trial of Clay Shaw in the JFK assassination, a witness showed up who linked Lee Oswald and Shaw. Despite warnings from his staff, Garrison used this witness. But once he was on the stand, the witness claimed that he fingerprinted his own daughter every night to prevent substitutions by "them". During the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the committee made a point of calling a witness who claimed that the open umbrella by the motorcade route in Dallas was actually a poison dart gun that had fired a dart at JFK to paralyze him, in order to make him an easier target. The actual umbrella was then displayed amidst jokes and laughter and great rolling of eyes, and shown to be merely an umbrella.....
In all three cases the witnesses were plants by the government whose job it was to taint any real questions of what the government was up to with silliness that the media could use to make fun of the whole issue and those who dared question the official story. The media focused on the "fingerprint man" to ridicule Jim Garrison. (Years later Richard Secord admitted under oath that Clay Shaw had been a CIA contract agent after all.) The story about the umbrella at Dealey Plaza was focused on by the media to show how silly the entire issue of questioning the Warren Report was (but fell flat on its face when the HSCA concluded that there had been more than one gunman in Dealey Plaza that day)
....The game is an old one, to plant bogus and easily disproved claims in any inquiry into what the government is doing, in order to ridicule those asking questions. In the old days it worked, because the media was under government control and could be counted on to withhold exposure of the fraud until it could most damage those who asked questions. These days, in the age of the Internet, such planted hoaxes do not survive because the questions the media should ask but refuse to do so ARE asked and answered.
So in other words, if a conspiracy sounds too good to be true, that's because it's a meta-double-super-conspiracy designed to cover up the primary conspiracy. Got that?!
I will throw in some more bits and pieces around the internet. Why not go with Wayne Madsen yet again? He's a weird source, but it's all quite tantalizing. Too tantalizing??
May 17, 2006 -- Add Cuba and Venezuela to the list of countries that knew of and informed the Bush administration about a "major terrorist attack" prior to 911. In addition to Russia, Jordan, France, Germany, and other nations, Venezuelan and Cuban intelligence picked up chatter about a "major terrorist attack" on the United States prior to 911. Cuban intelligence, which has an extensive network in Florida -- a home base of the hijackers and their handlers -- initially picked up reports about the attack and passed the information to both the United States and Venezuela. However, the Bush administration failed to react to this and other foreign warnings. Venezuelan intelligence, likely from its own sources in Florida and elsewhere, confirmed that something major would occur in the United States. The failure of the Bush administration to heed these warnings coupled with subsequent intelligence picked up by the Cuban and Venezuelan security services have led them to conclude that 9-11 was carried out as a result of an "inside job" within the Bush administration. Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has announced plans to hold an international 9-11 commission of inquiry in Caracas that will bring together a host of international government, security, and political leaders. Already, preliminary meetings in Caracas for the conference have attracted the attention of the FBI. Recently, an FBI agent asked for the guest list of a hotel on Margarita island to check on names of guests, including Americans, associated with the preliminary planning meetings for the conference.
May 16, 2006 -- Interesting confluence of activities surround Sky Way's aircraft confiscated in Mexico with 5.5 tons of cocaine and pre-911 Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) investigation of Israeli art students involved in suspicious activities in Dallas-Fort Worth area and Venice, Florida in close proximity to some of the 911 hijackers. That DEA investigation was shut down on orders from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller.
This is a further clue that those who planned and carried out the 911 attacks were heavily involved with drug smuggling. These reportedly include elements of Russian-Israeli-Ukrainian (RUIM) organized crime, Latin American narco-dealers, U.S. operatives of the radical right-wing Israeli Kach Party, Saudi billionaire businessmen and Pakistani intermediaries, and political officials close to the GOP in Texas and Florida. For example, links have been established between Red Sea Management in Costa Rica, a company linked to the Sky Way cocaine plane, and the Israeli embassy in San Jose.
May 9, 2006 -- World leaders suspect the Bush administration of involvement in the 911 attacks. The first skeptics to question what role the Bush administration played in the 9-11 terrorist attacks were a few Cabinet ministers in the governments of America's NATO allies. They included German Science and Technology Minister Andreas Von Bulow and British Environment Minister Michael Meacher. They were joined by Belgian European Parliament Member Paul Lannoye.
However, in recent months the former Cabinet ministers have been joined in their skepticism about the "official" version of the 911 events by Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. In March, Chavez said Venezuela will open an official investigation into the 9-11 attacks. Now, Chavez has been joined by Ahmedinejad, who in a recent letter to President George W. Bush, asked, "Why have the various aspects of the [9-11] attacks been kept secret?" Ahmedinejad indicated that the attacks could not have been carried out without the knowledge of the U.S. "security services."
The fact that the Venezuelan and Iranian leaders suspect Bush administration complicity in 9-11 is interesting. These leaders have at their disposal two highly-capable intelligence agencies. A major priority of the intelligence services of Venezuela and Iran (DISIP and VEVAK, respectively) is counter-intelligence against the United States. However, that is not likely where Venezuela and Iran may have gleaned information about who was behind the 9-11 attacks. Venezuela and Iran are members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and a major priority of their intelligence services is collecting information on oil deals, including the Bush administration negotiations with the Taliban in Tashkent and Berlin prior to 9-11 that quickly went sour and likely provided the impetus for the Muslim insurgents to attack New York and Washington on 9-11. VEVAK, a sworn enemy of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, had successfully penetrated the Taliban's and Pakistan's security services and would have been well aware of the attack plans and any U.S. foreknowledge of them, including knowing about money movements from Pakistan to the hijackers in Florida. DISIP was well aware of the smuggling of cocaine from Colombia, trans-shipped on a Saudi diplomatic Boeing 737 through Venezuela, by Saudi Royal family members who then used the proceeds to support Al Qaeda's attack on America.
As more and more governments are wrested from the control of the global neo-cons -- Italy, Britain, Mexico, and others -- additional intelligence may be obtained from various espionage agencies that will prove that the Bush administration was not an idle bystander in the events that led up to 9-11.
The Sky Way aircraft thing was first mentioned by Madsen on May 10. Evidently, he's tying this to the fun story that has been around the Internet since shortly after 9/11 about the Israeli spy rings that were allegedly shadowing the 9/11 hijackers in Florida, New Jersey, and elsewhere. This is of course Plenty Controversial to even talk about - the ADL believes it's inherently anti-semitic to even discuss (PDF). ("Urban Moving Systems" of New Jersey has also been named as a Mossad or espionage front tied to 9/11) But best of all, Carl Cameron at FOX News did a really amazing four part series on the Israeli spy ring (watch here 1 2 3 4). Worth putting Cameron's words again:
There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism.
Last fall I posted the following interesting map of Israeli spies that were apparently shadowing the 9/11 hijackers in Florida, mainly based on a compilation of public arrest records. Read the really quite strange report on this (PDF) and Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo on it. Make your own judgments on it. Personally I think it's entirely possible that in 2001 the Bush administration outsourced the monitoring of domestic Arab fundamentalists to Israeli espionage teams, but let's see the evidence, then. Also, hypothetically, it would have endangered the Republican/Likud alliance that masqueraded as the American/Israeli alliance to have the American public discover that Israel didn't do everything to stop 9/11.
Well, that's enough 9/11 conspiracies for one day. I think I'm going to smoke some crack now and visualize controlled demolitions.
What's fun about ^^all this shit^^ is that most people think it is either complete bullshit or else so dangerously controversial that they could never ever touch it. As for me, well, I'm always looking for the truth, because you never know where the hell you'll find it. FOX News?
More entertaining than this rehash are the BBC reports that "Pentagon plans cyber-insect army" and "US 'plans stealth shark spies'". That's freakin' awesome.
I hate it when butterflies get into government espionage conspiracies. Fuck it.
"A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources. It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation. We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation."
ABC News put out a press release, saying that an anonymous government source had informed them that the government was watching their phone calls specifically, apparently in part to find out who has been leaking about the government watching everyone's phone calls. It's Nixon in the information age (BTW check out this story about Kissinger tapping reporters and NSC staffers).
These days the Fourth Amendment is about as valued by our government as the hemp it was written on. It really pisses me off that my calls are being logged in some giant database - as USA Today revealed on my birthday, naturally. Well everyone is supposed to call Congress tomorrow, and despite my cell phone bill I think I'll do it. It's a measure of how far this nation has slid towards totalitarianism that such a wildly paranoid program like this almost totally passes in the media and people's heads don't explode out of sheer anger. Last night on the Daily Show (QT and WMP), Jon Stewart nailed it with a montage of FOX anchors defending the total canvassing of phone records, with "Wow, the entire network of anchors has been hired to be the press secretary..."
(CrooksAndLiars.com is our site of the day for their many handy video clips and good sources)
Fortunately 51% of Americans oppose the NSA database - commentary from Atrios here. Poor National Security Advisor Big Glasses Hadley just can't seem to tell Wolf Blitzer a single damned useful result of the NSA Total PhoneCall Awareness Trolling (QT). Even Joe Scarborough thinks its kind of chilling, since if Nixon had done this, they would have caught Deep Throat before Watergate broke.
Murray Waas, the intrepid National Journal reporter who has been covering the Valerie Plame / Libby case in obscene detail, is himself getting positive coverage from US News. He started by working for Jack Anderson as a teenager. Not bad at all. And his blog.
NY Times bombthrower Frank Rich has a new book, the Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth. Sounds good to me. More Rich lately (also on RawStory and featured in E&P):
"His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent....read on"
Meanwhile Al Gore went on SNL, claiming to have invented an anti-hurricane machine, and I missed it. And the trailer for his new movie about the environment.
Action Alert from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee: Wednesday, May 17, National Call-in to Congress on NSA Warrantless Surveillance:
Last December, we learned that, according to some Members of Congress, the President may have violated laws by allowing the National Security Agency to spy on Americans' phone calls.
On Thursday, 5/11, USA Today published a major cover story revealing a National Security Agency (NSA) database of millions of innocent Americans' domestic phone call records, indicating who, when and where we are calling.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm
This database has nothing to do with catching suspected terrorists: It is documenting all our associations in the largest database in history-with a goal of including "every call ever made" within the nation's borders. This program is truly *beyond "Big Brother"!*
*Take Action Now*
It's time for the American people to tell Congress in a clear, loud voice that *we've had enough!*
Join the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) and thousands of other Americans by calling Congress on Wednesday, May 17 to demand they investigate this government intrusion immediately. ADC, the BORDC, the ACLU, People For the American Way, and other organizations (see below) have declared the week of May 15 "National Call-in to Congress Week" and are asking their constituents to call their members of Congress on a specific day. Let's keep those phones ringing in the Congressional halls all week long!
*The Message*
Please phone each of your Senators, and your Representative. *Urge them NOT to consider draft legislation that would give the executive branch new surveillance powers that are immune to oversight by the courts and Congress. Call for a full, public investigation of the NSA surveillance program. *
*Call the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121* (24 hours) and ask the operator to connect you. Or this ADC page to find your legislators' phone numbers.
*Additional sample talking points:*
Here are a few suggestions. Choose one or two:
* The President has broken the law. He must stop warrantless eavesdropping and collecting records on all our phone calls and come clean with the American people about any further secret powers he claims as Commander-in-Chief.
* The administration's claim that it must break the law to protect us from al-Qaeda are just plain false: any communications specifically targeting an al-Qaeda member outside the U.S. doesn't even need a warrant, and FISA judges are ready and waiting to issue warrants to wiretap any suspected al-Qaeda in the U.S.-- even if those calls include U.S. citizens or residents.
* Overburdening the FBI with thousands of false leads makes us less safe because it leaves them less time and fewer resources to find the real terrorists.
* How can Congress even consider passing legislation to make these illegal programs legal, when it can't even find out what they entail? It must investigate. This is no time for new legislation!
* What's needed is an immediate, full and unrestricted public investigation into the NSA spying program, including a probe into the massive database collecting Americans' phone calls.
* The idea that the database of all our calls is permissible as long as it doesn't contain names and addresses is ludicrous. By linking the database of phone calls with all the other government data mining operations, the government can literally follow our every move, every contact, and every transaction. It's "Big Brother" run amok!
* Congress needs to pass whistleblower protections for government employees and safeguards for journalists who provide information to the American public about illegal government acts.
* The Fourth Amendment is clear. Electronic surveillance of this sort requires a warrant. A warrant allows a judge to serve as a check against executive abuse of power. That check keeps our government honest - preventing one branch of government from mischief and errors.
*Organizations supporting the call-in day (partial list)* include the Alliance for Justice, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, American Civil Liberties Union, Bill of Rights Defense Committee, Council on American-Islamic Relations, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Electronic Privacy Information Center, First Amendment Foundation, Friends Committee on National Legislation, Liberty Coalition, National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Coalition Against Repressive Legislation, National Lawyers Guild, Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances, People For the American Way, Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations, and United For Peace and Justice.
More information is available on the BORDC webpage.
Because guess what? Without any probable cause, the government doesn't have any fucking right to your phone logs. Some would say that defending the Constitution is worth fighting for. Or at least calling for.
How to Pick a Satisfying Career: Know Yourself
Hongpong.com Drupal development: Some new advancements: I have organized the menus a bit and set up a basic forum. It is colossally easy to register an account on the new system, which allows you to put up files and such, as well as personal blogs and polls. Anonymous comments are also turned on.
Check out the new RSS headline aggregator thingy set up - viewed here as a big list of mixed things, or here broken into the component sections (or "wires")or a set of the sources we're putting together. NOTE: Right now the auto headline updater doesn't work - in other words it won't check sites on its own yet. Therefore I think anyone can hit drupal.hongpong.com/cron.php to force updating the feeds. (we're gonna do some SEO somehow, too)
Meanwhile some randomness: Bill Salisbury on polarization in MN nominating processes. He is an intrepid reporter who's been around the Capitol for a long time.
Help Palestinians but dodge giving Hamas government money? Sounds dubious.
Aspyr is releasing Civilization IV for Macintosh tentatively in June. I just saw it on PC again, and it is excellent.
Porter Goss: shitty leader goes back to Capitol Hill. Never should have brought his greasy face outta the House.
You gotta see the Truth live. The word is law, bitch! Wayne Madsen promotes Al Gore comeback in 2008 in the Salt Lake Tribune.
If you care at all about South America you need to check out Greg Grandin's "Rumsfeld's Latin American Wild West Show" on TomDispatch.com. Basically the U.S. is militarizing its relations with the whole region, as one country after another slips out of Washington's orbit. Only a small part of a CRUCIAL read about how direct American imperialism/Full Spectrum Dominance has been field-tested south of here:
Latin America, in fact, has become more dangerous of late, plagued by a rise in homicides, kidnappings, drug use, and gang violence. Yet it is not the increase in illicit activity that is causing the Pentagon to beat its alarm but rather a change in the way terrorism experts and government officials think about international security. After 9/11, much was made of Al Qaeda's virus-like ability to adapt and spread through loosely linked affinity cells even after its host government in Afghanistan had been destroyed. Defense analysts now contend that, with potential patron nations few and far between and funding sources cut off by effective policing, a new mutation has occurred. To raise money, terrorists are reportedly making common cause with gun runners, people smugglers, brand-name and intellectual-property bootleggers, drug dealers, blood-diamond merchants, and even old-fashioned high-seas pirates.
In other words, the real enemy facing the U.S. in its War on Terror is not violent extremism, but that old scourge of American peacekeepers since the days of the frontier: lawlessness. "Lawlessness that breeds terrorism is also a fertile ground for the drug trafficking that supports terrorism," said former Attorney John Ashcroft a few years ago, explaining why Congress's global counterterrorism funding bill was allocating money to support the Colombian military's fight against leftist rebels.
Counter-insurgency theorists have long argued for what they describe as "total war at the grass-roots," by which they mean a strategy not just to defeat insurgents by military force but to establish control over the social, economic, and cultural terrain in which they operate. "Drying up the sea," they call it, riffing on Mao's famous dictum, or sometimes, "draining the swamp." What this expanded definition of the terrorist threat does is take the concept of total war out of, say, the mountains of Afghanistan, and project it onto a world scale: Victory, says the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, "requires the creation of a global environment inhospitable to terrorism."
Defining the War on Terror in such expansive terms offers a number of advantages for American security strategists. Since the United States has the world's largest military, the militarization of police work justifies the "persistent surveillance" of, well, everything and everybody, as well as the maintenance of "a long-term, low-visibility presence in many areas of the world where U.S. forces do not traditionally operate." It justifies taking "preventive measures" in order to "quell disorder before it leads to the collapse of political and social structures" and shaping "the choices of countries at strategic crossroads" which, the Quadrennial Defense Review believes, include Russia, China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Southeast Asia -- just about every nation on the face of the earth save Britain and, maybe, France.
[Read the next one carefully then check your phone records: -Dan]
Since the "new threats of the 21st century recognize no borders," the Pentagon can, in the name of efficiency and flexibility, breach bureaucratic divisions separating police, military, and intelligence agencies, while at the same time demanding that they be subordinated to U.S. command. Hawks now like to sell the War on Terror as "the Long War," but a better term would be ‘the Wide War," with an enemies list infinitely expandable to include everything from DVD bootleggers to peasants protesting the Bechtel Corporation. Southcom Commander Craddock regularly preaches against "anti-globalization and anti-free trade demagogues," while Harvard security-studies scholar and leading ideologue of the "protean enemy" thesis, Jessica Stern, charges, without a shred of credible evidence, that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is brokering an alliance between "Colombian rebels and militant Islamist groups."
.....In Latin America more generally, it is increasingly the Pentagon, not the State Department, which sets the course for hemispheric diplomacy. With a staff of 1,400 and a budget of $800 million, Southcom already has more money and resources devoted to Latin America than do the Departments of State, Treasury, Commerce, and Agriculture combined. And its power is growing.
For decades following the passage of the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act, it was the responsibility of the civilian diplomats over at Foggy Bottom to allocate funds and training to foreign armies and police forces. But the Pentagon has steadily usurped this authority, first to fight the War on Drugs, then the War on Terror. Out of its own budget, it now pays for about two-thirds of the security training the U.S. gives to Latin America. In January 2006, Congress legalized this transfer of authority from State to Defense through a provision in the National Defense Authorization Act, which for the first time officially gave the Pentagon the freedom to spend millions from its own budget on aid to foreign militaries without even the formality of civilian oversight. After 9/11, total American military aid to the region jumped from roughly $400 million to more than $700 million. It has been steadily rising ever since, coming in today just shy of $1 billion.
Much of this aid consists of training Latin American soldiers -- more than 15,000 every year. Washington hopes that, even while losing its grip over the region's civilian leadership, its influence will grow as each of these cadets, shaped by ideas and personal loyalties developed during his instruction period, moves up his nation's chain of command. [And that in turn, could be the backdoor for American-directed coups and direct political pressure --Dan]
Training consists of lethal combat techniques in the field backed by counterinsurgency and counter-terror theory and doctrine in the classroom. This doctrine, conforming as it does to the Pentagon's broad definition of the international security threat, is aimed at undermining the work civilian activists have done since the end of Cold War to dismantle national and international intelligence agencies in the region.
BagNewsNotes on Pitching the Zarqawi bloopers.
The Ny Times says today:
Two related National Security Agency surveillance programs begun after the Sept. 11 attacks have provoked legal controversy because the agency does not seek court warrants for their operation.
In the domestic eavesdropping program, the N.S.A. listens in on phone calls and reads e-mail messages to and from Americans and others in the United States who the agency believes may be linked to Al Qaeda. Only international communications — those into and out of the country — are monitored, according to administration officials. Until late 2001, the N.S.A. focused on only the foreign end of such conversations; if it decided someone in the United States was of intelligence interest, it had to get a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Now such warrants are sought only for communications between two people who are both in the United States.
In the telephone record data-mining program, the N.S.A. has obtained from at least three phone companies the records of all calls — domestic and international — showing the phone numbers on both ends of each conversation, and its date, time, duration and other details. The records do not include the contents of any call or e-mail message and do not include personal data like credit card numbers and home addresses, officials say.
Security agency employees perform computer analysis in an effort to identify possible associates of terror suspects.
Meanwhile a nice birthday present from the AP - May 11: Justice Department Abruptly Ends Domestic Spying Probe
The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
"We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program," OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey.
Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
"Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation," wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program "has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception."
Meanwhile it is interesting that the Carlyle Group has some control over how those security clearances are handed out via the U.S. Investigative Services, USIS, entity. $13 million in a recent contract.
Man, to hell with it. I'm gonna go have fun now.
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
Big Poppa Doom informed everyone that, in a handy and expedient combination of Apocalyptic middle eastern wars and invisible men with booming voices, God is determining our foreign policy. What could go wrong? Catch the video. Editor&Publisher and the WaPo on it.
Bush: I base a lot of my foreign policy decisions on some things that I think are true. One, I believe there's an Almighty. And, secondly, I believe one of the great gifts of the Almighty is the desire in everybody's soul, regardless of what you look like or where you live, to be free.
Also the following statement:
One decision he questions: After the successful invasion, "preparing an Iraqi army for an external threat. Well, it turns out there may have been an external threat but it's nothing compared to the internal threat." He did not explain what external threat the Iraqis were being trained for.
FDA 420 political diktat: Last week the FDA published a fancy condemnation of marijuana medical studies -- and in an odd example of a federal bureaucracy trying to dictate rules to state legislatures, condemned efforts at the state level to reform marijuana laws. It's kind of improper for federal agencies to order state legislatures to Jump. Scientific American on it, and here's the FDA statement.
As more than a few people are noticing these days, this is another example of fake politicized science, like ordering NASA scientists to shut up about global warming (read the damn NASA memo). (don't forget that national parks are falling apart and of course the government doesn't care about global warming) Go hang out at smokedot to compensate, and don't forget all those tax dollars flushed down the toilet for the war on drugs.
Net Neutrality: Couple more articles about the impending cancellation of the internet's egalitarian structure. Fortunately, Nancy Pelosi is supporting an amendment that would save Net Neutrality. You can become a "citizen co-sponsor" about it here. The attempt to fix it is called the Markey Amendment. Despite having a serious uphill battle, the word seems to be spreading:
We now have over 75 coalition partners, everyone from the Parents Television Council to the Texas Internet Service Provider’s Association to Consumer Action, and the blogosphere is on fire. We launched yesterday, and net neutrality is just blowing up.
Comic book collectors, video gamers, librarians, hip hop sites, music fans, more video gamers, designers, small business owners, and nonprofits have heard of the issue and are very angry at the telecom cartel’s move.
And now the tech companies have chimed in with Don’t Mess with the Net.
Iraq for Sale: The liberal documentary filmmaker Robert Greenwald (Outfoxed and others) is working on a new film, Iraq for Sale, about corrupt defense contractors, in time for the election this fall. However, they are trying to get $50 donations to finance production. I advised them that the trailer on their website doesn't seem to work on Mac.
Air Force censors liberal websites: According to someone at the DailyKos, the Air Force is blocking the DailyKos, Atrios Eschaton and TalkingPointsMemo. The roughly equivalent (although more hateful, I would say) rightwing sites FreeRepublic and LittleGreenFootballs are not blocked. More on this. If you are in the military and are trying to circumvent ideologically tainted censorship, try these tips on Peacefire. You can see if a program called SmartFilter is blocking URLs here (we are classed as "personal pages"). There is something odd about how the Air Force seems to be the most fundamentalist branch of the military.
It is also interesting that Armed Forces Radio is extremely tilted towards rightwing commentary that is rebroadcast from civilian sources. It's like 90% conservative. More on Armed Forces Radio bias here and here. This has bad effects, wherein for example, Rush Limbaugh tells soldiers through Armed Forces Radio that the Abu Ghraib torture was basically acceptable to "blow some steam off".
This website is clearly not blocked at many military installations, including the Air Force. However, I have also been sent screenshots of this site being blocked on military internet at a particular place that I won't elaborate on.
MZM meta-scandal: Corrupt defense contractor trying to start a war in Iran, and pretty much everything else too:
Disgraced defense contractor planned to promote democracy in Iran: March 24
By Warren P. Strobel - Knight Ridder
WASHINGTON - In a new example of disgraced defense contractor Mitchell Wade's attempts to exert influence in Washington and beyond, Wade and two business partners formed a nonprofit group in 2004 to promote democracy in Iran, according to documents and interviews.
Wade and the two partners, who have been large contributors to Republican political campaigns, formed the Iranian Democratization Foundation in April 2004, according to incorporation papers filed in Washington.
....In November 2004, Congress approved spending $3 million to promote democracy in Iran. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last month asked Congress for a large boost in funding, to $75 million. Behrooz Behbudi, who helped incorporate the foundation, said in a telephone interview that Wade "was supposed to get funds from the Congress" for the project. The two later fell out over business dealings in Iraq, Behbudi said.
Wade, who headed contractor MZM Inc., pleaded guilty last month to bribery-related charges and making illegal campaign contributions. His chief congressional patron, former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, pleaded guilty in November to taking bribes. Wade's dealings, which include contracts MZM received from Pentagon intelligence agencies, are under investigation.
MZM is a fun one. It is interesting how there are so many scandals around Washington, they sort of blend into and overlap each other. MZM was one of Duke Cunningham's corrupt companies, but in the Jack-Abramoff-of-all-trades go-get-em style of DC operators, MZM shadiness has also been a major cause of Katherine Harris' Senate campaign disintegration in Florida, and MZM contractors helped cover up the fake Iraq intelligence in one of the Congressional investigations, by working for the Silberman-Robb Commission for WMD Whitewashing, as TPMmuckrakers have dug up. Isn't DC great? The muckies also said that MZM helped select bombing targets early in the Iraq war:
In addition to its work at CENTCOM, MZM is known to have had contracts to support CIFA, the Pentagon's domestic spying operation; the FBI's Foreign Terrorist Tracking Task Force; the Department of Energy's Counterintelligence Office; the White House's Robb-Silberman Commission to study WMD intelligence; the Homeland Security Department's watch center; and the Army's National Ground Intelligence Center.
Check out PrivateForces.com for more on privatized military firms, the sector of the economy that's gonna eat all the others.
Gas Temperature Map: You gotta check this out. It's getting hot out there.
Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt: "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
I have billed this website to be about spinstorms, Information Operations and latent contradictions. Here are two crucial elements of the current political environment that have to be fully confronted.
One: There are clandestine U.S. military operations in Iran today - which Congress really has no clue about, and are not at all in our country's interests. This is insane.
Two: The military has a specific psychological warfare campaign to manipulate the perception of the "Abu Musab al Zarqawi" figure in Iraq - and the American audience is an official target of this psychological warfare, the Washington Post rather explosively confirms today. This indicates that PSY OPS planning and operations are integrated into the basic structure of how the U.S. media is fed information by the Pentagon. Your brain is currently contaminated with the results of military psychological operations. This is also insane.
Sy Hersh has been telling us for a while that the situation between the United States and Iran is getting hot very quickly. A new report: The Iran Plans: Would President Bush go to war to stop Tehran from getting the bomb? is decidedly alarming. There are plenty of horrible things in here, but why not mention the beginning:
The Bush Administration, while publicly advocating diplomacy in order to stop Iran from pursuing a nuclear weapon, has increased clandestine activities inside Iran and intensified planning for a possible major air attack. Current and former American military and intelligence officials said that Air Force planning groups are drawing up lists of targets, and teams of American combat troops have been ordered into Iran, under cover, to collect targeting data and to establish contact with anti-government ethnic-minority groups. The officials say that President Bush is determined to deny the Iranian regime the opportunity to begin a pilot program, planned for this spring, to enrich uranium.
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
Surely we'll get back to this. But it seemed an appropriate thing to throw in right before I go to bed and start a new week, pondering how these ethnic minorities will be manipulated -- who will be the next Hmong-like ethnic group, used and abused as a tool of American war policy, then left to twist in the wind? Azeris? Baluchis? Turkmen? Kurds?
What could possibly go wrong?!!!? Note Khuzestan, down there next to Iraq. Apparently, since it has many (Shia) Arabs, it is considered a prime area for ethnic fragmentation that will somehow serve American interests.... (And Baluchistan is another key angle for stirring up trouble). Get your popcorn ready, the new Great Game with Nuclear Chips will really be an entertaining one.
By the way, isn't it interesting to live in a country that launches preemptive covert operations into various places without informing Congress or the public it is supposed to serve? What is the appropriate response from Iran? What of this American public, swiftly led into yet another strange and ugly Eurasian trap? What the fuck are we supposed to do?
Now a turn to the even more surreal. Today, The Washington Post confirms that "Abu Musab al Zarqawi", the vaunted evil terrorist, has officially been used as an instrument of psychological warfare by the Pentagon. Last September I posted "Zarqawi == Emmanuel Goldstein". I said:
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.
.....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.
.....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.
Now the Washington Post sets this off:
Military Plays Up Role of Zarqawi: Jordanian Painted As Foreign Threat To Iraq's Stability
By Thomas E. Ricks, Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, April 10, 2006; Page A01
The U.S. military is conducting a propaganda campaign to magnify the role of the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, according to internal military documents and officers familiar with the program. The effort has raised his profile in a way that some military intelligence officials believe may have overstated his importance and helped the Bush administration tie the war to the organization responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The documents state that the U.S. campaign aims to turn Iraqis against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian, by playing on their perceived dislike of foreigners. U.S. authorities claim some success with that effort, noting that some tribal Iraqi insurgents have attacked Zarqawi loyalists.
For the past two years, U.S. military leaders have been using Iraqi media and other outlets in Baghdad to publicize Zarqawi's role in the insurgency. The documents explicitly list the "U.S. Home Audience" as one of the targets of a broader propaganda campaign.
[Sidebar: Two slides from a briefing prepared for Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describe a U.S. military propaganda campaign that was intended to highlight the role of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian terrorist, in the Iraqi insurgency. By emphasizing his foreign origin, the "psychological operations" effort sought to play on a perceived Iraqi dislike of foreigners and so split the insurgency.]
The military's propaganda program largely has been aimed at Iraqis, but seems to have spilled over into the U.S. media. One briefing slide about U.S. "strategic communications" in Iraq, prepared for Army Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the top U.S. commander in Iraq, describes the "home audience" as one of six major targets of the American side of the war.
That slide, created by Casey's subordinates, does not specifically state that U.S. citizens were being targeted by the effort, but other sections of the briefings indicate that there were direct military efforts to use the U.S. media to affect views of the war. One slide in the same briefing, for example, noted that a "selective leak" about Zarqawi was made to Dexter Filkins, a New York Times reporter based in Baghdad. Filkins's resulting article, about a letter supposedly written by Zarqawi and boasting of suicide attacks in Iraq, ran on the Times front page on Feb. 9, 2004.
Leaks to reporters from U.S. officials in Iraq are common, but official evidence of a propaganda operation using an American reporter is rare.
.....It is difficult to determine how much has been spent on the Zarqawi campaign, which began two years ago and is believed to be ongoing. U.S. propaganda efforts in Iraq in 2004 cost $24 million, but that included extensive building of offices and residences for troops involved, as well as radio broadcasts and distribution of thousands of leaflets with Zarqawi's face on them, said the officer speaking on background.
The Zarqawi campaign is discussed in several of the internal military documents. "Villainize Zarqawi/leverage xenophobia response," one U.S. military briefing from 2004 stated. It listed three methods: "Media operations," "Special Ops (626)" (a reference to Task Force 626, an elite U.S. military unit assigned primarily to hunt in Iraq for senior officials in Hussein's government) and "PSYOP," the U.S. military term for propaganda work.
One internal briefing, produced by the U.S. military headquarters in Iraq, said that Kimmitt had concluded that, "The Zarqawi PSYOP program is the most successful information campaign to date."
Damn, skippy. I have rarely seen better evidence that we will have to defend our brains from military psychological operations directly. The public mood is a battlespace (which of course is exploited for Republican partisan political gains).
I can't wait to see if this gets the proper bounce in the media this week - and better yet, hopefully Republicans will explain why military propaganda is good because it makes us feel good.
Strange times. Stay sharp. We could run out of space real fast.
Technorati Tags: baluchistan, cia, covert, iran, PSYOPS, propaganda, spin, war, zarqawi
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.
There's a nine minute Ali G Show clip wherein Borat checks out the American political scene, and in a subtle conversation about religion, gets one James Broadwater to say that Jews will go to hell because they aren't for Jesus. There's plenty more, but I am always amazed how easily Cohen can bring out the latent antisemite in Americans.
Charlie Sheen popped up on Alex Jones' radio show (for the uninitiated, Jones is one of the leading Internet Conspiracy Guys - infowars and prisonplanet are kinda required if you're into that sort of thing). Anyhow there was an interview that can be downloaded (mp3) and here is the summarized story about it.
"It feels like from the people I talk to in and around my circles, it seems like the worm is turning."
I listened to the interview on my iPod when I went to Target this morning, and there wasn't anything particularly new about the vaunted 9/11 conspiracies, such as the funny-looking hole in the Pentagon, the "pulling" of WTC 7, controlled demolition and all the rest. I am really not a believer in such things, although I will always be happy to note that the hole in the Pentagon just doesn't look right at all. But Jones and Sheen go through the basic motions of the Story, so it's sort of amusing.
Oh yah, PrisonPlanet currently claims that there is a media coverup, as the Associated Press refuses to run a wire story about Sheen's remarks. They say:
Mainstream Media Blackout On Sheen 9/11 Piece (March 22):
Controlled gatekeepers and delusional Neo-Cons attempt to kill story
.....We will not cease in our efforts to turn this into a massive story but we need your support. Get the story and e mail it out to every newspaper, newswire and TV news station in existence.
And also March 21: PrisonPlanet: Huge Reaction To Sheen 9/11 Story. Gawker: Escort-Loving Sitcom Actors Lend Credibility to 9/11 Doubters.
All right, I am officially amused by the Charlie Sheen Effort to Expose the 9/11 Conspiracy of March 2006. Everyone gets bonus points for originality.
On the flip side there is a massive story on 9/11 conspiracy theories from a skeptical perspective (although I have not read it yet) "The Ground Zero Grassy Knoll" in New York Magazine.
Well those are a couple brief and weird things. More later. Sorry things have been sparse but i've been trying to get the other sections of my life together, and watching bizarre Egyptian movies and stuff...
Welcome Back to America, Buddy...
Eat Up.
I apologize for the delay in this posting. I've been in Mexico, on the worst vacation of my life (more on that later). As we've seen little action from our merry band of HongPosters, I am going to offer up some Saturday Grab Bag™ action for anyone out there who's just looking for something to pick at...
Dean Johnson: I'm a Flippin' Idiot, Give Me Another Chance: Why oh why, Deanster? Had to laugh at this news item, actually. It seems that MN-DFL Senate Majority Leader Dean Johnson (or MNDFLSMLDJ for short) met with a group of Pastors in his constituency some time back to discuss the proposed ban on Gay Marriage (I assume this is the one being forwarded by the great Satan herself, Michelle Bachman) and told them that he had spoken to members of the state Supreme Court, who had assured him that the 1997 law that defined marriage as [blah, blah, blah] would be sufficient to hold off any advances on the homo-hitching front. Well, turns out that not only was Mr. Johnson apparently lying (no MNSC members recall ever discussing the issue with him) but he was being taped by one of the pastors in attendance. As you might have guessed, the Forces of Medievalism have already pounced on the issue as proof of the need for stricter anti-non-white-middle-class-suburban-protestants legislation and Johnson's essential unfitness in his role as Majority Leader. Well, they're right about one thing; Johnson is a hack politician extraordinaire, and hopefully this ugly episode will make room for someone too bright to lie to a bunch of spies for Jesus. [Story Here]
Navy Exchanges Fire With Sexy Pirates: Two American ships, the USS Cape St. George and the USS Gonzalez (A guided missile cruiser and guided missile destroyer, respectively) came upon a 30 foot fishing boat towing several smaller skiffs this morning while in a Dutch-led patrol off the coast of Somalia. When the American craft moved in to board the Somali boats, they were fired upon by small arms and possibly an RPG launcher. The Navy fired back, wounding five and killing one with no American casualties. I had to read the article a couple of times first in order to giggle, and then I had to find this picture (this is what I imagine the lead pirate to have looked like) before I could really consider where the pirates went wrong. I think I've got it now, though; Their first mistake was probably firing AK-47s from a 30-foot boat at 300+ feet of American military hardware, packed to the gills with a terrifying array of missiles, artillery and, apparently, more conventional heavy machine guns. Interestingly enough, Piracy is actually on the rise around the world, especially on the coasts of East Africa (where there were 35 attacks last year) and in the South China Sea, where large-scale piracy against major shipping craft and, in one case, a racing yacht have become commonplace in recent years. Personally, I think it is time to declare a Global War on Sexy Piracy, if only to hear all of Rummy's iterations on the theme as he fails to do anything about it- "Worldwide Struggle With Extremely Provocative Maritime Thievery", anyone? [Story]
Cheeseburger in Paradise
Mexico was a bust this Spring Break '06, for a variety of reasons. A trip to the Baja with Tha Fam went horribly wrong. Dreams of sandy beaches and great seaside food gave way to days of huddling indoors as the 50 degree winds whipped the windows of the darkened, unheated house we were staying in, forcing water under the doors and leaving all of our clothes smelling dank. The first problem was planning- the planner of the trip, who shall remain unnamed, didn't bother to find out that Baja California Del Norte is, as a rule, cold in March. Quite cold, really, rarely climbing out of the mid-60s during the day. Also, Baja California Del Norte sucks, a collection of corrugated shacks clinging to the side of a cliff along a steep, rocky, unprotected coastline, with no culture of any sort, a complete lack of any kind of shopping (other than, of course, I Fuck on the First Date t-shirts) and shitty restaurants whose defining feature is the zeal of their employees in their attempts to coerce you to eat at their establishment, including (no joke) jumping in front of the car in order to entice you to park (for free!) outside of the joint. Should you get in, you will be met by the likes of this gentleman above, fat southwestern types who come down in droves to sand race on the dunes in heavily-modified trucks and ludicrously overpowered sandrails. Apparently, driving around in circles on sand is a sport, not just something that ataxia-addled meatheads do in the absence of a real life. The less said about it the better, really. We left early, and it is 80-some degrees here in Tucson.
Hopefully Dan will be down here soon and we will keep you guys posted.
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.
Batch O Goodies: Small victory for the First Amendment. And bongs.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - An Alaska high school violated a student's free speech rights by suspending him after he unfurled a banner reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" across the street from the school, a federal court ruled on Friday.
Joseph Frederick, a student at Juneau-Douglas High School in Alaska, displayed the banner -- which refers to smoking marijuana -- in January 2002 to try to get on television as the Olympic torch relay was passing the school. Friday's ruling by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco overturned a decision by a federal court in Alaska that backed Frederick's suspension and said his rights were not violated. "Public schools are instrumentalities of government, and government is not entitled to suppress speech that undermines whatever missions it defines for itself," Judge Andrew Kleinfeld wrote in the court's opinion. The court also cleared the way for Frederick to seek damages, saying Morse was aware of relevant case law and should have known her actions violated his rights.
Joe Fuckin Lieberman spends some quality time with Rush Limbaugh at a 50th anniversary party for National Review. Nuke him and support Democratic challenger Ned Lamont in the primaries.
Russ Feingold is on point these days, and CNN sucks in their coverage of the censure thing. What else is new?
Guardian: US postwar Iraq strategy a mess, Blair was told. In pretty blunt language, the British staff was honest about so much of the bad stuff, so long ago.
Israel is the New Athens: Time to gank some land already: Guardian: Israel sets four year deadline to draw final borders:
Mr Olmert, who is strongly favoured to win a general election in three weeks, told the Jerusalem Post that by 2010 he intended to "get to Israel's permanent borders, whereby we will completely separate from the majority of the Palestinian population and preserve a large and stable Jewish majority in Israel".
He did not specify the route of the new frontier, which he said would be decided after an "internal dialogue inside Israel" and consultations with Israel's foreign allies. But he repeated his intention to annex the main settlement blocks in the West Bank and retain control of the Jordan river area "as a security border", resulting in a Palestinian state entirely surrounded by territory under Israeli control.
The plan outlined by Mr Olmert would require the removal of about 60,000 Israelis from settlements deeper inside the West Bank but leave about 350,000 in the main blocks and East Jerusalem.
As they used to say in the Greek times, "Take it, bitch." The Thrasymachus principle of political power. Things haven't changed much since 431 BC: "History of the Peloponnesian War" by Thucydides: Chapter XVII: Sixteenth year of the war: The Melian Conference (aka The Melian Dialogue):
The Melians are a colony of Lacedaemon that would not submit to the Athenians like the other islanders, and at first remained neutral and took no part in the struggle, but afterwards upon the Athenians using violence and plundering their territory, assumed an attitude of open hostility. [Athenian generals] Cleomedes and Tisias, encamping in their territory with the above armament, before doing any harm to their land, sent envoys to negotiate. The Athenian envoys spoke as follows:
.....Athenians: For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretences - either of how we have a right to our empire because we overthrew the Mede, or are now attacking you because of wrong that you have done us - and make a long speech which would not be believed; and in return we hope that you, instead of thinking to influence us by saying that you did not join the Lacedaemonians, although their colonists, or that you have done us no wrong, will aim at what is feasible, holding in view the real sentiments of us both; since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
....Athenians: When you speak of the favour of the gods, we may as fairly hope for that as yourselves; neither our pretensions nor our conduct being in any way contrary to what men believe of the gods, or practise among themselves. Of the gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessary law of their nature they rule wherever they can. And it is not as if we were the first to make this law, or to act upon it when made: we found it existing before us, and shall leave it to exist for ever after us; all we do is to make use of it, knowing that you and everybody else, having the same power as we have, would do the same as we do. Thus, as far as the gods are concerned, we have no fear and no reason to fear that we shall be at a disadvantage.
Thucydides: Summer was now over. ...the Melians again took another part of the Athenian lines which were but feebly garrisoned. Reinforcements afterwards arriving from Athens in consequence, under the command of Philocrates, son of Demeas, the siege was now pressed vigorously; and some treachery taking place inside, the Melians surrendered at discretion to the Athenians, who put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and inhabited the place themselves.
Old boss, same as the new boss. Thanks, Leo Strauss. Power => Morality.
Dubai deal and racism: Raimondo: Dubai and Demagoguery. Juan Cole basically notes that, well, if you spend five years whipping up racist nationalism, it can sort of spill over in ways you don't expect. Not that it's happened before. The Big Lie eventually catches up with you. There's more good stuff in this one about Islamic theology & how it relates to Christians... in other words, the backstory that the 'hatemongers' never ever talk about.
The hatemongers are well known. Rupert Murdoch's Fox Cable News, Rush Limbaugh's radio program and its many clones, telebimbos like Ann Coulter, Evangelical leaders like Franklin Graham, Congressmen like Tom Tancredo, and a slew of far rightwing Zionists who would vote for Netanyahu (or Kach) if they lived in Israel-- Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes, Michael Rubin, David Horowitz, etc., etc. And finally, there are many Muslims who have an interest in whipping up anti-Islamic feeling. Ahmad Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress helped maneuver the US into a war against Iraq with lies about a Saddam-al-Qaeda connection and illusory WMD. The dissident Islamic Marxist group, the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) is now placing equally false stories about Iran in the Western press and retailing them to Congress and the Pentagon.
More goodies coming. I had to get the Melian thing in though.
Someone anonymous sent me the following story from a doctor inside the U.S. military's medical trauma operations center. I did a quick check and this has already appeared here and here on the Internet, as far back as December. Oh well, enjoy. According to BlackFive, the source is one "Scott D. Barnes, LTC, MC, USA". It's a harsh one, but decidedly all too real...
"Well, as promised, with this letter I have kept my commitment to do better in keeping you informed of what I was doing over here in Iraq. Since I had only sent one letter previously, with this update I have doubled my correspondence. Again, if there is anyone else you think would want to get a copy of this letter, please feel free to pass it along.
I had every intention of trying to get this out just around Thanksgiving but very soon after that holiday, things seemed to pick up at work and I have just been trying to keep pace with the influx.
November has been an interesting month. Certainly not as busy as October but patients would come more in waves than a steady stream. During the month of October, the 86th Combat Support Hospital (CSH) was the 3rd busiest trauma center in the world! You read that correctly, only the trauma centers in Miami and Los Angeles did more work that we did. Just think of all the trauma hospitals in New York, Chicago, Baltimore, Dallas, Philadelphia, Washington DC, and those in Europe, Asia, and Central/South America - most of which have 5-10 times the number of staff which we have here. It's amazing what you can get done when you eliminate the burdensome task of JCAHO (hospital regulating organization) and the exponentially expanding administrative tasks that have grown like Kudzu (weed that has overtaken much of the highways in the southeastern US) as they choke off efficient patient care. That and the fact that if you work 24 hours a day and live in the hospital while being locked down to about two square blocks seem to help us see more patients.
This is medical and surgical care practiced the way that many doctors dream. You see problems, diagnose the condition, quickly plan the operation, and you just do it. Patients don't wait, doctors don't wait, OR staff doesn't wait. It is amazing! We all love it and if it weren't for missing our families or dealing with the occasional rocket and mortar attack, most of us would not want to leave.
I have had the privilege of being adopted by the neuro team. We have world class care here. COL Ecklund is the chief of the neurosurgery program at Walter Reed, COL Ling is the only neuro-intensivist in the entire department of defense (he actually works at Johns Hopkins neurosurgical ICU teaching most of the military's critical care and neurology residents as they rotate through), and COL Mork is the anesthesiologist dedicated to the neurosurgical cases. As a number of head injuries involve eye injuries, it is a somewhat natural pairing. This has afforded me an incredible opportunity to be involved in quite a number of neurosurgical cases. COL Ecklund has shown me how to drill some burr holes in the skull and screw on plates to hold the bones after the case as well as closing up the scalp incisions over the craniotomy at the conclusion of the case. I can operate on the eyeball and use suture much finer than human hair, but to be a surgical assist to such a master as COL Ecklund has been inspiring.
These soldiers, civilians, and even prisoners have no idea how fortunate they are to have such skilled hands at work in their case.
More on the flip:
The integration of the whole team approach is one of the greatest factors in setting this experience apart. Within minutes of a patient hitting the doors of the emergency room you have a general surgeon, neurosurgeon, oral-maxillo-facial surgeon, urologist, orthopedic surgeon, and an eye surgeon all examining and conferring on the way to best care for a patient.
The nursing staff, the OR staff, the radiology techs..everything..it all just appears. Sort of like magic, a couple of doctors get called, word starts to get out and the machine starts working. The medics start drawing blood, the radiology techs arrive and start shooting pictures, the administrative personnel (yes we do have some!) start preparing the necessary paperwork, the anesthesia providers coming around like all of the other doctors, blood products from the blood bank starts to appear, and often the chaplain arrives. It really is beautiful to watch if you have a chance to sit back and really see what is going on.
Too often we don't see it because we are knees deep into the moment. We need to be reminded by those outside. Last month, the commander of one of the MP brigades asked to have a service for the OR/ER personnel that have meant so much to this unit over the duration of their deployment. This unit had been hit so hard week after week. Almost 40% of their members have been impacted by injuries. They had been such frequent fliers that we have become brothers in this struggle; the unit commander and sergeant major often join us in the operating room as we work on their men. This closeness and unity of purpose is not commonly seen between the medical corps (docs and the like) and the line units (real soldiers)...but in this setting we are brothers. These line units no longer see us as detached, primadonnas who sit in a luxury white hospital while they train in the mud and dirt. They see us in our environment and see the same faces when they come in on Monday morning as when they come in at midnight on Tuesday and again on Thursday night. They ask if we ever get any sleep and how we can keep going. My answer is always the same, "Sergeant, when you are on combat operations, when was the last time you slept and how do you keep going?"
When the unit Sergeant Major told me that they do it because they don't want to let down their buddy next to them because he is depending on that help and they do it because they know that if they get hurt, they feel sure that the medical machine will not let them down. I told him our answer was similar for how we can operate the way we do. I don't want to let down my neurosurgeon or my general surgeon who depend on me for helping with the eyes (a lot of the neurologic function in an unconscious patient comes from the eye exam and in a severely traumatized eye that can be difficult to asses even for an eye surgeon) and I don't want to let down that soldier who puts his life on the line in part because he put his faith in our ability to put him together if he gets broken.
We work two sides of the same street but when we meet it is under the most difficult circumstances. When those young MPs roll in after having been torn up by IEDs (improvised explosive devices) and their lives are in the balance the family pulls together. The unit leaders come into the OR and the jobs are less defined, you just look for something that needs to be done and you do it. One young sergeant was badly broken and rushed to the OR. The IED had done its intended job and shredded this courageous American everywhere that wasn't covered by body armor. He was dying, but we weren't going to let him go without a fight. He had no immediate eye injury, so I just went to work getting the blood and hanging it on the infusers since those that usually do this were otherwise occupied. We kept pouring unit after unit into him but he was loosing it as quickly as we were able to get it in. The trauma surgeon and the vascular surgeon cracked his chest and started going after his injuries to try to stop the hemorrhaging. His heart stopped a number of times. The trauma surgeon held his heart and kept squeezing to aid in circulation while the anesthesiologists were infusing the medications needed to restart the heart. The two unit commanders were right there voicing their support and praying as they were watching the team. Two major injuries were found in the carotid and subclavian artery but too much damage had been done too much blood had been lost, and too much time had passed before his injuries could be repaired. We went through 45 units of blood. His heart stopped 7 times and we were able to restart it 6 times. When it became clear that we would not win this battle and that this young sergeant had gone into that good night, we turned off the machines and monitors, the chaplain stepped forward, and the unit commanders, nurses and doctors closed into a circle and we asked for the Lord's mercy on his soul and for God's peace with the family that will soon find out what we already know. This hero paid the ultimate price while doing his country's bidding.
I walked out onto the hospital roof which has been my refuge after such cases. I usually stay closer to some cover because I don't want to give snipers any target practice but this time I went over to hang over the rail looking down into the parking lot/patient receiving area. This is where the men usually gather to wait for news on what happened to their buddies (we don't have a waiting room). I will never forget what I saw there. For the strength of the emotion but also because I have seen it now too many times.
About 30 soldiers hanging out in various groups, some talking, some joking, some smoking, some tossing a football, some catching a few winks, but just doing what waiting soldier do. LTC T (their commander) walked out to the group who immediately jumped up and gathered around the boss. I couldn't hear what was said from the roof, but I knew that commander had a difficult message to deliver. I didn't have to hear the words, these warriors' actions said it all. Some just there motionless, some grabbed their buddies and just let the tears run down their dirt-stained faces, others unable to contain their anger, went to find a wall and began hitting it. The commander and sergeant major moved through their guys, reaching out to each one with a hug or supportive arm. Sometimes I can put all the damage and suffering behind me; my years in medicine have introduced me to death and in some ways I can detach myself. But to see this effect on his brothers in arms, transformed my previously detached self and turned on my humanity. In the ER and the OR, I can be the professional doctor, but on the roof, I become a human again. Under the cover of darkness I feel the pain of what I've seen.
Once the sergeant's body was prepared, his fellow soldiers came through and paid their last respects. This will always be the hardest part of my time here, to see these rough men break down at the sight of their fallen comrade. These leaders and subordinates file past their brother, touching him and paying their respects, shedding their tears, hugging their surviving brothers. Then in a most amazing display of professionalism, they wipe their tears, put on their gear, and walk out of the hospital back to their unit and start their patrols all over again.
So the Sergeant Major asks how can we go without sleep and how can we operate for hours at a time. After seeing the heart of his soldiers, how can we not?."
Via a story in the BBC sent by a friend: "Guantanamo: Anatomy of a Hearing", we find the Sketchy Bush Era Tribunal court documents of one Guantanamo detainee, Feroz Ali Abbasi, who was captured in Afghanistan, and the government claims was part of an Al Qaeda cell defending the airport. The PDF includes (12 MB) a surreal yet frightening court transcript between a Military Tribunal quasi-super-judgity-entity-power-man (the Tribunal President), the Detainee, and his Personal Representative. It also has a lot of handwritten legal statements from Abbasi.
I personally believe that setting up some kind of parallel shadow military-judiciary structure can only lead to cartoonish super-villainy and a general sense that the Law is about as meaningless as an afternoon in detention. These documents certainly lean that way. They ought to be treated as Prisoners of War, not Alien Pods from the Great Quivering Space Monster, or whatever the fuck bizarre fantasy lies at the sinister heart of the Detainee Rendering machine.
Straight from deep inside the Legal Black Hole, I offer Abbasi's formal declaration that he is indeed, a Prisoner of War, with all the legal implications therein:
The net result is some kind of Kafkaesque Neo-McCarthyism with the tone of the Vice Principal from Hell giving you detention. Includes the memorable quote, as Abbasi questions the legal basis for the invasion of Afghanistan in international law, from a prepared statement:
Tribunal President: "Mr Abbasi your conduct is unacceptable and this is your absolute final warning. I don't care about International Law. I don't want to hear the words International Law again. We are not concerned with International Law. I am going to give you one last opportunity, for which I am being much more generous and perhaps I shouldn't, but I will give you one last opportunity to address the specifics on the summary of evidence."
This is followed by many handwritten pages, apparently by Abassi from the confines of his cell in Cuba. It reminded me of a guy stuck in detention, complete with flourishes of handwriting and sketched arrows:
(d) anyone charged with an offense is presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law; [a provision, it seems, America has conveniently forgotten.]
But it gets better: "BOING!" is written there in the margin, associated with the statement that
The manner in which petitioner has been treated in Guantanamo Bay, and the "tribunal" that has been organized to try him – described by another respected British jurist, Lord Steyn, as a court that is a "mockery of justice" and that "derives from the jumps of the kangaroo" – cannot pass muster under the most basic and fundamental description of due process.
Further down there, Abbasi states that "I contest that I am properly classified as an 'enemy combatant.'" Finally, then, I will wrap it up with this bit...
In fact the unfounded use of military force, commencing I believe on October 9th 2001, is merely a repeat of the yet again unfounded cruise [missile] bombings of The Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan, an ACT OF WAR I might add, after the Oklahoma bombing to which yet again Usama bin Laden was accused yet again without adequate evidence and yet again was unjustly attacked.
So, recent history has proven that the Terrorist United States of America has had an unjustifiable and unreasonable hate for the Islamic-Emirate-of-Afghanistan. Why so? The very words of your Commander-in-Chief reveal all:
"Crusade."
This point is made even more heinous by the subsequent point that Usama bin Laden possessed a fax line with the Terrorist American government. That though that fax line he was WARNED to the similar purport of, "The Americans are going to bomb in one month's time"! Knowledge only a handful could have possessed, who I would surmise within the upper echelons of the American government itself. Events were true to the news.
There is more to be read. The BBC report does not make clear his fate today. It's the Abassi view from inside the Legal Black Hole.
Check out this 50-state composite survey of whether Bush broke the law in the wiretapping scandal. It certainly breaks down along red/blue lines, but it is still good to see that, say 39% in Virginia think he broke the law, to only 36% who think he didn't.
We are this close to starting the apocalypse. Isn't that fabulous?!
Bush Adviser Foresees Iraq Violence Lull
WASHINGTON - President Bush's national security adviser said Sunday that Iraqi leaders had "stared into the abyss" and determined that sectarian violence was not in their interest.
Although bombings and other attacks have surged in the last week, Stephen Hadley expressed optimism in the light of statements from Iraqis who have condemned the attacks and pledged to move forward with building a unity government.
"It is a time of testing for Iraqis," Hadley said on CBS' "Face the Nation."
"They've stared into the abyss a bit, and I think they've all concluded that further violence, further tension between the communities, is not in their interest," he said.
The cumulative Iraqi death toll since the shrine situation reached at least 400 today. And yet again this is presented as evidence that "the terrorists are getting desperate." Thanks for that insight.
MySpace machinations. I thought this sounded eerily familiar, as adults spazz out about MySpace, now that the kids have literally nowhere to hang out in RealSpace anymore. Wired on it:
The profile the Hermitage, Pennsylvania, Hickory High School student bestowed on his principal was not kind. For "birthday" he listed "too drunk to remember." And for vital stats like eye and hair color he wrote, simply, "big" -- a poke at the educator's girth that he managed to weave into most of the 60-odd survey questions in Trosch's fictional profile: Do you smoke? "Big cigs." Do you swear? "Big words." Thoughts first waking up? "Too … damn … big."
The teen told some friends at school about the gag. Big mistake.
As a judge would later put it, "word of the parody … soon reached most, if not all, of the student body of Hickory High School," and the fake MySpace profile, along with several less nuanced commentaries crafted by other students, became a monster hit at the school. The administration banned student PC use for six days, canceling some classes, while they traced the profile to 17-year-old senior Justin Layshock, who promptly confessed and apologized.
"We grounded him and didn't allow him on the computer for two weeks," says Layshock's mother, Cherie Layshock. But the school had stronger medicine in mind. Layshock was suspended for 10 days, then transferred into an alternative education program for students incapable of functioning in a regular classroom.
A gifted learner who had been enrolled in advanced-placement classes and tutored other kids in French, Layshock spent the next month in a scaled-down three-hour-a-day program where a typical assignment saw students building a tower out of paper clips as a lesson in teamwork. The punishment led to an ACLU lawsuit that is ongoing, and garnered the school district a slew of critical stories in the local papers.
Wherein they make the point that (public) schools can't really control the speech of students at home. The concept of digital satire, ah, so attractive, the Siren Song of mocking bastards at school. Well I learned that lesson the hard way. Anyway.
Afghanistan is intrinsically rebellious, and that is pretty much all you need to know:
Afghan, Nato and US forces surrounded the main high security prison in Kabul yesterday with tanks after it was taken over by more than 1,500 Taliban and Al-Qaida prisoners during a violent riot. At least 30 prisoners were injured and unconfirmed reports said seven others were killed in fighting after inmates took two women prison guards hostage in protest at new regulations requiring them to wear uniforms.
Bursts of gunfire could be heard throughout the day from Pulicharkhi prison after the Afghan police rapid reaction unit, armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers, entered the complex in an attempt to prevent a mass break-out. Prisoners were heard chanting “Allah-o-Akbar” in between the firing.
Pulicharkhi, which holds around 2,000 prisoners, became notorious during Afghanistan’s Communist era with allegations of torture and secret executions. About 110 detainees held by the US at Guantanamo Bay are expected to be transferred there later this year.
The prisoners had allowed 70 women inmates to be moved to another part of the prison after storming into the female wing from their own. As night fell, negotiations announced by the Interior Ministry to end the stand-off were suspended. Security forces had yet to gain access to parts of the jail under the prisoners’ control.
“I have heard that prisoners have been injured. Taliban and Al-Qaida members from different countries are behind this unrest,” said the Deputy Justice Minister, Mohammad Qasim Hashimzai. “They still control the wing from where they had started the riot. They have demands; we are going to listen to what they want. If we cannot solve it through negotiations, we have our own options.”
If the United States and NATO cannot administer Kabul's main prison, are they really going to be able to check the heroin industry or even deal with (let alone attempt to dominate) the various heavily armed ethnic factions?
The Soviet Union was defeated here, bankrupting them. The British were defeated here (twice - perhaps thrice depending how you score it), expending a huge amount of cash from the India colony, and ultimately helping drag down British-Indian colonization. And now, NATO and the United States cannot control the Afghani equivalent of Abu Ghraib. To me, this is totally in keeping with the pattern of history.
After all, they've had opium since Alexander the Great stopped by. [maybe apocryphal, but sounds good].
And of course America's Iran paranoia is skating off into a dimension all its own. Google News 'Iran Nuclear' search:
Results 1 - 50 of about 64,400 for iran nuclear
A final note. Let me introduce a nice old map from the Great Game. Via Wikipedia's recommended Great Game history, a really subtle HongPong.com geopolitical illustration:
That's Persia in Blue. 1848. Good times. (Also note that Kuwait didn't exist)
RED SCARE, PART 4,394,480: ThinkProgress.org featured a video with a Fox News talking head, who informed us that Russian Spetznaz Teams smuggled Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction into Syria and the Bekaa Valley.
MCINERNEY: Well, I believe that — that [Saddam Hussein] had [WMD] and then the Russians convinced him, because they sent a team in, a Spetsnaz [Russian Special Forces] team in, and they moved those weapons into three locations in Syria and one into Bekaa Valley. And they did it very thoroughly. They were very professional. They were Spetsnaz with GRU. They knew exactly where all the material was, because they were preventing the inspectors from finding it. And then they had a brilliant what they call mass deroka – deception - campaign. When the Iraqi survey group didn’t find anything, then they spread throughout the capitals of Europe and the U.N: “See, there were no WMD.”
O’REILLY: So you believe that the Russians themselves moved the WMD’s?
MCINERNEY: Absolutely, absolutely.
Now this is bullshit, but it reflects how the new order of symbolic logic is being constructed this year. The general's threatening language must focus on Russia, because Russia is starting to make moves with HAMAS and Iran, plus people like McInerney surely see a need to finally kill Russia and steal their energy.
More realpolitik below the fold, but first let's look at the psychological effect of the information, rather than its truth value.
The everyday man on the street thinks "Iran equals The Nuclear" and therefore accepts what is happening. With Iraq, all it took was a small batch of defectors working for Ahmed Chalabi, a demonic press, and the ruling establishment to scare the shit out of this whole country. When you are held in fear, you unthinkingly fork over political power — more precisely, control over a kind of emotion that is pre-political power. The key to this power is found more in the id than the ego.
Generating psychological projection of fear onto Other groups is a crucial form of war propaganda — or psychological warfare performed on the domestic population, in some cases. The mental image of the WMDs becomes a source to project anger and anxiety towards. "We can't let them hit us" becomes a kind of mental crutch, colored goggles laid over the general sense of anxiety. It's not your fault, it comes from the outside, the government reassures us.
But don't think about Abu Ghraib, or any evidence the leadership is incompetent. Thoughts against the leadership endanger the information war! You are not smart or privileged enough to evaluate our performance. You cannot talk about military policy because only the Dark Priesthood (McInerney and his like) can truthfully tell YOU what is going on. This is the only safe way to feel authority and information.
Here in Minnesota, the Republicans are also testing the new "Midwest Heroes" ads from the RNC's 527 ad machine. These ads say: you must believe that distrusting the leadership equals making a dead soldier's mother cry. You must psychologically project motherhood into trusting the authority of the war-makers. (it's quite the cynical inversion of Cindy Sheehan, I have to say) These "mother == trust in war" and "father == the Bush aura of fear" concepts will surely play quite well, all year long, upon millions of fearful and angry American minds. As Progress for America Voter Fund admits:
Some politicians.... policies thwart the ability of American families to support the War on Terror, keep more of what they earn, provide a safe environment for educating their children,... [primal father?]
TV pundits like McInerney perform the intellectual carpet-bombing of absolute gibberish, week after week, so that the average drooling Fox viewer, rendered into a narcotized state from all the whooshing colors and racist theme music, is left with a hazy, angry impression that the fuckers are trying to bring us down. (This is assisted by frequently replaying 9/11 clips on a split screen: video masochism => longing for authority)
The Freudian Trip:
It is quite possible that the average viewer's sense of ego is deactivated or degraded. Their primitive id emotions can be pushed up and down. They experience a kind of 'primal father' longing for order and authority; a need to experience order, sadism, if you will. (Freud thought of Moses as an excellent, benevolent Primal Father figure)
There are shadows in the dark. Only the light can drive this back, das volken are the true people of this country. We are clean, they are dirty... And around and around it goes.
Watch "On the streets of America 3" for the ultimate effect of these things.... Russia's actual role below the fold - this is what they're actually scared of....
Russia is going to do its own thing, and the hawks marketed to morons on Fox will perform Threat Construction to create an aura of fear and instability. Thus, we are soothed on our steady march towards doom. (Thanatos, the sublimated death wish instinct, might really be at the heart of the war, in producing an attraction to achieving a state of calm: the afterlife? Millennialism?)
Ok, ok.... That was a little nuts. But I'm trying to describe the general state of emotional manipulation these days. We need to stick to cold realism to understand more of what's really happening, beyond the tormented imagination of a Fox viewer.
So, more realistically, George Friedman lays it out in a Stratfor email: "The Middle East and Russia's New Game":
And this brings us to Moscow's invitation to Hamas. There are a number of reasons to make the invitation -- the single most important of which was that the United States did not want it to be done. ...... between the lines, the Russians wanted to deliver two messages to Washington.
The first was that Moscow no longer regards itself as a junior partner to the United States in foreign policy -- and, in fact, doesn't regard itself as a partner at all. Second, they wanted to make it clear that, just as Washington is making trouble for Russia in its own periphery, the Russians are equally capable of making trouble in areas that are of fundamental interest to the United States. Moscow's message is this: Do not assume that the failure of Russia to exercise its foreign policy options means that the Russians have no foreign policy options. Nothing Russia is getting from the United States in economic relations compensates for the geopolitical harm the United States is doing to Russia. In other words, this is about 2005, not 1995. A lot happened in the last decade, most of it not good for the Russians. The rules are changing.
There is another, more directly strategic reason for the move. Russia has, and has always had, strategic interests in the Middle East. Given the decay of Russia's strategic position in the formerly Soviet region, these interests -- which today include ties to Syria and a potential partnership with Iran on nuclear enrichment -- have become more important rather than less. The U.S. penetration of Central Asia, the Baltics and Ukraine cannot simply be countered in these areas; it is only by challenging the United States in the Middle East that Moscow can divert American attention from areas of great interest to the Russians. It is not just a matter of bandwidth -- meaning that the more trouble the United States has in the Middle East, the less time it has for the former Soviet Union. It is also the case that if Russia is to contain the American presence along its southern frontier, having influence and a presence to the rear of this region -- in the Middle East -- gives it leverage over some of the former Soviet republics.
......Russia's willingness to speak to Hamas creates a new dynamic in the Muslim world. Syria and Iran are seeking "great power" support against the United States. ....By inviting Hamas and possibly opening a channel between Hamas and the Israelis, Russia is positioning itself to become a mediator in other disputes, and to walk away with relationships that the United States has been unable to manage.
Given the robustness of Russia's arms industry, which is much more vital and advanced than is generally understood, the Russians could return to their role as arms provider to the region and patron of governments that are hostile to the United States. The situation from 1955 to 1990 was a much more natural geopolitical dynamic than the current situation, in which Russia is really not present in the region. Russia is a natural player in the Middle East.
Remember also that Hamas is very close to Saudi Arabia, with which Russia has an intensely competitive relationship in the energy markets. And then there is Chechnya. The Russians have long charged that "Wahhabi" influence was behind the Chechen insurgency as well as insurgencies in Central Asia. In the Russian mind, "Wahhabi" is practically a code word for "Islamist militants," including al Qaeda. The Russians also feel that, while the Americans have forced the Saudis to provide intelligence on al Qaeda, they have not elicited similar aid on the issue of the Chechens. In other words, Moscow perceives the United States not only as having neglected to help Russia on Chechnya, but as actually hindering it.
So what's the lesson? 2006 will have a certain Retro-Cold War tint to it. There may be a kind of vintage comeback for "Daisy" style political ads. Iran fits in as a kind of annex to the Evil Empire. And your id is subject to psychological warfare.
Just another Wednesday afternoon in the Information Age...
This is what movies are supposed to do.-61.jpg)
We can all agree that Hollywood lacks any guts nowadays. Thus, the best "movie" movie of the year would have to shatter all boundaries of taste and convention — make you laugh, cry. Only Gary Busey and Billy Zane have the guts to get us out of this cinema funk. And they have.
Valley of the Wolves: Iraq (Turkish: Kurtlar Vadisi Irak) is hands-down one of the coolest movies I have seen in a long time. It will be a cult classic, it will cause some angry Christian riots in Cleveland. It's that good. According to Wikipedia, it is the most expensive Turkish movie ever. Actual plot details there - mine are purely visual impressions.
It's more cliche than an episode of Knight Rider, more crass than Jerry Bruckheimer, and it owes debts to Full Metal Jacket, Lethal Weapon, Hong Kong, Kurosawa, Ford's westerns, and every late 80's action flick on FX or USA. Check the website for an English trailer (WMV - ok on Mac) – because the version I downloaded was almost totally Turkish.
Set aside the canned "anti-Semitic" reaction. Busey really has no more than ten minutes of screen time as the evil Jewish doctor stealing organs from Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and shipping them to Israel. But someone had to play this unique, absurdly comic villain, finally bringing the unreal Abu Ghraib universe into movie culture through wicked Dr. Frankenstein-style High Camp. (Abu Ghraib really is this pointless & random, I think is Busey's subtext)
Billy Zane is Sam William Marshall, the Coalition Provisional Authority messiah-figure / piano-playing murderous psychotic, usually clad in white. He poses as a "white hat" for the savages: get it? (I think Zane figured he owed the Middle East an outlandish villain after The Mummy - fair's fair)
Zane has an entourage of evil mercenaries – the khaki vests, buzz cuts and machine guns are a fair visual representation of a typical Blackwater Personal Security Detail. In the English teaser he seems to say "When the Turkmen are done, the Arabs are next," and the movie mainly follows the travails of the Turkmen minority in northern Iraq.
I got Valley off a Turkish BitTorrent site (here's the Torrent - it works, be patient). For a little clip hit this link and uncompress it. In that early scene, Zane, his mercenaries and the U.S. soldiers raid the Turkish headquarters in Iraq. He tips over a Turkish flag – cue the dramatic music. They lead the personnel out to the truck with bags over their heads, and in the film version, an officer writes a letter, and puts it and a Turkish flag in a bag, and shoots himself. The raid is true, the suicide, not.
I downloaded a version with poor sound, and extreme flickering (the frames are not synced - it strobes really bad). Also, everything was dubbed into Turkish, including Zane and Busey. No subtitles — though the English-language trailer on the website features their lines in English, so hopefully if when the movie is released in the U.S., it will be a little easier to follow.
This film is awesome, and it would be a huge hit in the states. It reminded me of Reservoir Dogs, Apocalypse Now, the insanity of the news, Bollywood, Rambo, The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Natural Born Killers, Lord of the Rings, the Chuck Norris flick Delta Force, a bit of The Matrix (roof escape), anything about Compton. Also reminded me of the book "The Ugly American" - as there is a scene with Zane handing out toys and food to the Iraqis while the media captures it.
(and of course Battle of Algiers and Lawrence of Arabia. And Xbox's "Call of Duty 2": the bazaar levels)
A lot of people die in "Valley of the Wolves." They are killed by a suicide bomber, crazed mercenaries with rocket launchers, jumpy U.S. troops, Zane himself. I took quite a few screenshots and so I will lay out a bit of the action. This movie would be huge in the United States – and it might make Rumsfeld's head explode in anger.
And I'm sorry, it's fun. It's revolting. It's utterly insane and packed with tons of Hollywood cliches, starting with the Noir venetian blind trick in the first minute.
Go look at the IMDB comments for a sampling of reactions. A Turk is pissed because the heroes are gangsters. How many ways could this movie make you angry? That's what makes art fit a certain place and time...
A little more of the cast:
Badass Sheikh Abdurrahman Halis Kerkuki. He intervenes in a beheading-video-in-progress and rides a white horse.
Strikingly similar-looking to the Battle of Algiers guy.
The two-bit Turkish gangsters who save the day in their black suits and white shirts. Tarantino heroes, without a doubt.
Leila, the young woman whose groom is killed in the wedding at the beginning of the movie (see English trailer). She kicks a lot of ass.
I started taking screenshots after the flick started, after the initial raid. Spoiler warning: this outlines a lot of what happens. Don't look at this if you want to be surprised. Including dramatic ending. Although I couldn't fully understand it.
There are a few dozen pictures on the flip. By "Turkish guys" some might actually be Turkmen. Again, I had no dialogue when watching.
Some kind of dedication ceremony. Dear Leader poster in back there.
Prisoners (including those captured from the wedding) are deposited at Abu Ghriab. Busey is furious that the mercenary killed a bunch of the Iraqis in the container. Yes, those are the coolers for Israel.
A dramatic conversation between Zane and the Turkish guy I couldn't understand. There was a bomb under Zane's chair. Zane is essentially holding the crowd of children hostage while the bomb is defused.
The evil mercenaries wasting innocent people. Rambo, anyone?
Sniper & suicide bombing type situation. Lots of wounded soldiers & innocent people.
More of the Abu Ghraib situation. German Shepherd & Lynnie England-style. The beginning of this scene is really shocking.
Public Relations - handing out food and goodies as media watches. Hence the subtle "white hat" metaphor.
Dramatic destruction of a minaret with priest inside.
Ethnic cleansing / forcible displacement of Turkmen, I think, as U.S. soldier watches, confused. There is a monologue of sorts, and I distinctly picked out something like "and then what of the Arabs?" This is pretty much the only place you will hear about the ethnic cleansing of minorities in Iraq – which alarms the Turks.
Sweet religious ceremony. This was really cool.
STAB!
Hostage video in progress. Who is that actor??
Zane has a piano moment.
Widow seeks wisdom from clerics and has a dangerous confrontation, handled calmly
Climactic battle - she is good with a knife. Turkish guys gotta save the day.
Classic Hollywood / Shakespearean ending / Nose ring symbolizes lost love & such.
Just another Day in the Valley.
I am sorry if looking at this spoiled some parts of the movie for you. Who knows how long it will take for this to get onto an American screen? If it never does, we are the poorer for it. This is great Saturday afternoon popcorn fare. I just want to actually understand the dialogue.
Just amazing. Just another day in the valley of the wolves.
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.
Lots of people in Minnesota have seen these "Midwest Heroes" ads by now. They remind us of how Al Qaeda in Iraq is trying to destroy America. Well done. Who is plunking the cash down? The "Progress for America Voter Fund," run by such luminaries as Ken Mehlman, the director of the Republican National Committee, and various Swift Boat conspirators.
Nick Coleman called it the Swift Boating of Iraq, otherwise Swift Boating in reverse. Also a bit here. Hindrocket applauds that "My own guess is that liberals aren't afraid that the Midwest Heroes are wrong. They're afraid they're right."
So the oddity is that on my boss' radio show, one of the guys, Stephenson I think, was on there, and of course Janecek praised him, while Lambert was more critical. But what sort of media transaction is this? Why is this message an ad buy? Who is pushing it?? Well the director of the Republican Party. That simple.
PFA has some really nice Republican attack ads from 2004 on their site. "Why do we fight?" is cheesy. "Finish it" has a really funny part at the end. "John Kerry has a 30 Year Record of Cuts in Defense and Intelligence and Endlessly Changing Positions on Iraq. Would You Trust Kerry up against these fanatic killers. President Bush didn't start this war, but he will finish it."
Which I think is especially amusing because he sure as fuck won't finish it. Well, it would be amusing if it weren't a national disaster. My point is that this is a 527-style wing of the Republican attack machine. And they are using Minnesota as their test TV market for November.
They offer this on MidwestHeroes.com and the PFAVoterFund site:
About PFA Voter Fund
Some politicians are working overtime to push their failed policies on America and distort the accomplished public policy records of conservative leaders across this nation. These policies thwart the ability of American families to support the War on Terror, keep more of what they earn, provide a safe environment for educating their children, and continue to expand employment and grow the economy.
Progress for America Voter Fund ("PFA-VF") is a conservative issue advocacy organization dedicated to setting the issue record straight about these critical issues.
Here are the goals of the PFA-VF:
1. Level the playing field on issue advertisements — it may not be possible out raise even George Soros alone, but the PFA Voter Fund must try to reduce the lopsided advertising advantage that liberal 527s have on the campaign trail today.
2. Reinforce the messages of conservatives across the nation -- we have messages we know will work and energize the base; we just need the resources to deliver these messages.
As a diverse coalition of concerned citizens, nonprofit organizations, and other players in the political process, PFA-VF is dedicated to educating the American people regarding the public policy positions of candidates for federal, state and local office and mobilizing conservative voters. These activities provide the American people with the information they need to see through the misleading public policies and campaign themes of liberal politicians.
Well there ya go. Good times. If only we could get George Soros to keep ruining everything, liberals could finally take over.
Hello to the rest of America, this is like $10 billion dollars in November's generic Republican attack ads distilled to about 30 seconds. Set your brains on "drool" and prepare to be bombarded 600,000 times.
It doesn't get any more pure than this. But wait!! Look at all this fucking progress in Iraq!!!! Thanks MidwestHeroes, for giving us this Stuff that The Bush Hater Liberal Media Wants To Hide!!
“Iraqi Students Now Carry Laptops That Connect At Internet Cafes To The World’s Web Sites And Libraries Where Before They Had To Rely On Pencils, Slide Rules And Outdated -- Often Censored -- School Textbooks.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Iraq Is Laying The Groundwork For A Self-Sustaining, Market-Based Economy.” “Only a year-and-a-half after regaining its full sovereignty, Iraq is laying the groundwork for a self-sustaining, market-based economy which can serve as an engine of growth for that nation and for the broader Middle East.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Iraq’s economy is expected to grow by nearly 4% this year and accelerate to nearly 17% in 2006.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“Per capita income should soon exceed $1,000 -- nearly double the level in 2003.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
“More than 30,000 new businesses have been registered and many have set up shop.” (Robert M. Kimmitt, Op-Ed, “Iraq’s Post-Saddam Economy,” The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/05)
There are also lots of Department of Defense Press releases, and quotes from an editorial in the Indianapolis Star!!
This is some kind of joint project of the "Families United for our Troops and their Mission", whatever precisely that is. I started drifting over their blog and found this chestnut.
Monday, February 06, 2006: Information Warfare
Information warfare, what’s the big deal? Gold Star families are working to tell their stories to anyone willing to listen, including the media. One Gold Star mom said this of her husband, “He would talk to the moon about our son”. One reason we tell their stories is to keep the memories of our loved ones alive. Another reason is to continue to serve our country.
The battle continues to be waged, at home and abroad. Every war is fought on two fronts. Every war must be won on two fronts-the battlefield and the field of public opinion. President Lincoln set down the perimeters of the battle when he said, “With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.”
We will win the War on Terror, on the battlefield. We must continue to share the successes of the war in the media so that the public opinion is not swayed for defeat by misinformation on the home front.
“The American Enterprise” March, 2006, published an article written by John Guardiano. The article entitled, Information Warfare, stated: “Like most veterans of the war, I am amazed and dismayed at the relentlessly negative—and very misleading—media portrait of our efforts.” He cited this example, “Anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan is a media cause celebrity; but Diane Ibbotson, Debby Argel Bastion, and countless other mothers who have lost their sons (and daughters) and continue to support the war are ignored. This despite the fact that they are more articulate and serious –minded than Sheehan, with personal stories that are just as compelling.”
So we “soldier on” in the cause that our loved ones gave their lives for, to win the battle on the home front that our Armed Forces are winning on the battlefields. We will continue to tell the stories of America’s fallen heroes, of veterans service and sacrifice, of the resolve of families who support the military and their mission.
Posted by Diane Ibbotson @ 11:55 AM
And Ken Mehlman is master of Information Operations.
...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.
"My Gun Doesn't Even Have a Safety"
Dick Cheney Strokes his Artillery
A news item more perfect than I could have dreamed up on a good day, via CNN.com:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and wounded a companion during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, spraying the fellow hunter in the face and chest with shotgun pellets.
What can I even say to this? Clearly the man's political and personal styles are similar, something along the lines of "shoot first..." At least he has just become the first one of the architects of the Iraq War to have ever fired a gun at another human being. It appears that the wounded man is a millionaire Austin attorney named Harry Whittington who has been active in Texas Republican politics since the 1950s. Though the incident could not immediately be confirmed as karmic, it does not appear to be fatal. Whittington, according to the ranch's owner, a Mr. Armstrong (I skimmed it, so sue me) was "peppered pretty good", something that, according to Mr. Armstrong, "happens from time to time" presumably because Cheney cannot go too long between expressions of his bloodlust. What else could be to blame for this? Rap music? Terrorists? Maybe Mr. Whittington's Bush-Cheney '04 check was not supplemented by the usual soft money donations from business associates? Who knows? Knowing Cheney, any mention of the incident will be disappeared before the paper hits the stands tomorrow morning.
Jealous, Anyone?
Here's where I had brunch today, at the lovely Arizona Inn here in Tucson, Arizona. Right in the middle of this rather poorly-kept desert city, a fantastic 1930 resort oasis. I had a Reuben, my darling girlfriend had the club sandwich and we took a walk around the lush grounds afterwards to work off the mayo and thousand islands. It was about eighty degrees out today, cloudless and dry, and I walked around the Fourth Avenue Bike Fair and watched a guy on a Hayubusa put down 186hp on a mobile dyno- cool. I am currently blogging (now that I am blogging, do I have to bitch about the term blogging?) from out-of-doors, on the patio of my place. With the whorled ribbons of incense and meth smoke entwining around me, my creative juices are set flowing in this, the portion of the year where the desert turns from foe to friend and the angry sun becomes the sustainer of lives of leisure. Leisure is kind of the theme in the coming months or so, as I am taking trips to the Baja Peninsula and, for the first and probably last time, Las Vegas, Nevada.
When not traveling, though, I will be here, planted at my laptop (or "Enlightenment Disseminator" as I like to call it) and bringing you the best in wastes of your time and mental capacity.
"Before I slide I'm gonna leave you this jewel/even mechanics walk around with they tools/It's The Militia"
-Freddie Foxxx
Seen on the Street of Tucson (click for larger image)
fin.
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?
I have to get my wisdom teeth pulled at 11 AM. Jane Cat has a damaged right ear. Apparently poor thing got a hematoma, or a separation of skin & cartilage, as a consequence of an infection. Makes the ear go off to an angle.
So there will be no updates from me for a day or two. Perhaps one of our recent contributors might. Perhaps not. That is the nice thing about the internet, you don't really have to give a shit if you don't want to.
One of the nice things about tooth surgery is the Vicodin. Ironically, one of the nice things about the War on Terror is how it defeated the War on Drugs by making regional post-mujahideen warlords our key allies. And their primary industry is controlling and exporting the same varieties of opiates that I'm about to be awarded for my tooth surgery.
So I am putting up this totally sweet map of opium poppy cultivation, two years into the War on Terror. Note that the dark red sections are more than 50% opium cultivation. This is Freedom, everyone.
One of my favorite maps of all time:
More Afghanistan industry heroin tracking from the UNODC here. Big pimpin, spinnin cheese.
Today's News of the Weird by Chuck Shepherd:
Recently opened archives in Moscow show that in the 1920s, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered his top animal breeding scientist to create interspecies "super warriors." Stalin's half-men, half-apes would be "invincible," "insensitive to pain" and "indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.
Well this spurred me down the strange path of gibberish and esoterica on the Internet about the mysterious projects of the Soviet Union. One elaborate story about Soviet electromagnetic research leading to scalar EM weapons was quite an exotic tale. Soviet weather control, applied Tesla Death Ray stuff. It's kind of like Pop Sci Fi from the Cold War, Red Dawn meets electrical engineering. For example, take "Historical Background of Scalar EM Weapons" by Lt. Col. T.E. Bearden (retd.), 1990, which relates
The peculiar "nuclear flashes" seen by the Vela satellites in September 1979 and December 1980 could have been due to a testing of a scalar EM howitzer in the pulsed exothermic mode. In the mode, scalar EM pulses meet at a distance, where their interference produces a sharp electromagnetic explosion (hence the "flash", very similar to the initial EMP flash of a nuclear explosion. Even in the vacuum of space, such an explosive eruption of energy from within the local spacetime vacuum itself may be expected to lift matter from the Dirac sea, producing a plasma. Prompt absorption and re-radiation of energy from this sudden plasma may be expected to present nearly the same "double peak" profile as does a nuclear explosion. This was the profile presented by the flashes. Note that the second flash detected was apparently of an "explosion" primarily in the infrared, almost certainly ruling out a conventional nuclear event. It does not rule out, however, pulsed distant holography using pumped EM giant time-reversed wave transmitters.
He also says that the Challenger explosion was caused by Soviet energy weapons. It is really a compelling kind of story, but of course I'll trust it as far as I can throw it. Also offers this:
In the late 1960's, Lisitsyn reported that the Soviets had broken the "genetic code" of the human brain. He stated the code had 44 digits or less, and the brain employed 22 frequency bands across nearly the whole EM spectrum. However, only 11 of the frequency bands were independent. This work implies that, if 11 or more correct frequency channels* can be "phase-locked" into the human brain, then it should be possible to drastically influence the thoughts, vision, physical functioning, emotions, and conscious state of the individual, even from a great distance.
It may be highly significant that
(1) up to 16 of the giant Soviet woodpecker carriers have been observed by Beck and others to carry a common, phase-locked 10-Hz modulation, and
(2) such a 10-Hz signal has been demonstrated by Beck, Rauscher, Bise, and others to be able to physically entrain or "phase-lock" the human brain, if stronger than the Schumann resonance of the Earth's magnetic field.
This, in turn, leads to Total Conspiracy on the old tinfoil hat - schizophrenic model. But who can deny the mystique of Soviet energy weapons scientists in some secret military city, hunched over their experiments, trying to extract energy from the ether, playing chess and swilling vodka on break? Why not? And what about how the Soviets cooked the U.S. Embassy in Moscow with lots of microwave radiation, the twisted bastards? (this is pretty weird, medical studies of State Dept. staff and Moscow radiation)
And the terrible stories about radioactive contamination around the USSR are also part of this weird backstory to the nuclear apocalypse of the cold war.
Presenting: Stalin's Plan: Neo-monkey-humanoids and Tesla Weapons:
Ok I feel silly right now. But just think: what if the Russians are applying their considerable SAM and directed energy expertise towards Iran? Surely, if Iran would pay, Russia would be down with it.
This guy says that the US military is experimenting with energy weapons that manipulate Iraqis in Iraq. Sounds fanciful, but hey, when in Babylon, do crazy shit like Nebuchadnezzar, right?
And don't forget the classic story of Tesla and the Tunguska Explosion.
One final tidbit: check out the mysterious HAARP, some kind of Alaskan energy device that the U.S. military has set up to muck around with the ionosphere or something. And, um, someone blamed Hurricane Katrina on it. Which goes to show that all this shit about electromagnetic technology is a really great wildcard for any given conspiracy theory. CONTRAILS ARE REAL!!!
A quick tour of goodies mostly from DailyKos. Via here and here, we discover that Joe Lieberman was the first person in the whole damn building to jump to his feet and applaud Bush's comments on Iraq. What the fuck? (the comic is mine - I need to offer something to match Jon tonight)
Stick up for photography in public places, it's your right: Australian snappers to defy police ban - NEWS.com.au. Via Slashdot.
Why we spend $400,000,000,000 EVERY YEAR: Raimondo checks out 'Why We Fight', a really sweet sounding documentary about the Military Industrial Complex, starring Richard Perle and Billy Kristol, Karen "Hey I saw the Office of Special Plans" Kwiatkowski, good ol' Chalmers Johnson, McCain, and other stars of the heady days of 2003-2004 spoofed intelligence wars. Also talks about the pro-war thinktank matrix and how the military industrial complex spreads cash around many congressional districts, to keep on Going and Going. Good old Eisenhower:
"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence – economic, political, even spiritual – is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
Because pressing 'Delete' is not really the best way to exonerate your SMTP-based crimes against America: Fitzgerald thinks someone is tampering with the White House email logs pertaining to the Valerie Plame scandal. Well done guys.
CNN Money: Visions of Future Google. Bankrupt, or the entire media, or else God & consciousness in your DNA. Why not?
Easy Cowboy:
Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports
By Kevin G. Hall
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.
(Via DailyKos) Also from the Kos, in TX-22, Tom DeLay just can't pull cash like he used to:
Rep. Tom DeLay has just $150,000 more in the bank than challenger Democrat Nick Lampson, the most recent election filings show.
DeLay's campaign committee reported having $1.44 million on hand and Lampson's campaign $1.29 million, according to year-end reports that were filed late Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission. The reports include all funds received up to Dec. 30, 2005, and also include a swing-for-the-fences fundraising dinner in Houston for DeLay with Vice President Dick Cheney on Dec. 5. DeLay's office called the fundraiser "the most successful of the congressman's career."
"In one night alone, the congressman took in more than $500,000," said campaign spokeswoman Shannon Flaherty. "It was a very strong fourth quarter."
Keith Olbermann rips apart Bill O'Reilly. And Chris Matthews is still telling absolute horseshit about Domestic Spying.
Augh I am bored of this hack shit but maybe someone cares. Thank you DailyKos.
This post is spilling all over the place. I want to get this stuff out there for this week, which will surely be an interesting one for me personally, and probably the rest of the world as well.
Misc bits: Alternet sets up The Echo Chamber to track what's cracking on the Left. Their website is set up really well. BillMonk will do all these mysterious things to split restaurant tabs for you and keep track of cash that people owe other people socially.
Because Spin can stop global warming: NY Times: Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him.
Vote for the 2006 Bloggies awards.
Time to Drink like there's no tomorrow: Dear Leader will have to explain himself on Tuesday then. Probably the usual batch of veiled threats towards Muslims and promises of eschatology-based improvements for the everyday nuclear family. China is building a Tokamak fusion reactor apparently. I wish we would have the guts to try stuff like that these days.
An important internet advisory not to shave your ass hair.
Improbable visit: A Canadian-based Iranian named Hossein Derakhshan, of Hoder.com, is on his way to go see what's happening in Israel, cutting through all these layers of intrigue. Good for him.
Hillary's war pandering is sickening. Raimondo is right. Sy Hersh is saying there are American covert ops going on in Iran. Via DefenseTech.org, a really hilarious discussion of nuclear targeting technology that would hypothetically be involved in an insane first strike.
A return to Global Guerrilla theory and fourth generation warfare. I am not going to elaborate some complete 21st Century Clauswitzian doctrine. But I will say that current American military doctrine is pathetically outdated, poorly led, and really doesn't even recognize its own roots in the guerilla tactics of the Revolutionary War (and KTCA's sweet portrayal in Liberty! lately have reminded me of this).
I think that Global Guerrillas is a site full of useful information, even though its love of buzzwordery gets a little annoying. There is a glaring need for a less stupid jargon around this whole field, and GG is good stab at the problem. Certainly the connection between the 'Open Source' model of software development, and the curious 'bazaar' of violent action in Iraq is really interesting. Consider "The Bazaar of violence in Iraq," "The Bazaar's Open Source Platform," "Target: The Fallujah TAZ [Temporary Autonomous Zone]," "A Shadow OPEC," "Guerrilla Entrepreneurs" (especially), "Weak, failed and collapsed states," "Iraq's security system meltdown" featuring swarming tactics, the "Loyalist Paramilitaries" option (which sucks), based on "Primary Loyalties," "Homemade Microwave weapons." Also useful: "SWARM: Fuel and Oil Disruption in Iraq." And the Open Source War.
One really interesting tie-in from T.E. Lawrence "of Arabia" about the value of "Partial vs. Complete System Disruption." The lesson: Throwing monkey wrenches into the system is a better way to weaken the enemy than outright destruction, because attempting to restore a damaged system (or complete an impossible goal, i.e. 'democratizing Iraq') really saps the energy of the occupier over the long term. Lawrence and the Arabs hassled the Turks to pin them down without forcing a retreat, because if the Turks retreated from Arabia they would go fight the British farther north. Far better to harass them, tie them up in the desert, and still get freedom of movement, as they are distracted by defending their rail lines. Sweet.
And by the way, thanks also for "AL QAEDA'S GRAND STRATEGY: SUPERPOWER BAITING". Correct, sir.
I am opposed to fanatical visions of militaristic conquering, installing 'rule sets' and expecting some kind of 'global sys-admin force' to come in and generate compliant countries. What the hell am I talking about? Thomas Barnett's vision of The Pentagon's New Map, which I read and it scared the shit out of me. William Lind, a paleoconservative expert of fourth-generation warfare, explains why this is a hellish idea.
Yet I fear that the USAID/IRI/NED are the sort of evolving foreign policy complex that wants to do just this crazy kind of shit. What? Where? Look at Haiti to see Barnett's vision in action, I would say.
Suspicious actions in Haiti: I don't really know what the hell is happening in Haiti, but it seems shady, and it seems that sketchy international organizations like the International Republican Institute, some bizarre shadow branch of the United Nations called the United Nations Office for Project Services, USAID and others are attempting to cement the rule of mean anglicized elites in Haiti right now.
According to Anthony Fenton, a Canadian independent journalist, on Democracy Now! there was a conspiracy between the U.S., Canadian officials and others to depose Aristide. And apparently an Associated Press writer was on the take with the National Endowment for Democracy, a sketchy as hell organization. Check out that interview for some serious insanity.
Also check out InTheNameofDemocracy.org which is a new group monitoring the global shadow groups like NED, IRI and USAID's various tentacles.
There is a broad outline here of these huge organizations having funds channeled into them from the CIA, State Department and nasty corporations. Basically, it looks like a spinning sawblade of Washington-consensus foreign policy, managing the little countries under a new Monroe Doctrine. Right-wing Cubans are involved. There was a really complex yet enlightening article in the NY Times Sunday about how the IRI is sort of a shadow government-forming thing that essentially helped get Aristide deposed.
To analyze how far the Iranian Bomb is along, check out these posts at ArmsControlWonk.com, very good. How Close is Iran? Part 2: The Missiles. Shorter: Don't Panic.
Lurking Koppel: Ted Koppel, of all people, pops up to make some salient points about the horrible dynamics of TV news in the NY Times:
Most particularly on cable news, a calculated subjectivity has, indeed, displaced the old-fashioned goal of conveying the news dispassionately. But that, too, has less to do with partisan politics than simple capitalism. Thus, one cable network experiments with the subjectivity of tender engagement: "I care and therefore you should care." Another opts for chest-thumping certitude: "I know and therefore you should care."
Even Fox News's product has less to do with ideology and more to do with changing business models. Fox has succeeded financially because it tapped into a deep, rich vein of unfulfilled yearning among conservative American television viewers, but it created programming to satisfy the market, not the other way around. CNN, meanwhile, finds itself largely outmaneuvered, unwilling to accept the label of liberal alternative, experimenting instead with a form of journalism that stresses empathy over detachment.
It's worth looking back to January 20, 1980 for a moment, when the election of Ronald Reagan somehow transformed itself into the release of the Iranian hostages. "You could see then that the fix was in, somehow," as someone older than me once put it. So was there an "October Surprise" arrangement that brought this about, a secret conspiracy between Reagan's political campaign, and the newly arrived radicals in Tehran? Well, Robert Perry says that the was a conspiracy, and he's been kicking around this one for a while. (And guess what, I bet Iran will do something exciting this October, too)
The Imperium's Quarter Century By Robert Parry. January 20, 2006
If there is a birth date for today’s American Imperium, it would be Jan. 20, 1981, exactly a quarter century ago, when Ronald Reagan was sworn in as President and Iran released 52 American hostages under circumstances that remain a mystery to this day.
The freedom of the hostages, ending a 444-day crisis, brought forth an outpouring of patriotism that bathed the new President in an aura of heroism as a leader so feared by America’s enemies that they scrambled to avoid angering him. It was viewed as a case study of how U.S. toughness could restore the proper international order.
That night, as fireworks lit the skies of Washington, the celebration was not only for a new President and for the freed hostages, but for a new era in which American power would no longer be mocked. That momentum continues today in George W. Bush’s “preemptive” wars and the imperial boasts about a “New American Century.”
......What’s now known about the Iranian hostage crisis suggests that the “coincidence” of the Reagan Inauguration and the Hostage Release was not a case of frightened Iranians cowering before a U.S. President who might just nuke Tehran.
The preponderance of evidence suggests that it was a prearranged deal between the Republicans and the Iranians. The Republicans got the hostages and the political bounce; Iran’s Islamic fundamentalists got a secret supply of weapons and various other payoffs.
Though the full history remains a state secret – in part because of an executive order signed by George W. Bush on his first day in office in 2001 – it appears Republicans did contact Iran’s mullahs during the 1980 campaign; agreements were reached; and a clandestine flow of U.S. weapons followed the hostage release.
Impending death of the Petrodollar: Nowadays Iran is planning to open an oil exchange market priced in euros, not dollars. This is a really big deal that makes up a major undercurrent driving all the current hostilities. This Iranian 'bourse' would be a huge blow to the stability of the U.S. dollar. It will prove really hilarious to the Russians and others to sit back and watch as America flails around trying to defend the almighty Petrodollar. This is the kind of stuff that gives Dick Cheney the cold sweats. Really a big deal, and there's a lot more to be said on it.
Iran continues its strange and menacing manipulation of Holocaust symbols with new claims that "Iran mission to UN: More study needed to prove Nazi Holocaust". Meanwhile the neo-cons and alumni of Iran-Contra today hail Ahmadinejad as a really great guy for them: The Demogogue Neocons Love to Hate By Jim Lobe:
“Let us state the obvious,” wrote Reuel Marc Gerecht, the resident Gulf specialist at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute in the Weekly Standard's feature article Monday. “The new president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is a godsend.”
“Thank goodness for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,” wrote Ilan Berman, the neoconservative author of a hawkish new book, Tehran Rising: Iran's Challenge to the United States, in the National Review Online last week.
.......Ahmadinejad's declarations, which are seen by many experts here as related at least as much to his domestic political strategy as to his foreign policy worldview, have not only been manna from heaven for neoconservatives, who have long had Tehran in their gun sights.
.....That the administration, which promulgated and then implemented a doctrine of preventive war against presumed enemies allegedly bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction, should come under attack from all these sources [AIPAC etc] for excessive passivity is ironic. But it is also testimony to the degree that it has been forced by its Iraq adventure to adopt what can only be described—to the disgust of the neoconservatives, in particular—as both a new humility and a new realism with regard to Tehran.
A nugget of wisdom from The Agonist about how Iran works in Central Asia. We need to get off the crackhead rhythm of the 24-hour news cycle and look at this in terms of centuries.
Iranians making a play for their own back-yard? At least, that's what I take away from this pretty good article in the Washington Post about Central Asia. The author of the piece, Nick Schmidle writes:
[T]he Iranians hope that big-money investments in the region, coupled with a successful nuclear fuel cycle, will elevate their status in the Muslim world.
One thing you have to keep in mind about the history of Iran in Central Asia is this: since the 6th century BC when Cyrus crossed the Oxus to subdue Queen Tomyris and the Massagetae the Persians have been fixated on influencing and stabilizing the lands to their immediate north. Only twice in Persia's three millenia of history have they been overrun from the West (Alexander and the Arabs). All the others came from the East and North (Mongols, Hepthalites, Turks, Uzbeks, Russians).
Kadima & The Alon Plan vs. HAMAS & 1967 Borders??: The Allon or 'Alon' Plan was the 1967 scheme to annex a big swath of the West Bank. The dimensions are roughly laid out in this map from IsraeliPalestinianProCon.org. Now, apparently HAMAS is advocating the full 1967 borders as a basis for a truce. We will see how horrible the U.S. media makes such an argument sound.
Ariel Sharon's basic strategy was to solidify the Allon Plan and make it palatable to the American public, or at least get Congress to swallow it.
Hamas hints at truce in return for '67 borders
By Arnon Regular, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service
A long-term truce (hudna) with Israel is possible if Israel retreats to its pre-1967 borders and releases Palestinian prisoners, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar told CNN on Monday.
"We can expect to establish our independent state on the area before '67 and we can give a long-term hudna," Zahar told CNN's Wolf Blitzer.
Zahar laid out a series of conditions that he said could lead to years of co-existence alongside Israel. He said that if Israel "is ready to give us the national demand to withdraw from the occupied area [in] '67; to release our detainees; to stop their aggression; to make geographic link between Gaza Strip and West Bank, at that time, with assurance from other sides, we are going to accept to establish our independent state at that time, and give us one or two, 10, 15 years time in order to see what is the real intention of Israel after that."
Asked about Hamas' call for Israel's destruction, Zahar would not say whether that remains the goal. "We are not speaking about the future, we are speaking now," he said. Zahar argued that Israel has no true intention of accepting a Palestinian state, despite international agreements including the Road Map for Middle East peace.
Until Israel says what its final borders will be, Hamas will not say whether it will ever recognize Israel, Zahar said. "If Israel is ready to tell the people what is the official border, after that we are going to answer this question." Asked whether Hamas would renounce terrorism, Zahar argued that the definition of terrorism is unfair.
Israel is "killing people and children and removing our agricultural system -- this is terrorism," he said. "When the Americans [are] attacking the Arabic and Islamic world whether in Afghanistan and Iraq and they are playing a dirty game in Lebanon, this is terrorism." He described Hamas as a "liberating movement."
.....Hamas will not oppose Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas if the latter decides to negotiate with Israel, the deputy head of Hamas' political bureau, Musa Abu-Marzouk, said Sunday.
Ok then, those are promising signs from a shadowy group (a pretty good history from MidEastWeb) that is suddenly blinking in the limelight. Not sure what the hell it means, but I don't know if they do either.
Lots of things are happening. Former CIA dude Pat Lang reacts to the election with typical CIA sarcasm. Hamas leader: 'Palestinian army' possible. Haaretz: Umm Mohammed talks politics By Amira Hass, "Hamas deputy says resistance to 'occupation' will continue". "Turning from Terror / A Green Dawn is on the rise." "Hamas' next step / In search of a united force".
The Observer | Focus | The Hamas revolution:
'East Jerusalem,' he intoned dryly from the podium, 'six seats.' And with each successful candidate he named, he listed their party. 'Change and Reform,' he read out first, the banner under which Hamas, an organisation better known for its dozens of suicide attacks against Israel, was standing. And again: 'Change and Reform'. And yet again. Four times out of six.
He turned to Hebron, a clean nine-seat sweep for Hamas. So he continued through Nablus, North Gaza, Tulkarm, Jenin and Gaza City. Even the largely Christian area of Bethlehem saw two of its four seats fall to Hamas. Among the Gaza winners was Um Nidal, also called Mariam Farah, a gun-toting woman known as the 'Mother of Martyrs' who ordered three of her sons to their deaths as suicide bombers.
As Hanna Nasser spoke, mentally the crowded room coloured in a map of Gaza and the West Bank, from the flat and crowded slums of Gaza's Khan Younis to the hilly cities of the West Bank, painting it in Hamas green. Only wild and dangerous Rafah at Gaza's southern tip voted unanimously for the old order.
With each result history was gyrating more wildly about the auditorium with its stone-faced electoral commission members sitting bleakly in a row. Everything had been transformed.
Observations from Gilbert Achear on JuanCole.com:
4. The irresistible rise of Ariel Sharon to the helm of the Israeli state resulted from his September 2000 provocation that ignited the "Second Intifada" -- an uprising that because of its militarization lacked the most positive features of the popular dynamics of the first Intifada. A PA that, by its very nature, could definitely not rely on mass self-organization and chose the only way of struggle it was familiar with, fostered this militarization. Sharon's rise was also a product of the dead-end reached by the Oslo process: the clash between the Zionist interpretation of the Oslo frame -- an updated version of the 1967 "Alon Plan" by which Israel would relinquish the populated areas of the 1967 occupied territories to an Arab administration, while keeping colonized and militarized strategic chunks -- and the PA's minimal requirements of recovering all, or nearly all the territories occupied in 1967, without which it knew it would lose its remaining clout with the Palestinian population. The electoral victory of war criminal Ariel Sharon in February 2001 -- an event as much "shocking" as the electoral victory of Hamas, at the very least -- inevitably reinforced the Islamic fundamentalist movement, his counterpart in terms of radicalization of stance against the backdrop of a still-born historic compromise. All of this was greatly propelled, of course, by the (very resistible, but unresisted) accession to power of George W. Bush, and the unleashing of his wildest imperial ambitions thanks to the attacks on September 11, 2001.
5. Ariel Sharon played skillfully on the dialectics between himself and his Palestinian true opposite number, Hamas. His calculation was simple: in order to be able to carry through unilaterally his own hard-line version of the Zionist interpretation of a "settlement" with the Palestinians, he needed two conditions: a) to minimize international pressure upon him -- or rather U.S. pressure, the only one that really matters to Israel; and b) to demonstrate that there is no Palestinian leadership with which Israel could "do business." For this, he needed to emphasize the weakness and unreliability of the PA by fanning the expansion of the Islamic fundamentalist movement, knowing that the latter was anathema to the Western states. Thus every time there was some kind of truce, negotiated by the PA with the Islamic organizations, Sharon's government would resort to an "extrajudicial execution" -- in plain language, an assassination -- in order to provoke these organizations into retaliation by the means they specialized in: suicide attacks, their "F-16s" as they say. This had the double advantage of stressing the PA inability to control the Palestinian population, and enhancing Sharon's own popularity in Israel. The truth of the matter is that the electoral victory of Hamas is the outcome that Sharon's strategy was very obviously seeking, as many astute observers did not fail to point out.
Haaretz has lots to mull over. I think "hostile rabble" is a tad racist, but that's what appears to be on their minds right now. Analysis: Wave of democracy pits Israel against 'Arab street':
By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent
The Palestinian Authority election marks the beginning of a new period in the region that could be termed "the era of the masses." Henceforth Israel will have to factor into its foreign policy something it has always ignored - Arab public opinion.
Israel has always based its regional policy on arrangements and terror-balances with the Arab dictators. They understood force and Israel could do business with them. Their authority was seen as a barrier protecting Israel from the rage of the hostile rabble in the "Arab street." That was the basis of the peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, Yasser Arafat and his heirs and the game rules vis-a-vis Syria and Lebanon.
But those days are over. The democratization process that U.S. President George Bush has triggered and the open debate promoted by Arab satellite networks are causing the old frameworks to crumble. The mass demonstrations that led to the Syrians being driven from Lebanon, the elections in Iraq and those in the territories are merely the beginning. As far as Israel is concerned, the worst stage will come when the democratic wave washes over Jordan, its strategic ally; Egypt with its modern army and F-16 squadrons, and Syria and its Scud and chemical warhead stores.
The mess continues. Shadowy times ahead.
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.
The latest tape was released today. This would appear to cast pretty strong doubts on Michael Ledeen's recent claim that some wise and trustworthy Iranians claimed he was dead. Wouldn't be the first time that some Iranians manipulated a neocon for their own purposes (such as overthrowing Saddam). But oh well. Here is Bin Laden's complete statement, as offered by the Associated Press.
It is instructive that on CNN they don't talk about bin Laden's comments about the American military industrial complex and its 'merchants of war', the 'patient' strategy against the Soviet Union, the polls that show wide American skepticism about the war, but of course, only highlighting threats on the American homeland if the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are not cancelled.
Bin Laden is surprisingly forthright about his general strategies, and this one is no exception. He is certainly an expert in the paradigm of fourth-generation warfare; right now, the United States seeks tactical victories while defeating itself on the moral plane. Bin Laden is making moral arguments directly to the American public about how the subjugation of Muslims will ultimately prove self-defeating. And tellingly, as always, the media does not report or contextualize pretty much anything about this.
For all the big talk, it is amazing that no one really reads his full statements, which make much more clear the al Qaeda strategy. (Qaeda is Arabic for 'base,' by the way)
It should be noted that bin Laden uses a sort of antiquated dialect of Arabic, so surely there will be some dispute over the translation of key phrases. Nonetheless, bin Laden's many previous public pronouncements have proven to be rather direct and useful explanations of his general strategy.
Background:
No one should talk about Al Qaeda without understanding their concept of the near enemy (local apostate regimes of the mideast) and the far enemy (that props them up - the U.S.).
Associated Press: Update 1: Full Text of Bin Laden Tape - at Forbes.com:
The following is the full text of a new audiotape from al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. Parts of the tape were aired on Al-Jazeera television, which published the entire version on its Web site. The text was translated from the Arabic by The Associated Press.
Bin Laden appears to be addressing the American people:
My message to you is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end them. I did not intend to speak to you about this because this issue has already been decided. Only metal breaks metal, and our situation, thank God, is only getting better and better, while your situation is the opposite of that.
But I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he (Bush) has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them (bin Laden's followers) on their land than their fighting us (Americans) on our land.
I can reply to these errors by saying that war in Iraq is raging with no let-up, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favor, thank God, and Pentagon figures show the number of your dead and wounded is increasing not to mention the massive material losses, the destruction of the soldiers' morale there and the rise in cases of suicide among them. So you can imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts a soldier as he gathers the remains of his colleagues after they stepped on land mines that tore them apart. After this situation the soldier is caught between two hard options. He either refuses to leave his military camp on patrols and is therefore dogged by ruthless punishments enacted by the Vietnam Butcher (U.S. army) or he gets destroyed by the mines. This puts him under psychological pressure, fear and humiliation while his nation is ignorant of that (what is going on). The soldier has no solution except to commit suicide. That is a strong message to you, written by his soul, blood and pain, to save what can be saved from this hell. The solution is in your hands if you care about them (the soldiers).
The news of our brother mujahideen (holy warriors) is different from what the Pentagon publishes. They (the news of mujahideen) and what the media report is the truth of what is happening on the ground. And what deepens the doubt over the White House's information is the fact that it targets the media reporting the truth from the ground. And it has appeared lately, supported by documents, that the butcher of freedom in the world (Bush) had decided to bomb the headquarters of the Al-Jazeera in Qatar after bombing its offices in Kabul and Baghdad.
On another issue, jihad (holy war) is ongoing, thank God, despite all the oppressive measures adopted by the U.S Army and its agents (which is) to a point where there is no difference between this criminality and Saddam's criminality, as it has reached the degree of raping women and taking them as hostages instead of their husbands.
As for torturing men, they have used burning chemical acids and drills on their joints. And when they give up on (interrogating) them, they sometimes use the drills on their heads until they die. Read, if you will, the reports of the horrors in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.
And I say that, despite all the barbaric methods, they have not broken the fierceness of the resistance. The mujahideen, thank God, are increasing in number and strength - so much so that reports point to the ultimate failure and defeat of the unlucky quartet of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Declaring this defeat is just a matter of time, depending partly on how much the American people know of the size of this tragedy. The sensible people realize that Bush does not have a plan to make his alleged victory in Iraq come true.
And if you compare the small number of dead on the day that Bush announced the end of major operations in that fake, ridiculous show aboard the aircraft carrier with the tenfold number of dead and wounded who were killed in the smaller operations, you would know the truth of what I say. This is that Bush and his administration do not have the will or the ability to get out of Iraq for their own private, suspect reasons.
And so to return to the issue, I say that results of polls please those who are sensible, and Bush's opposition to them is a mistake. The reality shows that the war against America and its allies has not been limited to Iraq as he (Bush) claims. Iraq has become a point of attraction and restorer of (our) energies. At the same time, the mujahideen (holy warriors), with God's grace, have managed repeatedly to penetrate all security measures adopted by the unjust allied countries. The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the European nations who are in this aggressive coalition. The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through (with preparations), with God's permission.
Based on what has been said, this shows the errors of Bush's statement - the one that slipped from him - which is at the heart of polls calling for withdrawing the troops. It is better that we (Americans) don't fight Muslims on their lands and that they don't fight us on ours.
We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars - which lets us understand the insistence by Bush and his gang to carry on with war. [sounds like Eisenhower attacking the military industrial complex! -Dan]
If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."
Finally, I say that war will go either in our favor or yours. If it is the former, it means your loss and your shame forever, and it is headed in this course. If it is the latter, read history! We are people who do not stand for injustice and we will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting. Your minds will be troubled and your lives embittered. As for us, we have nothing to lose. A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain. You have occupied our lands, offended our honor and dignity and let out our blood and stolen our money and destroyed our houses and played with our security and we will give you the same treatment.
You have tried to prevent us from leading a dignified life, but you will not be able to prevent us from a dignified death. Failing to carry out jihad, which is called for in our religion, is a sin. The best death to us is under the shadows of swords. Don't let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years and we bled their economy and now they are nothing.
In that there is a lesson for you.
Afghans also defeated the British Empire twice in the 1800s. Surprised he forgot to throw that in.
TheMemoryHole.org: LSD Reports From the US Military, mostly from back in the 1950s. Totally for real. I was delighted to hear that Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who inadvertently created Lysergic Acid Diethyl-Amide, celebrated his 100th birthday this week. Thanks, Albert! You are cooler than all the Beat poets combined! (I just had this vision of a giant Allen Ginsberg robot stomping around Tokyo. I've got to lay off these magic droplets!)
We'll have lots more later today, but this batch of goodies should entertain until later.
Why are conservatives so afraid? by Kos. (But is Kos a coward?) Damn right, Digby:
This idea that we are living in a unique time that calls for special measures is what they always say. (And this current fantasy about the unique threat that proved our oceans couldn't protect us is particularly rich considering they fearmongered a communist threat of total annihilation for decades.) Often cooler heads are able to quell the worst excesses (like the fervent belief that we needed to launch a tactical nuclear war against the commies) and satisfy the right wing's other ongoing paranoid fantasy --- the left as a fifth column --- with silly, wasteful surveillance of animal rights groups or Quakers or former Beatles (along with pernicious surveillance of their partisan opponents.)
They are rhinestone cowboys who are scared to death and don't know how to contain their fear. So they lash out at their domestic political enemies, who they can bluster about and pretend to be tough, while hiding behind the military uniforms of their Big Brother and Preznit Daddy (which is a real stretch when it comes to Junior.)
The fact that they continue to win elections as being the tough guys perhaps says more about our puerile culture than anything else. They lash out like frightened children and too many people see that as courage or resolve.
Violent Islamic fundamentalism is a serious problem, not an existential threat. And it's a difficult problem that requires adults who can keep their heads about them when the terrorists put on their scary show, not big-for-their-age eight year olds staging a temper tantrum.
War and Piece rocks for your Washington 'defense' and neocon tidbits. Laura Rozen 'gets it.'
MediaMatters video: Olbermann awards "Worst Person" honors to Gibson for his religious "intolerance"; Coulter named runner-up for "Nazi block watchers" comment.
Parapolitics, from those calm people at PrisonPlanet: Spooky AOL Ad Says Big Brother Is Watching the Internet. At this site, AOL is essentially trying to scare people off the Internet? A few other PP posts, some from other sources: Doug Thompson, Capitol Hill Blue: A President at war with America. Local paper reports that Canadian Army to occupy downtown Winnipeg as part of a drill. The Decline of the American Empire and the ever-popular 9/11 intrigue thread, Silverstein Answers WTC Building 7 Charges, are by PP writers. Around and around it goes.
From the similar SIANews.com, a division of LibertyThink, MySpace.com: Rupert Murdoch's New Takeover/IP-invasion Project and Michael Berg Changes Story About Nick & Moussaoui. I think it is funny that this one dude, Michael P. Wright of Norman Oklahoma, is on a crusade to prove whatever the hell happened with Nick Berg - and the fact that Zacharias Moussaoui somehow had Berg's computer password is one of the weirdest 9/11 anomalies out there. Seriously, my best of luck to him, but whatever happened seems to have been covered up quite thoroughly.
The DeLay Babylon Project: WaPo: The DeLay-Abramoff Money Trail. Case Bringing New Scrutiny To a System and a Profession. Think Progress » Abramoff: The House That Jack Built.
Even David Brooks rips GOP over Abramoff and sleaze. Oh Bobo, where's the love?
Followup on Sibel Edmonds: Edmonds has evidently told the blogger at 'Wot Is It Good 4' that he's brought together many Sibel-approved nuggets of info/conspiracy. So let's list: sibel and feith and perle?, Outing Plame? or Outing Brewster Jennings? and of course sibel edmonds, brewster jennings, edelman and grossman. I'll have some more on this later.
Secret Pentagon Study: Armor Problems Have Killed Many. Sounds like whoever wrote that thing is about to get fired and find a horse head in their bed.
Some goodies from the Agonist: More on Iran attack plans, Iran and deterrence, and the Persian difference. Stirling Newberry comments on the GWOT for the Agonist. Makes a lot of sense:
...the creation of intelligence product has demonstrably been compromised, this is what Afterdowningstreet shows, what Daschle's comments on the information that Bush gave, and didn't on spygate shows, and what the constant flow of rosy scenario Iraq reconstruction reports show. Computer people have a phrase "GIGO" for "Garbage In, Garbage Out", but there is also the "filter effect", where a program or mathematical operation yields the same result no matter what is put in.
With a lumpenexecutive at the top, and a corruption of the synthesis process, all the high sounding organizational ideas are not worth anything. Further more, if there were a serious drive to integrate information, then people such as Crowley [Rowley? -Hongpong] - who wrote one of the two "gun shot residue" memos on the possibility of terrorists learning how to fly planes - would be promoted, not exiled, and the people who have overseen the failure to find the Anthrax attacker or forsee 9/11 would not have been promoted to the top of the counter-terrorism chain. An agency run by screw ups, is going to screw up. An agency managed by kiss ups, is going to spend its time managing up, not down.
Also he makes the point that the 'terror' organizations pursued by the FBI fail to include right-wing Christian groups. I feel that Newberry's basic theory of what constitutes 'terrorism' is really pretty accurate:
Thus, there is not only an ineffective executive, but an entire subculture whose functional effectiveness is degraded by the realization that they work for a political, and not national, security apparatus. There is a willing participation in the construction of an inaccurate paradigm, the construction of institutions designed to perpetuate and disseminate that inaccurate paradigm, the execution of plans based around that inaccurate paradigm, and the acceptance of the deaths of hundreds of Americans and thousands of civilians because of the willfully inaccurate and criminally negligent handling of the global war on terrorism. The trend line is not upwards for ourside, but flat. And that means that the next spectacular terrorist attack on our soil is a matter of when, not if.
The corruption of executive institution, the willing prostitution of the executive branch of government, and the politicization of hierarchy and research are the root causes for our failure to decapitate Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
[.....]
Terrorism has two modes: that of asymmetrical warfare - where one side chooses not to oppose the military of the other side directly, but instead attacks civilians or prisoners. The other is a mode of political control, where privileged - economically or politically is immaterial - actors act in arbitrary and capricious ways, often through proxies, to prevent the formation of political counter-consensus. This second form of terrorism is far more common and pervasive. Its actions account for the bulk of deaths by terrorization. The use of terror and terrorization is an intergral part of warfare and even governance, in that some agentes will only be deterred by the possibility of disproportionate force. However, it only becomes terrorism, when there is the attempt to terrorize the mean, not the extreme, of the body politic. It also is terrorism when there is the discontinuity with the rule of law. The difference between repression and terrorism, is that terrorism strikes without legal justification or accountability. Crystalnacht was terrorism, Dachau was something far worse.
This paradigm makes it clear that the flip side of non-state terrorism, and revolutionary or anarchist terrorism, is state or hierarchical terrorism. The two are co-dependent upon each other.
All right. The State Dept straightens it out: “Identifying Misinformation” as summarized by FTW.
Liberal hawks piss me off because they seem to wholly lack integrity. Ugh.
Liberal Hawks: Flying in Neocon Circles
By Tom Barry
In the heat of Iraq the neoconservatives are seeing their visions of Pax Americana turn into nightmares and headaches. But they are not alone. Liberal hawks like Ivo Daalder, Robert Kerrey, and Will Marshall also find themselves discredited as the quagmire in Iraq swallows up all their arguments supporting the invasion and occupation.
CNN.com - Officials: Error tipped Iran to CIA agents - Jan 3, 2006
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Several U.S. agents in Iran were rounded up after the CIA mistakenly revealed clues to their identities to a covert source who turned out to be a double agent, according to a book that hit shelves Tuesday...
Risen's new book get megadittoes for revealing a great many dark things about Bush, the CIA and the NSA. Cryptome has a useful chunk of the book. Discussing it on Volokh.com from the grouchy anti-libertarian wing.
Some other parts about the book: Guardian: George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb? Amazing story: the CIA forks over slightly flawed bomb plans, to clever people who will probably find the tiny flaws.
Peter Dale Scott: Cheney-Rumsfeld Surveillance Plans Date Back to 1980s. Scott is one of your paratypical parapolitical writers of the shadow conspiracy etc.
An equation for our times: via ThisModernWorld.
Heck of a Job, Hayden! - by Ray McGovern. Ray McGovern is an old hand at the CIA, a bit crusty, but with key insights into the structural problems over there. This is the kind of perspective I support in Washington.
Has sparked some rather unusual speculations about the political consequences of domestic monitoring. Bill Richardson and Christiane Amanpour are the leading 'NSA political targets' of the moment. Albuquerque Tribune reports that Bill Richardson fears the NSA eavesdropped on him, in part due to a Wayne Madsen report.
Bizarre case that ricoched around the Internet and CNN over the last couple days. Sort of a paradigm-shaking omniscient big brother hullabaloo: NBC changes official transcript of Andrea Mitchell interview, deletes reference to Bush possibly wiretapping CNN's Christane Amanpour. AmericaBlog: What it means to John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Bill Clinton if Bush wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
Steve Clemons advises cooling it with connecting Bolton's NSA intercept shenanigans with the current mess. Also talks about an NSA advertisement and its weird phrasing:
Rather than saying that you are looking for "intelligent and imaginative people" to "protect U.S. information systems", the line should be that you are looking for such people to protect the Constitution and Democratic government as well as the general welfare and liberty of the American people.
NY Times: Noah Feldman on the situation with executive power (via DailyKos):
Not since Watergate has the question of presidential power been as salient as it is today. The recent revelation that President George W. Bush ordered secret wiretaps in the United States without judicial approval has set off the latest round of arguments over what the president can and cannot do in the name of his office. Over the past few years, the war on terror has led to the use of executive orders to authorize renditions and the detention of enemy combatants without trial. . . . The limits of presidential power will almost surely be a major topic of discussion during Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin this week.
"[P]residentialism" . . . is not the system envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The framers meant for the legislative branch to be the most important actor in the federal government: Congress was to make the laws and the president was empowered only to execute them. The very essence of a republic was that it would be governed through a deliberative legislature, composed carefully to reflect both popular will and elite limits on that will. The framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession.
From the repressed homosexual Okie preacher department: Tulsa Pastor Arrested In OKC On Lewdness Charge. Ha.
CNET: Windows flaw spawns dozens of attacks. Huge security holes, terrible. Glad I have a Mac.
Ah, pretty damn amazing. National Geo video (WMP): 30 Japanese hornets take on 30,000 European honeybees. But how do the Japanese bees defend against the onslaught?
Scientists in Canada are working on a fully synthetic life form (more here and here).
Microsoft Confirms They are Censoring Their Blogs in China.
Awesome. From Corey Anderson at CityPages (via AmericaBlog).
MNPublius offers a list of MN blogs of the year, copied from MNspeak's author Rex. Publius gets a nod... Hongpong continues 100% under the radar, where all the kool kids really hang out.
Oh those Russians: MOSNews: West Should Not Be Scared of Russian Spies, says Russian Foreign Intelligence Service director Sergei Lebedev. Nice.
What is this bullshit? Students pressed F5 (reload) too much and that's a felony? Student accused of trying to crash school's computer system!
Thinking about Wal-Mart? Need to convince conservatives they suck? Try the Neighborhood Retail Alliance: Conservative Case Against Wal-Mart in NYC . Subsidies for private corporations should be a conservative's enemy. Also ProfessorBainbridge.com: The Conservative Case Against Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart screws up health care. Costs taxpayers a lot. How can the Party of Nixon Reagan support such welfare mommas sucking at the Capitol's teats?
News from the Wilderness: Former LAPD cop Michael Ruppert is an enigmatic, larger than life character among the various conspiratorial journalists and 9/11 researchers that tell exciting tales of intrigue and Peak Oil suspense. He claims to have stumbled into CIA-backed drug trafficking in Los Angeles as a narcotics officer.
His confrontation with former CIA director John Deutsch in a room full of angry Angelenos (as C-SPAN recorded) is an absolute classic para-political moment - the room erupts when he names the CIA programs involved in supporting drug operations (Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower, according to Ruppert). This is featured in Guerrilla News Network's video Crack the CIA, an excellent look at the Central Intelligence Agency and its storied associations with Central American traffickers, featuring Ruppert (Iran-Contra didn't pay for itself, hon).
He sort of went on a deep & weird geopolitical tangent from there — Crossing the Rubicon is one of the oddest political books of our times — and certainly one that the mainstream media doesn't want to review or promote. Nonetheless, his view of how peak oil may propel psychotic and reckless behavior in the U.S. leadership is certainly worth considering. His site, From The Wilderness, also carries a lot of energy stories from other sources (with remarks), so it is useful for finding the odd Chinese pipeline story and all that. The Agency That Could Be Big Brother by NSA whiz James Bamford, Nuclear Clouds Gather Over Asia from IPS, and China lays down gauntlet in energy war from Asia Times are all useful.
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!!
Right now there is a sweet discussion of the NSA wiretapping situation on Talk of the Nation with Neal Conan. James Bamford is talking about it, and he said that the CIA is approximately half private contractors now - an ongoing integration of the private sector into the intelligence community.
(Which seems to be something that Gillian Harding is moving towards -- how interesting. And now her name is going to be on my highly flagged website. :-D)
Some stuff happened. Well, a final semester at Macalester. Thanks to Peter "I really am a reporter in Wyoming right now" Gartrell, he and I started working at Politics in Minnesota, as the new edition of the state directory of legislators and politicos got put together.
Along the way I ran into Al Franken at the Capitol, after he talked to DFLers in caucus (Matt Entenza took the photo!). So Peter and I each interviewed about 1/3 of the state legislature, which I think adjusted my perceptions of why people get into office, and what sorts of folks they actually are. Overall it was quite a stunning experience.
In my time there, I uncovered an old document, "Minnesota's Non-Party Legislature" by Senator Daniel S. Feidt, written by my grandfather in 1957. A sort of paean to a lost legislative system, the nonpartisan arrangement that he served under for many years.
Hunter Thompson shot himself, which was pretty brutal, but an understandable exit for an old man in increasing, terminal pain. Towards the end he was as surprised as everyone else to still be alive. He shot himself in front of the typewriter, with one word inscribed: 'counselor.' A Raw Story contributor noted its meaning:
I picked up the Bible and quickly scanned the Gospel of John. There it was in the 14th chapter:
“16 And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.”
......
For following your Counselor often means discovering things that aren’t fit for polite company. It’s never pleasant to find evil growing among the peonies. Or in the hearts of your elected officials. Better to be “vaguely happy” than uncomfortable. Thompson, though, never fell for that devil’s lie. He knew that even though the truth often cuts like a razor, it also serves as a “Comforter” when the jackals begin circling. Because as Thompson recognized, the jackals don’t really give a damn whether you speak the truth or not. They are coming after us all one day. But facing the bastards down is a whole lot easier when you’ve got the truth by your side.
Nick Petersen and I did a tribute radio show on WMCN on Fri.,Feb 25th. I still have the recording of this session, and I'm going to get it out here pretty soon. The show had a real good feel to it, and strange things happened that day.
Nick and I randomly ran into Flan for what would be our final time. Matt Norman lit a shot of Wild Turkey on fire and spilled it on a desk, spreading a large fire that I quickly blew out. I purchased two red stoplights from Ax-Man.
The Alfalfa Males performed at the Peters' house on Dayton & Fry, which was awesome.
So then, it seems a strange and bittersweet day now, but still, it was a worthwhile venture.
In terms of academics, I was glad that I took a difficult class on the Holocaust from Dr. Frank Adler in my final year. The basic historical lessons of the Holocaust are incredibly valuable today; the many connections between the Shoah and the War on Terroah's murderous political atmosphere these days disturb and alarm me. It has taught me that only by first making fellow humans into two-dimensional characters (filthy Jew / terrorist rat nest) and merging perceived negative identities (Judeobolshevik / Islamofascist) can a rationalized, industrialized process of annihilation take hold, and drive a war ever further.
Graduation was momentous, etc. etc. It was profoundly weird, since I'd been arrested the prior Wednesday at an unexpectedly aggressive police raid against a cottage that had only contained a party for about five minutes. I took pictures of police action (as I have in the past, successfully) and they didn't appreciate that, and slapped the camera of out my hand and arrested me. This began seven months of repeated hearings and delays, and shifts to three different judges at Ramsey County courthouse. The city refused to cough up the memory card. When I finally got to tell the judge my side, she was upset that the photo evidence had not been presented, and my charges were summarily dismissed. A tiny victory added to the sediment of legal affairs...
This summer I moved in with Colin Kennedy, with Matt and Eric next door, sharing a massive front porch overlooking Selby and Fry. Good times were had by all. I was employed part-time by Politics in Minnesota and Computer Zone Consulting, which was not really quite enough income, but still somewhat interesting. I knew that I needed to find a full time job, but the case of the Macalester raid was still hanging over me and I feared (somewhat irrationally) that background checks would backfire terribly.
We had a good time hanging out with the Jane Cat, debating anarchy and the waxing and waning of empires. I read quite a few political books from differing perspectives...
The CIA hits Hongpong.com again. In late July I determined that the Central Intelligence Agency had visited this fine site on July 7 looking for 'text messaging IED' on Google. Also for some reason they came looking for 'bloomington lrt condo' in March. This was not as cool as the CIA hit from 'goss punish cia analysts cold war 2004' back in November 10, 2004, as CIA employees were surely considering the blowback from the election in their agency. There have been a lot of other government hits this year, from the Defense and State Departments, the Australian Defense ministry, etc. etc.
Indeed, I feel very strongly that intelligence analysts in the CIA, DIA, State Department and other institutions should be free to give their unvarnished views of the facts as they see them. I fear that the neo-conservatives and other National Security Nasties like Porter Goss are threatening analysts who vary from the preferred political standpoint. For example, it would have been a bad career move for an analyst to say that 'I don't think there are real WMDs in Iraq' before the war (the NSA's Kenneth Ford may be such a case - perhaps). Are Goss and others crushing all factual dissent, pursuing an empire of suppressing analyzed reality in the American intelligence community, in favor of synthetic neo-con paranoid bullshit, designed to scare America into compliance and endless wars?
There was a Times story that John Bolton at the State Dept. used NSA intercepts that monitored conversations between American officials -- as a way to try to outmaneuver his rivals (like probably Armitage, for example). This is individual information warfare inside the government at its most dangerous -- especially since the neo-cons are fuckwits who don't deserve to keep their jobs at all. They are better at backstabbing then 'delivering the goods' we need to solve our multiplying problems. As a source said to Laura Rozen:
Bolton was running his own counterintelligence operation, was using the intelligence to figure out how he can get back at people.
The point is this: My perspective on this site is very wary of the deepening dominance of political appointees in places like State and CIA, and with it, increasing surveillance and political pressure against the 'career professionals' of our government.
We have intelligence agencies to attempt to sift fact from fiction, prevent foreign manipulation, and present the political leadership with options. The WMD stories about Iraq, propagated by the INC and Chalabi, supported by Cheney, his hawks and journalists like Judith Miller, should have been stopped cold by personnel in the intelligence agencies, since as it turned out, much of Chalabi's stuff was made up by Iranians who wished to get the US to topple Saddam. I think that the war in Iraq couldn't have happened without browbeating the rank-and-file at the CIA, who didn't trust Chalabi or the WMD yarns. Political appointees made it impossible for the rest of the intelligence community to speak out against the war.
Libby was a Fixer of Intelligence around the Policy: The big, weird political story of the year was Libby's indictment. but what was his motive for defending the Yellowcake story and trying to discredit Rove? That is pretty much the kernel of the story, not the contested chronology of reporter conversations. If the Iraq war started because of purely 'altruistic' intelligence mistakes about WMD, then why would Libby try to enforce the silence of the intelligence community by suddenly burning a top agent, Valerie Plame?
On the other hand, if the war started because of wholly fabricated stories, if the Office of Special Plans and Michael Ledeen, among others, were systematically spoofing the 'threat perception' of Iraq while suppressing the realistic views of the general intelligence community, then suddenly we see that Libby attacked the CIA in order to intimidate the rank-and-file to shut them up about all the gaps in the fake war rationales.
I have tried to be alert for information that indicates this kind of deception, stuff offering some insight into the complex of fear and disinformation that has settled over this country. I think that HongPong.com, on the whole, provided a useful core of information to begin teasing apart the big picture. I have a great respect for the many in the government who struggle with this stuff. The conflict will continue, and I'll try to help illuminate what I can. (each one of us can be the eye in the pyramid sometimes, right? :-)
On September 1, I found myself very underemployed and with little money. I was forced to move back into Hudson, WI, with the folks, as I worked on some projects and slept in the family room upstairs. However along the way I met Russ Feingold at a fundraiser at a Wisconsin farm. Good times. He called for a firm deadline for withdrawal, continued scrutiny of the Patriot Act, and other sound yet gutsy political positions that have the added benefit of actually defending freedom and our national interests. He's lining up to be the Progressive Dem presidential candidate for '08, and it seems basically impossible, but it would be great to get his perspective in the mix.
Peace efforts in the fall continued to raise some consciousness, as a kind of war fatigue set in, causing Bush's poll numbers to plunge. I took photos at a peace vigil on the Lake Street bridge — as the White House refused to release documents that should have been released to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004 — documents that would surely have influenced their conclusions about how bad the spoofed intel was, helpting to blame it on the CIA.
Depressingly, this year it was confirmed that the US deployed 'White Phosphorus' weapons as chemical weapons in the vicinity of Fallujah, and possibly elsewhere. How grimly ironic that we invaded the cradle of civilization in illusory pursuit of some moldering VX and mustard gas shells, only to find ourselves so hated by the occupied that we chose to apply to combat a chemical that essentially melts flesh?
The Pentagon initially claimed that these were 'incendiary' not 'chemical' weapons, and indeed, WP can be used to light up or torch a sizable area. However, it can also be deployed as a 'shake and bake' chemical assault, as an Army publication termed it. This shows that we still haven't nuked anyone, but we're getting there. Although, arguably, Depleted Uranium is a form of chemical warfare as well.
Nonetheless, as the polls inexorably shifted against Bush and confidence in his war conduct, it seemed that reality would finally snap back against their utopian fantasies and sordid machinations. The Downing Street Memo and the abrupt secret Senate session to demand intel investigations finally shifted the ball in the 'fake intelligence' conflict, and a majority of Americans now seem to believe that Bush misled them. These were no small feats.
I also went along a march and rally at the U of M, which culminated in a protest in front of the recruiter's office near the University. The protests showed the strain of this costly and destabilizing war on the students. I mean, simply put, how much more could we put into our dilapidated schools and anxious students, if not for the Mesopotamian Follies?
In October, Colin unearthed a sweet apartment in downtown Minneapolis, and I decided it was worth swooping on. We've had a number of good parties, which has made it all worthwhile. Life at Politics in Minnesota has picked up a bit, and seems worth sticking with for a while.
A final twist: Dan sets a bit of the agenda on a Clear Channel transmission: As it turned out, one of my two superiors at Politics in Minnesota, the shadowy Republican lobbyist/analyst Sarah Janecek, somehow landed a major radio hosting gig on a new Clear Channel station in the Twin Cities, KTLK. From 4 to 7 on weekdays, she and Brian Lambert (formerly of the Pioneer Press) will host a radio show. They had a warm-up show on KFAN on Friday, and I provided some material - mainly of 'Top 10 of 2005' style lists from the Internet. It added a few parts to the show, so that was good.
Much as at the beginning of this year, I never thought I'd be involved with something like the Politics in Minnesota directory, and yet, there I was. Now I find myself nearby the genesis of something almost mythically shady, a new Clear Channel station. Time to see what is happening in there....
This year has been one strange episode after another. I got arrested but won the legal case, met the Legislature, got checked by the CIA, worked for a Republican operative, moved to downtown Minneapolis, and oh yah, graduated from college.
We've got hazy but ambitious plans here. It's a short 11 months to the next election. Congress is on the table, the stage is set, the dance will continue, Bush will skate the edge of the Eschaton and I'll stick to my operations. With Katrina, the Tsunami, and the obliteration of a Great American City, nothing can be taken for granted. With the expanding Information Wars, nothing can be trusted.
Like I said before, the operative principle here for 2006 is "Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted." Call this strange year cashed.
Some scientists determined that apparently, across the scale from bacteria to whale, the basic unit of life is energy and metabolism -- not time. A Master Equation for All Life Processes? Check out the 10 little-known sweet science stories. A Swedish bio-gas (cow poo) train, pillows are laden with fungi, French scientists figured out how to slow down & speed up light, (!!!) leading the way to future all-optical data routers (!!!!!), a robot with square wheels, and of course they are training honey bees to find land mines! (also 50 greatest robots ever - via GM)
The Eagle faces the olive branch: Dear Leader recently addressed the nation about that war thing, and someone told me that it was interesting how the olive branch on the Great Seal of the United States is hidden.
(Bush has also been pressuring newspaper editors a lot lately, including trying to prevent the CIA European prison stories in the WaPo, and the Times NSA story, by summoning the editors to the Oval Office in a vain effort to intoxicate with the fearful trappings of power)
I found out that on the Presidential Seal, the eagle used to face the arrows until 1945:
This one-time change has given rise to the myth that the eagle's head changes position to indicate wartime or peacetime, but that is obviously not true. The eagle faced right from 1880 to 1945, and has faced left ever since. It is nevertheless true that, when the change was made in 1945, the announcement referred to the symbolism of the eagle facing peace instead of war, and this symbolism has been alluded to many times since, although it was not the motivation for the change.
Make no mistake; when the Duke makes a televised address, every visual detail is carefully managed. The fascinating Brian Springer film "Spin", which was made primarily with intercepted satellite signals — open video feeds from the White House and other political and media operations. There's one funny part when they remove a photo from behind Poppa Bush's seat, because it is thought to resemble a recent photo of when he passed out in Japan.
So make no mistake, the selection of the arrows was 100% intentional, in a White House as image-conscious as this one.
(evil witch Peggy Noonan observed Bush talking about the way the eagle faces pre-9/11)
Windy: Energy issues in MN. Apparently the vast majority of windmills around Buffalo Ridge are not owned locally according to an interesting Strib article. Let's think about the means of production here people!
They don't like the vote: Guardian: Religious parties deal blow to US hopes for Iraq. Apparently an official level of 5% vote fraud in Iraq has been accepted, Juan Cole says:
The Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq admitted on Sunday that voting fraud occurred in approximately 5 percent of the ballots cast, but said that this level of fraud would not affect the over-all outcome. Still, the IECI announcement will certainly fuel Sunni Arab anger and conviction that the election was stolen.
Bizarre. The Sunnis think that Shiites ganked their votes, and there have been mass protests in Fallujah. KR: "Iran now enemy No. 1, Sunnis say". Violence resumes apace as Sunni Arab student leader killed in Mosul after protesting vote -- Shiite militias and Kurds accused of killing him.
AP reports that US airstrikes are escalating, although of course it is hard to tell how many civilian casualties this generates, or whether they are the 'right targets,' or whether it is strategically useful at all. Such urban bombardments have not been seen in years, but due to 'perception management' techniques, the US public is blissfully unaware. A Steel Curtain for their bodies and our eyes, indeed.
RJ Eskow: Voting Confirms: Iraq Is a Red state. We have generated a fundamentalist theocracy, aligned against Israel, towards Iran, while 45% of the country supports attacking US troops. Why was this such a brilliant fucking idea again? Robert Scheer cackles: Iran's victory revealed in Iraq election.
Ethnic/sect structure of iraqi forces is doomed, man: One of the measuring sticks of how propagandizing a perspective on the Iraq war is how the difference between Sunni & Shiite groups is framed. When Sunnis are "rat's nest terrorists" while the Shiites are "Free Iraqis come to Battle for Freedom" in the northwest of the country, you are looking at some obfuscation.
Consider this first: SF Chronicle: Various private armies still exist, threatening Iraq's national security:
Residents of Samarra, the scene of bloody clashes between U.S. soldiers and insurgents, said they feared a Shiite militia being unleashed on the city. Interviewed in their homes this week, they said they were unaware of a Mahdi Army presence, but claimed they had already suffered when commandos affiliated with al-Sadr's militia were dispatched to the city earlier this year.
Ibrahim Farraj, who lives in the Sikek district, said, "The Interior Ministry forces are very strong. The insurgents are afraid of them, but they are corrupt and we cannot trust them. The last time the Interior Ministry was here, they were al-Sadr -- people are scared of them and the Mahdi Army."
U.S. Army Capt. Ryan Wylie, of the 3rd Infantry Division serving in Samarra, said he had heard rumors that the Interior Ministry was conducting a private war, but had seen no evidence.
These bloggers that have been embedded with US troops in the northwest Euphrates river valley are all about exaggerating this difference. In particular, Bill Roggio at Threatswatch (where the map above came from) explains how Rats Nests are obliterated in Steel Curtain Unmasked, and other interesting dehumanizing euphemisms. See if you can find the subtle twist of meaning here:
Throughout the operation, the 1/1/1 of the Iraqi Army and the Desert Protection Force worked in conjunction with the U.S. Forces, and proved to be an instrumental part of the operation. The Iraqi Army battalion participated in combat operations, and they and Desert Protectors were able to identify foreign fighters and local insurgents.
I wonder if Roggio can wrap his head around the concept that 'identifying' is not a neutral act of observation, but a conscious change of political identity (by Shiite militia, no less) leading straight to violence.
Roggio is not happy about a Washington Post article that characterized his role in Iraq as a military-supported Information Operation. He says that all the cash to get him there was raised independently, and that the military has not 'influenced' his writing. But his main sources are military personnel, and his perspective is deeply enmeshed with the same terminology and concepts that Pentagon spokespeople attempt to beat into our heads. Here's his core point:
Equating military information operations with al-Qaeda propaganda efforts is a form of moral equivalence of the worst sort. The U.S. military is conducting an influence campaign to draw attention to the news which is missed by the media on a daily basis. Their belief (and one that I share) is the portrayal of events in Iraq do not reflect the actual situation on the ground. While the articles may be viewed as “favorable” to the Coalition, the question is, are they accurate and factual? The Washington Post does not address this issue, nor does it provide evidence that the military is running a disinformation campaign.
Misrepresenting the source (such as the placed Iraqi newspaper stories) is a form of disinformation because it manipulates the perception of where it's coming from. The military's justification is that there is a metaphysical or ontological gap between (all?) portrayals and reality, according to him. Well isn't there always? How far can this go? Also consider this ironic statement:
al-Qaeda is running a sheer disinformation campaign which uses human beings as props in events such as beheadings and execution styled killings. It manufactures events, such as the faux uprising in Ramadi in the beginning of December. The truth is not relevant to al-Qaeda’s propaganda operations, only results matter.
The administration has 'manufactured' all sorts of symbolic events and concepts, such as the Statue Toppling, the mysteriously Satanic Terrorist Singularity in Fallujah that needed to be nuked after the 2004 Presidential election, etc. There have been plenty of symbolic constructions. Look at how Pat Tillman died -- that event was manufactured beyond the truth (it was a friendly fire fatality) to burnish the war narrative. Oh by the way, here's what Tillman's dad said:
"They purposely interfered with the investigation, they covered it up," Patrick Tillman said. "I think they thought they could control it and they realized that their recruiting efforts were going to hell in a hand basket if the truth about his death got out."
Al Qaeda is not the only force at hand here seeking to 'sharpen the contradictions' through symbolic action. What is Shock and Awe, if not a symbolic gesture? (Roggio also said that lots of Sunnis voted for Allawi in Anbar. That's fucking ridiculous!)
But what can I say about a worldview with ideas like "Samarra, a city once ripe for a Tal Afar styled assault."
By the way, here's a by-the-numbers orthodox propaganda tale about the Terrorists in Mosul. Of course it comes from the American Forces Press Service, part of the 'American Forces Information Service.' Use this to set your propaganda index, I guess.
Sadr City has a good deal of reconstruction, after decades of neglect. A story in the rightwing UK Telegraph claims that Tal Afar is totally ballin' these days:
Their commander, Col H R McMaster, is a counter-insurgency specialist who wrote a book about the Vietnam War, in which he criticised the US military's failure to understand the enemy's culture.
Before deployment, his men were given extensive Arabic classes and intensive lessons on Iraqi history, customs and religion. Proper efforts were made to woo local tribal sheiks with banquets in which goats were slaughtered and concerns listened to.
"The enemy is really good at disinformation and propaganda. We have to win the battleground of perception," he said.
Big Brother & Crying Wolf: People are more willing to believe the right yarn at the right time these days. A student at Dartmouth claimed that Homeland Security questioned him after he got Mao's Little Red Book through inter-library loan. But apparently it was a hoax. This story shows that people are expecting to hear these kinds of things... so stay sharp, we can hit spin real fast here.
Scratch the Checks and/or Balances: How sad is it that Sen. Rockefeller gets to jot secret handwritten notes of concern to the White House like a high school sweetheart, and that is supposed to be his total constitutional role? WTF?
AIPAC says Jump! WaPo: "Pro-Israel Group Criticizes White House Policy on Iran:"
AIPAC, which describes itself as nonpartisan, has criticized nearly every administration's Middle East policies, often speaking out when Israeli government officials express private frustration with U.S. policies.
But the news releases mark the first major criticism of the Bush White House and come as the administration is focused on problems in Iraq and has no clear path on Iran.
[.....]
Ross said the criticisms, though serious, are unlikely to lead to an all-out rift between AIPAC and the administration. "At the end of the day, every administration does what it needs to do, but obviously they will have to pay attention to this," he said.
Which again suggests that AIPAC should be registered as an agent of a foreign power. Well, that, and some of their (former) personnel have been indicted on espionage charges (more info here via the New Yorker).
Biochemical roots of the Munchies: Cannabinoid receptors around the hypothalamus.
In their studies, the researchers concentrated on the lateral hypothalamus (LH) of the brain, known to be a center of control of food intake. Their studies involved detailed electrophysiological measurements of the effects of specific neurons that they had identified in previous studies as being important in endocannabinoid signaling.
Their studies revealed that activation of CB1 receptors, as by endocannabinoid molecules, induced these neurons to be rendered more excitable by a mechanism called "depolarization-induced suppression of inhibition" (DSI).
What's more, they found that leptin inhibits DSI. However, they found that leptin did not interfere with the CB1 receptors themselves. Rather, leptin "short-circuits" the endocannabinoid effects by inhibiting pore-like channels in the neurons that regulate the flow of calcium into the neurons. Such calcium is necessary for the synthesis of endocannabinoids.
Call the Cave of Shadows the Cave already! As we find ourselves hip-deep in propaganda, it's hard to know where to turn. Such strange web conspiracy theories as the Chappelle Theory briefly amuse us, but these are just the zeitgeist products of an insane time. The Cosby Theory, a follow-on satire of Chappelle Theory, explains the terrible conspiracy of the Cosby Sweaters. (the guys who dreamed up the Chappelle Theory were advised by their lawyers to let everyone know it's totally fake).
Some guy mocked me in the comments, implying I believed that the Chappelle Theory was real. I said that "The site looks good, it tells an exciting tale. In other words it's another well-marketed conspiracy theory thing," and I picked out a quote of Oprah ranting about her infinite power like a Bond villain. I thought it was a well-crafted example of that sort of site, but at no point did I claim it was real, although it prompted me to reflect that Chappelle might have been threatened somewhere along the way, and some of the 'Dark Crusaders' may have negatively reacted to Chappelle. (It was indeed well-marketed. They are now selling Dark Crusaders t-shirts.)
These days, there is a pretty thick distance between what we're presented with, and the Objective Truth that I still suspect exists somewhere. This site has been unafraid to link to raving lunatics, angry Iraqis, neoconservative screeds and gibbering Freemason spotters. I'm not looking over their shoulder, so how can I trust them any differently than, say, Scott McClellan or the Associated Press?
As we learned from such works as The Illuminatus! Trilogy, a conspiracy theory can offer a direct conjecture about a certain set of facts or circumstances, but it can also show an alternate style of linking events and people together.
A goofy conspiracy theory centered on pop culture is a kind of prism that reflects the basic weirdness of our times. When it's executed with style, I'll mention it because its logical form — apart from its literal content — can help induce a bit of a mindfuck, a unit of guerilla ontology to the everyday grind, imploding assumptions.
For example, when I mentioned to my family this crazy Chappelle Theory, they immediately leapt to Oprah's defense. How would Oprah ever threaten anyone?! She's a paragon of sassy afternoon virtue!!"
Aha!" said I, tanked on a bit of Sierra Nevada Celebration Ale. "Why do you leap to praise her automatically? She's just some billionaire! This silly theory reveals that you have all sorts of biased, programmed instincts to defend the wealthy & powerful, etc etc..."
The point is that we live in an Disinformation Age, and a wobbly conspiracy theory can help show you why Conventional Wisdom is just as shaky. As I have detailed here, we invaded Iraq partly because Iranian intelligence agents fed lurid stories about nuclear weapons through Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress into the Pentagon and the Vice President's office. That's part of the history of our times, and it's pretty damned conspiratorial. It sets the bar for intrigue, I think it's fair to say.
The sources of supposedly 'clean & authoritative information' in our information economy utterly failed to figure this out in time, and they still haven't come clean about it.
I long ago decided that only by monitoring the widest possible spectrum of rhetoric and information can a rough sense or useful 'heuristic' of any given political theater be reached. So I can't be afraid to reflect on what anyone from Charles Krauthammer to Wayne Madsen to DEBKAfile to Hezbollah's Al Manar is talking about. You can't achieve more intellectual accuracy by boycotting Mother Jones.
When yet another slickly executed Conspiracy Theory tale comes along, as they always do, I'll often toss it up here because it shows that the Dominant Narrative and Tacit Assumptions are often just as ridiculous. The battle for perceptions runs deep these days; the war is between your ears and behind your eyes.
The issue of Information Warfare is going to be a hot one next year, but we ought to take it all with a sense of good humor and a strong drug regimen to keep our minds limber, as the Dude put it.
To some extent, all political rhetoric rests on gestures toward phantasmic workings, a secret esoteric logic — either hidden actors, or Principles such as Freedom arranged by that mysterious Other 'Calling from beyond the Stars' for Dear Leader. As Ariel Sharon put it recently, "You see things from here [as PM] that you don't see from there [an outsider]." This is the 'appeal to authority' argument, and the Authorities cash out the fallacy as far as they can.
Plato spelled out this basic political principle for us in the Allegory of the Caves, when he said that only the select can reach the World of True Forms, while the rest would just watch projections. He meant that a good leader better be able to dream up some fine-sounding esoteric Forms to tell the tribe at the campfire. An objectively false 'conspiracy' can still illustrate how these grand Authoritative and Legitimate Sources are just a couple notches up from the tribal shaman.
Botox is the new charmed skull on a stick, the Brookings Institution is nothing but the 21st century's beard-stroking witch doctor.
Of course, as an atheist I must consider all spiritual appeals as possibly having this basic political purpose at their core, even if part of the intention is self-deception, rather than purely manipulating the audience.
Again we must return to the words of Hasan i Sabah, the leader of the Assassins. "Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted." Surely, Karl Rove is his truest disciple, and I'll set the ideological filters for my site's content accordingly.
The One Laptop Per Child nonprofit organization is supporting the distribution of a Linux-based $100 laptop, which will soon go out to children in Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria. It also has a hand-cranked power generator, which is a brilliant idea.
Forbes: Intel's Barrett Dismisses $100 Laptop As 'Gadget'
LONDON - It's a crank. Intel Chairman Craig Barrett has dismissed a WiFi-enabled, Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop aimed at bringing computers to developing economies as a "$100 gadget". The lime-green devices run on electromotive energy from a wind-up mechanism--thus allowing the machines to be used in areas lacking a regular power supply.
Bit of a jackass, then. See also PCWorld.com - Kids' Laptop Hits World Spotlight. Pic source from the oddly negative article carried in Vermont Guardian.
By 2007, five to ten million of these laptops will have been shipped to developing countries. By the year after that, the number is expected to have grown ten-fold. What is not known is whether this project will mark a new phase in the spread of knowledge, or whether hundreds of millions of children will become slaves to their little green boxes instead of playing in the backyard.
The Man was Here: WaPo: "CIA scours blogs for useful intelligence: Some `secrets' can be found in plain view." Well at least I know the CIA has already been here a couple times. So it's not breaking news.
Ten stoner ideas for peace in Iraq: Brilliant. Air conditioners, kind bud, Xbox 360s with extra controllers, Madden 2006, Marshmallows, kegs of Budweiser, acoustic guitars and whores. Shrewd strategy. "I guarantee this much: Give a 16-year-old Sunni the choice between killing himself and spending his life playing videogame football, and he’ll make the right choice every time." BSnews.org also features the "Bush War Plan Clearly Written In Crayon."
DeLay is hurting Republicans in vulnerable districts. Ouch. Sweet.
The blogosphere may be unreasonably carried away with Paul Hackett's chances in the Ohio senate race, given his low name ID. Rep. Sherrod Brown seems to be leading in polls.
Polls in Iraq seem oddly positive. I doubt their scientific value. "'Failure' Most Popular Term Sending Traffic From Google To US White House Site".
Bite the patting hand: Rightwingers are angry when the NY Times Magazine carried a story titled "Conservative Blogs are more Effective." Weird.
Elections in wars may not work: Haaretz/Reuters: Gaza gunmen fire on PA security compound, storm election HQ. "The Wall of Hate" is a film about the West Bank partition wall that Israel is constructing.
Iraq blogstorm and the 'Iranian occupation': Check out Iraq Blog Count for an index. A friend of mine was saying that all these blogs and Internet things complicate the situation, but I strongly disagree because I think we get a real good sense of the mentality and the situation of Iraqis, just by looking through a few of them. Baghdad Burning by Riverbend is of course well-known now, and excellent. The Iranian Occupation bit is interesting:
The agony of the long war with Iran is what makes the current situation in Iraq so difficult to bear- especially this last year. The occupation has ceased to be American. It is American in face, and militarily, but in essence it has metamorphosed slowly but surely into an Iranian one.
It began, of course, with Badir’s Brigade and the several Iran-based political parties which followed behind the American tanks in April 2003. It continues today with a skewed referendum, and a constitution that will guarantee a southern Iraqi state modeled on the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Of course all this talk about the US dropping chemical weapons makes it more 'complicated.' Would the Baghdad Burning book -- now on its way -- seem more credible somehow? Truth-about-iraqis.blogspot.com has a anguished rant whose tone rings very true. And this one too:
This is not Iraq. The only Iraq I can identify with is the Iraq that rages in the hearts of those who defend its honor, who die defending its honor, those who fight the Iranian horde, the US oppressor.
.....In any case, everything is coming tumbling down. The war lies, the GOP, right wing radio, the illusionists, the nazis and their WASP allies, the zionist war machine, and the racist white-hood wearing commentators.
The Iraq lie is simply too heavy a burden.
Sow it buddy, then drink the rotten milk of human waste.
Nefarious is as nefarious will do.
I think it makes a major, positive, difference -- although the terrible experience of Khaled Jarrar when he was captured by the Interior Ministry, and his additional troubles because they found out about his blog, were an example of how it can hurt the writers. But we wouldn't know about what it's really like inside the New Security Organs of Iraq without people like him.
For more, consider Aunt Najma's A Star from Mosul (with many relatives blogging too), Treasure of Baghdad, Free Iraq ("The US's pre-emptive occupation of Iraq will see to it that the Lion of Babylon rises again" sweet) and Iraqi Rebel.
David Ignatius likes the eschatological-conspiracy angle in "Breaking the Assassins." Thanks for obfuscating reality with a bunch of grand gibberish. Can Rummy defeat the Cult of the Assassins? Sure!
Ethnically pure militias: Bloomberg service: Bush's Strategy, Iraq's New Army Challenged by Ethnic Militias
The Defense Department's intelligence agency says there are dozens of loosely organized Shiite armies in southern Iraq, Kurdish militias in the north that function like a regular army, and as many as 20,000 Sunni fighters who are part of the violent insurgency in Iraq's four central provinces.
..... ``The situation continues to deteriorate,'' said Anthony Cordesman of the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. ``It's a matter of the militias, new political organizations, Shiite groups'' and Iraqi security forces becoming ``forces for revenge or reprisal.''
....Leslie Gelb, former assistant secretary of state and former president of the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations, said most of the militias pay first allegiance to their ethnic or tribal group. ``It's not an Iraqi army,'' said Gelb, who visited Iraq for 10 days earlier this year. Kurds are loyal to Kurds, Shiite militias resembling ``mafia operations'' run the south, ``the central region has the insurgency, and Baghdad is all mixed up,'' he said.
Patrick Lang, former chief analyst for the Middle East at the Defense Intelligence Agency, said Iraq's different ethnic groups ``will not serve together'' in national army units. ``They tried it and it didn't work, and now they're going back to ethnically pure units,'' he said, citing Defense Department officials he declined to identify. Lang, a retired colonel in the Army's Green Berets, is now president of Global Resources Group, a Washington-based consulting firm.
"Islamic leaders unveil action plan to rescue a 'nation in crisis'." Baghdad Press Club investigated as a central node of paid military propaganda.
Cheney visits Auschwitz and secret CIA Poland camp on same trip? Oy vey. FT: Allegations of secret US jails in Europe are 'credible'. Guardian: Investigator links Europe's spy agencies to CIA flights. Ireland On-Line 'Signs suggest US illegally held detainees in Europe' especially Poland and Romania. Take it with a grain of salt, but Wayne Madsen's report on Cheney visiting secret camps in Poland (Dec. 13) around his visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp last January. Not sure if it's a true report, but if it is true, a very dark irony.
Iran talks a big game: But this Haaretz article makes it all too clear that their economic situation is excellent, and they can count on Russia and China to help them in the UN if things get hairy. Ahmadinejad can continue to smile while the world argues. True.
The Horatio Alger NAMBLA chapter: Larry Beinhart's "Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin" looks interesting. In particular, for example, he establishes that Horatio Alger was a pedophile, and was a pedophilic minister before he got chased out of Brewster, Massachusetts, and admitted to it. That's established, then the spin dissection starts. Weird. And maybe that's more widely known, but I never heard of it. Also claims that the NYC chapter of NAMBLA is the Horatio Alger chapter. Creepy.
Vote Spoofing: The War at Home: Diebold chief executive Wally O'Dell resigns, as more questions about company conduct and illegal trading have come up. There are lawsuits happening as people claim that Diebold failed to get its modified voting machine software correctly certified on some occasions. In North Caroline, the EFF has filed a lawsuit. O'Dell was the guy who claimed he would help 'deliver' Ohio's electoral votes to Bush.
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?
There is talk on local hiphop site D. U. Nation about the shootings at the Quest the other night. Citypages staffer Peter Scholtes just posted an interesting account of the concert & incident. Forum member Tanqueray_Loccsta adds the improbable MySpace + Gangsta fusion:
Man they aint gonna close the quest, they got Mark Webster back. He's gonna clean it up just like he had it when I was a bouncer there. I was gonna work there with him but I got my own drama, Anyway I only got time for my Muzic from now on.
But for those that dont Know this street shit is real it no movie or t.v shit its mufuccas out here like myself that really lived this shit or still are living it now. And most beef that happens aint about someones shoes getting stepped on, or getting bumped into.
Its about real shit that took place in the streets and then you so happen to see the mufucca that fucced you over and its on right there. aint no fuccin talkin just drama.
The only fucced up part about it is it makes it hard for niggaz like me to do shows cuz they be scared of the type of crowed that will come. so the only cats that get the good venues are backpack rappers. no offence to yall...
but the streets are real.. shit My big bro O.G K-Wood just got murdered july 31st 2005 over north. check out his muzic at
http://www.myspace.com/murda4hire
this shit is real man mufuccas is gangstas 4 real man...
and it aint all superficial like ppl think it aint about being cool or tuff only ppl think that is on the outside looking in.
Tanqueray Loccsta says he's performing on Dec 13 at Minnesota Snipe's CD release party. I'd never seen a MySpace site in memory of a slain guy from the North Side -- complete with some of his tracks. It seems like a good idea, to make sure there's a spot on the Internet where their loss is marked, with music that celebrates them.
DailyKos says today that there are rumors that Bush has considered a jolt of Joementum to replace Rumsfeld. Yes, Joe Lieberman could run the Pentagon. It doesn't really seem plausible. I can't believe they would go Joe rather than find someone more tough-looking. Lieberman is horrible, and kos points out it would free Senate Democrats from his the grip of his nasty faux-centralism, but I don't know.
Given the circumstances I would really like a SecDef who was A) competent and experienced B) not murderously senile. I actually believe that the Republicans could come up with someone like that, but sadly they probably won't.
Speaking of the DKos, the site went down for a while when the server was being moved in a van, and a dog sniffed an apparent bomb that was actually cologne or something. So the government got them down for a while on a false positive.
Everyone's on a hair trigger?
Right now on C-SPAN, they're having the final session of the 9/11 Public Discourse Project, which was the low-budget sequel to the 9/11 Commission. They gave the government a lot of 'bad grades' for how it has failed to come up with specific measures intended to counter terrorism, which was more critical than I expected.
There is a lot of boring blather, but I thought the most interesting bit of the closing remarks was when Richard Ben-Veniste called for public hearings into the Able Danger intelligence project, and cited several programs (Eagle Eye and Talon, I think two were called) that he believed deserved greater scrutiny. I think they were being used to amass information at the Defense Department about American citizens. We'll hear more about this later, I hope, and I don't have a transcript.
Also on C-SPAN, Rumsfeld had some thing at the School of Advanced International Studies at John Hopkins, in which he elaborated about the war and the media / information environment etc. He said it was soo much more difficult because they can't break the law or lie, unlike the Enemies. And I laughed. Tragically I didn't see the whole thing, but it looked like a classic.
C-SPAN is a damn good service. Look at all these videos you can watch through their website. Ben-Veniste was right to thank them for broadcasting the hearings, to make the American people eyewitnesses to the operations of the government. But it's going to take a long time for it to Work...
Ah, for the longest time I have been speculating that they were going to let the war spill into Syria, under the ridiculous assertion that this would somehow improve the Situation. Finally Sy Hersh has said that we have gone in... Oh boy, what ever the fuck could go wrong? (and who approved of Attacking Syria, exactly? Congress??)
There is a lot of terrible stuff in here.
UP IN THE AIR
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Where is the Iraq war headed next?
....“The President is more determined than ever to stay the course,” the former defense official said. “He doesn’t feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage ‘People may suffer and die, but the Church advances.’ ” He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. “They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,” the former defense official said. Bush’s public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. “Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House,” the former official said, “but Bush has no idea.”
......
Meanwhile, as the debate over troop reductions continues, the covert war in Iraq has expanded in recent months to Syria. A composite American Special Forces team, known as an S.M.U., for “special-mission unit,” has been ordered, under stringent cover, to target suspected supporters of the Iraqi insurgency across the border. (The Pentagon had no comment.) “It’s a powder keg,” the Pentagon consultant said of the tactic. “But, if we hit an insurgent network in Iraq without hitting the guys in Syria who are part of it, the guys in Syria would get away. When you’re fighting an insurgency, you have to strike everywhere—and at once.”
Another part of the article points out the fears among many in the military if American air power is provided to the Iraqis, meaning the "Iraqi government" -- and whichever tinpot tribal leader is in control that Thursday -- will be able to order American airstrikes on whichever 'terrorist' sect they choose.
So in both instances, force spiraling out of control. But what else is new?
Happy turkey days to all. I have been hiding out as a sudden cold has hit me - but its already getting better. Video games and Orange Juice can cure most anything, especially deep in November.
Strange days though. I find myself less concerned than usual about tracking the war. Plus Israel would appear to be shifting to the left, as Sharon looks to ditch the Crazy Right of Likud. That's really good, I think. But let's put aside those nasty situations and consider what Fark tells us about the world.
William Shatner wants to sell a kidney stone on eBay (bottom of page). Same page: Scotty's ashes will not get shot into space on schedule. Now scheduled for January. It seems like they went thru the transporter a few times too many...
Wireless mosquito defense network. Yes. Food Agency Tries To Quell Fears About Glow-In-The-Dark Meats. Police Search for Gary Glitter in Vietnam.
Fox News reviews the upcoming Clooney Middle East flick Syriana very positively. Also calls it a good companion piece to Three Kings, one of my favorite movies. And it's based on a book by former CIA dude Robert Baer. Hmmm... ok I'm interested. Also the guy who did Traffic is involved.
The basic story is that an oil company has set up shop in the Gulf, just as a merger is going through. The local royal Arab family is in the middle of a succession as the Emir (king) is about to step aside for one of his two sons: an idiot, and a sensitive, forward thinker. Guess who gets the job?
Clooney plays a CIA agent who’s a little over the hill and washed up. But he’s onto the fact that the government and the oil companies are trying to stay in control through the manipulation of who becomes king.
Most profitable East Bank poetry ever: Bob Dylan poems written at the University of Minnesota in 1959-60 fetch $78,000. And today it's the Loring Pasta Bar...
NSA and UFOs: The National Security Agency gave out some information about UFOs -- not much information. Surprisingly, the secretive intelligence agency pointed out that since so much of their reports about 'unidentified' phenomena came from spying on foreign communications systems, they couldn't share most of it! Really, that's pretty funny. A 'Top secret UMBRA' file is declassified here (PDF). (more sweet NSA documents from FAS - check out Secrecy News and the CRS reports)
Is the earth in a space-time vortex? NASA's on the job.
All this Raw Milk must be stopped. Russian scientist trains remote control turtles to spy? Cell phone explodes. Robber holds up bar with ham sandwich.
News from the Co-Prosperity Sphere: Japan to have a 'military' again for first time since WWII. Survey shows money can help buy happiness.
Stephen Hawking is tough as hell. Before a lecture, when he was taken off a respirator, he nearly died, but they resuscitated him. Hawking went on to give the lecture via Internet teleconferencing.
What did he think of "The Simpsons" TV show, which has had Hawking as an animated guest star? "It's the best thing on American TV." What did he think of the program to send American astronauts back to the moon? "Stupid," he answered. "Sending politicians would be much cheaper, because you don't have to bring them back."
Also an elderly Georgia man on oxygen managed to foil some robbers.
Mexican border squads (drug militia?) handle their marijuana with aplomb. El Paso Times:
Pot-laden truck creates armed standoff
A marijuana-laden dump truck got stuck in the Rio Grande on Thursday evening in Hudspeth County, leading to a standoff between U.S. law enforcement and what appeared to be the Mexican military, sheriff officials said.
.....Doyal said the truck driver returned with the armed men, including men who arrived in official-looking vehicles with overhead lights and what appeared to be Mexican soldiers in uniform and with military-style rifles.
In related news, the same part of the brain that gets "the munchies" is altered by a new drug suppressing appetite.
Nothing quite like that British All-Seeing Eye. Now they are going to TRACK ALL VEHICLES IN BRITAIN. Oh what will they think of next? Plus it all got snuck through Parliament, of course...
Gatso 2: rollout of UK's '24x7 vehicle movement database' begins
A "24x7 national vehicle movement database" that logs everything on the UK's roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of 'Gatso 2' network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.
Which possibly explains why the sorcerer's apprentices in ACPO's tech section don't seem to have needed any kind of Parliamentary approval to begin the deployment of what promises to be one the most pervasive surveillance systems on earth.
The control centre is intended to go live in April of next year, and is intended to be processing 50 million number plates a day by year end. ACPO national ANPR co-ordinator John Dean told the Sunday Times that fixed ANPR cameras already exist "at strategic points" on every motorway in the UK, and that the intention was to have "good nationwide coverage within the next 12 months." According to ACPO roads policing head Meredydd Hughes, ANPR systems are planned every 400 yards along motorways, and a trial on the M42 near Birmingham will first be used to enforce variable speed limits, then to 'tackle more serious crime.'
However, in Britain a 1689 law helped get a man out of a parking ticket. This memorable quote:
A spokeswoman for the National Parking Adjudication Service said no previous challenge to parking fines using the Bill of Rights had been successful.
Good luck with your cameras!! They still love drinking. BBC reported that
Looking back only 700 years, London had over 1,300 alehouses - one for every 50 people living in the city.
Meanwhile in Australia they are still messing around with the gnomes. Worst tech products of 2005.
Machines and objects to overtake humans on the Internet:
The ITU's vision goes further, highlighting refrigerators that independently communicate with grocery stores, washing machines that communicate with clothing, implanted tags with medical equipment and vehicles with stationary or moving objects.
Industrial products would also become increasingly "smart", gaining autonomy and the intelligence thanks to miniaturised but more powerful computing capacity.
"Even particles and 'dust' might be tagged and networked", the ITU said. "
Robot moose foils poachers in Canada (CNN video). Speaking of particles, the nice "Mountains of Creation."
NBC chief says that they pay too much attention to blogs over there, but pushing video over the Internet has improved ratings. What?
Superspreaders of disease are primarily responsible for mass epidemics, new study says. "A lot of people don't infect anyone".
Too much CO2? Stash it underground, says a guy from BP. Weird. An Austrian city is building giant mirrors to get light over a huge hill between November and February. Sweet!!
Bomb the Television. In some ways Bush is a bit of an Anarchist. I mean some radicals have fantasies like this, but really floating this kind of thing in the halls of power, like some crazed giant child -- I find it too easy to believe. Paper Says Bush Talked of Bombing Arab TV Network:
President Bush expressed interest in bombing the headquarters of the Arabic television network al-Jazeera during a White House conversation with Prime Minister Tony Blair in April 2004, a British newspaper reported Tuesday.
The Daily Mirror report was attributed to two anonymous sources describing a classified document they said contained a transcript of the two leaders' talk. One source is quoted as saying Bush's alleged remark concerning the network's headquarters in Qatar was "humorous, not serious," while the other said, "Bush was deadly serious."
I have always thought there was something shadowy and vicious about the conflict between al-Jazeera and Bush. The part in Control Room where American planes kill Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayub is killed in Baghdad was a terrible moment in the history of journalism -- and stories such as this make it seem more likely that the Pentagon really does believe this is a workable PR strategy. Juan Cole reflects on Al Jazeera & the conflict on all this.
Either way, this seems to be serious, given the Official Secrets Act gag orders on the whole thing, reports Guardian. The White House scoffed contemptuously.
Cheney: Drudge: X Marks the spot.
The More Well Known Pong: The history of Beer pong at Dartmouth.
The Mongolian Armed Forces are serving the cause of freedom.This WSJ bit about Mongolia made me sort of happy. I don't know why, but the idea that Bush managed to stir up the spectre of the Mongol Hordes seems so ... appropriate.
But Mongolia, which contributed about 130 soldiers, has maintained its number through five troop rotations, managing to avoid the sort of explosive local debate that has echoed through other foreign capitals. If that number sounds small, consider this: As a proportion of population, the infantry company and engineering platoon Mongolia sent from a population of 2.5 million people makes it the third-largest U.S. partner per capita.
"The Mongolian Armed Forces are serving the cause of freedom," Mr. Bush said, "and U.S. forces are proud to serve beside such fearless warriors."
....In preparing for Mongolia, the president needed to figure out how to tactfully refuse a gift horse. ...Rumsfeld got a horse -- a black-maned steed he named "Montana" -- when he visited this visually stunning nation of desert steppes in October. Such gift horses aren't actually taken home; instead, they are kept around but not ridden, in anticipation of the next visit.
But White House aides say Mr. Bush was worried about the obligations of ownership. Would taxpayers be on the hook for upkeep? Was there any way to guarantee the horse's well-being down the road? The question occupied not one but several meetings at the National Security Council in the days leading up to Mr. Bush's trip...
Kyrgyzstan on verge of anarchy: official.
Gang feuds for control of local bazaars have flared up in the south, while an angry crowd managed to seize and briefly hold the main government building in the north, a severe blow to the reputation of newly elected President Kurmanbek Bakiyev.
Volkswagen rocked by claims of sex junkets. What more can I say? Oh well, it's Brazil?
MOSCOW (Reuters) - An eagle-eyed investigator's wife ended a Russian manhunt by spotting a murder suspect's name in the credits of a television show, a newspaper said Tuesday.
SONY DRM copy protection defeated by tape. I will always believe that Securing Freedom by protecting Fair Use rights are essential to maintaining a vital and healthy culture. Therefore, whenever corporate copy protection systems are defeated be ingenious human beings, I think it makes a real positive -- and immediate -- improvement. A piece of tape defeats Sony's new DRM system - the rootkit one:
The user can simply apply a fingernail-sized piece of opaque tape to the outer edge of the disc, rendering session 2 - which contains the self-loading DRM software, unreadable. The PC then treats the CD as an ordinary single-session music CD, and the commonly used CD "rip" programs continue to work as usual.
Misc file: What happens when you get possessed by Bill Cosby? Jeff Goldblum is watching you... Cebu mayor: I will go to sex den if I want to. Chinese develop the liquid condom. In the ever-expanding world of the cosmetic surgery industry, new breast implant gel technology promises to be less likely to kill you. Getting a tech job in the XXX internet business.
Interweb securitay: The Bavarian police issue a strangely precise advisory about a Sober.worm virus - before it seemed to appear on the Internet. Always time for intrigue in Bavaria... Oddly enough the worm also comes with (fake) messages that claim to be from the FBI and CIA, implicating illegal activity. Oh my.
Consider the Top 20 Internet Security Vulnerabilities -- and note that there really isn't much wrong with the Mac. Paris Hilton used as virus bait (wha?)
Honduran Teen Escapes Prison for 5th Time. He said he was going to break out and kill all the journalists. Somewhere, the future Karl Rove-Che hybrid of Central America is hiding...
This is a complex one. DC journalist / conspiracy theorist / ex-NSA/State guy Wayne Madsen is one of those weird sources, and I hardly automatically take stuff on his website seriously. However, he has been out there awhile and he's cultivated some strange sources... Earlier this week he said that there was some kind of homosexual/pedophile ring in the White House that was responsible for ordering a lot of the sexually humiliating practices at sites like Abu Ghraib. (A controversial assertion, to say the least, but where the hell DID all this deviant shit come from? A handful of Kentucky yokels??)
...But that is not the main point today. He has a long quote from something purportedly written by a guy in French intelligence that describes the origins of al Qaeda ("The Base" in Arabic) as essentially the contact information and network architecture of a relatively modest computer setup -- which only later became the grand imaginary demon we shudder at today. So take this with the proper grains of salt...
t is roughly analogous to my usual way of thinking about the whole "nasty international terror network", only put in more concrete and concentrated terms. I won't believe this till someone shows me, but in some ways it makes more sense than the usual nonsense we hear. Hezbollah is just a database query away -- the International Islamic Front was always just a email server. Heh.... wouldn't it be another fine irony? Madsen (sorry no dated link):
November 18, 2005 -- More on Al Qaeda -- the database. Shortly before his untimely death, former British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook told the House of Commons that "Al Qaeda" is not really a terrorist group but a database of international mujaheddin and arms smugglers used by the CIA and Saudis to funnel guerrillas, arms, and money into Soviet-occupied Afghanistan. Courtesy of World Affairs, a journal based in New Delhi, WMR can bring you an important excerpt from an Apr.-Jun. 2004 article by Pierre-Henry Bunel, a former agent for French military intelligence."I first heard about Al-Qaida while I was attending the Command and Staff course in Jordan. I was a French officer at that time and the French Armed Forces had close contacts and cooperation with Jordan . . .
"Two of my Jordanian colleagues were experts in computers. They were air defense officers. Using computer science slang, they introduced a series of jokes about students' punishment.
"For example, when one of us was late at the bus stop to leave the Staff College, the two officers used to tell us: 'You'll be noted in 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' which meant 'You'll be logged in the information database.' Meaning 'You will receive a warning . . .' If the case was more severe, they would used to talk about 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Meaning 'the decision database.' It meant 'you will be punished.' For the worst cases they used to speak of logging in 'Al Qaida.'
"In the early 1980s the Islamic Bank for Development, which is located in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, like the Permanent Secretariat of the Islamic Conference Organization, bought a new computerized system to cope with its accounting and communication requirements. At the time the system was more sophisticated than necessary for their actual needs.
"It was decided to use a part of the system's memory to host the Islamic Conference's database. It was possible for the countries attending to access the database by telephone: an Intranet, in modern language. The governments of the member-countries as well as some of their embassies in the world were connected to that network.
"[According to a Pakistani major] the database was divided into two parts, the information file where the participants in the meetings could pick up and send information they needed, and the decision file where the decisions made during the previous sessions were recorded and stored. In Arabic, the files were called, 'Q eidat il-Maaloomaat' and 'Q eidat i-Taaleemaat.' Those two files were kept in one file called in Arabic 'Q eidat ilmu'ti'aat' which is the exact translation of the English word database. But the Arabs commonly used the short word Al Qaida which is the Arabic word for "base." The military air base of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia is called 'q eidat 'riyadh al 'askariya.' Q eida means "a base" and "Al Qaida" means "the base."
"In the mid-1980s, Al Qaida was a database located in computer and dedicated to the communications of the Islamic Conference's secretariat.
"In the early 1990s, I was a military intelligence officer in the Headquarters of the French Rapid Action Force. Because of my skills in Arabic my job was also to translate a lot of faxes and letters seized or intercepted by our intelligence services . . . We often got intercepted material sent by Islamic networks operating from the UK or from Belgium.
"These documents contained directions sent to Islamic armed groups in Algeria or in France. The messages quoted the sources of statements to be exploited in the redaction of the tracts or leaflets, or to be introduced in video or tapes to be sent to the media. The most commonly quoted sources were the United Nations, the non-aligned countries, the UNHCR and . . . Al Qaida.
"Al Qaida remained the data base of the Islamic Conference. Not all member countries of the Islamic Conference are 'rogue states' and many Islamic groups could pick up information from the databases. It was but natural for Osama Bin Laden to be connected to this network. He is a member of an important family in the banking and business world.
"Because of the presence of 'rogue states,' it became easy for terrorist groups to use the email of the database. Hence, the email of Al Qaida was used, with some interface system, providing secrecy, for the families of the mujaheddin to keep links with their children undergoing training in Afghanistan, or in Libya or in the Beqaa valley, Lebanon. Or in action anywhere in the battlefields where the extremists sponsored by all the 'rogue states' used to fight. And the 'rogue states' included Saudi Arabia. When Osama bin Laden was an American agent in Afghanistan, the Al Qaida Intranet was a good communication system through coded or covert messages.
"Al Qaida was neither a terrorist group nor Osama bin Laden's personal property . . . The terrorist actions in Turkey in 2003 were carried out by Turks and the motives were local and not international, unified, or joint. These crimes put the Turkish government in a difficult position vis-a-vis the British and the Israelis. But the attacks certainly intended to 'punish' Prime Minister Erdogan for being a 'toot tepid' Islamic politician.
" . . . In the Third World the general opinion is that the countries using weapons of mass destruction for economic purposes in the service of imperialism are in fact 'rogue states," specially the US and other NATO countries.
" Some Islamic economic lobbies are conducting a war against the 'liberal" economic lobbies. They use local terrorist groups claiming to act on behalf of Al Qaida. On the other hand, national armies invade independent countries under the aegis of the UN Security Council and carry out pre-emptive wars. And the real sponsors of these wars are not governments but the lobbies concealed behind them.
"The truth is, there is no Islamic army or terrorist group called Al Qaida. And any informed intelligence officer knows this. But there is a propaganda campaign to make the public believe in the presence of an identified entity representing the 'devil' only in order to drive the 'TV watcher' to accept a unified international leadership for a war against terrorism. The country behind this propaganda is the US and the lobbyists for the US war on terrorism are only interested in making money."
ExplodingDog comic says it all. "I knew the answer in the beginning." The poor stick figure works through it now, too late -- the war was rationalized in terrible ways, turned now to mist. The righteous American stands alone, confused, as the world smolders with conflict, blood all around. The US has apparently introduced White Phosphorus chemical weapons into the arena of Iraq, apparently using them around Fallujah to kill targets and surrounding people:
White phosphorus results in painful chemical burn injuries. The resultant burn typically appears as a necrotic area with a yellowish color and characteristic garliclike odor. White phosphorus is highly lipid soluble and as such, is believed to have rapid dermal penetration once particles are embedded under the skin. Because of its enhanced lipid solubility, many have believed that these injuries result in delayed wound healing. This has not been well studied; therefore, all that can be stated is that white phosphorus burns represent a small subsegment of chemical burns, all of which typically result in delayed wound healing.
..... Phosphorus burns on the skin are deep and painful; a firm eschar is produced and is surrounded by vesiculation.
White Phosphorus shells apparently react with human flesh by sort of melting it, giving victims a carmelized, melted appearance while the clothes remain intact. There are reports that it's a developed Marine tactic, used in Fallujah.
The US Army itself admitted that it uses WP in Iraq, in their own "Field Artillery Magazine", as a DKos diarist pulled it together. The military said (PDF):
"WP [i.e., white phosphorus rounds] proved to be an effective and versatile munition. We used it for screening missions at two breeches and, later in the fight, as a potent psychological weapon against the insurgents in trench lines and spider holes when we could not get effects on them with HE. We fired 'shake and bake' missions at the insurgents, using WP to flush them out and HE to take them out."
When Paula Zahn introduced the exciting Suicide Bomber Woman Video the other day, they couldn't resist throwing in this horrible theatrical music, that kind of "Islamic Threat" theme, heavy with throbbing drums and synth strings, the stuff that keeps FOX News so jazzy and amusing. The thrill of the chase! Vicarious pursuit! Who can stop these Arabs before they come down the street!?
For some reason there are tornadoes ravaging the country today - the atmosphere is weird right now. Why are there so many Lockheed-Martin and Boeing feelgood promotional ads on CNN? What are they even selling?
"The End of News?" by Michael Massing - as rightwing dominance settles over much of the news landscape. This pretty much sums up the toxic information swamp we're in:
Through the Internet, commentators can channel criticism of the press to the general public faster and more efficiently than before. As became plain in the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry, to cite one of many examples, an unscrupulous critic can spread exaggerated or erroneous claims instantaneously to thousands of people, who may, in turn, repeat them to millions more on talk radio programs, on cable television, or on more official "news" Web sites. This kind of recycled commentary has become all the more effective because it is aimed principally at a sector of the population that seldom if ever sees serious press coverage.
On the other hand, there's been this change in the political wind over the last month or so, with Libby's indictment, Harry Reid's recalcitrance -- forcing the long-suppressed investigation into the spoofed intelligence. It's been a treat to see Wolf Blitzer asking everyone about it, over and over, while Cafferty cackles. It seems the elite crew finally smell blood.
James Fallows runs through the basic points of the whole case. When every chattering head on TV claims "the Senate Intelligence report PROVES this intelligence manipulation never happened", and yet, that's pretty much their only firm point, it signals that a great many pillars of the pro-war case have finally been knocked away.
Another major defense of the war was the National Intelligence Estimate on October 1, 2002 that the CIA produced about Iraq - which they claim showed that the CIA and other intelligence agencies was dumb as anyone about the matter. There was a classified version that only a limited circle of politicians could read, and the unclassified version. The classified one had lots of things like "The State Dept thinks this WMD is not really certain", while the version that they deigned to permit Congress to read lacked the statements of doubt. Small catch. Lots of details on the NIE here and here.
RUMSFELD STRIKES BACK read the CNN title bar today, as he cited the Dems who'd talked about Iraq's threat in the past. He says that the decision to invade was based on the same stuff they had, they were all seeing, before 2000. He implies that the quality and quantity of information available to the Dems in 2002 and 2003 was the same as what the President saw, as 'everyone knew.' But even the Washington Post can't take that seriously anymore:
But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.
Rummy even trotted out the Orwellian classic "Islamofascists: we just gots to kill 'em!"
Nothing quite as handy as merging political identities for a quick & lazy ethnic demonization -- see 'Judeo-bolshevik' for how these things work out.
They keep saying, "How dare we have this discussion now, when the war is still happening and the troops need moral support?" Well, three arguments:
First, the American public ought to see the difference in Iraq intelligence between what Democrats in Congress, Bush himself, the various intelligence agencies, and the shady guys around Cheney and Rumsfeld saw. The stuff from Chalabi should be on the public record, one piece at a time.
Second, because I believe that things were willfully manipulated (and aggressively defended when attacked - the Plame case a key symptom), the people who did that shit should lose their security clearances and go play golf with their devious friends. They don't have some intrinsic right to government paychecks, even if firing them would embarrass or fragment Bush's sad White House more than it has already. It has been widely said, especially in recent weeks, that people like Michael Ledeen were running around in 2002, helping move the specific Niger forgeries that scared the hell out of the American people. Some of this was dug up by Josh Marshall and Laura Rozen in "Iran Contra II?" Larry Franklin and the AIPAC scandal fold right into this stuff, as well.
Third, it is plenty patriotic to believe that the American people should pressure the government to have a realistic, honestly weighed and "not murderously insane" view of the world. The Bush Administration has no short-circuit to infallibility or the Wisdom of God. The embattled ranks of the U.S. military need to know that the pencil-pushers in DC will actually have to pay a price for their nonsense, and their evasion of disasters like the torture policy. The blame here resides near the top of the chain of command -- we have to help out the lower rungs by getting them out of the system. The armed forces have to know that we are going to protect them from being forced to commit such terrible acts as torture.
From an article in the Miami Herald, Leonard Pitts:
In the name of fighting terror, we have terrorized, and in the name of defending our values, we have betrayed them. We have imprisoned Muslims in America and refused to say if we had them, why we had them, or even to provide them attorneys. We have passed laws making it easier for government to snoop into what you read, who you talk to, where you go. We have equated dissent with lack of patriotism, disagreement with treason. And we have tortured.
Meanwhile, Lindsey Graham attempts to suspend Habeus Corpus for people detained as terrorist suspects. (If you permit yourself to believe that they're all known, proven terrorists, well, that just isn't true of any jail or shadow detention network - sorry)
Fortunately there are lots of military veteran Democrats, many from Iraq, who are getting into the elections less than 12 months from now. While I can't demand their politics align with my own perfectly, they'd be a hell of a lot better than the chickenhawks at understanding the terrible price of war and violence (as well as treating veterans decently).
The blowback against the Right is reaching far and wide.
Jordan bombing: Juan Cole reflects on the death of Moustapha Akkad, a Syrian movie producer who was involved with the Halloween movies, among others. Akkad was on track to produce a film about Saladin, but now it won't happen:
The guerrilla war in Iraq has claimed a unique cinematic voice of transnational modernity, who had explored the terror of psychopathology and the angst of alienation, as well as the history of anti-colonial movements.
The Iraq conflict has become a bad horror film. It has killed the grandfather of the "Halloween" movies. And it has snuffed out the man who wanted to bring real Muslim heroes such as the Prophet Muhammad, Omar Mukhtar and Saladin to American film-going audiences. Now, his last project will remain unachieved. Saladin was a Kurd from what is now northern Iraq, and he defeated the Crusaders with a legendary chivalry that inspired their respect.
Zarqawi's henchmen inspire only horror, not respect. They have no chivalry, only bloodthirstiness. They are Michael Myers, not Saladin.
Moustapha Akkad was an American voice as well as a Muslim one. We needed his ability to communicate one culture to the other. His death diminishes us all, and signals the nightfall of a decade-long "Halloween" of the horrific sort for Iraq and for the United States.
New Israeli Labor Party leader wants to pay settlers to leave West Bank: Condi Rice managed to cut a deal to fully open the Gaza-Egypt border for the Palestinians, a major step forward towards independent operations. This is good, but also the new leader of the Israeli Labor party, Amir Peretz, said that he wants to compensate settlers who want to leave the West Bank.
Peretz, who accuses the government of neglecting the poor and wants to restart peace talks with the Palestinians, also told Israeli television on Saturday he would back any bid "to give back parts" of the West Bank.
Wegner said Peretz agreed with Sharon that Israel should keep large Jewish settlement blocs in the occupied land. But, Wegner said, Peretz wanted the "billions" Israel spends on building those enclaves to be diverted to help the country's poor.
.....Wegner said Israel was in effect holding settlers not protected by the barrier as "political hostages".
This is true. It is unethical to force Jewish people to live in an occupied territory when they simply can't afford to move out. Perversely, market forces keep impoverished Jewish settlers trapped there, deprived of the choice to leave -- trapped by tax incentives and poverty, they're hapless pawns in the Israeli right-wing's absurd land game.
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...
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.
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.
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.
BROUSSARD [of Jefferson Parish]: We have been abandoned by our own country. Hurricane Katrina will go down in history as one of the worst storms ever to hit an American coast. But the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina will go down as one of the worst abandonments of Americans on American soil ever in U.S. history. … Whoever is at the top of this totem pole, that totem pole needs to be chainsawed off and we’ve got to start with some new leadership. It’s not just Katrina that caused all these deaths in New Orleans here. Bureaucracy has committed murder here in the greater New Orleans area and bureaucracy has to stand trial before Congress now.
Yeah, I don't know if I can put the big picture of the storm together. Nonetheless here are some stories.
Someone told Cheney to go fuck himself on live television. Tomgram: Iraq in America: At the Front of Nowhere at All: The Perfect Storm and the Feral City By Tom Engelhardt really puts it into perspective, and all the nasty parallels and feedback effects from the Iraq war making things worse, the sudden and shocking evidence that the Public Sector in this country has been stripped to the bone, etc. A lot of blame is getting spun around, Brit Hume even claimed that Bush "pleaded" that the mayor of New Orleans would evacuate.
Also this White House photo of Bush in a video teleconference before it hit just illustrates how they shouldn't have dropped the damn ball. Check out the official note from FEMA's Brown (PDF), five damn hours after it hit, putting DHS and FEMA into action in the "near catastrophic event". Via TPM.
The Red Tape and bizarre bureaucratic moves included having firefighters hand out fliers apparently. The pathology of our government:
...as specific orders began arriving to the firefighters in Atlanta, a team of 50 Monday morning quickly was ushered onto a flight headed for Louisiana. The crew's first assignment: to stand beside President Bush as he tours devastated areas.
Image before life. Also Barbara Bush said that "This is working out very well for them" in their tortured refugee status because they were "underprivileged anyway." There are some horrible reports about totally staged relief events - entire sites that appeared to hand out supplies, then collapsed as soon as Bush and the less observant American media moved off. The Germans of ZDF were more observant. But wait, maybe that was not accurate at all. Here are some translations of the media in question.
It would appear that Blackwater USA - the same private military firm/mercenary org that's done such a fine job in Mesopotamia - has sent at least 150 people into the New Orleans area. They are patrolling with M-16s. Yeah. A blogger on the ground appears to have broken this story.
The practice of putting political apparatchiks into FEMA makes more sense if we consider what might have happened if it had hit a swing state in an election year, such as the 2004 hit on Florida, where FEMA rolled in and basically showered people with cash well outside the damage zone, resulting in a nice bounce of several points for Bush. Was Michael Brown basically perpetrating fraud in Florida 2004 (PDF)? Salon: The Politics of Hurricane Relief. ThinkProgress Katrina Timeline attempts to counter the spin. Billmon is doing a damn good job these days, as always.
True Blue Conspiracy Theorist Wayne Madsen said that someone, probably the government, was jamming radio transmissions around New Orleans. What the hell? I don't get it. Well, now there is an update that is is coming from some kind of pirate radio station in the Caribbean. Ok, whatever. Here is how you can defeat radio jamming signals. Apparently. Also, he has a grand conspiracy already going into place about depopulating the poor black population of the city. I liked the bit about "secret hereditary societies." So take this with many grains of salt:
September 9, 2005 -- Dallas meeting plans reconstruction of New Orleans without poor African Americans. According to well-informed New Orleans sources, New Orleans' wealthiest families, including those who are direct descendants of the French who settled New Orleans (not the Acadians [Cajuns] who were poor refugees from British tyranny in Nova Scotia) are meeting in Dallas today with Bush administration officials, New Orleans city officials, wealthy Texas oilmen, and bankers to plan for the reconstruction of New Orleans. These wealthy New Orleans residents live in the gated community of Audobon Place, a section of the city near the Garden District replete with personal helipads that still has running water and sewage and was only slightly affected by hurricane Katrina. It is now reportedly being patrolled by private Israeli security forces. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal ran a piece with more details on this story.
Rep. Richard Baker (R-LA): "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
The Dallas meeting focused on rebuilding and re-zoning New Orleans without the "criminal element," a code word for the city's poor African American community.
These New Orleans residents have been scattered across the United States and are now under the control of FEMA. There is an understanding by the wealthy New Orleans elite that the poor will never be able to return. The Journal reported that the person who chaired the Dallas meeting was Jimmy Riess, one of the wealthy New Orleans elite who also served as Mayor Ray Nagin's Chairman of the Regional Transit Authority, which is in charge of the city's buses, trolleys, and trains. New Orleans sources report that public transportation was purposely not used to evacuate the poor New Orleans residents as a means to depopulate the poorer and more flood-prone sections of the city. [hongpong: wtf?!! let me get my tinfoil hat right away!] In fact, after the properties in New Orleans poorer communities are razed many of the deed records of the poor and middle class contained in government offices and title companies of Orleans Parish and neighboring Jefferson Parish may end up being casualties of the flood. As one New Orleans source put it, "people will not have proof they ever owned anything." As for renters and residents of public housing, they will be prevented from returning to their native city, according to New Orleans sources. Louisiana's Republican House member Richard Baker, a strong Bush ally, may have tipped his hand about the future plans for New Orleans when he told a group of lobbyists, "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."
Guess Who Is Planning the Rebuilding of New Orleans?
The French-American elite of New Orleans are among the city's "rich and famous." They run the Mardi Gras "crews" (Krews) or clubs, secret hereditary societies that sponsor the annual pre-Lenten festival. Many also run large oil companies and are long time supporters of the Bush family and their associated oil and gas cartels.
Meanwhile, the wars: There was the conference about terrorism and security called America's Purpose, which you can see video about, and some stuff on CSPAN. Washington dude Steve Clemons was involved. In terms of the war, Juan Cole offered an excellent dissection of how Christopher Hitchens is still trying to defend it.
The "sovereign" Iraqi government wants to get those private mercenary / privatized military / security firms under control somehow, including a central registry. Also this news from the Telegraph.
For more than two years such contractors have roamed with impunity. But now the interior ministry has imposed rules requiring all their firms to be registered and weapons to be carried only by guards holding an official licence.
If any of the companies is considered to be a threat or if it angers a government official its official permit could be revoked and the business ordered to depart.
About 25,000 security contractors, many of them British, American and South African ex-servicemen, lured to Iraq by wages of up to £750 a day, are estimated to be in the country providing protection for official buildings, supply convoys or visiting businessmen.
They are highly unpopular with locals. Convoys of contractors have become a common sight on a journey through Baghdad since the March 2003 US-led invasion.
Adorned in sunglasses and bullet-proof vests, they travel in white four-wheel-drive vehicles with gun barrels protruding from the windows. Many refuse to obey road signs and consider traffic jams a security risk so barge through the lines of vehicles which are often forced to pull over rapidly on to pavements.
Their lack of official status has long been a concern and those operating on US department of defence contracts are free from risk of legal penalty under the Iraqi judicial system if they killed anyone in a firefight.
But under the new rules confirmed yesterday all such firms will be brought under the authority of the Baghdad government. All companies will have to provide details of their number of employees, jobs undertaken and office addresses.
Most significantly their employees will no longer be allowed to possess a weapon without approval. Many of the firms have considerable firepower. As well as AK-47s and assault rifles some have heavy machineguns and anti-tank rocket launchers. One company, Blackwater, even has its own fleet of helicopters which criss-cross Baghdad with machine guns poking out from the side.
The surging private military industry is a fascinating subject for me. If you want a really entertaining video shot from the Blackwater guys' helicopters, check out MilitaryVideos.net. The latest video, from August, is Blackwater in Najaf 2 (BitTorrent wmv - legal). Sounds exciting. Index of some of these companies, Global Guerrillas on PMFs, the Guardian on it. Soldiers of Good Fortune by Barry Yeoman in Mother Jones is a really excellent primer. And of course Wikipedia on it.
OS X + Windows Video Tech Tip: For some horrible reason, Windows Media Player for Mac OS X is a very stubborn piece of crap that hates to play lots of WMV files. However, if you retitle the file's type from .wmv to .asf , then lots of them will work. Incredibly stupid, but it works on most of the videos from MilitaryVideos.net.
Juan Cole offers us the following tidbit about how Rummy thinks that we can do a Top Notch job in New Orleans, Iraq AND the Global War on Terror.
The US Pentagon is sending hundreds of members of the Louisiana National Guard home from Iraq. Some of them have lost homes in New Orleans. Internet gossip had earlier suggested substantial discontent in the ranks over being stuck in Iraq while Louisiana faced its biggest crisis in modern history.
The Iraqi Interior ministry said 9 Iraqis were killed, among them a high-ranking official in the ministry of the interior. Another 20, at least, were injured.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfield maintains that the US government can both take care of New Orleans and pursue the "global war on terror."
Uh, Donald, let's look at this situation. First, much of New Orleans is under water. You stole money that should have been spent on its levees for the Iraq War, and you stole state national guards from Louisiana to fight in Iraq. (The state national guards hadn't signed up to fight foreign wars and were surprised when you kidnapped them, sometimes for a whole year at a time.) So you haven't actually done a good job with the effects of Katrina in New Orleans. In fact, the job has been so bad that some wags are saying they can't believe you personally were not in charge of the recovery effort.
Then let's consider the war against al-Qaeda. You may have noticed that Ayman al-Zawahiri issued a videotape late last week. It was bundled with the farewell suicide tape of Muhammad Siddique Khan, the mastermind of the 7/7 bombers in London. It now appears that your inability to capture al-Zawahiri has allowed him to intrigue with Pakistani jihadi groups to recruit British subjects to bomb their own country. Bin Laden and Zawahiri are at large and free men, which is your failure.
Then there is the war in Iraq. I don't need to tell you that that isn't going very well. In fact, what in hell are you doing in the godforsaken Turkmen city of Tal Afar? Is it really a big threat to the United States? Is it likely to be friendly to us if you drop 500 pound bombs on its residential districts?
You left out the fourth war Bush is fighting, on the US poor. The average wage of the average American work fell last quarter, amidst rising corporate profits. Bush cut billions in taxes on the rich, and then gave $300 checks to some poor people, who didn't seem to realize that by taking it they were giving up all sorts of government services and maybe even their social security payments.
So, Donald, maybe it is true that you can save New Orleans, occupy Iraq and fight a global war on terror all at the same time. But you, at least, cannot actually do these things successfully. Which is why you should have resigned a long time ago.
Projects in Iraq are running out of cash. This would include water and power projects. Also, the US is obsessed with gaining control of the town of Tal Afar near Syria, and has been bombing the bridges over the Euphrates River in an effort to prevent militants from circulating. Of course, some people might suggest that such an action is pretty much the Direct Method for "dividing a country", but how could I suggest such a thing? Also the city of Qaim, on the edge of Syria, has been a site of dramatic violence and such... As usual it is all being blamed on Goldstein. I mean Zarqawi. A complex report about the struggle in Iraq over its economic organization. Of course, the US has been crushing the wishes of the more socialist-oriented Iraqis, who realize their country has a good chance of getting ahead with export-led industrial development and a heavily subsidized public sector backed up with oil wealth. Oh well. That is Not Suitable to our Fantasy Vision, dammit!
Israel is wrapping up the Gaza occupation, and the little slice of land between Gaza and Egypt will finally return to Arab hands. This is called the Philadelphi Corridor or Philadelphi Route, which this Fikret Ertan dude reflects on. The matter of border customs stations, overseen by an international team, has not been fully resolved yet. It seems that Bush is intervening with the Europeans, asking them not to pressure Sharon so that he's more likely to win against Netanyahu. However, as writer Gideon Samet points out, they are being lazy and unhelpful, making the wrong moves with the "Israeli hurricane" as well. Israel is sealing the Rafah crossing in Gaza to prep it. The notoriously goofy Rabbi Ovaida Yosef said that Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment for Bush's support for leaving Gaza.
"It was God's retribution. God does not shortchange anyone," Yosef said during his weekly sermon on Tuesday. His comments were broadcast on Channel 10 TV on Wednesday.
Yosef also said recent natural disasters were the result of a lack of Torah study and that Katrina's victims suffered "because they have no God," singling out black people......Yosef singled out black victims, saying "they don't study Torah." He used the word "Kushim," which in the Bible refers to an ancient African people but in vernacular Hebrew is considered derogatory.
Our last Israel tidbit comes from Amira Hass, on "Gun Envy." Life for a tiny child in the Gaza slums:
In another year or two, he will learn to distinguish between an armed Jew and an armed Palestinian. Instead of fear, maybe he will be filled with pride and excitement. In another three years, he will know how to distinguish between armed men from Hamas and armed men from the Palestinian Authority/Fatah, and will already decide which is his favorite team. Thus, without his parent's wanting it, without realizing it, without his similarly excited friends realizing it - he will be infected with the common malady whose scientific name is "gun envy."
The minor variety of this illness is sympathy (for one organization or another) and emulation (with toy guns). The serious variety is to join an organization. The most common symptom of this illness is reflected in the billboards and posters that constantly crowd one's field of vision: men armed with rifles and mortars, in every pose imaginable, and with each organization competing over whose is bigger. Another symptom is expressed in the public military ceremonies that elicit ecstatic reactions from the crowd.
She astutely points out that the Palestinians are in fact developing mirror images of the main force all around them, the IDF.
Was Israel Keeping Tabs on some of the 9/11 hijackers?
What an interesting question!! What do you say,
senior FOX News reporter Carl Cameron, in December 2001?
CARL CAMERON, FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Since September 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9-11 attacks, but investigators suspect that they Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it. A highly placed investigator said there are "tie-ins." But when asked for details, he flatly refused to describe them, saying, "evidence linking these Israelis to 9-11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information." Fox News has learned that one group of Israelis, spotted in North Carolina recently, is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the United States is also investigating for links to terrorism. Numerous classified documents obtained by Fox News indicate that even prior to September 11, as many as 140 other Israelis had been detained or arrested in a secretive and sprawling investigation into suspected espionage by Israelis in the United States. Investigators from numerous government agencies are part of a working group that's been compiling evidence since the mid '90s. These documents detail hundreds of incidents in cities and towns across the country that investigators say, "may well be an organized intelligence gathering activity." The first part of the investigation focuses on Israelis who say they are art students from the University of Jerusalem and Bazala Academy.....
And so on and so forth. An incredibly weird thing to hear from Fox News. But within weeks this story vanished down the memory hole, and only because someone managed to tape the four Fox reports and put them up on the Internet can we watch all 1 2 3 4 of them right now!
The new twist, as Justin Raimondo brought to attention, is that some corporate lawyer did a massive study (PDF) picking apart all the various weird detentions of Israelis, and he discovered a very serious overlap between where the 9/11 hijackers lived, and where the Israelis were apparently spying from. The maps are hilarious! So it would be quite a dramatic story if it all turned out to be true. Personally, I am not betting my lunch money on it, but I thought it certainly interesting enough to post on the site.
As always, Josh Marshall is holding it down on TalkingPointsMemo.com. There has been plenty of good stuff about the Katrina spinstorms there lately.
I am no fan of Allan Bloom style neoconservative browbeating of the "Liberal Academia", but this review in NYTimes about the effect of his classic "Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Stolen My Maple Syrup" was sort of interesting. I think the interesting point was that Bloom would be appalled how the rightwing is attempting to ideologically straitjacket academia in the same sorts of ways that Bloom thought the Big Scary Left did back in the day.
Misc bits: freewayblogger.com chronicles signs posted on overpasses and stuff against Bush and the War. This is very old news, but the British graffiti artist Banksy bombed the wall constructed by the Israeli government inside the Palestinian Territories. I can't believe he did something so detailed in the high-security area. Badass.
That's all for today, folks.
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.
The government officially ordered Jewish settlers to leave Gaza today, and thousands refused to budge. Within 48 hours the forcible removal of everyone who hasn't yet left will begin, and it's anybody's guess as to what will happen. The following looks at some of the intersecting tactical, religious and sociological problems for Israel, including the very real threat of rebellion within the Israeli Defense Forces. It's a long post, but damn, this situation is complicated.
Right now, a confrontation with eight distinct militant sides or command groupings is about to materialize, and I can only guess at how the complex operation will play out among these forces: the Gazan Palestinian Authority and its paramilitaries [in particular Dahlan's people]; HAMAS; smaller militant organizations; hardline settlers and the YESHA Council of Settlements [YESHA an acronym for Judea Samaria Gaza]; radical Jewish militants [Kach/Kahanists] and possibly rebel IDF units from hesder yeshivas; the national Israel Defense Forces; the Israeli police; the more passive [generally more secular] Gaza settlers. Prime spots for English updates across the spectrum include ynet (Yedioth Ahronoth), Haaretz, Arutz Sheva, Jerusalem Post, israelinsider, DEBKA, IMRA, WAFA, Palestine Post, Palestine Report (PMC), JMCC, Palestine Chronicle, Indymedia Israel (open wire).
Northern West Bank is a closed military zone. Haaretz: Gaza sealed as disengagement begins:
Israel Defense Forces troops sealed off the Gaza Strip at midnight Sunday, marking the start of the withdrawal, the first time Israel will pull out of land Palestinians want for a future state. Forty-eight hours later, soldiers will begin forcibly removing those settlers remaining in the settlements.
Israeli authorities set up roadblocks across southern Israel and cut off bus service to the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip on Sunday as they began final preparations to begin dismantling all 21 settlements inside Gaza.
As of Sunday, thousands of residents remained inside the settlements, vowing to resist their eviction. Other opponents of the pullout have threatened to hold massive demonstrations against the plan and to run the roadblock on the Gaza border to create chaos and torpedo the plan. Settler leaders were to lock the gates of some Gaza settlements Sunday to keep out the soldiers and police officers who are charged with handing out the eviction orders to residents.
In a parallel protest, dozens of police officers received telephone calls from people in the United States who identified themselves as members of the Chabad movement, asking the police to refuse to carry out evacuations, and to influence fellow officers to refuse, the radio reported. It said the police were outraged that their personal phone numbers were distributed to disengagement opponents abroad. [indicates rebellious forces are using key intelligence]
Harel is to command a force of more than 20,000 police and soldiers in the disengagement operation beginning this week. He turned aside media reports that soldiers at checkpoints had turned a blind eye to infiltrating protesters.
There are six tactical 'rings' of Israeli forces: "Yesha trying to foil pullout by keeping troops away from Gaza:"
Yesha Council settler leaders are instructing pullout opponents to drive in convoys to the Kissufim crossing, at the entrance to the Gaza Strip, and prevent security forces from reaching the settlements slated for evacuation.
[.....]The disengagement forces will be divided into six "rings." The first ring (combining both army and police) will deal with removing the settlers from their homes. The second ring, of Israel Defense Forces soldiers only, is charged with blocking the surrounding roads to prevent anti-withdrawal activists from reaching the settlement being evacuated. The third and fourth rings, all army, will defend both civilian and security forces from Palestinian attack. The fifth ring, mostly IDF soldiers, will patrol the Green Line to prevent activists from infiltrating the Strip from Israel. The sixth ring, consisting of police officers, will control traffic on Israeli roads in the western Negev near the Gaza border. And there is another ring, which no one wants to discuss. It is the "zero ring," which will deal with any violent standoff situations that arise. Brigadier General Amos Ben-Avraham, who is the commander of the division unit for this force, avoids the cameras. Senior officers who were willing to talk about it hope it will not be needed, but they know that is an unreasonable expectation.
Kfar Darom is packed with protesters, ready to resist. A settler with 15 supporters announced the establishment of a 'Jewish Authority' in Gaza independent of Israel and has forthcoming 'tactical secrets.' Just another ranting guy, but the rebellious/seditious political current is firmly entrenched. An excellent interactive graphic on the New York Times site indicates along one block of Neve Dekalim, which started when I did (1983), the long-term residents of its first block are mostly planning to stay put until the soldiers come around, although some have shipping containers set up. "Gush Katif settlers to lock gates to stop IDF entering"(earlier today) but more secular northern Gaza settlements are mostly empty already. Plans of resistance:
In the more hard-line settlements, people are reportedly planning to lock their doors and windows and chain themselves to heavy objects. People are being advised to continue resisting even after they have been put aboard buses, and to damage the bus and even set it on fire in order to put it out of commission.
The YESHA Council is orchestrating an outer ring of settler resistance, with settlers operating two more inner rings of defense to impede and possibly battle the IDF:
Residents have been told by leaders to store as much dry food as possible. According to plans issued by the various struggle headquarters, there will be three rings of opposition. The outer ring, under the charge of the Yesha Council of settlers, is to block the main arteries leading to the Kissufim crossing with tens of thousands of activists, who will face thousands of police and soldiers. The second group of activists intends to deploy between the settlements, and send as many people as possible to a settlement being evacuated. The headquarters of one organization, the National Home, has told members to bring wire-cutters to get through fences and move toward a settlement being evacuated, to avoid soldiers blocking the roads. "The goal is to create 20,000 fronts," a leaflet distributed in the Gush stated. Inside the settlements, illegal residents and settlers will reportedly attempt to sabotage vehicles and block roads. Detailed recommendations on how to deal with mounted police were posted at synagogues, including a suggestion to inject horses with the atropine syringe that comes in the gas-mask kit issued to Israelis, which would lead to its death.
It seems to me that the leadership of Tanzim, HAMAS, Islamic Jihad & the other militant organizations has every incentive to keep things tamped down during the process, but HAMAS will probably try to prove its potency by firing a few rockets and mortars. The police are already blaming the army for the massive infiltrations:
A combination of two main factors led to the failure: the army's overly generous policy of issuing visitor passes that allowed thousands to enter, hundreds of whom had come to stay; and soldiers manning the roadblocks who were soft on enforcement. False documents, hiding in car trunks or pestering the soldiers until they gave in all took their toll. The large number of infiltrators raises suspicions that soldiers sympathetic to settler ideology looked the other way as people illegally crossed the roadblocks.
By the middle of last week, increasing numbers of containers stood next to homes, especially in the secular settlements. Still, there are impressive numbers still there: social pressure in the Gush, honed over four and a half years of rocket fire, will not buckle to the Disengagement Administration until the last minute. [....] Hard-core resistance is expected in Kfar Darom, parts of Neveh Dekalim, Kerem Atzmona, Shirat Hayam and possibly Morag, where the largest number of infiltrators has settled in.
The army is expected to react especially harshly to resistance from this quarter, possibly as early as tomorrow, and will apparently be spearheaded by a Border Police brigade. The troops will approach the protesters unarmed, but they will be followed by trucks with clubs. [......]A particularly worrisome scenario involves possible extremist action, with security around Prime Minister Ariel Sharon particularly tight. But one settler climbing on a roof in Neveh Dekalim and shooting at Khan Yunis is enough to start a chain reaction, which will mean a withdrawal under Palestinian fire.
As long as this does not happen, the unknown in the equation is the Palestinian side. With the prize so close, the Palestinians seem to be restraining the terror organizations. The IDF hopes this will be the chance for Mahmoud Abbas' government to prove it is serious about preventing terror.
Haaretz editorializes that the settlers are preparing for war with the IDF:
Entire yeshivas have recently moved to Gush Katif, openly, with a permit, because of the weakness of the army and police. [....] The settlers are not the enemy, and the army is not preparing for war against them, said the chief of staff without understanding that that this equation is true in only one direction. The army is not preparing for war against the settlers, but the settlers are preparing and how.
This is the approach that Gush Emunim used for years, with great success: tears and pleas for mercy on one hand, adherence to the goal and willingness to cut through fences on the other, all while cultivating the belief that they are right, whereas the evacuating forces are merely doing the dirty work.
This frighteningly empathetic approach has led to repeated failures against the settlers throughout the decades since Sebastia [in Sinai], and it is liable to do so this time as well. Too many meetings between commanders and evacuees, too much coordination and too many heart-to-heart talks have weakened the army and strengthened the settlers. Thus while hundreds of permanent residents of Gush Katif are preparing to leave quietly, they are being replaced by thousands of opponents of the evacuation for whom the IDF is the avowed enemy. [.....] President Moshe Katsav's request for the evacuees' forgiveness and his statement that he has been impressed by their struggle also demonstrates that so far, the settlers have the upper hand.
Also they editorialize, "Beware the zealots," connecting the escalating internal conflict with the baseless anger that destroyed the Second Temple:
Now, less than 60 years after the land was won by the small band of people who broke into dance after the UN vote and then went off to fight a war of survival, the young country is repeating the event that long ago sealed its fate: The destruction of the Second Temple was not only the ruin of the physical Temple in Jerusalem, it was also the ruin of the national home. The actual destruction was carried out by foreigners, but it was the blind zealots, saturated with a megalomaniacal hunger for power, who presumed to lead the tiny Jewish state on their own stubborn path, turning their back on political reality and speaking in the name of a single principle: religion, according to their interpretation.
The zealotry of those who destroyed the Temple and the national home sprouted from the fundamentalist flower beds of the religious hierarchy, which cloaked itself in eternal power in the name of a jealous God, deaf to the world and refusing all compromise. In the struggle over the image and existence of that Jewish state, the zealots bested the yearners for peace. The former chose suicide, slaughter and exile, and sealed the fate of the entire Jewish people. Much to our horror, the third Jewish commonwealth now faces a challenge which draws its inspiration from similar sources.
The location is identical, and the balance of power between the state and the international community is similar. Once again, the fragile sovereignty of a state fighting for survival can be perceived. Once again, a stubborn, irresponsible, megalomaniacal group of zealous rabbis has arisen, kicking indiscriminately at the sovereignty of the state and at the chances for a normal, just life within the family of nations, and threatening to bring down the house if it does not get its way.
At first glance, Israel seems to be dealing with a problem similar to that of the Western democracies, who are deporting the religious extremists who threaten their sovereignty. But these countries, whether Christian or secular, are fighting Islam, while Israel is attempting to make its way in the world while threatened from within by the zealous leaders of Judaism - the root of the nation from which the state itself sprouted.
Tisha B'Av this year is therefore a day of deep spiritual reckoning. In light of the historical lesson that it evokes, the Jewish State must steel itself for the struggle it now faces, for the sake of its sovereignty and to prevent a third destruction of its home.
IDF chief of staff estimates 5000 thousand rightwing protesters have infiltrated the settlements, many of them young fellow settlers raised in the West Bank and indoctrinated in radical yeshivas. It is hard to say how violent the more extreme settlers may become, possibly including attacking nearby Palestinians to provoke an escalation, as they reportedly attacked Palestinian officials in January.
Israeli security organizations consider some IDF units organized from Hesder yeshivas in the West Bank as possibly seditious and likely to obey radical rabbi leadership over military orders. "Hesder yeshivas under fire":
IDF commanders are worried about the possibility of receiving hesder yeshiva soldiers because they may refuse orders,” said the head of IDF Personnel Directorate, major general Elazar Stern. Stern was addressing ultra-Orthodox soldiers who had just been drafted into the army.
Times profile on the settlers:
The Gaza settlers are made up largely of middle-class families with children, and their resistance is expected to be mostly passive. Soldiers and police may have to drag them from their homes, but clashes are considered unlikely.
But some settlers could resist more actively. And the infiltrators, many of them deeply religious teenagers or young adults from the West Bank, are seen as wild cards and could be more aggressive in confronting the security forces. In the Rafiah Yam settlement in southern Gaza, a resident torched his house, a minibus and a warehouse, Reuters reported. "I don't want to leave anything for the Palestinians," the resident, Yaakov Mazal-Tari, said. "They do not deserve it. I'm going to burn everything, and what I can't burn I will destroy."
There have been a lot of protests near the Al Aqsa/Temple Mount site lately. Also there will only be about 8,000 police available in the entire rest of Israel, down from the normal level of 28,000. This means a lot of potential mischief from thieves and everyday criminals, fanatics who might go after the Temple Mount/Al Aqsa site or other holy sites. Another confrontation at the Temple site like this one (or this little one) between young Muslims and the Israeli police, possibly egged on by Jewish or Christian fundamentalists, could easily escalate, and hardcore settlers have a strong incentive to do so.
The social/class component should be considered, as this Times update today describes how people sought better quality of life thru incentives, trapping them in a war zone:
Many of Neve Dekalim's residents came from neighboring working-class towns in southern Israel, seeing the move here as a step up the economic and social ladder. Government financial incentives meant they could buy more affordable and larger homes than inside Israel. The move also allowed them to build a community of religious Jews.
The community grew into the main commercial and municipal center for Gaza settlers. It has a gas station, a grocery store, four synagogues, health clinics, two seminaries and several schools and day care centers. The settlement borders the Palestinian town of Khan Yunis, where scores of mortar shells have been launched at Neve Dekalim.
Further betraying the sense of suburban calm, a hulking cement wall separates Khan Yunis from Neve Dekalim. The settlement is ringed by electric fencing and guarded by soldiers. At a recent prayer rally, about 2,000 people prayed and sang, asking God to intervene to help halt the government's plan to evacuate their town along with the 20 other Jewish settlements in Gaza. The mood here swings between despair and the hope that an 11th-hour miracle might yet occur.
The leadership of hesder yeshivas, an integral element of West Bank settlement strategy, have inserted whole groups of radicalized young teenagers into the Israeli military as fully organized units. Zeev Schiff in Haaretz on the danger of yeshiva unit rebellion inside the IDF:
The problem is that over the years other rabbis-civilians-have acquired a status that enables them to intervene in purely military matters. At the same time, there is a growing influence of civilian rabbis on the actions of extremist settlers. For example, when the theft of olives from Palestinian farmers became widespread, there were rabbis who gave a "religious green light" for these criminal acts. The infiltration of civilian rabbis into the IDF has been slow but steady. In the past, the settler leaders tried to influence the appointment of the head of Central Command, in whose territory most of the settlements are located. When they weren't happy with a head of Central Command, they tried to dictate to the defense minister when this commanding officer should not be invited to a joint meeting with them. Minister Moshe Arens was the one who rejected that demand.
The infiltration of the rabbis into the IDF has been carried out mainly by means of the hesder yeshivas (which combine Torah study and military service). There are 14 such yeshivas, and their students perform compulsory military service for a total of 16-18 months in all the rest of the time they study. For about two and a half years, their commanding officer is in effect the rabbi of the yeshiva. In addition, the rabbis of the hesder yeshivas established a "yeshiva committee" for themselves, which has been recognized by the IDF. The problem is that the committee is involved in making decisions such as which yeshiva should be recognized, who will be recognized as a yeshiva student, and where he will serve. This is not only intervention in the army on an organizational level it is also an attempt to determine its values.
This path has led to the phenomenon of refusal to serve. But even without the disengagement from the Gaza Strip, these rabbis are for the most part on a collision course with the military system. ..... The chief of staff and the rabbis are not in a situation where they have to conduct a dialogue. This dangerous phenomenon must be wiped out. Just as the generals should not interfere with what is happening in the rabbinical world, so the rabbis should not interfere with what is happening in the IDF. Had the opponents of the disengagement, which was approved by the Knesset, won their struggle, in the end we would have witnessed the rabbis' domination of the IDF agenda.
It's hard to say how the outcome of the withdrawal will be measured by the leadership of the eight forces above. The hardcore settlers and YESHA Council will find it a galvanizing event that will produce a more radicalized cadre of youngsters who will return to their West Bank settlements and redouble their efforts to prevent the Israeli people from withdrawing further. They will probably attack Palestinians in Hebron and near Tapuah, a hardcore settlement of neo-Kahanists outside Nablus in the northern West Bank. However, many less radical settlers would also like to 'cash out' of their entrapping West Bank mortgages like their Gaza brethren, and leaving Gaza will increase pressure to help West Bank moderate settlers finance their departure.
The Israeli Defense Forces and the Israeli Border Police will finally be relieved of the onerous task of defending pointless irregular settlement positions under constant Palestinian bombardment, a key reason that Israel's settlement policy is detrimental to its security, as a former Meretz MK Prof. Galia Golan once explained to me. However this means they could be more free to conduct scorched-earth Defensive Shield type operations, while bulldozing new swaths around West Bank settlements such as Ariel and Maale Adumim, that Sharon has promised to hang on to (in keeping with his long-term implementation of the 'Allon Plan,' nearby the Orwellian 'separation' fence line - please look at fence satellite images for cognitive dissonance between geography and morality)
The Likud party is probably going to splinter in some way, with Netanyahu challenging Sharon. Polls show that Netanyahu has the advantage in a primary over Sharon, but a "big bang" realignment, with Sharon leading a bloc combined with Josef Lapid of the secular centrist Shinui Party and Shimon Peres of Labor could take a commanding swath of the Knesset, strongly defeating a Likud led by Netanyahu.
The PA and HAMAS are competing to claim credit for the Israeli move, like any other politicians would. The people at DEBKA are claiming that Al-Qaeda style militants will move into Gaza (take them with a grain of salt) and also, if Lebanon is truly demilitarized the militants based there might shift into Gaza. HAMAS would dearly like to turn settlement sites into their own enclaves, but wealthy Gulf Arabs also want to put together large development projects.
I'd like to wish the Palestinians and Israelis with the best of luck in crushing the wills of their violent and recalcitrant internal rivals, in the hopes that this withdrawal can stabilize and eventually reverse the complex and violent process of the Israeli occupation and gradual annexation of the Palestinian occupied territories. It's one hell of a brave step, without a peace treaty. It's too important to fail.
So apparently former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds processed some wiretaps that indicated House Speaker Dennis Hastert was getting huge sums of money from shadowy Turks to implement pro-Turkish policies. That's not the sort of thing that simplifies your day, assuming it's true. There's a big story in Vanity Fair about it, and a summarization via Corporate Crime Reporter. It seems exciting but I don't have any way to know if it's truly going to pan out.
Corporate Crime Reporter: "Vanity Fair: Turks Boasted of Payments to Hastert:"
Turkish officials boasted of giving “tens of thousands of dollars in surreptious payments” to House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois) in exchange for political favors.
That allegation is contained a profile of Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
The article, “An Inconvenient Patriot,” by British writer David Rose, reports that Edmonds was asked to listen to wiretaps as part of what appeared to be an FBI public corruption probe into bribes paid to members of Congress – both Democrat and Republican.
Rose, citing “some of the wiretaps,” reports that “the FBI’s targets had arranged for tens of thousands of dollars to be paid to Hastert’s campaign funds in small checks.”
The article notes that under Federal Election Commission rules, “donations of less than $200 are not required to be itemized in public filings.”
The article reports that Edmonds has given confidential testimony on several occasions – to congressional staffers, to the Inspector General, and to staff from the 9/11 commission.
“Edmonds reportedly added that the recordings also contained repeated references to Hastert’s flip-flop, in the fall of 2000" to “the continuing campaign to have Congress designate the killings of Armenians in Turkey between 1915 and 1923 as genocide.”
Worth following. The ACLU, who has been helping Edmonds out, point out that this case has major ramifications for people trying to blow the whistle on crappy government practices and general nastiness (crimes?), and urges the Supreme Court to look at it:
Edmonds' case is not an isolated incident," said ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson. "The federal government is routinely retaliating against government employees who uncover weaknesses in our ability to prevent terrorist attacks or protect public safety."
[....]The ACLU is also asking the Supreme Court to reverse the D.C. appeals court's decision to exclude the press and public from the court hearing of Edmonds' case in April. The appeals court closed the hearing at the eleventh hour without any specific findings that secrecy was necessary. In fact, the government had agreed to argue the case in public. A media consortium that included The New York Times , The Washington Post , and CNN intervened in the case to object to the closure.
Edmonds, a former Middle Eastern language specialist hired by the FBI shortly after 9/11, was fired in 2002 and filed a lawsuit later that year challenging the retaliatory dismissal.
Her ordeal is highlighted in a 10-page article about whistleblowers in the September 2005 issue of Vanity Fair which links Edmonds' allegations and the subsequent retaliation to possible "illicit activity involving Turkish nationals" and a high-level member of Congress. The ACLU said the article, titled "An Inconvenient Patriot," further undercuts the government's claim that the case can't be litigated because certain information is secret.
In addition, a report by the Inspector General, made public in January 2005, contains a tremendous amount of detail about Edmonds' job, the structure of the FBI translation unit , and the substance of her allegations. The report concluded that Edmonds' whistleblower allegations were "the most significant factor" in the FBI's decision to terminate her.
The outcome in Edmonds' case could significantly impact the government's ability to rely on secrecy to avoid accountability in future cases, the ACLU said, including one pending case charging the government with "rendering" detainees to be tortured.
(more ACLU stuff about the course of the case here)
Another blast from the past came today as Peter Gartrell materialized in town, on his way to a cub reporter gig at a newspaper in Gillette, Wyoming, covering the natural gas industry. I've got to run over & say Hi in a sec...
So then, the Gaza withdrawal is less than two weeks away. A 19-year-old AWOL Israeli soldier-turned-settler got on a bus and shot four Israeli Arabs, wounded more, and was in turn killed by those he hadn't shot. He spent a while in the settlement of Tapuah, which is dominated by Kach followers or Kahanists, one of the most dangerous radical Jewish groups, which believes in the widespread ethnic cleansing of Arabs from both the West Bank and Israel.
Such groups are now pitted against the Israeli government, the courts, law enforcement and the military as the Gaza action gets underway. Of course, Sharon is wary of such radical groups, seeing as how a very similar assassin to the bus assailant killed Yitzak Rabin those years ago.
I don't have time to toss in the links now. Damn
Home Front: (not that I am fond of such terms) "Mass casualties push war sentiments back to forefront".
As I noted earlier, the Pentagon is trying to forestall releasing even more horrible Abu Ghraib photos. Military lawyers argued against harsher interrogation methods in early 2003 (NYT).
Iran has the upper hand perpetually, it seems.
China: It's never too late to gear up some more enemies. Max Neocon Max Boot has the latest paranoia about China's research into Earthquake Weapons to make us quiver...
Max Boot: China's Challenge
In 1998, an official People's Liberation Army publishing house brought out a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare, written by two senior army colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui. This book, which is available in English translation, is well known to the U.S. national-security establishment but remains practically unheard of among the public.
Unrestricted Warfare recognizes that it is practically impossible to challenge the U.S. on its own terms. No one else can afford to build mega-expensive weapons systems such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, which will cost more than $200 billion to develop. "The way to extricate oneself from this predicament," the authors write, "is to develop a different approach."
Their different approaches include financial warfare (subverting banking systems and stock markets), drug warfare (attacking the fabric of society by flooding it with illicit drugs), psychological and media warfare (manipulating perceptions to break down enemy will), international-law warfare (blocking enemy actions using multinational organizations), resource warfare (seizing control of vital natural resources), even ecological warfare (creating man-made earthquakes or other natural disasters).
The two write approvingly of al-Qaeda, Colombian drug lords and computer hackers who operate outside the "bandwidths understood by the American military." They envision a scenario in which a "network attack against the enemy" would be carried out "so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network and mass media network are completely paralyzed." Only then would conventional military force be deployed "until the enemy is forced to sign a dishonorable peace treaty."
Who are these 21st Century acolytes of Sun Tzu? I'm sure they have interesting lives deep in the Chinese military. This review said "Colonel Qiao Liang, for instance, received his B.A. degree in Chinese literature, and has published several notable novels. He is employed in the Creative Writing Departament of the Air Force..." If you wish to read "CHAOXIANZHAN" or "Unrestricted Warfare" it may be found in HTML (via Cryptome) or PDF (via Terrorism.com). It's around 200 pages so get ready for fun.
Well that's all I've got time for tonight. Time to kick it with Peter, and also Will Rothschild, who is leaving town Real Soon Like.
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."
I had a dream last night that I ran into Donald Rumsfeld at a picnic. It was really awkward! Anyway,
This was kinda disturbing:
Poll: Americans Say World War III Likely:
(07-24) 02:14 PDT WASHINGTON, (AP) --
Americans are far more likely than the Japanese to expect another world war in their lifetime, according to AP-Kyodo polling 60 years after World War II ended. Most people in both countries believe the first use of a nuclear weapon is never justified.
Those findings come six decades after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The war claimed about 400,000 U.S. troops around the world, more than three times that many Japanese troops and at least 300,000 Japanese civilians.
Out of the ashes, Japan and the United States forged a close political alliance. Americans and Japanese now generally have good feelings about each other.
But people in the two countries have very different views on everything from the U.S. use of the atomic bomb in 1945, fears of North Korea and the American military presence in Japan.
Some of the widest differences came on expectations of a new world war.
Six in 10 Americans said they think such a war is likely, while only one-third of the Japanese said so, according to polling done in both countries for The Associated Press and Kyodo, the Japanese news service.
"Man's going to destroy man eventually. When that will be, I don't know," said Gaye Lestaeghe of Freeport, La.
Some question whether that war has arrived, with fighting dragging on in Afghanistan and Iraq as part of the U.S. campaign against terrorism.
"I feel like we're in a world war right now," said Susan Aser, a real estate agent from Rochester, N.Y.
Perhaps this is somewhat connected with the fear of nuclear attack firmly embedded in Bush's base. As a Drum post on the Washington Monthly points out, Rove and the White House may have been taking the Niger Uranium story and running with it because the Republican base was scared shitless of a nuclear attack, and needed to stay all riled up.
...the White House political operation wasn't lashing out just because of Joe Wilson. They were lashing out because they believed their political lives depended on their own supporters continuing to believe that Saddam had been actively working on a nuke program. Without that belief, they'd lose support within their own base even if they eventually found evidence of chem and bio programs.
In Karl Rove's world, the base is sacred, and nukes were the key to their support. Joe Wilson threatened to open a crack in that support, and that's why he had to be destroyed.
FBI agents monitored Web sites calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counterterrorism unit, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The American Civil Liberties Union pointed to the documents as evidence that the Bush administration has reacted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States by blurring the distinction between terrorism and political protest. FBI officials defended the involvement of counterterrorism agents in providing security for the Republican and Democratic conventions as an administrative convenience.
The documents were released by the FBI in response to a lawsuit filed by a coalition of civil rights, animal rights and environmental groups that say they have been subjected to scrutiny by task forces set up to combat terrorism. The FBI has denied targeting the groups because of their political views.
"It's increasingly clear that the government is involved in political surveillance of organizations that are involved in nothing more than lawful First Amendment activities," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. "It raises very serious questions about whether the FBI is back to its old tricks."
A Sept. 4, 2003, document addressed to the FBI counterterrorism unit described plans by a group calling itself RNC Not Welcome to "disrupt" the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. It also described Internet postings from an umbrella organization known as United for Peace and Justice, which was coordinating worldwide protests against the convention.
"It's one thing to monitor protests and protest organizers, but quite another thing to refer them to your counterterrorism unit," said Leslie Cagan, national coordinator for United for Peace and Justice.
Another document, addressed to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which coordinates anti-terrorist activities by the FBI and local police forces, described threats to disrupt the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
Responding to the lawsuit filed in May in U.S. District Court in Washington, the FBI said it had identified 1,173 pages of records relating to the ACLU and 2,383 pages relating to Greenpeace. The content of the records, which were generated since 2001, is not known.
I feel safer already.
What a weird summer for news.
I would like to take a sec to note the various wingy conspiracy theories cropping up around the London bombing. Not because I find them readily credible, but because they are sort of an instant folk mythology that gets generated these days through the Internet. Also if any bits of it pan out, well you can say that you heard about them around here.
I'm just throwing these out there, to illustrate the kinds of counter-narratives that pop up around all sorts of major events. It's the X-Files mentality, the Grassy Knoll syndrome of American politics. The CIA killed JFK, some said even then. There are always people attracted to some weird explanation, (say the Flight 800 missile story) where the Council on Foreign Relations, the VFW post and the Taxpayers' League collude in some great scheme to take over the world and get free cable while fluoridating the water.
Anyway, the main nut of the conspiracy theory right now, "Blair Knew" in a nutshell, (via the very paranoid sites Propaganda Matrix and PrisonPlanet) is that some dude named Peter Power, (not to be confused with Austin) who used to be a key anti-terrorism law enforcement officer in London, and now runs some private security consulting agency, said on the BBC right after the bombing that there were anti-terror drills involving like 1000 people, practicing dealing with bombs on the London Underground at virtually the same locations that the bombs actually went off. (and perhaps stations were closed before the bombings) "How the Government staged the London bombings in Ten Easy Steps."
As this Webster Tarpley guy put it,
Last week's London explosions carry the characteristic features of a state-sponsored, false flag, synthetic terror provocation by networks within the British intelligence services MI-5, MI-6, the Home Office, and the Metropolitan Police Special Branch who are favorable to a wider Anglo-American aggressive war in the Middle East, featuring especially an early pre-emptive attack on Iran, with a separate option on North Korea also included.
Wheeee!!!! You have to admit, politics is more interesting when everything's frickin crazy!!!
Other people have similar theories. So the conspiracy goes that some covert ops group, with Powers as an auxiliary, triggered the bombings and set up some typical Pakistanis to take the fall for it. Also, they point out that the numerous cameras on the exploded bus just happened to be turned off on July 7, therefore conspiracy! (And of course they say that Madrid was a coverup too)
A top Iranian cleric alleges that the UK could have bombed itself. And there was some strange tie between Web claims of responsibility and a Saudi dissident.
Conspiracy theorists love to say that security drills are the best opportunity for Evil Illuminati to fake terrorist events because it circumvents the usual security measures and provides cover for incriminating activity, and some are saying that London reprises the alleged 9/11 drills. September 11 conspiracists / "investigators" such as Michael Ruppert argue that the military was doing some kind of operation called "Vigilant Warrior" and/or "Vigilant Guardian" on the morning of September 11, where agents posing as terrorists were performing airline hijackings. And also, there were supposedly fake "blips" put into air traffic control systems to simulate these planes, thusly permitting the real hijackings to go through and smash the WTC. Massive list of conspiracy stories. The National Reconnaisance Office had scheduled a plane crash drill on 9/11, the AP reported.
Of course, many conspiracy types complain that the flight that hit the Pentagon clearly isn't there, the wreckage just isn't there, it must have been a missile or something. A surprising number of people I've talked with find this plausible. Someone from 911citizenswatch talked about these drills. And so this is claimed to fit into why NORAD did such a bad job on September 11. (there's plenty of silly websites about 9/11 Mystery images, as well.
On a totally different (and much more well-documented) tack, the London bombing has been tied to a strange Bush Administration leak about a captured Al Qaeda agent last fall, which may have led in part to the London bombing. Lat year, people alleged that during the 2004 campaign, the Bush Administration blew the cover of Naeem Noor Khan, a recently turned Al Qaeda double agent that the British and Pakistanis were using to smoke out more militants. That is, the law caught this guy, he was sending out more emails to militants in England, someone in Washington dropped his name to some papers, and then the British authorities had to swoop prematurely, to prevent the militants from getting away. This compromised the operation, and perhaps let people get away to attack subways later, as plans on Khan's computer indicated.
So, the wilder theory suggests that "they" did it, while the more well-documented story indicates that they merely screwed up a British investigation last year that might have caught the bombers, in order to win the White House.
These days, at least the Rove/Plame story has finally stuck at the top level of the news, and perhaps that should be the basic yardstick for measuring deception nowadays. Like it or not, something nasty happened with forged documents about uranium. Cryptome.org has the actual Niger documents, for yr viewin' pleasure. The Bush Administration, and Karl personally, went through a lot of hoops to propagate disinformation about Iraq and crush anyone like Wilson that tarnished their fantasy.
As Frank Rich put it this morning in "Follow the Uranium":
[Attacks on Wilson], too, are red herrings. Let me reiterate: This case is not about Joseph Wilson. He is, in Alfred Hitchcock's parlance, a MacGuffin, which, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, is "a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." Mr. Wilson, his mission to Niger to check out Saddam's supposed attempts to secure uranium that might be used in nuclear weapons and even his wife's outing have as much to do with the real story here as Janet Leigh's theft of office cash has to do with the mayhem that ensues at the Bates Motel in "Psycho."
This case is about Iraq, not Niger. The real victims are the American people, not the Wilsons. The real culprit - the big enchilada, to borrow a 1973 John Ehrlichman phrase from the Nixon tapes - is not Mr. Rove but the gang that sent American sons and daughters to war on trumped-up grounds and in so doing diverted finite resources, human and otherwise, from fighting the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. That's why the stakes are so high: this scandal is about the unmasking of an ill-conceived war, not the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative who posed for Vanity Fair.
And let's not forget that this whole thing happened because of a damned New York Times editorial. Rich's "We're Not in Watergate Anymore" is also interesting.
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
I am tired of hearing about how the Israeli government is doing this that or the other thing, and the strange press reports about how Israelis in London got tipped off by Scotland Yard just minutes before the bombing piss me off because I don't want to ponder another bizarre conspiracy-lke situation. And yet here it is...
It's a strange time in Israel right now, with the Gaza disengagement only 30 days away. The settlers are doing all sorts of crazy shit there, blocking roads, fighting with Israeli soldiers, etc.
It's pretty damn hazardous to be a pro-withdrawal Israeli leader, as Sharon seems to be for the moment. Last time around, radical religious nationalists of the right wing wanted to murder Prime Minister Rabin, applied a talmudic theological concept called 'Din Rodef', a pronouncement that murder is acceptable for someone who threatens Jewish lives. Then a student, Yigal Amir, partly educated in West Bank settlements, killed Rabin.
Israeli politicians are maneuvering between the settlers and the rest of Israeli society, and in my view one of the shadiest operators is current Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a hardcore hawk who has made many declarations about the importance of preserving West Bank settlements. Consider this pre-bombing editorial by an Israeli rightwinger about the importance of finding a secular leader to protect the settlement movement. He names Netanyahu as a leading, but tainted, contender for that spot.
So it is quite annoying that Netanyahu happened to be practically on top of one of the bombings in London, and according to an early Associated Press report, his security team was warned minutes before the bombing occurred, as I posted yesterday.
Later press reports altered this account, and now the British and the Israelis Totally Deny everything. Not surprisingly, various people are taking this weird story and running with it. Justin Raimondo at Antiwar.com is asking "What did Bibi know - and when did he know it?" with some antiwar blog entries about how the timeline of Israeli denials doesn't make any sense (because now the Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom is claiming they were warned after the first explosion, yet the Brits didn't detect it was actually a terrorist attack until around the third explosion) , and the right-wing blogosphere helping to spin the story towards oblivion. (including Powerline. Fuck those guys.)
In any case, I'm not going to level accusations. It's all quite weird and who knows what really happened. However, the private intelligence service Stratfor posted a very odd report about the London bombings, which someone put onto the Internet:
July 7, 2005
Israel Warned United Kingdom About Possible Attacks
Summary
There has been massive confusion over a denial made by the Israelis that the Scotland Yard had warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terrorist attacks “minutes before” the first bomb went off July 7. Israel warned London of the attacks a “couple of days ago,” but British authorities failed to respond accordingly to deter the attacks, according to an unconfirmed rumor circulating in intelligence circles. While Israel is keeping quiet for the time-being, British Prime Minister Tony Blair soon will be facing the heat for his failure to take action.
Analysis
The Associated Press reported July 7 that an anonymous source in the Israeli Foreign Ministry said Scotland Yard had warned the Israeli Embassy in London of possible terrorist attacks in the U.K. capital. The information reportedly was passed to the embassy minutes before the first bomb struck at 0851 London time. The Israeli Embassy promptly ordered Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remain in his hotel on the morning of July 7. Netanyahu was scheduled to participate in an Israeli Investment Forum Conference at the Grand Eastern Hotel, located next to the Liverpool Street Tube station -- the first target in the series of bombings that hit London on July 7.
Several hours later, Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom officially denied reports that Scotland Yard passed any information to Israel regarding the bombings, and British police denied they had any advanced warning of the attacks. The British authorities similarly denied that any information exchange had occurred.
Contrary to original claims that Israel was warned “minutes before” the first attack, unconfirmed rumors in intelligence circles indicate that the Israeli government actually warned London of the attacks “a couple of days” previous. Israel has apparently given other warnings about possible attacks that turned out to be aborted operations. The British government did not want to disrupt the G-8 summit in Gleneagles, Scotland, or call off visits by foreign dignitaries to London, hoping this would be another false alarm.
The British government sat on this information for days and failed to respond. Though the Israeli government is playing along publicly, it may not stay quiet for long. This is sure to apply pressure on Blair very soon for his failure to deter this major terrorist attack.
Also, Arutz Sheva, an extremely right wing Israeli news source affiliated with the settler movement and Arutz 7, a pirate settler radio station, posted this strange story this morning:
Report: Israel Was Warned Ahead of First Blast
10:43 Jul 08, '05 / 1 Tammuz 5765
(IsraelNN.com) Army Radio quoting unconfirmed reliable sources reported a short time ago that Scotland Yard had intelligence warnings of the attacks a short time before they occurred.
The Israeli Embassy in London was notified in advance, resulting in Finance Minister Binyamin Netanyahu remaining in his hotel room rather than make his way to the hotel adjacent to the site of the first explosion, a Liverpool Street train station, where he was to address an economic summit.
At present, train and bus service in London have been suspended following the series of attacks. No terrorist organization has claimed responsibility at this time.
Israeli officials stress the advanced Scotland Yard warning does not in any way indicate Israel was the target in the series of apparent terror attacks.
In typical style, Raimondo threw into his "When did Bibi Know" story a link to this incredibly strange FOX News story from 2001 about an Israeli espionage operation running across the United States. I'd never seen the actual FOX video until now. It has since been deleted from Fox's website.
At least the G8 is still going to hand out some aid. Huzzah.
Why not throw in some links to various reactions. Disturbingly, Fox commentators agreed that this attack was a good thing for the West. An oddball site Propaganda Matrix goes further with the Israel angle and posts a claim from the ever weirder Prison Planet site that as they say: "Cover-up in progress." The far saner Juan Cole has more to say. George Galloway said that this is the price for invading Iraq. A Dude on TomPaine.com. Tariq Ali reacted.
Last thing, I strongly recommend looking at what Efraim Halevi, the former director of the Mossad and now the head of the Center for Strategic and Policy Studies at Hebrew University, wrote about how after the bombings, a very generalized "we" have to escalate the anti-Islam war:
Ex-Mossad Chief Calls For World War After London Attack
Rules of conflict for a world war
By Efraim Halevi
07/07/05 "The Jerusalem Post"
......There will be supreme tests of leadership in this unique situation and people will have to trust the wisdom and good judgment of those chosen to govern them. The executives must be empowered to act resolutely and to take every measure necessary to protect the citizens of their country and to carry the combat into whatever territory the perpetrators and their temporal and spiritual leaders are inhabiting.
The rules of combat must be rapidly adjusted to cater to the necessities of this new and unprecedented situation, and international law must be rewritten in such a way as to permit civilization to defend itself. Anything short of this invites disaster and must not be allowed to happen.
So, you know, another ranting Israeli hawk. Big deal...
This post is a little more hodgepodgy than I intended, but I want to close by noting that I don't really support believing these accusations and innuendoes about the attacks yesterday. As the wise big guy in the film Control Room sarcastically put it, "Everything that happens in the middle east is an Israeli conspiracy, a water pipe in Damascus breaks, it's an Israeli conspiracy." I'm paraphrasing. There are some strange threads to this story, and I certainly think that Stratfor is a quite credible source. I've got no ultimate conclusions on the matter, just questions.
Yet another thing to roll my eyes about...
I'm going up north for the weekend so there might not be any more posts. I am also working on a new Hongpong.com version, and hey, you can check out how it's getting put together @ wp.hongpong.com. Go WordPress!
It reminds me of when I went to London, only a few days after the Madrid bombings. At the time, the whole system was on a terror alert, as they feared a reprisal. However, I walked right past heavily armed police onto the Tube, and it wasn't as if they were patting everyone down. "Al-Qaeda shadow looms over London." This was very similar to the Madrid attacks:
"Like the attacks on the Spanish capital, the targets in London were key transportation nodes: underground stations which intersect with main railway stations, feeding through hundreds of thousands of passengers an hour during peak time," says Dr Eyal.
"And, like in Madrid, the purpose was to kill as many people as possible, by striking at different targets at more or less the same time."
The London stock market plunged after the attacks but the FTSE 100 index came mostly back up. US stock markets aren't hosed. And oil is at a record high but for some reason eased off after this. I wonder if the Plunge Protection Team is rolling out? (London's Evening Standard on the PPT)
The Guardian has a news blog running with updates (General summary). The photo here came from flickr.com. There is a large collection of pictures tagged "London Bomb Blasts" that has a lot of original pictures. (BBC also has pictures and a map of the bombed lines)
Wikipedia now has a picture collection as well as large set of emerging information. Wikinews covers "Four bombs rock London" with many news links, including the surprising news that Netanyahu of all people had some kind of advance warning from the Brits.
The Israelis were tipped off minutes before the explosions?! WTF?
Netanyahu Changed Plans Due to Warning
By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press Writer Thu Jul 7, 7:14 AM ET
JERUSALEM - British police told the Israeli Embassy in London minutes before Thursday's explosions that they had received warnings of possible terror attacks in the city, a senior Israeli official said.
Israeli Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had planned to attend an economic conference in a hotel over the subway stop where one of the blasts occurred, and the warning prompted him to stay in his hotel room instead, government officials said.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom said he wasn't aware of any Israeli casualties.
Just before the blasts, Scotland Yard called the security officer at the Israeli Embassy to say they had received warnings of possible attacks, the official said. He did not say whether British police made any link to the economic conference.
Reporter Chris Allbritton put a translation on his site back-to-iraq.com, of a statement posted on an al-Qaeda linked website, www.qal3ati.com. The site seems to be gone for now, but this was the post:
Announcement on London's Operation 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe
In the name of God the most merciful...
Rejoice the nation of Islam, rejoice nation of Arabs, the time of revenge has come for the crusaders' Zionist British government.
As retaliation for the massacres which the British commit in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mujahideen have successfully done it this time in London.
And this is Britain now burning from fear and panic from the north to the south, from the east to the west.
We have warned the brutish governments and British nation many times.
And here we are, we have done what we have promised. We have done a military operation after heavy work and planning, which the mujahideen have done, and it has taken a long time to ensure the success of this operation.
And we still warn the government of Denmark and Italy, all the crusader governments, that they will have the same punishment if they do not pull their forces out of Iraq and Afghanistan.
So beware.
Thursday 7/7/2005
Jamaat al-Tandheem Al-Sierri (secret organization group)
Organization of al Qaeda't al-Jihad in Europe.
BTW Allbritton is releasing podcasts of his journalism over in Iraq. Nice.
Speaking of Afghanistan, an interesting BBC tale about American troops battling near the Pakistan border. As their Afghan ally put it, are mostly Arabs, Waziris from Pakistan and Chechens. Also, the Iranians are going to train Iraqi troops. What could go wrong?! "Will the US be asked to leave key military bases?" in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan & Uzbekistan?
In the evening of the aftermath, Financial Times analysts have published a harsh rebuke to the United States and its Global War on Terror:
Bush has to review strategy, say US experts
By Guy Dinmore and Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
Published: July 7 2005 18:16 | Last updated: July 7 2005 18:16
A constant theme of the Bush administration is that America and the world are safer because of the US invasion of Iraq and its anti-terror strategy.
That argument prevailed during the US presidential election campaign last year, despite even official US evidence to the contrary, but may have been finally buried by Thursday’s bombings in London.
Experts in Washington said following the blasts that it was time for the Bush administration to re-evaluate its strategy. Confronted by opinion polls showing his falling popularity and waning support for the war in Iraq, Mr Bush stuck to his guns in a speech to the military last week that characteristically showed no hint of change.
“There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home,” said Mr Bush in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Last September, at the peak of his re-election campaign, Mr Bush told the Republican national convention: “We are staying on the offensive striking terrorists abroad so we do not have to face them here at home. Our strategy is succeeding. We have led, many have joined, and America and the world are safer.”
John Hamre, president of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former deputy secretary of defence, said: “Clearly [the world] is not safer. I think this highlights the complexity of the problem.
“We must defend a vast infrastructure constantly while extremists get to pick the time and place with very limited tools. Obviously we must try to intercept the terrorists. But we must also address the broader socio-political context. We can’t solve this with a relatively limited dimensional model of counterforce. Being mighty is one thing. Being effective is another. This is a much more complex problem.”
Classified studies by the CIA and State Department leaked to the media last month concluded that Iraq had replaced Afghanistan as the prime training ground for foreign terrorists who could travel across the world spreading destruction. The Bush administration has struggled even to work out whether the world is a safer place or not.
A year ago, the State Department had to withdraw a report by the Terrorist Threat Integration Centre that claimed terror attacks in 2003 had declined sharply. The revised report more than doubled the numbers of attacks and deaths.
We have to keep on going, doing whatever the hell we are doing...
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 ...
Kinda sweet. Skype provides free Internet telephony for your Mac, PC, Linux or PocketPC. Sounds frickin sweet! You can also get a phone number assigned to you for 30 euros a year, and in theory you could have the number in Chicago while you live in Paris, saving everyone tons of money.
Sweet desktop backgrounds for yr widescreen via the blog of
Blog Torrent. What a great name. Good work, Downhill Battle!
I am looking at new ways to put HongPong together, in the hope that it could improve my odds of fruitful employment. ftrain has some interesting elements, crazy pretentious tho. Tao Of Mac has wiki or Everything2-style features with each of its pages. (check out ten open source projects to watch) WordPress is going to replace MovableType as the main site engine, and hopefully the HongWiki will get more closely integrated with the pages... Wordpress has lots of plugins now. Liberals Aganist Terrorism and their TerrorWiki. I like the idea of a Terrorwiki.
SoSueMe, the aptly named blog by Jon Lech Johansen of DeCSS/DVD/iTunes cracking fame. He's talking about why VLC has a frickin traffic cone icon. Excellent. Apparently a bunch of affiliated kids came back drunk with a cone. And then they started a cone collection. As someone who has gone coning from time to time, I deeply respect this.
This is the shadiest Microsoft disclaimer I've ever seen, at Start.com: "This site is not an officially supported site. It is an incubation experiment and doesn't represent any particular strategy or policy. For other incubation experiments, see http://sandbox.msn.com. Enjoy!"
So damn funny, a t-shirt that says "I was Butt-Fucked at the NEVERLAND RANCH and all I got was this Lousy T-Shirt!" This kid gets a prize for t-shirt of the century. ()
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.
This is one of those beautiful moments where spin, lies, truth, death, image, the friction of war and cause and effect come together to show us once and for all that we are totally fucked in the past, present and future. Iraq was always the central front of the war on terror. And it always will be......
Editor and Publisher reports:
Reporters Press McClellan on Secret CIA Report on Iraq
By E&P Staff
Published: June 22, 2005 5:10 PM ET
NEW YORK At the daily White House press briefing Wednesday, reporters raised with Press Secretary Scott McClellan a bombshell story from Iraq carried earlier Wednesday in The New York Times and wire services, based on a CIA report. Essentially, the questions at the White House boiled down to: Has the invasion and occupation of Iraq actually created more terrorists than it has crushed, and also given them much-needed experience in killing Americans and others?
According to the classified CIA report, the Iraq insurgency poses an international threat and may produce better trained Islamic terrorists than the 1980s Afghanistan war that gave rise to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
“The assessment, completed last month and circulated among government agencies, was described in recent days by several Congressional and intelligence officials,” Doug Jehl wrote in The New York Times. “The officials said it made clear that the war was likely to produce a dangerous legacy by dispersing to other countries Iraqi and foreign combatants more adept and better organized than they were before the conflict.”
The report says Iraqi and foreign fighters are developing a broad range of deadly skills, from car bombings and assassinations to tightly coordinated conventional attacks on police and military targets. If and when the insurgency ends, Islamic militants are likely to disperse as highly organized battle-hardened combatants capable of operating throughout the Arab-speaking world and in other regions including Europe.
Vice President Dick Cheney has recently argued that the insurgency is in its last throes, despite reports that the guerrillas have grown more sophisticated and more deadly.
Naturally, McClellan was asked about all this today at his daily press briefing. Here is the relevant part of the official transcript:
** Q Scott, how concerned is the administration about the potential for Iraq to become a sort of training ground for Islamic extremists who may go back to their home countries and use these techniques to destabilize their governments? There's a new report on that recently.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, let me mention a couple things. As the President has said for some time now, Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism. Wherever you stood before the decision to go into Iraq, I think we can all recognize that the terrorists have made it a central front in the war on terrorism. That's why, as the President said earlier today, we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so that we don't have to fight them here at home. And that's where things are. And that's why the terrorists understand how high the stakes are ...
Q The report suggested that there's concern that Egyptians, Jordanians and others will go back to their home countries, using the techniques they've learned in Iraq to destabilize those countries.
MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I don't know what your question is.
Q Are you concerned about that? Do you think there's potential for that?
MR. McCLELLAN: Iraq is a central front in the war on terrorism. In terms of what's your question on it, I think you're making the assumption that these individuals would just be sitting around sipping tea, as Secretary Rice likes to refer to in her previous comments. So I don't know what your question is regarding that.
Q Just following up on that question, you said at the outset of that, the terrorists have made it a central front in the war on terrorism. I thought it was a central front in the war on terrorism before we invaded.
MR. McCLELLAN: It is. It's part of the war on terrorism, yes.
Q It was.
MR. McCLELLAN: No, it is.
Q It is now --
MR. McCLELLAN: Both.
Q Was it prior to --
MR. McCLELLAN: Both. It's part of the war on terrorism, David.
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!
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.
A few sites to look at: American Hajji is apparently the blog of a soldier who just got dumped into Mosul, fresh from the U.S. He also has posted a lot under "nameless soldier" on DailyKos.com.
Always look at the Agonist, a sort of open-source-model news aggregator that I've been looking to since the war started. They posted my submission of the AIPAC story a few days ago. A statement about Chinese currency manipulation from a Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH), direct to their site. Also a rather overwrought bit about dirty money in the global economy by UK journalist Nick Kochan.
When to start a bombing? Congressman John Conyers has a sweet blog entry @ DailyKos (pretty good user range, ya?) about how the recent British memo that got released about the intelligence being "fixed around the policy" is helpful, but Conyers adds that the Americans were bombing Iraq in 2002 with the specific intention of antagonizing Saddam Hussein into retaliating. This early bombing, preparing the "battle space" as they called, was a particularly illegal action intended to provide a legal pretext, which ultimately failed to work. So they had to dream up the niger-uranium type stuff instead....
GoreTV: Al Gore's rumored cable news station has finally resurfaced as... drum roll... Current (not to be confused with our new MPR operation). As Business2.0 reported:
Gore took the wraps off his long-awaited foray into media moguldom, Current, a cross between video blogging and the early days of MSNBC. Starting Aug. 1, hipster hosts will introduce streams of blip-length clips, created by the viewers themselves, focused on music and other suitably hip subjects. The channel's first call for entries offered a tempting $3,000, three-segment "studio development deal" as a prize for the best submissions. The East Coast liberal elite expecting DNC-TV or endless reruns of Charlie Rose and Topic A With Tina Brown were left scratching their heads.
Meanwhile, Google's Larry Page sent reporters scurrying when he offhandedly mentioned during a panel that the company would begin accepting amateur video search submissions "in the next few days." Sure enough, Google's video service is now accepting files for upload and review, although the company is offering few details on when and how someone might ultimately be able to watch them, not to mention how much Google might someday charge viewers for the privilege. Ignoring the stated restrictions on what could be uploaded, the wits at Slashdot immediately saw right through what Page described as an "experiment in video blogging": This was Google's back door into the porn business. Amateur video indeed.
Then Google and Gore announced a deal with each other. Google's "Zeitgeist" feature, which compiles the top 10 most searched terms at any moment, will become the organizing principle of Current's news programming.
They have jobs available.
BagNewsNotes digests news imagery and the various methods of political spin contained therein. For example, the recent cover of Mother Jones, a crappy Schwartzenegger ad, a disturbing photo of a soldier writing on an Iraqi's head, or Queer Eye for the Pregnant Guy. NewsCorpse.com has an amusing name altho it seems pretentious.
Censorship: A batshit Poli Sci professor in Hawaii thinks that censoring the media is a fabulous idea. I don't feel like dragging myself through the details of the recent Amnesty report about our shiny new gulag system, but good ol' Sidney Blumenthal has something about the great international secret torture conspiracy®©.
Ukraine's New Boss is about the same as the Old Boss. They are going right back to old-school socialism under the new patronage of the United States, in Raimondo's view.
Fahd hospitalized? When this duffer of the desert finally goes, it'll be a mess fo sho.
The Avian Flu is coming!!! AUGH!! This horrible post from the DailyKos construes a future America laden with refugee camps and pandemic. Awful. More about it.
Libertarians: Check out LewRockwell.com, libertarian blogging and so forth. With interesting stuff from (non-libertarian) reporter Jim Lobe about the messy state of the US military, and another article about that disturbing Housing Bubble we've heard about.
I always say read Juan Cole (not to be confused with John Cole) and these days it's no different. In this case, thoughts about a recent suicide bombing against Iraqi Sufis. Also, uhm, some southern Iraqis want to reorganize the provinces into a super-province of Sumer, in reference to the very ancient civilization once sited there:
Al-Hayat says that its sources in Iraq describe an ongoing dispute between the Kurds, who want an Iraqi federalism that gives "states' rights" only to Kurdistan but not to other provinces, and the Shiites, who want a federalism that would apply geographically throughout the country. The Shiites want to create a southern super-province to serve as a counter weight to Kurdistan. Shiite leaders are planning a congress that can establish the instrumentalities for creating the region of "Sumer" in the south, which will consist of 3 consolidated provinces.
[....]
The plan is opposed by Iyad al-Samarra'i of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Party, who said that the IIP is willing to recognize a Kurdistan but that otherwise the present provincial boundaries should be kept. He said that if the Kurds and Shiites did go ahead with their schemes for large federal regions, the Sunni Arabs would be forces to consider creating one for themselves, as well.
The Shiites' use of "Sumer" as the name of the southern confederation is a reference to the earliest civilization in Mesopotamia, based in the south near the Gulf, who had writing as early as 3500. It is always a bad sign when people revive ancient place names, since it points to a romantic nationalism, the most virulent, false and ugly kind. (The people of southern Iraq didn't even know about Sumer two centuries ago-- modern archeologists recovered that part of history. It was perhaps the one success of Saddam's educational system that he instilled a craze for ancient Iraqi civilization in the students, as part of his nationalist agenda).
Apparently the Brits want to hand over security in their sector within a few months — de facto security control has mostly been in the hands of various Sadrists, the Dawa Party militia and other Shiite characters for quite a while.
A subject I always find alarming: the idea that God is acting to drive the gears of miscellaneous things that happen in the war, an essential element in the messianic narrative of our days. Good old Oliver North put together a book about "A Greater Freedom: Stories of Faith from Operation Iraqi Freedom." Another book, "The Faith of the American Soldier" by Stephen Mansfield, has a seemingly more rational description of itself on Amazon:
Since men and women in battle not only face the prospect of their own deaths but also must fashion a moral rationale for killing, the battlefield is often a place of tremendous religious transformation.
Do men and women at war revert to the faith of their youth or do they gravitate to the spirituality around them? Do they lose all faith in the face of horror, or do they piece together an informal faith that simply gets them through the fight? Are they better warriors and do they experience less post-traumatic stress if they believe their war is righteous and that they are agents of good?
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.
It is nearly time to relocate into 1630 Selby. Kennedy is gone for the week, visiting family, and Alison has already moved out, so it is eerily quiet at both ends. My stuff is more than half-packed up. I bid an ambivalent farewell to dowdy plaid shirts that stuck with me far longer than they should have, and threw away old notes and bits of paper, signifying elements of the trail over the last four years.
The server may go down for a while here, and may take some time to come back. Hopefully quickly.
Many objects found in the room, a mapbook of Paris, cards and CDs, photos from the war protests and London. The Hongpong.com Gentoo Linux server, a Pentium 4 Dell Dimension that has performed admirably since I got it from Dan Schned's brother Alex last summer, has faced the challenge of websurfers from the CIA and thousands of virus attacks with great stamina and more importantly, almost unshakeable stability. The server will go down after 42 days in operation. Not bad, but not as good as its all-time record of 111 days.
The electrical problems in my room (bet you didn't know the Uninterruptible Power Supply was grounded by a wire I installed) never blew up the computers, and the dust from all the shit in here didn't quite kill me.
The room was sort of an overgrown projection of my personality, hodgepodge with sprinklings of conspiracy, David's crazy art, wires and components, Rhymesayers stickers, burnt matches, post-its and printouts, critical theory readings and Poli Sci books scooped from the free table, a bookcase topped by Marx, half the Illuminatus trilogy, scribblings and bizarre charts taped to the walls. Many a long night hunched over the computer, following hyperlinks into arcane trivia until three or four in the morning. I tried real hard to "Get it" even though all too often I felt totally disconnected, hostile to the America outside.
Those days are over now... there were fun times, strange times. Someone once claimed that the center of the universe passed through the corner where the TV used to be. For some reason, I tended to believe it.
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)
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.
Our hazy theme today is how rhetoric and threat language are used to shift around the perceived morality of Acting Against The Evil Ones.
Sometimes we should reflect on how the government views internal enemies. The inclusion or exclusion of various groups from heightened law enforcement scrutiny tells us a lot about how that government perceives its own identity.
So I have some stuff about Natan Sharansky, whose supposed ideology about the spread of freedom has totally infatuated Bush, but is itself the slanted product of a hardcore Likud supporter, shifting the definition of Arabs to suit his own purposes, influencing both Israeli and American government identities.
First thing is a report of a leaked memo from the Department of Homeland Security which indicates DHS will institutionally become more fixated on left-wing groups, those Real Dangerous Earth Liberation Front types, apparently placing less emphasis on right-wing militia and white supremacist groups. Great:
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) does not list right-wing domestic terrorists and terrorist groups on a document that appears to be an internal list of threats to the nation’s security.
According to the list — part of a draft planning document obtained by CQ Homeland Security — between now and 2011 DHS expects to contend primarily with adversaries such as al Qaeda and other foreign entities affiliated with the Islamic Jihad movement, as well as domestic radical Islamist groups.
It also lists left-wing domestic groups, such as the Animal Liberation Front (ALF) and the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), as terrorist threats, but it does not mention anti-government groups, white supremacists and other radical right-wing movements, which have staged numerous terrorist attacks that have killed scores of Americans. Recent attacks on cars, businesses and property in Virginia, Oregon and California have been attributed to ELF.
On the flip side is Bush's Democratic Revolution Loverboy, Israeli Minister of Jerusalem Affairs/Olde Time Soviet Dissident Natan Sharansky. Sharansky wrote some book about the global democracy movement, but this all seems to be slick packaging within which lies a typical Likud hawk. Perhaps I'm not being fair; he did truly spend the better part of a decade in the Soviet gulag. However, as a piece in the American Conservative, a paleo-con periodical put it...
The one-time Soviet prisoner, now an Israeli cabinet minister, became the personal embodiment of the link that neoconservative intellectuals had long asserted in print between the Cold War and “World War IV”—a long twilight struggle against totalitarianism morphing seamlessly into the War on Terror. Sharansky could claim authoritatively that the battles against Soviet despotism and Islamic terrorists were essentially part of the same fight, the free against the unfree. As a result of his personal struggle, Sharansky embodied, to use a favorite catchword of the administration’s ideologists, “moral clarity.”
But in real political life, moral clarity between liberty and despotism is not so easy to come by—and perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in Sharansky’s own path since he entered Israeli politics. For there his career has been marked not by moral clarity but rather by moral ambiguity and inconsistency in his advocacy of democracy and human rights, particularly in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. [....]Over the course of Sharansky’s political career, he has steadily morphed from avatar of universal human rights into a pillar of Israel’s nationalist camp.
Soon after Sharansky’s arrival on Israel’s political scene, international human rights advocates and members of the Israeli peace movement began to suspect that he adopted a double standard in dealing with the Palestinians. After a long and exasperating exchange with Sharansky in 1997, an Arab reporter for Al-Sharq al-Awsat threw up his hands and exclaimed, “What you are in effect saying is that everything that the Israeli Government does today is right, that the whole world is wrong to criticize Israel, and that there is no possibility of making any changes in Israel’s policies?” Sharansky blithely responded, “I would not put it quite so strongly.”
[....]
In a particularly cynical move, Sharansky and Sharon’s other opponents sought to twist Israel’s democratic process to hobble even this very tentative step toward peace [the Gaza withdrawal]. As a recent Ha’aretz editorial characterizes this ploy: “The referendum campaign being waged by Sharon’s ministers, his buddies in the Likud, the settlers and fanatics of every stripe, is a threat to the democratic-parliamentary structure of the state, no matter how you look at it.” In a recent cabinet vote on Sharon’s Gaza withdrawal plan, Sharansky cast one of five nays.
[...]
....the nature of Sharansky’s political constituency in Israel drove him to the nationalist extreme. His original party started out narrowly focused on advancing the ethnic interests of Russian Jews and was fairly moderate on most other issues. But Avigdor Lieberman, another Russian Jew, saw the potential for a political party based on the growing Russian Jewish community and better understood that this community was very hawkish, particularly on the issues of Islam (which for Russians was clearly identified with the Chechen War) and the Arabs. Subsequently, Sharansky and Lieberman formed the National Unity Block, which came to represent the most nationalistic edge of the Israeli political spectrum. Like their former countrymen back in the old motherland, Russian Jews in Israel are, in the words of Eduard Kuznetsov, editor of the Israeli Russian-language paper Vesti, “the descendants of an imperial attitude. Land is sacred. And though only 1 percent of them live in the occupied territories, they have an instinctive hatred of Arabs and see no reason to make any concessions.”
Well, "instinctive hatred" is more of a blanket term than I really like, but then again this is a Russian newspaper editor talking. The following interview in Mother Jones illustrates the Likud-nationalist ideology behind the flowery democracy talk:
MJ: Another criticism of you is that as Housing Minister in Ariel Sharon's first government, you participated in the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. And many people say: "Well, how can one promote a democratic Palestinian state while at the same time supporting settlements which Palestinians see as an impediment to that state?"
NS: Well, look, Palestinians see the strengthening of Jewish settlements as an impediment, and some Israelis see the strengthening of the Palestinian Authority as an impediment. But the truth is that if you really want to live in peace, with two democratic societies—Palestinian and Israeli—these must be societies where people can live without fear. And here's something that's strange. The whole world expects that Arabs should be able to live peacefully in Israeli territory—and as you know 17 percent of Israeli citizens are Arabs. At the same time, the world also expects that Jews should leave the territories controlled by the Palestinian Authority, because those Jews will be killed there. That, from the beginning, shows that the world expects very different things from these two types of societies.
I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace. Israel has showed many times that, as soon as there is any hope for peace, we will make all sorts of concessions. The last example of this was Ehud Barak. But if we're making these concessions, I want to make sure that we have a reliable partner first, a partner who is also ready to take those concessions, for the sake of peace.
MJ: Israel has peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, which have held, even though neither state is a democracy, why wouldn't the same be true for an undemocratic Palestinian state?
NS: First of all, we want to have peace with everybody, whether they are a democracy or not. But the difference is that with democracy you can have peace that you can rely on. For leaders of democratic states, war is always the last option, but when you have peace with a non-democracy, you have to rely on the strength of your military to enforce it. So we have peace with Egypt backed by a treaty, but also peace with Syria without a treaty. In both cases, it's because we can rely on the strength of our army. Peace with the Palestinians, however, will not come with their state safely behind the Sinai. The new state will be in the suburbs of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. In this case, it's much more difficult for Israel to rely on the strength of its army to enforce peace, so we need a partner we can trust and rely on, a democratic partner.
One more word about Egypt. What's interesting about our agreement with Egypt is that Egypt got a lot out of it: the territories, financial support, weapons from Americans, and so on. But it lost something very important to the government: It lost Israel as enemy. And for a dictatorial regime, an outside enemy is something that helps the regime survive. So they lost us as a political enemy, but then in the last twenty years they emerged as the new anti-Semitic center in the world. The country prints more anti-Semitic literature, like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, than any other Arab country, and that's a direct result of the fact that Egypt is not a democracy. When they lost us as a political enemy, they still needed us as a national enemy, so now they're becoming the center of anti-Semitism.
A whole array here of Likud bits. The "rely on the strength of your military to enforce [peace]" option == Revisionist Zionism's Iron Wall philosophy. The "I never saw the legitimate strengthening of the Jewish community in the territories under discussion as an obstacle to peace" bit was pure Land Grabbery and Hegemonic Discourse, and lazy hegemonifying at that. Of course it's legitimate, that's why it wasn't an obstacle to peace! Now that is a tautology worth putting clusters of zealots on the West Bank for. And we can see the ideological continuity with the Clean Break neocon folks as well.
On the other hand, he is right that the outside enemy helps the regime survive. USSR and the Capitalist Cigar smokers, Nazi Germany and International Jewry, the New Pentagon and Shibboleth O Evil Zarqawi, these are handy things. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning. To hate at least rhetorically delays the pressures of reform, but doubly so in a democracy where vast sections of the population have been brainwashed.
To make the American people intolerant of imaginary WMDs held by an inflated enemy image, that was the genius of Wolfowitz, and his Cold War predecessors like Wohlstetter. To run intelligence puffing-up using totally fake Empirical Evidence, like the old Team B venture, was recognized as the best political strategy to making doves look foolhardy. in those days, it was the nukes, whereas nowadays it was the Curveball-based intel, Yellowcake Uranium and Aluminum Tubes.
I have to go to bed now. More later. Augh, I always say that.
This is very important:
Terry Schiavo: The Blog: http://durrrrr.blogspot.com :
Friday, March 25, 2005
nnnnguh
AHHHHHHH WAAAAAAAA
posted by terri at 5:24 PM 149 comments
nnnnngnhgngnh
*blink*
posted by terri at 3:40 PM 42 comments
Also it seems that her parents are selling off their recently composed mailing list to conservative groups. But talk about your hyperactive core to target... those people got some buttons to push. (DailyKos / Billmon on it)
It is good to have Billmon back at the Whiskey Bar. I particularly like the future news snippets (as introduced by a dribble of news items parading the formation of an Iraqi government):
Iraqi politicians in the besieged Basra pocket vowed to break a deadlock that has blocked the formation of a new government, saying an agreement will be finalized before President-for-Life Bush's formal deification ceremony next week. Talks were slowed after three key negotiators – two Shia and one Kurd – died of old age last month . . .
Voice of Christian America
Iraq Cabinet Deal Said Close, Even as Evacuation Begins
January 12, 2009
Iraqi negotiators continued to haggle over the shape of their government in exile – nearly three decades after Iraq was overrun and annexed by the New Islamic Caliphate. Talks are reportedly deadlocked over genetic banker Ahmed Chalabi IV’s demand for control of the regime’s modest Treasury, reportedly valued at $150 trillion (3,500 Chinese renminbi) . . .
New New York Times
Iraq Talks Continue at Arkansas Oceanside Resort
March 28, 2045
Ok I gotta go to class now. There is much to say but little time to do it. Dang...
Hell, I'm finally back. My computer is acting weird which prevented me from updating the site earlier.... Anyhow...
We had a hell of a time in Colorado. I skied for the first time in eight years, so that was awesome.
God, I am too tired to deal with this right now. There were good stories. The National Security State came around at unexpected times. A guy told me that they know where Osama bin Laden is.
Our society seems to be obsessed with mortality, wall to wall Schiavo on the wretched airport CNN televisions that can never be turned off, as I found trying desperately to sleep on Friday before last in the Atlanta airport.
I have this weird psychological problem, which I think relates to my atheism. Simply put, I would say that we die every day, as some realities are brought about and other potential realities are crushed. As we move from one phase of life to another the old personality dies. But maybe not, maybe there is a firm and Profound bond between all the moments that make up a person's life, and it isn't all complex, random movements of inherently mundane and truly dead molecules.
Ugh, I don't mean to get negative. To be truly honest, I feel all right about where my life is going to go and I don't quite have the same level of anxiety that's sweeping through many of my classmates. We are moving on Real Soon, that's what's clear. The old social forms are ticking away, ready to go into the dust of these strange years of college...
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....
Bush orders Syria out of Lebanon
United States President George W. Bush on Wednesday pointedly ordered Syria out of Lebanon, saying the free world is in agreement that Damascus' authority over the political affairs of its neighbor must end now.
He applauded the strong message sent to Syria when Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and French Foreign Minister Michel Barnier held a joint news conference in London on Tuesday.
"Both of them stood up and said loud and clear to Syria, 'You get your troops and your secret services out of Lebanon so that good democracy has a chance to flourish," Bush said at a event on his job training programs at a community college in nearby Maryland.
Also Wednesday, Lebanon's opposition demanded the full withdrawal of Syrian military and intelligence services and the resignation of Lebanese Syrian-backed security chiefs.
I am highly suspicious of this stuff about Syria causing the assassination of this Hariri cat, and I fail to see how people can leap to such conclusions so quickly. Either way it is not a surprise that many Lebanese are tired of the Syrians, but then again Syria is perched in a quiet state of war with Israel, recently interrupted by an Israeli bombing of what they called an Islamic Jihad base, and of course the recent accusations that Devious Syrians were instrumental in the recent suicide bombing. And of course the Iraq thing. So where does Syria go? What are they really doing right now? Why is Lebanon any of our god damn business?
I'll note at this point that Hongpong.com has in fact gotten hits from the Paris of the Middle East... I forget what the ISP was called but it was kind of funny.
News links: Here I have a bunch of links mostly from Lebanon's Daily Star. I would like this set to illustrate the fact that Lebanon has quite an excellent degree of press freedom... not infinite but hey it's there.
Two weeks of turmoil summarized by the Daily Star."People power" brings down cabinet. History in the making. A good thing? Let's look at this great Lebanese model or so they say. Fragile Syria must withdraw. Electrified youth hope for new beginning. Saudis demand Syrian withdrawal. Cheers in Beirut (which you have to admit doesn't happen often).
Thoughtful second thoughts on Lebanon from Matt Yglesias. Keep reading Juan Cole, its good for you.
Some people are highly cynical: The Cedar Revolution is hollow by Justin Raimondo:
George W. Bush's journalistic sock-puppets are hailing their own hallucinations: what's sweeping the Middle East is not a wave of capital-"D" Democracy, but a tsunami of nationalistic and religious fervor that can only redound against us.
Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" is a case in point, one that illustrates the entirely illusory nature of the media hype – which is, unsurprisingly, identical to the U.S. government's official line. The official story is that the long-suffering peoples of Lebanon have had enough, and – drunk with the mere promise of the magical elixir of Democracy – are at last rising up, seizing their liberty, and throwing off their Syrian oppressors. It's a pretty story, albeit a bit simple-minded and hackneyed, but there's just one problem: it isn't true.
The reality is that Lebanon has had democracy for quite some time: or, at least, more so than any other Middle Eastern Arab nation. But instead of being a panacea for the country's problems, this relative excess of democracy has merely exacerbated them. Divided into a bewildering array of ethno-religious and political fiefdoms, Lebanon has managed to survive the foibles of majority rule largely by avoiding centralization and devolving power back to the various clans, parties, and religious groups that constitute, in effect, a collection of mini-states.
[.....]
The sudden and quite unexpected resignation of the pro-Syrian Lebanese government – which would have won any vote of confidence in the parliament – is being portrayed as a necessary concession to a rising populist movement patterned after Ukraine's "orange revolution" – but it seems to me it was a very clever ploy. The so-called "opposition" is united by nothing but a common hatred of Syria and a willingness to act on behalf of foreign interests. Once the government is out, however, and the Syrians withdraw to the Bekaa valley, they will be left to fight among themselves – and who can doubt that the communal grudge matches that have afflicted Lebanon for most of her history will reassert themselves in the absence of a stabilizing force?
So that's a few points on the matter. I really can't say what's what about this whole thing. It reeks of manipulation, and as jolly as it might look on TV, we are set for all kinds of problems to unfold...
also of random interest: sex lies and jeff gannon by justin raimondo...
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.
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!
It's December now... a long and cold one with little reason to believe that next year will be better than this one.
I am down in the library where I ought to be writing something about the nastiness of Development Politics for Spanish. As a source for nasty news about development in the Latino world, I recommend NarcoNews.com.
It could have been the best November of our lives. Instead, it's lookin' to be an optimistic crest before the long, dark slide towards whatever...
One thing I like about my living arrangements these days is that when I walk to school in the morning, I go past a series of newspaper boxes at the Grandview Grill, so I see the Wall Street Journal, Strib, Pioneer Press and a couple others right after I step outside. Today the PioPress said that November was tied for the deadliest month for U.S. troops. That I believe.
What did the Illuminati (and Hassan-i-Sabah) say? Nothing is true. Everything is permissible. I believe that too.
I am uncertain, in fact highly doubtful, about all the following links. Nonetheless they provoke further questions that I can't answer right now. And there is some cool bank fraud conspiracy stuff in there. First, a couple DailyKos diary entries:
Daily Kos :: Manipulating the media -- an experiment in cajoling CNN to cover the voting challenge stories more closely by signing up for CNN email alerts. Seems like a wack idea. Ignoring Voter Suppression is Betraying Black Voters.
At least CNN is printing something. CNN.com - Suit seeks new look at rejected Ohio ballots - Nov 26, 2004
I am not sure what the deal is with this guy. Ohio hearings show massive GOP vote manipulation, but where the hell are the Democrats & John Kerry? - Harvey Wasserman
A strange tale from OnlineJournal.com. It reads a little bit too much like the "classic spy caper" inspired by Iran-Contra, complete with offshore bank accounts and the Department of Homeland Security in the mix. Basically this asserts that a bunch of technicians went in and added electronic votes in Ohio under the guise of federal agents.
I have pondered the possibility that the Department of Homeland Security might have some inbuilt tendency to defend the Bush government by prolonging its political existence, much as the CIA is a self-perpetuating bureaucracy accountable to no one. This is really just a fart of a conspiracy theory... nonetheless now the internet has a story where DHS and FBI perpetuate the Bush administration. A fine tale...
I will add that I have my doubts about what the hell OnlineJournal.com is. For example take this cheesy piece about fascism in America.
"More on the [alleged] buying of electoral fraud by the Bush campaign":
November 26, 2004—Additional information on the buying of vote riggers with Saudi and former Enron funds has been obtained. The epicenter for the vote rigging operation is Dallas, Texas, and the operation may involve retired FBI agents who used a well-established "good ole boy" network to arrange for access to polling precincts by electronic voting machine technicians who took advantage of various November 2 security "lockdowns" to illegally alter the tabulation of votes in favor of Bush. Some of the retired agents may have used courtesy credentials issued upon retirement to fool unsuspecting polling place workers.
The cost of the operation was estimated at $29 million with the money sent via a circuitous network of offshore trust companies and shell activities. This reporter has obtained a copy of a bank check for $29,600,000 that was allegedly sent to cover the cost of the Texas-based vote rigging operation. The check is dated October 22, 2004, and was made payable to "Five Star Investment Ltd.," a trust said to have long connections to Saudi-funded operations in Texas and around the world. The payer is identified as "Equity Financial Trust," a Houston-based "brass plate" and post office box entity tied to offshore Cook Islands "folding tent" accounts used to hide away profits amassed by the former Enron as well as Saudi financiers.
On October 6, 2004, some two weeks before Equity Financial Trust transferred the money to Five Star Investment Ltd., the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions for Canada listed Equity Financial Trust, along with Bankers Financial and Security Trust, Falcon Financial and Trust, and Unity Virtual Trust Group as "unauthorized financial institutions." In fact, the check for $29.6 million, which is marked "Not to exceed fifty million dollars," is drawn on the Laurentian Bank of Canada's Toronto branch. Its serial number is 317675450 3 and the bank number is 23-97/1020. The bank instrument is issued by Integrated Payment Systems, Inc. of Englewood, Colorado, and Bank One, NA, Denver, Colorado.
It is noteworthy that a number of companies operated by past Bush campaign contributor Pierre Falcone, under criminal investigation in France for weapons smuggling in Angola, are called "Falcon." Several non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, have tied Falcone to questionable Halliburton activities when Vice President Dick Cheney headed the firm. Some of the vote riggers who were guaranteed a minimum payment for their services have started talking about the operation because they did not receive the money they were promised.
The same reporter previously published "Saudis, Enron money helped pay for US rigged election." Again, take it with that grain of salt, but there's nothing like a fun banking conspiracy!
November 25, 2004—According to informed sources in Washington and Houston, the Bush campaign spent some $29 million to pay polling place operatives around the country to rig the election for Bush. The operatives were posing as Homeland Security and FBI agents but were actually technicians familiar with Diebold, Sequoia, ES&S, Triad, Unilect, and Danaher Controls voting machines. These technicians reportedly hacked the systems to skew the results in favor of Bush.Well then, if they say so! :-P
The leak about the money and the rigged election apparently came from technicians who were promised to be paid a certain amount for their work but the Bush campaign interlocutors reneged and some of the technicians are revealing the nature of the vote rigging program.
There have been media reports from around the country concerning the locking down of precincts while votes were being tallied. In one unprecedented action in Warren County, Ohio, election officials locked down the facility where votes were being counted. The officials said this was in response to a Level 10 high-threat terrorist warning being issued by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI for Warren County. George Bush won 72 percent of the vote in Warren County, much larger than his percentage of victory statewide.
The money to rig the election in favor of Bush reportedly came from an entity called Five Star Trust, largely based in Houston but a worldwide entity that is directly tied to the Saudi Royal Family. Five Star Trust was termed "a well-protected vehicle" that has been used to support both Bush and Osama bin Laden in the US and around the world.
Other money used to fund the election rigging was from siphoned Enron money stored away in accounts in the Cook Islands, which was once the base of one of the more questionable and Saudi-linked BCCI subsidiaries. Cook Islands banks also handled some of the weapons smuggling financing of the Iran-Contra scandal. A former Justice Department attorney who helped prosecute the BCCI case said the use of the Cook Islands by the Bush reelection team indicates they wanted the bank arrangements to be a "quick folding tent" operation that would cease to exist when the election was over. He said the Cook Islands was notorious for not requiring any documentation for such operations.
[....]
The sale of nuclear material to Iraq was funded through Saudi operations in Houston, including those associated with George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, James R. Bath, and Saudis Abdullah Taha Baksh, and Kamal Adham, as well as Lebanese businessman Ghaith Pharaon (who was also involved in the collapse of Miami's CenTrust S&L, a bank that had ties to Jeb Bush). This gang, along with Salem Bin Laden, the older brother of Osama, funneled over $1 million into failed Bush ventures, including Arbusto, Spectrum 7, and Harken Energy. Some of the Saudi money also financed Enron Oil and Gas Resources (later EOG Resources) in the Belspec Fusselman Field in Midland, Texas, a deal in which George W. Bush had a financial stake. In fact, Saudi planes in the 1980s landed in Houston with mountains of cash used to buy nuclear material for Saddam to possibly use against the Iranians. The money was laundered through Houston's Main Bank, a bank close to the Bush family. Skyway Aircraft of Houston, owned by Bath, was invested in by Abu Dhabi's ruler (the main owner of BCCI) and whose parent company in the Cayman Islands was used by Ollie North to collect foreign money for his Iran-contra enterprise.
Sorry to disappoint but I can't really post anything today, except maybe late at night. The radio station is closed down for the weekend, so I don't have a show this evening. That's really a good thing because I don't have the time right now.
Today I am working on a paper about pipelines and pipeline politics. As an experiment I put together a few Wiki pages about pipelines. I have no idea if you might find these interesting, but energy politics is a real big deal so it might be worth lookin at. There is some interesting stuff about the Caspian Sea, an article by Seymour Hersh about Mobil oil doing shady things in Kazakhstan, etc. I should say that this paper is a lit review about the subject, so I'm not vouching for the accuracy of any of these materials. They are intended to provide different perspectives etc.
Also I have some stuff about pipeline plots in Afghanistan and the new deals between those old bugbears Iran and China. And The Balkans.
I am sorry I haven't updated the 'Tracking election irregularities' HongWiki page lately... It's on the list!
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.
This is a repost from BlackOutBlog, but as nobody reads BlackOutBlog, I'm posting it on Hongpong.
On to my thoughts:
Safire: He's leaving, and I am despondent over it. Safire is a gargantuan asshole, with a Mailer-like obsession, if not a Carlyle-like obsession, with the halls of power. His life has been lived with an ear undelicately to the ground, pumping biased sources for information often false. However, his commentary is excellent. There is no denying this guy is one smart mofo, and I will miss him.
Compounding my despondency is the now-obvious placement of David Brooks, who has been placed in the role of sucessor to token conservative on the NYT staff. Brooks is colorless, odorless, tasteless and uninsightful, choosing to review Tom Wolfe's (another non-dumb ragin asshole) new book the other day rather than do his job. He belittles those book critics who line up to trash his latest book every time, and lauds Wolfe's "moral intent" while dismissing his underdevloped characters.
To you, David, I say this: shut the fuck up. You aren't a critic, and your love of Wolfe has to do with some notion of him as a pitchman for your own retrograde notion of morality. First off, I don't think Wolfe is pushing any value system upon his readers. I would suspect, though I don't know, that Wolfe would agree with Oscar Wilde's prologue to The Picture of Dorian Gray when he says:
"There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written."
It's not as simple as that, however?there are beautifully-written books with no content or vision published every year. However, a writer and an artist are two different things, and morality has a complicated relationship with the artist and an untroubled relationship to the writer. Brooks would be a writer in this construction, lacking the chops for artistry:
"The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved."
In fact, Wilde would posit that Brooks is not even a legitimate critic:
"The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things."
Brooks is not translating, he is drawing conclusions on something for which conclusions can not be drawn, only interpretations forwarded. For him to discursively rant, stapling his ideology upon a great man of letters, demonstrates what a pea-brained little sycophant he is, a little nitpicking turd without the breadth of vision of Friedman (who I nonetheless dislike), the humanity of Kristof or Krugman (though Krugman can be a sanctimonious whinger at times) or the wit of Dowd (my hero). While the alternatives are no great shakes, either?we could have seen some George F. Will-esque replacement?I really think the world's most august daily could do a little better than Brooks.
Back to Safire; the man used "Weltanschauung" in his column today. These days, we are running out of competent writers in the newspaper industry. There is no craftsmanship, just a dry retelling of facts or a spoken word-like delivery of opinions. Safire is a godsend here?he, like Dowd, can write?they have lively writing voices, their prose represents a sub-character of themselves, not merely their world view as they would present it on a pundit's show. Dowd is a wry and raunchy cocktail-circuit party girl grown up, Safire is a deeply skeptical observer, peering through the fog of cigarette smoke and the haze of scotch towards the raw and unedited truths of the game as played in Washington.
Both voices are certainly self-caricatures; Safire is an accomplished historian of the English language, with other interests and an awareness of his crotchety bias. Dowd is simply too old and too smart to think her barbs even scratch her targets. They still do it, though, bring a literary twist into their writing, and I willmiss Safire's counterpoint. In retrospect, they should have been scheduled to write on the same day, it would have allowed for more competitiveness. By the way, Weltanschauung means "world view" in German.
As for world views and the relative lack thereof of certain individuals in government, Condi Rice was named Secretary of State by Piehole yesterday, meaning a continuation of her shameless sycophancy and her utter distaste for world politics. A former Kremlinologist, Rice is still bent by the "Us vs. Them" mentality that was the hallmark of the Manichaean ideological divide of 1946-1991.
Dan adds: Oh and she ducked questions under oath and stonewalled the 9/11 Commission.
Safire had argued that Powell would stay on a few months to see if Arafat's death could help clear the peace process, but it looks as if he wanted out and wanted out NOW. Obviously, peace is on the backburner now, and it's up with war:
Be afraid of the war mammie, be very afraid.
More news from the ongoing Israeli-American hegemon project. According to this rightwing news story, it sounds like Israel gave the U.S. some of their trusty Evil Israeli Bulldozers to git those Ayrabs... To restate the major problem with this type of thing, the U.S. military is so disadvantaged in the situation that we are dependent on the Israelis to provide operationally useful tactics (and bulldozers).
Unfortunately, traveling down this dark road will make us rise to ever worse methods of torture and suppression, while merging our perceived national identity with Israel's. The Israelis will happily provide the means (and the personnel?) as long as it takes. Operationally useful tactics probably can't rescue us from strategic disaster, and when the Arab TV networks get a good look at these bulldozers, it will make our strategic position that much worse.
I should add that I don't know much about WorldTribune.com so this article could be nonsense, but there is nothing in it too surprising. WorldTribune looks like a right-wing rag, as they have a link to the Drudge Report at the very top.
Is it really true that we have run out of armor plates so badly that we are buying the damn things from the Israelis? How much are we paying their military-industrial complex, then?
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
BAGHDAD – The U.S. military has employed Israeli urban warfare tactics during the current invasion of the Iraqi city of Fallujah.
U.S. officials acknowledged that hundreds of officers have trained in Israel over the last two years in urban warfare and counter-insurgency. In September, scores of U.S. officers trained at the Adam urban warfare school northeast of Tel Aviv, a facility that contains a mock Arab village.
The U.S. officers trained in Israel relayed their expertise to the U.S. Army's Joint Readiness Training Center in Fort Polk, La. Over the last two years, the army center has increased the number of mock Arab villages from four to 18 and employed Arab speakers for urban warfare exercises.
A key Israeli lesson adopted by the U.S. military was the need to maintain surprise during an infantry advance in an Arab urban environment.
Officials said the Army and Marine Corps have employed tactics developed during the Israeli military invasion of West Bank cities in 2002.
They said the Israeli methods helped save soldiers and accelerate the advance through Fallujah.
"We have learned a lot regarding urban warfare tactics in the Middle East from our allies," an official said. "Yes, this includes Israel."
In the Fallujah operation, U.S. troops broke through walls of Iraqi homes to avoid exposure in the city's narrow alleys, believed to have been mined by insurgents.
Another Israeli lesson was the use of air platforms to target enemy combatants during street battles. In Fallujah, the United States has employed AC-130 gunships to target insurgents in downtown Fallujah. In the Gaza Strip, Israel has used the Apache AH-64A attack helicopter to strike insurgents and their vehicles.
On Wednesday, the U.S. military said it has captured 70 percent of Fallujah and killed about 80 insurgents. The military, reporting light casualties, said most of the fighting was taking place in the center of the city.
"The enemy is fighting hard but not to the death," Lt. Gen. Thomas Metz, the multinational ground force commander in Iraq, said in a Pentagon videoconference broadcast from Iraq. "There is not a sense that he is staying in particular places. He is continuing to fall back or he dies in those positions. I think we're looking at several more days of tough urban fighting."
Another Israeli tactic developed by the U.S. military in Fallujah was the use of a multi-pronged advance on insurgency strongholds in an urban area. Officials said the technique was employed in the Israeli ground offensive on the northern West Bank city of Nablus in April 2002. The U.S. force has also employed armored D-9 bulldozers to clear roads. Israel has provided the United States with 14 armored D-9 bulldozers for the war in Iraq.
Officials said Israel has also provided armor for Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, many of which have been deployed in Fallujah. They said Rafael, Israel Armament Development Authority has sold the reactive armor plates to the U.S. Army.
In Fallujah, the U.S. military also employed an Israeli method of clearing mines. The method called for a tank to fire a barrel of more than a ton of explosives and attached to a 200-meter cord.
The barrel explodes and sets off mines planted in either a field or street.
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...
This is really weird. One of the more marginal yet oddly spunky anchors on cable TV, the former sportscaster Keith Olbermann, has suddenly decided to take his show, Countdown, straight into the land of tinfoil hats (welcome, sir!) and is now trying to blow the stories of voting irregularities wide open. Fascinating stuff. I am posting a bit about this voting fraud story (described as 'naked promotional announcement') I got this off a DailyKos diary which has links to some of the MSNBC videos.
There is some serious shit in here, about security lockdowns in Ohio and the apparent discrepancies between optical scanners and electronic machines in Florida. Yeee-haw!!!
This was originally published on MSNBC's website. The nut of the issue: we now have evidence that shows most of the gap in Ohio's election results can be filled with phantom voters (evangelicals or ghosts in the diebold machines, take your pick).
At least, that's what a corporate news desk is now saying. WHAT the HELL? I will not still not assign credulity to the idea that the election WAS stolen. However, now things are, shall we say, amped.
I needed to pull out this quote. I can't believe it myself. And Homeland Security is involved?
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
Sorry, here is the full thing:
SECAUCUS -- A quick and haplessly generic answer now to the 6,000 emails and the hundreds of phone calls.
Firstly, thank you.
Secondly, we will indeed be resuming our coverage of the voting irregularities in Ohio and Florida -- and elsewhere -- on this evening's edition of Countdown {8:00 p.m. ET}. The two scheduled guests are Jonathan Turley, an excellent professor of law at George Washington University, and MSNBC analyst and Congressional Quarterly senior columnist Craig Crawford.
For Jonathan, the questions are obvious: the process and implications of voting reviews, especially after a candidate has conceded, even after a President has been re-elected. For Craig, the questions are equally obvious: did John Kerry's concession indeed neuter mainstream media attention to the questions about voting and especially electronic voting, and what is the political state of play on the investigations and the protests.
Phase Two, in which Doris gets her oats...
Keep them coming. Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
* November 9, 2004 | 12:55 a.m. ET
Electronic voting angst (Keith Olbermann)
NEW YORK -- Bev Harris, the Blackbox lady, was apparently quoted in a number of venues during the day Monday as having written "I was tipped off by a person very high up in TV that the news has been locked down tight, and there will be no TV coverage of the real problems with voting on Nov. 2... My source said they've also been forbidden to talk about it even on their own time."
I didn't get the memo.
We were able to put together a reasonably solid 15 minutes or so on the voting irregularities in Florida and Ohio on Monday's Countdown. There was some You-Are-There insight from the Cincinnati Enquirer reporter who had personally encountered the `lockdown' during the vote count in Warren County, Ohio, a week ago, and a good deal of fairly contained comment from Representative John Conyers of Michigan, who now leads a small but growing group of Democratic congressmen who've written the General Accountability Office demanding an investigation of what we should gently call the Electronic Voting Angst. Conyers insisted he wasn't trying to re-cast the election, but seemed mystified that in the 21st Century we could have advanced to a technological state in which voting-- fine, flawed, or felonious-- should leave no paper trail.
But the show should not have been confused with Edward R. Murrow flattening Joe McCarthy. I mean that both in terms of editorial content and controversy. I swear, and I have never been known to cover-up for any management anywhere, that I got nothing but support from MSNBC both for the Web-work and the television time. We were asked if perhaps we shouldn't begin the program with the Fallujah offensive and do the voting story later, but nobody flinched when we argued that the Countdown format pretty much allows us to start wherever we please.
It may be different elsewhere, but there was no struggle to get this story on the air, and evidently I should be washing the feet of my bosses this morning in thanks. Because your reaction was a little different than mine. By actual rough count, between the 8 p.m. ET start of the program and 10:30 p.m. ET last night, we received 1,570 e-mails (none of them duplicates or forms, as near as I can tell). 1,508 were positive, 62 negative.
Well the volume is startling to begin with. I know some of the overtly liberal sites encouraged readers to write, but that's still a hunk of mail, and a decisive margin (hell, 150 to 62 is considered a decisive margin). Writing this, I know I'm inviting negative comment, but so be it. I read a large number of the missives, skimmed all others, appreciate all-- and all since-- deeply.
Even the negative ones, because in between the repeated "you lost" nonsense and one baffling reference to my toupee (seriously, if I wore a rug, wouldn't I get one that was all the same color?), there was a solid point raised about some of the incongruous voting noted on the website of Florida's Secretary of State.
There, 52 counties tallied their votes using paper ballots that were then optically scanned by machines produced by Diebold, Sequoia, or Election Systems and Software. 29 of those Florida counties had large Democratic majorities among registered voters (as high a ratio as Liberty County-- Bristol, Florida and environs-- where it's 88 percent Democrats, 8 percent Republicans) but produced landslides for President Bush. On Countdown, we cited the five biggest surprises (Liberty ended Bush: 1,927; Kerry: 1,070), but did not mention the other 24.
Those protesting e-mailers pointed out that four of the five counties we mentioned also went for Bush in 2000, and were in Florida's panhandle or near the Georgia border. Many of them have long "Dixiecrat" histories and the swing to Bush, while remarkably large, isn't of itself suggestive of voting fraud.
That the other 24 counties were scattered across the state, and that they had nothing in common except the optical scanning method, I didn't mention. My bad. I used the most eye-popping numbers, and should have used a better regional mix instead.
Interestingly, none of the complaining emailers took issue with the remarkable results out of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. In 29 precincts there, the County's website shows, we had the most unexpected results in years: more votes than voters.
I'll repeat that: more votes than voters. 93,000 more votes than voters.
Oops.
Talk about successful get-out-the-vote campaigns! What a triumph for democracy in Fairview Park, twelve miles west of downtown Cleveland. Only 13,342 registered voters there, but they cast 18,472 votes.
Vote early! Vote often!
And in the continuing saga of the secret vote count in Warren County, Ohio (outside Cincinnati), no protestor offered an explanation or even a reference, excepting one sympathetic writer who noted that there was a "beautiful Mosque" in or near Warren County, and that a warning from Homeland Security might have been predicated on that fact.
To her credit, Pat South, President of the Warren County Commissioners who chose to keep the media from watching the actual vote count, was willing to come on the program-- but only by phone. Instead, we asked her to compose a statement about the bizarre events at her County Administration building a week ago, which I can quote at greater length here than I did on the air.
"About three weeks prior to elections," Ms. South stated, "our emergency services department had been receiving quite a few pieces of correspondence from the office of Homeland Security on the upcoming elections. These memos were sent out statewide, not just to Warren County and they included a lot of planning tools and resources to use for election day security.
"In a face to face meeting between the FBI and our director of Emergency Services, we were informed that on a scale from 1 to 10, the tri-state area of Southwest Ohio was ranked at a high 8 to a low 9 in terms of security risk. Warren County in particular, was rated at 10 (with 10 being the highest risk). Pursuant to the Ohio revised code, we followed the law to the letter that basically says that no one is allowed within a hundred feet of a polling place except for voters and that after the polls close the only people allowed in the board of elections area where votes are being counted are the board of election members, judges, clerks, poll challengers, police, and that no one other than those people can be there while tabulation is taking place."
Ms. South said she admitted the media to the building's lobby, and that they were provided with updates on the ballot-counting every half hour. Of course, the ballot-counting was being conducted on the third floor, and the idea that it would have probably looked better if Warren had done what Ohio's other 87 counties did-- at least let reporters look through windows as the tabulations proceeded-- apparently didn't occur to anybody.
Back to those emails, especially the 1,508 positive ones. Apart from the supportive words (my favorites: "Although I did not vote for Kerry, as a former government teacher, I am encouraged by your `covering' the voting issue which is the basis of our government. Thank you."), the main topics were questions about why ours was apparently the first television or mainstream print coverage of any of the issues in Florida or Ohio. I have a couple of theories.
Firstly, John Kerry conceded. As I pointed out here Sunday, no candidate's statement is legally binding-- what matters is the state election commissions' reports, and the Electoral College vote next month. But in terms of reportorial momentum, the concession took the wind out of a lot of journalists' aggressiveness towards the entire issue. Many were prepared for Election Night premature jocularity, and a post-vote stampede to the courts-- especially after John Edwards' late night proclamation from Boston. When Kerry brought that to a halt, a lot of the media saw something of which they had not dared dream: a long weekend off.
Don't discount this. This has been our longest presidential campaign ever, to say nothing of the one in which the truth was most artfully hidden or manufactured. To consider this mess over was enough to get 54 percent of the respondents to an Associated Press poll released yesterday to say that the "conclusiveness" of last week's vote had given them renewed confidence in our electoral system (of course, 39 percent said it had given them less confidence). Up for the battle for truth or not, a lot of fulltime political reporters were ready for a rest. Not me-- I get to do "Oddball" and "Newsmakers" every night and they always serve to refresh my spirit, and my conviction that man is the silliest of the creator's creations.
There's a third element to the reluctance to address all this, I think. It comes from the mainstream's love-hate relationship with this very thing you're reading now: The Blog. This medium is so new that print, radio, and television don't know what to do with it, especially given that a system of internet checks and balances has yet to develop. A good reporter may encounter a tip, or two, or five, in a day's time. He has to check them all out before publishing or reporting.
What happens when you get 1,000 tips, all at once?
I'm sounding like an apologist for the silence of television and I don't mean to. Just remember that when radio news arose in the '30s, the response of newspapers and the wire services was to boycott it, then try to limit it to specific hours. There's a measure of competitiveness, a measure of confusion, and the undeniable fact that in searching for clear, non-partisan truth in this most partisan of times, the I'm-Surprised-This-Name-Never-Caught-On "Information Super Highway" becomes a road with direction signs listing 1,000 destinations each.
Having said all that-- for crying out loud, all the data we used tonight on Countdown was on official government websites in Cleveland and Florida. We confirmed all of it-- moved it right out of the Reynolds Wrap Hat zone in about ten minutes.
Which offers one way bloggers can help guide the mainstream at times like this: source your stuff like crazy, and the stuffier the source the better.
Enough from the soapbox. We have heard the message on the Voting Angst and will continue to cover it with all prudent speed.
Thanks for your support.
Keep them coming... Email me at KOlbermann@msnbc.com
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.
This is the partial transcript of Osama Bin Laden's recent video released on Al Jazeera. I have to say the best thing about it was his podium.
DUBAI, Oct 30 - Following are excerpts from a speech by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden addressing the American people in a video tape, parts of which were aired by Al Jazeera television on Saturday, as translated by Reuters.
"O American people, I am speaking to tell you about the ideal way to avoid another Manhattan, about war and its causes and results.
"Security is an important foundation of human life and free people do not squander their security, contrary to Bush's claims that we hate freedom. Let him tell us why we did not attack Sweden, for example.
"It is known that those who hate freedom do not possess proud souls like those of the 19, may God rest their souls. We fought you because we are free and because we want freedom for our nation. When you squander our security we squander yours.
"I am surprised by you. Despite entering the fourth year after Sept. 11, Bush is still deceiving you and hiding the truth from you and therefore the reasons are still there to repeat what happened.
"God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but after the situation became unbearable and we witnessed the injustice and tyranny of the American-Israeli alliance against our people in Palestine and Lebanon, I thought about it. And the events that affected me directly were that of 1982 and the events that followed -- when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon, helped by the U.S. Sixth Fleet.
"In those difficult moments many emotions came over me which are hard to describe, but which produced an overwhelming feeling to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the unjust.
"As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me punish the unjust the same way [and] to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.
"We had no difficulty in dealing with Bush and his administration because they resemble the regimes in our countries, half of which are ruled by the military and the other half by the sons of kings ... They have a lot of pride, arrogance, greed and thievery.
"He [Bush] adopted despotism and the crushing of freedoms from Arab rulers and called it the Patriot Act under the guise of combating terrorism.....
"We had agreed with the [the Sept. 11] overall commander Mohammed Atta, may God rest his soul, to carry out all operations in 20 minutes before Bush and his administration take notice.
"It never occurred to us that the commander in chief of the American forces (Bush) would leave 50,000 citizens in the two towers to face those horrors alone at a time when they most needed him because he thought listening to a child discussing her goat and its ramming was more important than the planes and their ramming of the skyscrapers. This had given us three times the time needed to carry out the operations, thanks be to God...
"Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands and each state which does not harm our security will remain safe.
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?
A big story's popped up over the weekend about 350 tons of high explosives (RDX and HMX, for those keeping score at home) stolen from a Baathist military compound in Iraq sometime after the war. The explosives, which can be used to blow up vehicles—or trigger nuclear weapons—apparently were hauled away by some large-scale operation. Because these were a classic 'dual use' product, for construction, military and WMD purposes, was the old Iraq permitted to keep such stockpiles. However, the International Atomic Energy Agency had tagged the stockpiles
So, in a sense, they were at least tied to the international system that was supposed to defend us from the anarchy of their widespread distribution. Which is exactly what has occurred.
Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo.com broke the munitions story to the Internet, quoting the Nelson Report. He has followed up the story with several posts. The New York Times has a story out on the munitions now, as well.
Only now has the 'interim' Iraqi government officially notified the IAEA that they disappeared. Apparently the Bush administration was hoping that this could be covered up until after Nov. 2. Unfortunately, the Iraqis are now left carrying the ball of exposing the disastrous occupation policies, and how avoidable the disaster has been.
The Nelson Report writeup has quotes from military people saying that this stuff probably plays a huge role in providing the explosives that rip through American military vehicles and personnel on a regular basis.
This should provide all sorts of flak for the hypercharged political week we're looking at. Hell, it could finally drive home the 'malicious incompetence' meme that just hasn't quite stuck since Abu Ghraib went down the mental Novocain hole of our domestic media environment.
This is only the latest episode in the whole disturbing arms-cache saga. I had a very bad feeling when the U.S. soldiers started running across piles of guns all over the country. Yet now we find that we even managed to lose the tagged explosives.
Honestly, why should I bother trying to avoid losing things when the Pentagon can't even track TONS OF EXPLOSIVES IN A CONQUERED COUNTRY?
Have a happy week, everyone. Try not to visualize how much trouble you could cause with just one ton of this stuff.
Then multiply by three-fifty.
I'm don't have the details about this, but it sounds like an amazing movie: "The Fourth World War" is a documentary out of the various movements against wars all over the world, or rather, the 'thousand civil wars' the trailer speaks of. Suheir Hammad is narrating, and she was really impressive when she spoke at Macalester last year.
The movie is touring the U.S., and playing at the Campus Center Sunday night at 7:30. It will be screened in Minneapolis later tomorrow night, at the Soap Factory at 10 PM (2nd St. SE and 5th Ave.).
Additionally, this is an example of how our Macalester internet setups aren't working. There is nothing about a MOVIE in the CAMPUS CENTER on Macalester's event calendar website. What is the point of having a site like that? If we started doing more dynamic things online at Mac, then such events could be better publicized, as I argued in a Mac Weekly editorial a couple weeks ago.
'The Corporation' also screened on campus recently, and I'm sad I missed that, although I saw it at Lagoon a while ago.
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!!
War makes the world understandable, a black-and-white tableau of them and us. It suspends thought, especially self-critical thought. All bow before the supreme effort. We are one. Most of us willingly accept war as long as we can fold it into a belief system that paints the ensuing suffering as necessary for a higher good; for human beings seek not only happiness but also meaning. And tragically, war is sometimes the most powerful way in human society to achieve meaning.
Chris Hedges, "War is a force that gives us meaning."
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.
Ok, ok, ok, I have to post some things around the ideological spectrum. Starting around the right-wing anti-war libertarian pole, Antiwar.com's Justin Raimondo had three interesting pieces, but as always I take him with a grain of salt. First, the Democrats may have flipped around, and become the more militarily interventionist party. Is this too hard to believe?
[Chalmers] Johnson cuts right to the essential issue, which is not just the plethora of bases, but certain recently-established military installations:The idea of permanent military bases in Iraq is simply ghastly, as most Americans can intuit by this point. Every permanent base there, established and maintained in such a bloody fashion, would irresistably attract every militant in the middle east."At the same time, they don't say anything about 14 permanent bases being built in Iraq. Four are already built: Tallil Air Base, Baghdad, the one in the north near Mosul and the one over on the border with Syria. They don't say anything about the bases in Jabuti, in the Saharan Desert, in Mali and places like that."
Neither Kerry nor Bush wants to talk about those particular bases, or what they imply. Whatever their disagreements over particular nuances, both "major" party candidates support the concept of a semi-permanent American military presence in Iraq.
Beyond that, this mutual nonaggression pact underscores the role of the two parties as twin pillars of a foreign policy based on hubris, and rooted in the grating, militant self-righteousness of our ruling elites that has – rightly – made us the objects of worldwide opprobrium.
"Good!" they say. "Bring the Terrorists out to fight!!! Bring em on, hash it out over there, stay on offense!"
Yeah. That's working out smoothly. Such a strategy is BASED on abusing and disrespecting the occupied nation, because then the goal is to turn into a bloody wasteland, you cannot but reach disaster.
Next story: the improbable tale of Israeli counterterror expert and sexual harrassment victim Golan Cipel. Now, some might say that it's a little odd to have an Israeli citizen acting as the main counter-terror czar in a crucial place like New Jersey. But wait, there's more! Evidently Cipel—or someone else named Golan Cipel—worked at the Israeli Consulate General in New York City, handling the public relations side of government activities. Raimondo's column has all sorts of interesting links to Internet search archives, such as the Google USENET archives that include a ton of the "Israel Line" government press releases that Cipel helped write. And, according to Raimondo, he's made a few interesting statements about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict here and there.
Also, Raimondo cites one hell of an odd posting from the right-wing FreeRepublic.com news site from November 2002 that says:
Perfect accuracy nearly two years ago, filched away on this madcap right-wing site. I find that rather stunning... In any case, Cipel sounds like he was fairly close to the Israeli intelligence services. Oh well.... besides this the neo-cons are lining up to sneak into the opposition. Check the door for sweaty, militant old bureaucrats, please. In a column about the late libertarian Mike Mayakis he referred to an old piece about how Superman was anti-war...and Captain America saw Nixon hang himself? Meanwhile this cheesy piece asserts that comics suddenly got political out of nowhere. Right.
NJ has within its borders a scandal which makes the Clinton/Lewinsky matter a walk in the park. The press has danced around the real issue. It will be revealed that what has occured in the Garden State is a scandal of the greatest importance. It will lead to the resignation of its current Governor James McGreevey due to his abuse of office and the NJ tax payers to prop up Golan Cipel. The nature of their real relationship is on the verge of breaking into the spotlight. This will be earth shattering.To: deepthroatnnj
I know what it is. That Isreali friend of McGreevy's who was on the payroll is really his gay lover.
2 posted on 11/03/2002 2:26:41 PM PST by Rodney King
There are some sweet political ads that Errol Morris is making for MoveOn.org. Seemingly modeled on the Apple Switch ads, that Morris also made, these are pretty sweet, and remind me of Fog of War because of the "Interrotron," a teleprompter-based interview device that Morris put together to really extract a directness from people. See the ads on this delightful PAC donation page.
Christopher Hitchens is such an idiot, I can't believe he got suckered into defending Ahmed Chalabi. What the hell?
I will summarize a few nice bits from Billmon, who has gone fishin' for a while. On the Valerie Plame/Get Scooter front, the prosecution zeroes in, but will Libby defend himself by claiming that other reporters already knew Plame was an agent? An older story asks if it will end at the Supreme Court.
To flip to the right, we have some columns from SoldiersForTheTruth.com, a really interesting source for perspectives on the strange mush of tortured politics of today's U.S. military. John Lehman from the 9/11 Commission says, damn right we are after the Islamic fundamentalists, so where's the leadership? The editor of DefenseWatch, Ed Offley, says we need to get more alert about Muslim soldiers as "the enemy within" acting for Al-Qaeda. I liked the bit by the site's main editor, David Hackworth, about a nation, divided again:
...Kerry’s campaign push on how he Ramboed his way through the war – for four months – rubs a lot of vets the wrong way. And it does take its toll on those of us who prefer our heroes to be modest, unassuming types like Alvin York – who stayed the course until it was “Over, over there.”But politics and style aside, Kerry did serve with distinction in Vietnam when he easily could have avoided that killing field. His service to his country shouldn’t be diminished by the same despicable, politically motivated tactics visited upon Sens. John McCain in South Carolina and Max Cleland in Georgia, also Viet vets. This kind of gutter-bashing doesn’t belong in American politics, and vets shouldn’t allow themselves to be used as ammo for cheap shots at one of their own.
The stalwart Brown Water Navy warriors who fought at Kerry’s side say he was A-OK, which is good enough for me. The muckrakers such as John O’Neill and his Swiftboat snipers – who didn’t sail on his boat but served anywhere from 100 meters to 300 miles away – are now coming off like eyewitnesses when in fact not one of their testimonies would hold up in a court of law. A judge would call these men liars and disallow their biased statements.
I’ve been in a fair number of battles in my lifetime, first fighting for my country in several hot wars, then covering a dozen conflicts as a correspondent. And I’ve learned that if you can’t see the fight right up close, smell it, hear it and touch it, you can’t possibly bear witness.
[......]
[John] O’Neill and his chorus of haters are still in their get-Kerry mode. I suspect the decades-long fury is still fueled by Kerry’s high-profile anti-war stance when he returned home. That was a position that was taken by hundreds of thousands of other Viet vets, including myself in 1971 – which, according to Joe Califono's recent book, Inside: A Public Life, almost cost me my life.
Not just Ted Kennedy, but hundreds of people are being screwed by airline watch lists. Ught.
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.
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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.
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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!
I want to post this satellite photograph of the enormous holy cemetery where the Marines have been ordered to crush the Iraqi fighters. This diagram, perhaps a little out of date, still shows how we are basically rushing the holy site... to prove what? What does it gain the United States of America to wipe out those guys, sitting, waiting around the all-important shrine of Ali. Is this some kind of windup for the big pitch into the apocalypse? Are the waves of bombers shocking and aweing like they were supposed to?
The al-Sadr / all-Shi'ite freakout continues as the Iranians get missiles and the aerial bombardment of ancient places escalates. How much can get crushed?? How quickly??
In this context I will place the appearance of the G. W. Bush in my hometown of Hudson about 12 hours from now. What will happen? Who knows? In any case, I will regard that spot as the place where this cruising hallucination of a government planted its flag in my space. Then an appearance at the Xcel Center.
Saw Norm Coleman on the Daily Show. Stewart was shocked, shocked that Norm was a nice Jewish Democrat from Brooklyn at some point. Coleman sported a nearly identical outfit to Stewart, which spurred a whole weird episode.
Anyhow I will round up quickly the main bits. See the anguished Iraqi blogs Baghdad Burning:
300+ dead in a matter of days in Najaf and Al Sadir City. Of course, they are all being called ‘insurgents’. The woman on tv wrapped in the abaya, lying sprawled in the middle of the street must have been one of them too. Several explosions rocked Baghdad today- some government employees were told not to go to work tomorrow.Raed in the Middle:So is this a part of the reconstruction effort promised to the Shi’a in the south of the country? Najaf is considered the holiest city in Iraq. It is visited by Shi’a from all over the world, and yet, during the last two days, it has seen a rain of bombs and shells from none other than the ‘saviors’ of the oppressed Shi’a- the Americans. So is this the ‘Sunni Triangle’ too? It’s déjà vu- corpses in the streets, people mourning their dead and dying and buildings up in flames. The images flash by on the television screen and it’s Falluja all over again. Twenty years from now who will be blamed for the mass graves being dug today?
We’re waiting again for some sort of condemnation. I, personally, never had faith in the American selected proxy government currently pretending to be in power- but for some reason, I keep thinking that any day now- any moment- one of the Puppets, Allawi for example, will make an appearance on television and condemn all the killing. One of them will get in front of a camera and announce his resignation or at the very least, his utter disgust, at the bombing, the burning and the killing of hundreds of Iraqis and call for an end to it… it’s a foolish hope, I know.
Raed also contributed to the Iraqi casualty database.
As I said once before, don’t tell someone to go to hell, unless u can really send him there.What are we gaining?
We, Americans and Arabs, what did we gain after all of those years of the war on terror?Thousands of bodies, and more hate.
What did we, Iraqis, gain after months of occupation and destruction?
A silly selected government? With a CIA agent as our PM and a Sheikh of a tribe as our president?Our fat Sheikh speaks English in his conferences…
What a great president…
Please, tell him that he is the president of Iraq, an Arabic country, even if he was taking his salary from what’s his name… bremer.When is this comedy play going to finish
I am not amused.
Then says Fred Kaplan: No Way Out:
No solutions in sightThis whole matter with the Pakistani Khan Al-Qaeda e-mail prisoner's name getting leaked by someone, and Condi saying such odd things about it, is just another example of this Administration's tendency to throw out very important information in an effort to gain some odd degree of spin that barely even helps their horrible situation. Juan Cole is trying to figure out how the terror alert might have led to the Khan leak, exactly. I don't know where to pass judgment, it's too messed up.
This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there's no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.Much as the Bush administration hoped otherwise, the fighting didn't stop—or so much as turn a corner—after sovereignty passed from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the new government of Iraq. Prime Minister Iyad Allawi made a fine speech on the occasion about dealing with the insurgency, especially the need to isolate the foreign jihadists from the homegrown rebels who simply don't like being occupied. But the distinction has turned out to be muddy, and it will remain so until Allawi demonstrates he deserves their loyalty—that is, until he proves that he's independent from his American benefactors and competent at restoring basic services.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military—the only force in Iraq remotely capable of keeping the country from falling apart—finds itself in a maddening situation where tactical victories yield strategic setbacks. The Marines could readily defeat the insurgents in Najaf, but only at the great risk of inflaming Shiites—and sparking still larger insurgencies—elsewhere. In the Sadr City section of Baghdad, as U.S. commanders acknowledge, practically every resident is an insurgent.
Know your ayatollahs. Quickly.
The Ancient city of Samarra. A Hotbed of violence. Really!?! That's what happens when you bomb a place.
For some reason this place is considered related to my site. It reminds me of mine but I don't understand the reason.
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!
Mordred has posted something about Donald Trump this morning so I suggest ya check it. Again I'll note that he's going to have a top link on the side here, but I haven't had the time to change my templates yet, and I guess I won't until I get back.
The wild documentary "Outfoxed" that even Kerry is mentioning finally arrived at my house yesterday and I haven't had time to watch it yet. It sounds awesome though.
Well well, it took one hell of a long time, but my summer video project is finally finished. I decided to call it 'Between the Lines' because that's where I'm always looking, true?
In the University lab right now, I am burning a total of four DVD copies. Turns out the first two that I made last night have a couple glitches in the menus that i didn't catch. I would also like to note that Apple's DVD Studio Pro, while a fairly powerful and intuitive program, is really annoying because it seems to always want to render (in this case called 'compiling' menus and 'muxing' tracks) every time I want to burn a copy. In other words, it is rendering out the whole thing, and then throwing it away every time. What the hell? It wastes like 20 minutes a disc.
On the other hand I may have been using the wrong command, 'Build' instead of 'Build/Format.' Right now it's doing the latter, so my hopes are higher.
So I am getting picked up at 3:30 today to fly out to Utah for my cousins' wedding. As I wait for the discs to burn, let me share some quick headlines that have been sitting around. I have a stack of about 30 links to post up. In the meantime here's a smaller collection of older tidbits:
Times feature on a woman who educates naive county officials on the madness of electronic ballot systems. What can I say? These things scare the hell out of me and I try not to think about it. Some terrorist plotting to disrupt the election? Who cares, we've got electronic machines that can eat votes by what, the millions?
In Iraq
The Times has switched its little "Iraq news theme" motif to "THE REACH OF WAR: THREATS AND RESPONSES" with scary looking narrow type. Hey, they gotta be selling papers....
This cemetary fighting in Najaf is some seriously creepy stuff. Can you imagine the chills on their spines as the Marines go into this ancient collection of Shi'ite graves? This type of situation is so incredibly combustible I don't even know what to say. And Robert Fisk (or was it Juan Cole?) said that the governor of the province is some unemployed old Iraqi they dragged out of Michigan. However, I think that the anger Iraqis feel about violating the sanctity of the cemetary is perhaps directed as much to Muqtada al -Sadr's guys that hunkered down there. I mean, it's not exactly a standard insurrection tactic. Then again, if you were a fanatical pre-millennialist you might want to bring about a more mythic Mahdi Army by fighting among the dead spirits. Or something like that. Like I said, chills on the neck.
A National Guardsman was ordered to look the other way at torturous conditions in an Iraqi detention center. Down the slippery slope...
Newsweek on Fallujah: "We Pray the Insurgents Will Achieve Victory."
Al Jazeera shut down in Iraq again?grouchy ministers. So is Jazeera just a Jihadi PR device? (I don't buy that; Control Room really put the idea away)
Elsewhere
Alternet on the vast right-wing Scaife conspiracy and more specifically his grudge against Teresa Heinz-Kerry.
"Afghanistan's Transition: Decentralization or Civil War?" on EurasiaNet. Indeed.
BAGnewsNotes has the best regular collection of parody images. Laughs every day.
Kerry has an interview in the Army newspaper Stars & Stripes, and it's really a pretty gutsy one. Nice work on both sides. But does this stuff, particularly about the global military base arrangement, mean Kerry is just going to play the military-industrial game yet again? (in fairness, Kerry is not a huge military pork enthusiast) He knows the jargon pretty well.
I found this random weird online science fiction story via a BlogAd. Just for something different.
First a correction to the CENTCOM story: Kat's sister wrote the program WeatherPop start to finish. Can't stomp on a programmer's rep here. Seriously.
Categorize this under both "Groupthink" and "Israeli-American Hegemony theory." This is not exactly a small matter: Senate Report on Iraq Intel Points to Role of Jerusalem, as reported in the Jewish New York weekly journal Forward:
Cooperation between Israel and the United States helped produce a series of intelligence failures in the lead up to the Iraq war, according to separate reports issued by members of the Senate and the Knesset.The Senate Intelligence Committee, in its report issued last week, blasted the Central Intelligence Agency for poor intelligence gathering and analysis, and concluded that the U.S. "intelligence community depended too heavily on defectors and foreign government services" to make up for America's lack of human intelligence in Iraq. The credibility of these outside sources was difficult to ascertain and, as a result, the United States was left open to manipulation by foreign governments, the Senate report concluded.
In particular, the Senate report claimed, America had become completely dependent on foreign sources to evaluate Saddam Hussein's ties to Hamas, Hezbollah and other Palestinian terrorist organizations. On this front, the Senate committee concluded that the foreign intelligence was "credible." On the issue of weapons of mass destruction, however, the Senate report concluded that the United States relied on incorrect intelligence to argue that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Any direct references to Israel were blacked out of the published version of the Senate report, but an earlier report issued in March by a Knesset committee made it clear that U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies were working together and exchanging information.
"In this particular case, nobody had hard, on-the-ground intelligence information," said Gerald Steinberg, a professor at Israel's Bar Ilan University and an expert on American-Israeli security relations.
Intelligence agencies, Steinberg said, were relying on a combination of data collected from Iraqi defectors, as well as radio monitoring or signal intelligence. The intelligence community, Steinberg said, "looked for the signal intelligence to verify what they got from the defectors. When you're doing that, and you don't have ground truth, you can usually find enough information to apparently verify what you're looking to verify."
Along similar lines, the Senate report criticized what it described as the creation of an "assumption train" — a chain of false assumptions based on faulty, unscrutinized intelligence. Judging from the Knesset report, issued in March by an investigative committee appointed by the Israeli parliament's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, several of the assumption train's cars were made in Israel.
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In turn, the Knesset report stated, foreign intelligence services relied on intelligence passed on by Israel that actually originated from operatives working for other governments. The result, according to the Israeli report, was "a vicious cycle of sorts in the form of a reciprocal feedback, which at times was more damaging than beneficial. It very well may be that the assessments given by an Israeli intelligence organization, or any other organization, to a fellow organization, were passed from hand to hand, played a central role in making up the assessments of that foreign organization, and then eventually returned to the original organization as an assessment of a different intelligence organization. That assessment, in turn, was immediately perceived as a reinforcement and validation by a reliable source, of the original Israeli assessment."
Meanwhile, Israel has completed its rehearsals to bomb the Iranian nuclear facilities.
Is it that the U.S. is losing its grip on the Shiites altogether? Of course, that's the scratch. We never had a handle on what Iran was doing. Initially, after 9/11, I heard about Al-Qaeda problems in Iran, which seemed obvious enough, as people would have been circulating around Afghanistan. However, Iran was invested against the Taliban by supporting the Tajik (heroin-funded) warlord Ismail Khan of Herat.
Iran has a decentralized power structure, with competing blocs protecting Byzantine budgets and managing giant state-owned foundations, the ancient bazaar projected on a modern scale. So some people that we would list as Al-Qaeda would obviously have slipped through such a huge and discombobulated state, with sympathetic help from the Revolutionary Guards or other random cats. The Iranian frontier with Afghanistan is part of one of the world's largest heroin routes, so all kinds of weird people are around...
Juan Cole is all over the Sunni-Shiite questions, the whole bit:
For all we know, there is an Iranian Chalabi who is behind these reports, hoping to get the US to overthrow the regime in Iran so that he can take over. As for the al-Qaeda detainees or those under electronic surveillance, the letter of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has already made it clear that some radical Sunni elements that fought in Afghanistan dream of provoking a Shiite-American struggle. Al-Qaeda detainees are notorious for providing the US with disinformation aimed at furthering their plots. Iran is a notorious enemy of Wahhabism and al-Qaeda and the Taliban. How sweet it would be to provoke a war between the US and Iran by hanging 9/11 on Tehran! (It should be remembered that NSA intercepts also showed that Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, presumably because Saddam ordered his officers to talk them up in the vain hope of deterring a US attack).
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Another problem is that Iran does not have a tight, unified government. The Iranian state consists of a number of competing power centers. In recent years the president, Mohammad Khatami, has supported more civil liberties and an opening to the West. The Supreme Jurisprudent, Ali Khamenei, is an old-style Khomeinist who revels in puritanical theocracy and hates the US. Even Khamenei, however, is not implicated in ever having planned direct action against US soil. Then there are the Basij and Revolutionary Guards and Quds Brigade paramilitaries, and it is unclear how much central control the state has over them. So even if some official in the Revolutionary Guards did let al-Qaeda operatives in (and this is by no means proven), it would not necessarily say much about the stance of the Iranian government(s).
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Iran has admitted to having taken some al-Qaeda operatives captive after September 11, but it is holding them for some quid pro quos from the United States. In particular, Iran wants to ensure that the US does not allow the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization to continue to hit Iran from its bases in Iraq, and the al-Qaeda detainees are among its only bits of leverage over Washington in this regard. (Amazingly enough, there are political forces in Washington, including the Neocon-dominated, pro-Israeli "Washington Institute for Near East Policy," that support the MEK terrorist organization and want the Bush administration to, as well. Even scarier, WINEP, this supporter of a notorious terrorist group, is highly influential in Washington and US military and State Department personnel are actually detailed there to learn about the Middle East!).
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Here is the Common Sense test: Usama Bin Laden is a fanatical Sunni Muslim surrounded by other fanatical Sunni Muslims and was nested in the Taliban, who are fanatical Sunni Muslims. Iran is Shiite, a branch of Islam that fanatical Sunni Muslims absolutely hate. In Afghan politics, 1996-2002, at the time it was dominated by the Taliban and al-Qaeda, Iran was allied with the Northern Alliance against the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Iran was trying to overthrow the Taliban and crush them and al-Qaeda.Iran's allies in Afghanistan were the Tajiks, the Uzbeks and especially the Hazaras. The Hazaras are Afghan Shiites. They form about 15% of the Afghan population. The Hazaras' main political vehicle was the Hizb-i Vahdat or Unity Party, which was and is closely allied with Iran. Tajik warlords in the Northern Alliance like Ismail Khan, who are Sunnis, also have strong ties of language and patronage to Iran. Basically, Persian speakers in Afghanistan tended to side with Iran, especially Shiite Persian speakers. Whereas Pushtu speakers and immigrant Arabs tended to side instead with Pakistan.
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Pakistan's Sunni fundamentalist-dominated military, especially its Inter-Services Intelligence or military intelligence, had more or less created the Taliban and heavily supported them with equipment, training, fuel and other goods.Iran and Pakistan were engaged in a regional struggle for influence in Afghanistan and Central Asia, in which Iran's Shiism and Pakistan's Sunnism were ideological tools. This struggle spilled over into Pakistan itself. The radical Sunni Sipah-i Sahabah or Companions of the Prophet, originating in Jhang Siyal in northern Punjab, has conducted a terrorist campaign of assassination against Shiites in Pakistan. Sipah-i Sahabah was one of the jihadi groups that got training in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and was allied with al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
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The second test is Who is Helped by these Crazy Allegations?- The Likud lobby in Washington, especially Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin and other warmongers. They want the Tehran regime overthrown in part because it stands in the way of an Israeli annexation of southern Lebanon, with the Litani river as the long-sought prize. Iran is allied with Hizbullah in southern Lebanon, which forced the Israelis back out of Lebanon with a nearly 20-year long guerrilla struggle. They also want to force Hizbullah to pull back its support of the Palestinian uprising. Since Iran has substantially cut back on its support for Hizbullah, however, overthrowing Tehran would have little effect on such local political dynamics. (The Likud's Ariel Sharon should never have invaded Lebanon in 1982, which is what created Hizbullah, suicide bombings as a tactic, and radicalized Lebanese like 9/11 hijacker Ziad Jarrah).
- Old-time US intelligence and diplomatic officials who have a grudge with Iran over the Hostage Crisis and other Iranian actions against the US in the 1980s
- The US military-industrial complex, which is frustrated at not being able to extract money from the potentially wealthy Iranian market
- Iranian expatriates from families formerly allied with the deposed Shah of Iran, who are enormously wealthy and influential and are eager to play Chalabi in Tehran. Watch them as key sources of disinformation.
- Al-Qaeda, which is seeking to "sharpen contradictions" by provoking serial fights between the US and Muslim powers. It would especially like to see a US- Shiite struggle, so that its two major enemies would both be weakened and pre-occupied with each other rather than Bin Laden.
The hawks are marshalling their forces to start justifying the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites, whether by the U.S., Israel, or why not, Kurdish guerillas? A new Committee on the Present Danger has slithered from the dankest cubicles of Washington. There have been two of these propaganda beasts before. The last CPD harassed Jimmy Carter, issuing a more alternative, hawkish foreign policy stream of exaggerations and paranoia, suggesting the need for ever-more military spending at all times. Many of the same people got involved with the very similar Project for the New American Century scheme.
Fortunately the chairman of the new blob has been forced to resign because he had been working with Austrian quasi-Nazi Joerg Haider. Justin Raimondo is all over this one.
As a random side link I picked up somewhere, let's step back and look at NSC 68, a national security directive issued in April 1950 that really sent us off into the cold war. What kinds of NSC 68s have been drafted by geniuses like Douglas Feith and thrown into our system, and what would a new CPD try to put in? In other words, what operational doctrines would cause the issues above to completely flare out of control?
It sounds like Allawi knows how to cap some insurgent ass, for better or worse. They say he shot six captured rebels, but that's the way it goes these days...
Spencer Ackerman's blog Iraq'd is back up and he has no idea if the man is a "cold-blooded murderer." eh....
Good piece from Hoaglund on the 'perception gap' on Iraq, pointing out that Allawi has a tendency to make pronouncements aimed at the beltway, and that whole attitude could cause even more divergent pointless thinking about Iraq:
There is some new stuff in the Valerie Plame case. So Wilson didn't actually debunk the Iran-Niger story? And wives pull all the strings, rendering a man worthless, or so they say in the WaPo.
Iraq and the world will benefit if Allawi can deliver on his promises to establish stability and democracy. Wish him well. But a dangerous gap is opening up between the determinedly upbeat pronouncements in Washington and from Allawi, and more disinterested reports from the field.Last Friday, Jim Krane of the Associated Press quoted unnamed U.S. military officers saying that Iraq's insurgency is led by well-armed Sunnis angry about losing power, not by foreign fighters. They number up to 20,000, not 5,000 as Washington briefers maintain, Krane added in his well-reported but generally overlooked dispatch.
The point is not 5,000 vs. 20,000. The insurgency's exact size is unknowable. The point is that enough officers in the field sense that what they see happening to their troops in Iraq is so out of sync with Washington's version that they must rely on the press to get out a realistic message. That is usually how defeat begins for expeditionary forces fighting distant insurgencies.
Josh Marshall is hacking through the details as usual but I found the following via Raimondo:
Washington journalist Laura Rozen is exploring the echo theory on intel distortions, that is, the same spoofers spoofed many different agencies, creating the appearance of truth such as WMDs all over the place.
Fafnir is a broken-hearted Fafnir. For I was deceived. Deceived by the story of Joe Wilson who as it turns out lied about absolutely everything he said to anyone ever because there in the Washington Post last Saturday exists definitive proof that somebody somewhere has said that his wife, exposed CIA agent Valerie Plame, got him his job checking out if Saddam Hussein had tried to buy uranium from Niger.Poor foolish Fafnir! I had thought somehow this was all about how exposing the identity of a covert CIA agent is a federal crime but apparently it is really about how her husband is a big fat jerk who got a job by ridin his wife's coattails. I don't quite understand what that has to do with a criminal investigation but hipublican intellectual Jonah Goldberg does so that's OK.*
Found a nifty Mesopotamian blog Iraq the Model, that I don't think I'd seen before.
Older news that polygraph tests have been done in the Chalabi-Iran leak investigation.
Look out, the NAACP says that Bush treats black people like prostitutes. What more can I say? A man with 8% of the black vote can't be wrong, can he?
A pretty dramatic development at hand as the 9/11 commission pins a great deal of Al Qaeda activity on Iran's government. It is not too hard to believe, surely, that Iran's intelligence services might have helped some dudes get around between the Afghan frontier, Pakistan and so forth. It's a rather more plausible casus belli than we stomped into Iraq with, which is a great part of why the war was so perplexing. Via a DKos thread here are some news links about the Iran strategic situation:
Starting at the top, a delightful headline: "Report: Israel's 'first strike' plan against Iran ready" from the JPost. Ex-neoconservative William Lind heard the hit might come this year. Tehran here we come... America or the Israelis. A mysterious report from July 1 about "Iran Reacts to U.S. Power Loss." Last December, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkowski opined about the pipeline politics in Central Asia.
The almighty neocon mastermind Michael Ledeen wrote about Iran for the millionth time. It's kind of funny ("Are you sitting down? Iran is a terrorist state.") but obviously this man should be regarded with as much suspicion as any mullah you might find.
Back in 2001, Asia Times reported that Bin Laden had been traced to Iran. In 1999, Shell oil put together an oil deal with Iran and some companies defied U.S. sanctions.
There's some complex demand problems among growing Asian nations, who are looking to Iran to fill energy needs. A Pakistani paper said that "Japan must ensure its Iranian oil supply" today.
For rather ugly leftie resource sites, look no further than oilempire.us.
In other misc mideast news, apparently Egypt's cabinet resigned on July 9th and no one noticed. Does this have anything to do with the flare-up in Gaza??
I enjoyed this feature, "Sightseeing in Oman? You Mustn't Miss the Smugglers" in the Times but sadly, its disappeared into the pay archives.
There have been a lot of strange reports from the wasteland of mirrors lately. Some of these are in registration-required type websites like the LA Times. Therefore as a handy tool for everyone I suggest BugMeNot.com, a repository of logins for news sites that should let everyone duck the hassle of giving those shady corps our email addresses. I have not looked at my server traffic logs in a while, but I suspect things have slacked off during this low-volume time of mine, and that's fine with me. I have been trying to get some exercise, get a life, get outside while the weather's good, and take two classes and work. So sue me.
I've got a lot of stuff referring to the CIA's Anonymous man. He's one solid character. Angry, yes, but clear enough to understand what a crazy detour Iraq was...
On a random note, keep reading Prof. Juan Cole every day.
The New Republic has learned that Pakistani security officials have been told they must produce HVTs [high-value targets] by the election. According to one source in Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), "The Pakistani government is really desperate and wants to flush out bin Laden and his associates after the latest pressures from the U.S. administration to deliver before the [upcoming] U.S. elections." Introducing target dates for Al Qaeda captures is a new twist in U.S.-Pakistani counterterrorism relations--according to a recently departed intelligence official, "no timetable[s]" were discussed in 2002 or 2003--but the November election is apparently bringing a new deadline pressure to the hunt. Another official, this one from the Pakistani Interior Ministry, which is responsible for internal security, explains, "The Musharraf government has a history of rescuing the Bush administration. They now want Musharraf to bail them out when they are facing hard times in the coming elections."The point here, assuming this is even close to true, is that the Bush administration--shockingly--views the war on terror as an ATM machine, where they can buy votes by withdrawing from the Pakistan account. The country is teetering on some sort of tribal war, but the administration's persistent evasion of really dealing honestly with the problems in that country has been put off for so long that when they try to symbolically whack the hornet's nest again because of domestic politics, what kinds of things might fly out?A third source, an official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan ul-Haq, informed tnr that the Pakistanis "have been told at every level that apprehension or killing of HVTs before [the] election is [an] absolute must." What's more, this source claims that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement: "The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in Washington." Says McCormack: "I'm aware of no such comment." But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
[........]
But there is a reason many Pakistanis and some American officials had previously been reluctant to carry the war on terrorism into the tribal areas. A Pakistani offensive in that region, aided by American high-tech weaponry and perhaps Special Forces, could unite tribal chieftains against the central government and precipitate a border war without actually capturing any of the HVTs. Military action in the tribal areas "has a domestic fallout, both religious and ethnic," Pakistani Foreign Minister Mian Khursheed Mehmood Kasuri complained to the Los Angeles Times last year.Some American intelligence officials agree. "Pakistan just can't risk a civil war in that area of their country. They can't afford a western border that is unstable," says a senior intelligence official, who anonymously authored the recent Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror and who says he has not heard that the current pressures on Pakistan are geared to the election. "We may be at the point where [Musharraf] has done almost as much as he can."
In any case this one will come to a head in a few weeks. More on how Iraq situation puts a "squeeze" on Musharraf. And Iraq is "A failure without borders" according to William Lind, who if I recall is a deserter of the neocon movement. This article describes the key idea of dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, or the abode of Islam and the abode of war as elements in Islamic 'fundamentalist' thinking, although Lind relishes his own rhetoric a little too much:
It is all one war, one battlefield. State boundaries mean nothing. Of course, it is not going very well on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan either. But in this war, events in those places are in effect merely tactical. The strategic centers of gravity are in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Egypt. Al-Qaeda, I think, understands this. Washington does not. That fact alone suggests we have only seen the opening moves in what promises to be a very long war.
The latest from Dr. Khalidi: in an excellent piece condensed from his remarks at the UCLA International Institute, Rashid Khalidi describes something I've personally heard before from other experts, that the Bushies told all the real regional experts to go straight to hell:
Everything taking place in U.S. policy in the Middle East since 9/11 is not grounded in real knowledge about the Middle East. Without a knowledge of resistance to Western control over two centuries, America cannot know how our policy is viewed in the region. We are seeing the dismissal of real history in favor of crude stereotypes.And of course if you haven't read it, check out my exclusive Mac Weekly interview with Dr. Khalidi from last fall. Talk about prescient warnings...Those who attacked the United States are very smart people who have played on real grievances in a very expert way. The Bush administration has not used the informational resources at its disposal to respond appropriately. The U.S. attack on Iraq was accompanied by an insidious attack on domestic Middle East experts. Experts can be wrong, but the dedicated professionals have often been prescient in their warnings.
Fareed Zakaria talks some sense, simply saying "Reach Out to the insurgents;" in other words the end of the CPA has opened an opportunity to define a new relationship with the opposition groups. I always firmly believe that we can't just classify such characters as "the terrorists" and leave the situation at that, for then you get nowhere. Instead, engagement... dialectic... other hopeless hopes.
The Iraqi Baathists in exile are considering forming an Iraqi government-in-exile to offer the Iraqi people. Or it could be a framework to propel a civil war. We would just need names for the sides. A basic argument from Charley Reese on the compatibility of Islam and democracy, and in particular mentioning where the U.S. recently sided with a military government against some elected Islamists in Algeria, sparking a civil war.
Once again I will cite this very fascinating up-to-the-minute perspective on the insurgents, and how well armed they are. Seems the daring journalist went out and actually talked with them for three hours. It's quite dramatic, including a rendezvous at Hotel Babel, swarming with foreign mercenaries. Take what they say with a grain of salt, but its surprisingly plain in a way:
"The Americans have prepared the war, we have prepared the post-war. And the transfer of power on June 30 will not change anything regarding our objectives. This new provisional government appointed by the Americans has no legitimacy in our eyes. They are nothing but puppets." Why have these former officers waited so long to come out of their closets? "Because today we are sure we're going to win."
[......]
We knew that if the United States decided to attack Iraq, we would have no chance faced with their technological and military power. The war was lost in advance, so we prepared the post-war. In other words: the resistance. Contrary to what has been largely said, we did not desert after American troops entered the center of Baghdad on April 5, 2003. We fought a few days for the honor of Iraq - not Saddam Hussein - then we received orders to disperse." Baghdad fell on April 9: Saddam and his army where nowhere to be seen."As we have foreseen, strategic zones fell quickly under control of the Americans and their allies. For our part, it was time to execute our plan. Opposition movements to the occupation were already organized. Our strategy was not improvised after the regime fell." This plan B, which seems to have totally eluded the Americans, was carefully organized, according to these officers, for months if not years before March 20, 2003, the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom.
The objective was "to liberate Iraq and expel the coalition. To recover our sovereignty and install a secular democracy, but not the one imposed by the Americans. Iraq has always been a progressive country, we don't want to go back to the past, we want to move forward. We have very competent people," say the three tacticians. There will be of course no names as well as no precise numbers concerning the clandestine network. "We have sufficient numbers, one thing we don't lack is volunteers."
[......]
Essentially composed by Ba'athists (Sunni and Shi'ite), the resistance currently regroups "all movements of national struggle against the occupation, without confessional, ethnic or political distinction. Contrary to what you imagine in the West, there is no fratricide war in Iraq. We have a united front against the enemy. From Fallujah to Ramadi, and including Najaf, Karbala and the Shi'ite suburbs of Baghdad, combatants speak with a single voice. As to the young Shi'ite leader Muqtada al-Sadr, he is, like ourselves, in favor of the unity of the Iraqi people, multiconfessional and Arab. We support him from a tactical and logistical perspective."
[....]
"The attacks are meticulously prepared. They must not last longer than 20 minutes and we operate preferably at night or very early in the morning to limit the risks of hitting Iraqi civilians." They anticipate our next question: "No, we don't have weapons of mass destruction. On the other hand, we have more than 50 million conventional weapons." By the initiative of Saddam, a real arsenal was concealed all over Iraq way before the beginning of the war. No heavy artillery, no tanks, no helicopters, but Katyushas, mortars (which the Iraqis call haoun), anti-tank mines, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other Russian-made rocket launchers, missiles, AK 47s and substantial reserves of all sorts of ammunition. And the list is far from being extensive.But the most efficient weapon remains the Kamikazes. A special unit, composed of 90% Iraqis and 10% foreign fighters, with more than 5,000 solidly-trained men and women, they need no more than a verbal order to drive a vehicle loaded with explosives
A little from Asia Times Online via their mideast page: More on the five key actors: Israel, the U.S., Iran, Turkey and the Iraqi insurgents. What will sovereignty mean to each? A moment for the great Mr. Negroponte and his Battalion 316 death squad. A fairly even look at the moral shell games being played with Saddam's trial. A book review of "Exiting Iraq: Why the US Must End the Military Occupation and Renew the War against al-Qaeda," written by Chris Preble.
Highly worth reading is a very lengthy piece on Al Qaeda by Craig Hulet looks at the CIA agent 'Anonymous' on why Al Qaeda would benefit from Bush's reelection:
The most profound assertion the author made (Anonymous), who published an analysis of al-Qaeda last year called "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. Bush is good for the Islamists the world over who want to make war on America and the West. Anonymous again:I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now. One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president. In every age ... the ultimate sources of war are the beliefs of those in power: "their idea about what is of most fundamental importance and may therefore ultimately be worth a war." - Evan Luard, International War
[......]
One must question not only what the administration is doing presently but what it will do should it return to office after the November elections; upcoming wars against other nation-states (which clearly have been targeted) are on the Pentagon's desk. Further evidence that the latter is officially on the agenda is below: This was dated Monday, February 17, 2003:US Under Secretary of State John Bolton said in meetings with Israeli officials on Monday that he has no doubt America will attack Iraq, and that it will be necessary to deal with threats from Syria, Iran and North Korea afterwards. Bolton, who is under secretary for arms control and international security, is in Israel for meetings about preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction. In a meeting with Bolton on Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said that Israel is concerned about the security threat posed by Iran. It's important to deal with Iran even while American attention is turned toward Iraq, Sharon said.
[.....]
Paul R Pillar, whose book Terrorism and US Foreign Policy was a staple for reading in counterterror circles and private security specialists like myself, pre-September 11. He notes this regarding the afore mentioned arguments:More than anything else, it is the United States' predominant place atop the world order (with everything that implies militarily, economically, and culturally) and the perceived US opposition to change in any part of that order that underlie terrorists' resentment of the United States and their intent to attack it.
[....]
The Defense Science Board's 1997 Summer Study Task Force on "Department of Defense Responses to Transnational Threats" notes a relationship between an activist American foreign policy and terrorism against the United States:As part of its global power position, the United States is called upon frequently to respond to international causes and deploy forces around the world. America's position in the world invites attack simply because of its presence. Historical data show a strong correlation between US involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.
Apparently more Democrats are being hired as lobbyists. Should I be happy?
To hell with global Social Democracy, they say....
Ick, a National Review hack defending the torture scandal. Just here for color. Yes in fact, Cheney is a 'mixed blessing' at best. Ha.
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 almighty seven-minute silence.
A centerpiece of Fahrenheit 9/11 will be the seven minutes, all of them, that Bush sat in the Florida classroom while the WTC burned. Psychological minutes. Minutes of very low credibility, shall we say. Roger Ebert reviews the movie.
There are goonies posing as a "grassroots" group trying to intimidate theaters into not showing Fahrenheit 9/11. The group, Move America Forward, is hosting its website from the same IP number as Russo Marsh & Rogers, a PR firm in San Francisco that among other things had people involved in the Gray Davis recall, as Cosmic Iguana dug up. They were also the same characters that got "The Reagans" bumped off network television so I couldn't see it.
The report of the 9/11 panel may wound Bush, duhh, but it is nice to see the Washington Post understanding that.
On the Fourth of July, a new book by an anonymous CIA official, "Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror," is going to be published. This article is fascinating but I'm not getting into the juicy bits right now.
A huge examination of 9/11 tapes by Gail Sheehy.
The families heard a tape that has just now surfaced. Recorded by American Airlines at its headquarters in Fort Worth, Tex., even as the first hijacked airliner, Flight 11, was being taken over, the tape shows the airline’s top management was made aware beginning at about 8:21 a.m.—25 minutes before the impact of the first plane into the World Trade Center’s north tower—that a group of men described as Middle Eastern had stabbed two flight attendants, clouded the forward cabin with pepper spray or Mace, menaced crew and passengers with what looked like a bomb, and stormed the cockpit in a violent takeover of the gigantic bird.Despite all the high secrecy surrounding the briefing, a half-dozen different family members were so horrified by voice evidence of the airlines’ disregard for the fate of their pilots, crew and passengers that they found ways to reveal some of what they heard on those tapes, and also what they felt. To them, the tapes appeared to show that the first instinct of American and United Airlines, as management learned of the gathering horror aboard their passenger planes on Sept. 11, was to cover up.
The response of American’s management on duty, as revealed on the tape produced at the meeting, was recalled by persons in attendance:
"Don’t spread this around. Keep it close."
"Keep it quiet."
"Let’s keep this among ourselves. What else can we find out from our own sources about what’s going on?"
"It was disgusting," said the parent of one of the victims, herself a veteran flight attendant for United Airlines. "The very first response was cover-up, when they should have been broadcasting this information all over the place."
That instinct to hold back information, some of the families believe, may have helped to allow the third hijacked plane to crash into the Pentagon and contributed to the doom of a fourth flight, United Flight 93. The United dispatcher was told by his superiors: Don’t tell pilots why we want them to land. The F.B.I. and the F.A.A. have also held back or, in one case, destroyed evidence in the government’s possession that would tell a very different story of how the nation’s guardians failed to prepare or protect Americans from the most devastating of terrorist attacks on the homeland.
[.....]
"This has been the attitude all the way along," Ms. Dillard observed. "Everybody was keeping it hush-hush."The failure to trumpet vital news from calls placed from the first hijacked flight throughout the system and into the highest circles of government leaves families wondering whether military jets could have intercepted American Airlines Flight 77 in time to keep it from diving into the Pentagon and killing 184 more people. That suicide mission ended in triumph for the terrorists more than 50 minutes after the first American jetliner hit the World Trade Center. Suppose American Airlines had warned all its pilots and crew of what their families were able to see and hear from the media?
The information hold-back may have arisen from lack of experience, or from the inability to register the enormity of the terrorists’ destructive plans, or it may have been a visceral desire to protect the airlines from liability. The airlines make much of the fact that the "common strategy" for civil aircraft crews before 9/11 was to react passively to hijackings—"to refrain from trying to overpower or negotiate with hijackers, to land the aircraft as soon as possible, to communicate with authorities, and to try delaying tactics."
This strategy was based on the assumption that the hijackers would want to be flown safely to an airport of their choice to make their demands.
But that defense of the airlines’ actions is belied by the fact that the F.A.A., which was in contact with American Airlines and other traffic-control centers, heard the tip-off from terrorists in Flight 11’s cockpit—"We have planes, more planes"—and thus knew before the first crash of a possible multiple hijacking and the use of planes as weapons.
[.....]
So many unconnected dots, contradictions and implausible coincidences. Like the fact that NORAD was running an imaginary terrorist-attack drill called "Vigilant Guardian" on the same morning as the real-world attacks. At 8:40 a.m., when a sergeant at NORAD’s center in Rome, N.Y., notified his northeastern commander, Col. Robert Marr, of a possible hijacked airliner—American Flight 11—the colonel wondered aloud if it was part of the exercise. This same confusion was played out at the lower levels of the NORAD network.What’s more, the decades-old procedure for a quick response by the nation’s air defense had been changed in June of 2001. Now, instead of NORAD’s military commanders being able to issue the command to launch fighter jets, approval had to be sought from the civilian Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. This change is extremely significant, because Mr. Rumsfeld claims to have been "out of the loop" nearly the entire morning of 9/11. He isn’t on the record as having given any orders that morning. In fact, he didn’t even go to the White House situation room; he had to walk to the window of his office in the Pentagon to see that the country’s military headquarters was in flames.
Mr. Rumsfeld claimed at a previous commission hearing that protection against attack inside the homeland was not his responsibility. It was, he said, "a law-enforcement issue."
Why, in that case, did he take onto himself the responsibility of approving NORAD’s deployment of fighter planes?
In minor media matters, CBS is waffling about airing an anti-Clinton ad.
Lately I have enjoyed looking at the blogs node707 "Just a Bump in the Beltway" , "WarAndPiece" and Spacerook. As always I recommend Mr Juan Cole and in particular this rich and huge interview he did with the somewhat maverick Pepe Escobar in Asia Times online.
A lot of people talking about the rhetoric of fascism along with crazy symbols of power. I can't say I'm a fan of that kind of crazy talk, but also as an atheist I am hearing an increasing amount of crazy talk that threatens to overrun my value system. Some are freaked out. Yes, many are. I'm not going to get into talking much about the unfortunate kidnapped defense contractor in Saudi Arabia... it is worth considering that Apaches do not have a great public reputation in the Arab world, as their networks are far less reluctant to show the Israeli ones in action. The documentary Control Room that I mentioned earlier is playing at either Lagoon or Uptown, I need to go see it.
We can't quite measure terrorism accurately. It's on the decline! Brilliant.
Measuring the self-appointed cultural warriors, look at the evil rhetoric of ol'David Horowitz from back in 2000.
Nasty bit mocking the NY Times for torching their credibility on Chalabi. Tragically, due to my unemployed status, I suspended the Times delivery this weekend. It was a nice dead pulp sort of read... This blog, page A01, monitors the Times all the time. (mahablog and the left coaster ain't bad either)
An excellent bit on Juan Cole's site about what a bad idea it was to ditch early elections in Iraq, and the shadowy motives involved. Al-sadr increases in popularity, the bloody way.
A lot of retired officials, some of them key Republican appointees of yore, have released a statement saying Bush must leave office because of all the alliances he's shattered.
Look, 2004 political campaigns are advertising on blogs and making some money. Yay for that... is it effective???? It's gotta be, in some situations.
Last bits of Reagan anti-nostalgia: "Schisms from administration lingered for years," to put it mildly. Yes, it was not all rosy tinted scenarios and photo ops. The end of the cold war: we needed Gorbachev to do it, bottom line.
A humorous bit about Iran-Contra: what if it was really quite a skim-off-the-top kind of bribery scheme?
Middle east chunking up, getting ominous etc.: "Worst is yet to come as US pays the price of failure" but sadly, "a tough time for neo-cons," widely discredited, they say.
Speaking of photo ops, Josh Marshall asks:
In fact, the prison abuse and torture story itself has become a perfect example of how two separate media storylines — ones that clearly contradict each other — can coexist and yet seemingly never cross paths.i'm going to throw in a handful of final, old, links here, which spelled out rather neatly two flip sides of the situation: the neo-con fanatic wing [one two three] and the fundamentalist Christian fanatic wing [one two three].
[.....]
In this case, the partisan divide is conventional and predictable. Administration advocates argue that abuse was isolated — just a few malefactors who got out of control — while critics claim that it was systemic, stemming from policy choices made at the highest levels of the Pentagon and the White House.Yet, while this debate is being carried on, we’ve also had a steady stream of evidence (not pictures, but reports, testimony, and other documentary evidence) that makes it fairly clear that the first debate really isn’t a debate at all, or rather, that it’s an open-and-shut case.
[....]
Let’s start by discussing what’s in the pictures: limited violence against detainees, the use of nudity and sexual humiliation as a means of “softening up” detainees, psychological “torture” like the threat of death (such as the case of the picture of the man standing, arms outstretched, who was told he’d be electrocuted if he fell), and the use of attack dogs to frighten if not necessarily attack prisoners.Those are the acts contained in those lurid photos. But even from the internal reports and official statements coming from the Pentagon and other branches of the administration, it’s clear that each of these methods was approved and authorized as a way of preparing detainees for interrogations.
First, there was approval for using an enumerated list of interrogation techniques for al Qaeda terrorists housed at Guantanamo and other U.S. facilities. Eventually those techniques — honed in Afghanistan and Guantanamo — were OK’d for use against detainees in Iraq. We even know that the importation of those methods into Iraq probably happened in the late summer and early fall of last year. Most of the techniques mentioned above are specifically mentioned in the list of authorized methods issued by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in Iraq. The rest are detailed in other memos and reports made public over the last month and would certainly be covered by the new “torture memo” out this week.
[......]
Yet the debate over who is responsible for what we see in those pictures continues, even when we have plenty of evidence that the tactics they were using were either specifically authorized by policymakers at the Pentagon or widespread at U.S.-detention facilities commanded by the same folks now prosecuting those reservists in the photos.Isn’t it about time that we just come clean with ourselves and admit that those half-dozen reservists really probably were just following orders?
Well there you have it, a few of the fine trends making up this turning point month.
Well, it has been a week of scarce updates, because I am in the midst of looking for jobs in the Twin Cities, a somewhat scarce proposition these days.
I was batting around the idea of perhaps starting a political Wiki project using the TikiWiki software I installed, but no sooner had I fired it up than I found one of my favorite sites, the DailyKos, had started their own Wiki, the dkosopedia. The interesting thing about Wikis is they promote a sort of merging, such that there is only one wikipedia, and only one disinfopedia on the Internet, although Wikis for, say, Linux support are also become more frequently used.
I entered some stuff into the dkosopedia, and I've been generally impressed by the progress they have made, as well as the lack of disagreement among writers so far. I put stuff on the Department of Defense and Minnesota, early forms such as they are.
So the dkosopedia would serve nicely in place of any attempted wiki project of my own so far. Some people I know have been batting around other ideas.
I'll throw this in before I wander off to do the job apps... good old John Dean observes the significance of Bush hiring a personal lawyer from outside the government on the Valerie Plame case. It doesn't look good for Bush at all on this count.
Crucial new humor comes from the Bush/ZombieReagan '04 campaign, rapidly evolving. My favorite poster: "Bush is safe. I only eat brains." Honestly, this precanned celebrity necro-worship is very boring, but at least it's only reached .6 PrincessDiDeaths in terms of syrupy wretchedness.
On the flip side I will offer Antiwar.com libertarian Justin Raimondo's praise of Reagan as someone who was smart enough to leave Lebanon and probably wouldn't have believed in the Patriot Act.
My favorite site the Agonist has switched to a Scoop engine like I used to have for their news digestion. Advance! Technology! As for other sites, gotta love Jesus' General
A little older news: the Americans have issued an arrest warrant for Ahmed Chalabi's aide Francis Brooke. Hurray. And the hunt for who leaked to Iran.
This was published a few days ago on Capitol hill Blue. I would take it with an enormous grain of salt, more as a reflection of the mood than actual journalism: "Bush's erratic behavior worries White House aides:"
President George W. Bush’s increasingly erratic behavior and wide mood swings has the halls of the West Wing buzzing lately as aides privately express growing concern over their leader’s state of mind.Probably satire, but damn accurate!In meetings with top aides and administration officials, the President goes from quoting the Bible in one breath to obscene tantrums against the media, Democrats and others that he classifies as “enemies of the state.”
Worried White House aides paint a portrait of a man on the edge, increasingly wary of those who disagree with him and paranoid of a public that no longer trusts his policies in Iraq or at home.
“It reminds me of the Nixon days,” says a longtime GOP political consultant with contacts in the White House. “Everybody is an enemy; everybody is out to get him. That’s the mood over there.”
In interviews with a number of White House staffers who were willing to talk off the record, a picture of an administration under siege has emerged, led by a man who declares his decisions to be “God’s will” and then tells aides to “fuck over” anyone they consider to be an opponent of the administration.
[.....]
God may also be the reason Attorney General John Ashcroft, the administration’s lightning rod because of his questionable actions that critics argue threatens freedoms granted by the Constitution, remains part of the power elite. West Wing staffers call Bush and Ashcroft “the Blues Brothers” because “they’re on a mission from God.”“The Attorney General is tight with the President because of religion,” says one aide. “They both believe any action is justifiable in the name of God.”
But the President who says he rules at the behest of God can also tongue-lash those he perceives as disloyal, calling them “fucking assholes” in front of other staff, berating one cabinet official in front of others and labeling anyone who disagrees with him “unpatriotic” or “anti-American.”
Right now, Fox News is advertising:
I am not going to make any Iran-Contra jokes this evening, except one.
"If you helped Reagan sell missiles to the Ayatollah so that coke mobsters in Latin America would get more weapons, what does that make you?"
"A trusted member of Fox News... if you ran the show, you get a show!!"
Only funny because it's true. Not because it's funny. Ollie also wrote a couple books such as The Jericho Sanction, with such chapter titles as Legacy of Death, The Letter, Intrigue, Traitors & Hostages, Blown Cover, The Wolf, Making Plans While Marking Time, and other highly original contributions. Then there is "Mission Compromised," something Ollie Poo would Never Do!
Reagan and God, from the link above:
But it was in his lifelong battle against communism – first in Hollywood, then on the political stage – that Reagan's Christian beliefs had their most profound effect. Appalled by the religious repression and state-mandated atheism of Bolshevik Marxism, Reagan felt called by a sense of personal mission to confront the USSR. Inspired by influences as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, he waged an openly spiritual campaign against communism, insisting that religious freedom was the bedrock of personal liberty. "The source of our strength in the quest for human freedom is not material, but spiritual," he said in his Evil Empire address. "And because it knows no limitation, it must terrify and ultimately triumph over those who would enslave their fellow man."Well, you have to admit it's better than "Bring Em On!" Billmon memorializes the great actor who filled up a suit 40% more effectively than W.
In some ways, Reagan's biggest triumph was the creation an atmosphere of existential crisis, in he could play the stereotypical role of the man on a white horse. He had a brilliant script, written by a new type of PR consultant (Michael Deaver generally gets the top credit) ready to exploit the synergies of the merger between politics and show business. And, like all great myths, it had enough correspondance with the reality of the times to be believable.Billmon follows again with a look at the Legacy:But there was always a kind of stage set quality to it - the sense that if you looked behind the facade all you'd find would be plywood and paper mache.
The legacy of Reagan's policies in the Middle East, meanwhile, are still being paid for - in blood. The cynical promotion of Islamic fundamentalism as a weapon against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the alliance of convenience with Saddam Hussein against Iran, the forging of a new "strategic relationship" with Israel, the corrupt dealings with the House of Saud, and (perhaps most ironic, given Reagan's tough guy image) the weakeness and indecision of his disastrous intervention in Beruit - all of these helped set the stage for what the neocons now like to call World War IV, and badly weakened the geopolitical ability of the United States to wage that war.There's a whole slate of good films coming out. Check out "The Hunting of the President," telling the story of Clinton's sleazy tormenters. My favorite part of the trailer might be where one journalist says "We were following these stories simply because Scaife was paying us to do it," presumably referring to the evil Republican billionaire industrialist Richard Mellon Scaife. Scaife indeed dropped a fat $2,400,000 on the American Spectator magazine to go after Clinton, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to the American Enterprise Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation... on and on and on... more about the foundations.But all this pales in comparison to Reagan's war crimes in Central America....
The second movie is of course Fahrenheit 9/11 (Quicktime trailer). I am not a uniform supporter of Michael Moore, particularly with glaring inaccuracies that pop up all over some of his stuff. Regardless, the man is a pressure release valve on the hypocrisy and contradictions in what they're trying to sell us. He is shrill and unpleasant a great amount of the time, but that's tempered by a real quest to bring us something significant, at odds with the mainstream narrative.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.In other news, a splendid review of media bias by Michael Massing in the New York Review of Books.The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
The United States and its allies are winning some battles in the terrorism war but may be losing the broader struggle against Islamic extremism that is terrorism's source, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Saturday.
The troubling unknown, he said, is whether the extremists -- whom he termed ''zealots and despots'' bent on destroying the global system of nation-states -- are turning out newly trained terrorists faster than the United States can capture or kill them.
''It's quite clear to me that we do not have a coherent approach to this,'' Rumsfeld said at an international security conference.
...
....saying that while terrorists must be confronted, the bigger problem is the extremist Islamic ideology that produces them.''What you have is a civil war in that religion where a small minority are trying to hijack it,'' he said.
This is just so damn goofy: an RNC promotional website for Hispanics that offers them four job choices: war veterans, teachers, senior citizens, or farmers and ranchers. Yes, that is where they fit in. (via WaPo)
Religious crusaders attacking the separation of church and state, while bringing political campaign pressure straight into churches. Safety for atheists not assured.
Hard to say what the deal is with the CIA. You'd think they'd be happy that their man Allawi has been dropped in (parachuted in) as Prime Minister. But no, CIA's big hoss is quitting, Chalabi's teaming with the rising stars of fundamentalist Shiites like the Iraqi Hezbollah. Then there was the president's speech at Colorado Springs, another fine incantation of fear. But even that was fabricated, when you hear that the al-Qaeda linked group he's quoting from is probably just a crackpot with a fax machine.
You can watch Daily Show segments online now. I liked this clip about Tenet.
"Jon, the CIA's credibility has never been lower. Crazy people no longer believe the CIA is implanting a chip in their heads to listen to their dreams. They just don't think they can pull it off. It's a sad day for America when even our paranoid schizophrenics realize they don't need to wear the alumnimum foil hats anymore."(via amy sullivan)
I am alarmed about the increasing waves of ... I don't know what to call it, angry energy ... oscillating between Fallujah, Fox News, Jerusalem and Najaf. On Fox they are all angry retired colonels all the time who've reached the firm consensus that the jihadis must be slaughtered in Fallujah wholesale, while the rest of the Arab world shimmers and buckles under the immense political pressure that Bush and Sharon generated by officially refuting the refugees and gaining the "Israeli population centers."
I'll cite a couple stories that I found interesting this evening. Firstly a piece on Tech Central Station positing the theory of a world-historical shift emerging through Islamic militancy in the middle east, conceived not as 'terrorism' or 'radicals vs moderates' but rather the new Islamist project or 'renovatio' of bringing down all the corrupt regimes and angling towards a new pan-Islamic caliphate. This kind of thing seemed a lot more far-fetched, what, a year ago?
WaPo says that a lot of soldiers are surviving injuries that would have been lethal, so of course it's a lot more living wreckage.
The Fallujah folks (of today's fallen minarets, no less) have sprouted a political arm affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. (could this be linked to Islamist disgruntlement in Syria??)
This feature from the journal Foreign Policy deflates a lot of myths about Al Qaeda, helping to illustrate that it's a sort of 'venture capital' kind of outfit rather than a coherent organization.
Suicide bombings have less to do with fundie indoctrination than sociological conditions: witness the Tamil Tigers, according to a political scientist. (not that this field doesn't attracts more than its share of preposterous poli sci fiends)
A writer in the Lebanese Daily Star is really just trying to get our attention, how could he have ever reached such silly conclusions:
Without being unduly alarmist, it is safe to predict that the coming weeks and months are likely to be exceedingly dangerous. It feels as if the whole planet is threatened by an imminent volcanic eruption. Such is the thirst for revenge and the level of frustration in the Arab and Muslim world that explosions of violence are to be expected in widely scattered locations....And don't forget: Bush didn't really plan for the impact Iraq might have on the domestic economy, either!! (reg. req'd) Sweetness.Recent actions and statements by US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as well as by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, have been so grossly offensive to a large segment of Arab and Muslim opinion that they seem bound to trigger a violent response. By resorting to force and by ruling out a peaceful settlement of regional disputes, whether in Iraq or Palestine, these leaders have legitimized terror. Consciously or not, they have in fact provoked it....
Israel lies at the heart of the present international disorder. Its supporters in Washington conceived the war against Iraq and pressed for it to be waged, in the mistaken belief that it would help Israel defeat the Palestinians. Differences over how to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict have become the main subject of discord between Europe and the United States. Europe has been powerless to make itself heard, largely because of the large-scale, high-level penetration of the American government by "friends of Israel." This is a striking feature of contemporary politics.
Meanwhile, Israel's daily slaughter of Palestinians continues to outrage the conscience of the civilized world, yet no one knows how to stop it. Memories of the Holocaust, together with an unmatched worldwide propaganda machine, have given the Jewish state a wide measure of immunity. Yet Sharon's cynical strategy is crystal clear. To seize more land on the West Bank, he is exploiting to the full the support of a weak American president, anxious for the votes of American Jews and fundamentalist "Christian Zionists" in an election year.
These links have been shamelessly pilfered from the superb WarInContext.org so please direct accolades and cash money to them; they work hard.
I guess all these articles really caught me as alarm bells that we are staring down a major sea change across the political system of the Mideast, like it or not. The question is which batshit apocalyptic militarists are going to call the shots on each side. (crossposted on DKos)
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.
...
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.
...
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.
I'm not doing that, but some of my favorite web writers seem to be: Billmon and Salam Pax, both of them needing some time to collect themselves after things have gotten so shaken up this week. Billmon closes this episode by saying:
A friend of mine likes to call the Israeli-Palestinian issue the "Death Valley" of American progressives -- a hellish, blasted wasteland that sucks the life out of anyone who tries to cross it. Better not to go there, and instead work the land that can be watered and tilled: health care, the environment, econoimc policy, etc. And for a long time I thought that was good advice.I also strongly recommend Billmon's second-to-last writing 'End of the road:'But since 9/11, I've come to think that the desert has to be crossed, otherwise the gradual descent into an endless war in the Middle East is going to doom whatever slim hopes there may be for a revival of progressive domestic policies in this country -- much as the coming of the Cold War did after World War II
.....
It doesn't look like this crash can stopped, either. I guess that's one of the essential elements of tragedy -- the disaster can be seen but not avoided. Maybe it's the same feeling that John O'Neill had as he ran back into the South Tower that day, knowing what he had feared most had come to pass. I don't know. When the next major attack hits America, and the pressure to retaliate with genocidal force becomes impossible for our rotten political system to resist, maybe then I'll know.I'm left at a bit of a loss here. What is to be done? The Popular Front isn't looking like a very viable proposition at the moment. Maybe it's just time to sit back and see whether the metaphorical truck breaks through the Middle Eastern telephone poll -- or wraps itself around it, turning the passengers into jelly. "Oh well."
I'm feeling pretty beat right now -- in several senses of the word. So I'm going to shut down the bar for awhile and think things over. I mean, if the leader of the free world can take a week off in the middle of an intifada, I figure I'm entitled to kick back for a few days, too.
Bush's statement marks the effective end of any realistic chance that the United States will play a constructive role in resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Washington truly is Likud-occupied territory now, and resistance is almost certainly futile. For all intents and purposes, the world's only superpower has been bound and gagged.I looked at Ayatollah Sistani's website today, including the Fiqh--questions and answers from the religious authoritay. They are entertaining, especially the oral sex questions. He also knows what's what with the lottery.
"While Bush vacationed, warnings went unheard." It seems that George Tenet is ducking responsibility for informing the president about terror threats at the ranch in August 2001, but then whose responsibility was it?? Aw snap–they must have forgotten to bring some brains to the Crawford picnic.
Sidney Blumenthal, Clintonista Extraordinamente, talks about how the military is increasingly pissed with Bush, and of course how ignorant he was in that press conference. This Slate digestion of the press conference is about as brave an interpretation as any sane person could tolerare.
Bin Laden offered a truce to Europe. How bizarre, I thought as it came over on the CNN breaking news early this morning.
They are trying to discredit the 9/11 commission, surprise surprise.
Updates from riverbend in Iraq as well as Iraq at a Glance.
Muslim WakeUp is a nifty very pro-modernization of Islam sort of site.
TurningTables is printing interesting things that he couldn't publish when he was still in the military. A proud army parent speaks out about how bad the leaders are.
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...
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
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.
.....
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.
......
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.
.....
-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.
Mac Weekly interview, October 10, 2003:
Dan Feidt: There have been a lot of violent incidents of in Sadr City recently, because the Americans have detained some clerics that follow Sadr. Is that a sign that the peace between the Shia religious groups and the United States is fraying?
Prof. Rashid Khalidi: It is not clear whether in fact what the United States is doing with Muqtada al-Sadr—in this place called Sadr City which is named for a relative of his who was killed by the Baathists—is going to lead to alienation of the Shia from the United States. Sadr doesn’t represent all the Shia. He is one factional leader. He is charismatic, he is popular but there are a lot of other people there.
The big question is A: how alienated are people in Iraq going to be, Shia, by American actions and policies, and B: to what extent will the United States try to repair its relations with the Shia by making up to Iran. There is an important faction in our government which is trying to do that, just as there’s an important faction in the government trying to sabotage any such possibility. So stay tuned for where the arm wrestling in Washington will end up. That in turn will determine a lot of these things. If The United States totally alienates Iran then one of the few possible means of positively affecting the attitudes of Shia in Iraq will disappear.
I have been playing Johnny Cash's cover of U2's One over and over the last few days. The burning away of any cohesion, any plan, any progression in Iraq has forced me to step back and do some soul searching. What was the point, anyway? I really tried to find out, in my own half-assed roundabout kind of way.
I talked for a while with a Macalester geography professor before lunch. Everyone was expecting Sadr to make a move at some point, he said, but it seems the U.S. never had a plan to handle him, and no one thought that it would go this far.
Before the war he tried hard to find out from his connections in Washington if there was, in fact, a postwar plan. There was none, of course, and no one ever told him who was ultimately in charge of making that plan.
So was it a sin of omission? Was the plan to bring it all crashing down? Why would people that had agitated against Saddam for years finally wipe him out without a playbook?
Since this stretch of HongPong.com started in March 2003, I can't say exactly what my point was; I just wanted to highlight what I saw was wrong in the war that was just getting underway.
On the fifth post, I pointed out that they weren't planning, and it alarmed professional policymakers. I tried to highlight the importance of these weird and disturbing documents like the Clean Break.
Now it's all coming down; can I say that I was surprised? Did I do enough to prevent this? Could I have influenced a damn thing?
If I feel upset that it might be flying to bits, I can only imagine how the many knowledgeable and concerned people I've met over the past few years feel about the grand failure to prevent what awaits us tomorrow. I was just one damn student.
I tried to conduct some journalism, but even after this interview, I didn't have a damnfool idea of what action I ought to take. At least I asked a question about Sadr.
As Radiohead says, "We tried but there was nothing we could do."
I found the following in a thread on Billmon.org, attached to a very insightful piece illustrating that anger towards Israel is not something we can surgically rip out of the Middle East.
This was posted by the German magazin der Spiegel and was taken from an the islamic weblog qoqaz.com they translated from the arabic and I have translated from the German. It regards the resistance in falludja.Al-Anbari: God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: Peace!
Al-Anbari: Peace upon you!
Al-Ramadi: Peace and the Mercy of God upon You!
Al-Ramadi: Are you still alive? (...) Send us news!
Al-Anbari: Wie have smashed the Americans, battles are raging in all the streets.
Al-Ramadi: By God!
Al-Anbari: By God! And we have taken their weapons and equipment.
Al-Ramadi: Were some of them killed as well?
Al-Anbari: Yes the whole troop that was on street 20, was completely destroyed and one of the cars, that was close to mariams house, was burned.
Al-Ramadi: Which Mariam?
Al-Anbari: Remember Mahmud al-Mariam, that lives close to the house of Ibrahim al-Khaschiban? The house behind his.
Al-Ramadi: Ah. Have they gotten in the houses or arrested anyone?
Al-Anbari: No they have not succeeded in getting to this place yet. Perhaps they will come in the night. At the moment they are collecting themselves in the street on which the playground is located close to the house of Safi al-Battah.
Al-Ramadi: Was kind of weapons are the resistance fighters using?
Al-Anbari: Light weapons and grenades.
Al-Ramadi: I have heard that their base in Ramadi was hit hard with mortar fire yesterday..
Al-Anbari: yes, their night was black. (...) The eintire region has risen against them without exception! Interesting is also that most of the Mudschahidin are made up of police and the new army.
Al-Ramadi: God is great! (...)
Al-Anbari: Truly, when you see their weapons you feel that the angels are fighting on our side!
Al-Ramadi: There is no victory except on Gods side!
Al-Anbari: They called me from the school and told me not to come, for the situation didn't allow it. They killed 6 Americans. I felt something pull me there, and I found the battle in the vicinity of our house. And the heroes ran after the Americans (...). When I saw them again, they were carrying the Americans weapons and equipment stained with their blood, they were screaming God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: By God, Arabs and Muslims here are truly very eager, to hear more such news, that cools the breast. I will copy this dialog and show all!
Al-Anbari: God is Great!
Al-Ramadi: And what now? (...)
Al-Anbari: We are at greatest readiness. (...) I will give you the details if I stay alive.
Kamal: I plead God for your safety and victory.
Al-Anbari: The American Armee, that the world fears, has turned out to be a horde of sheep(...).
Kamal: How are Mohammed and the other Mudschahidin?
Al-Anbari: They are well. thank God we had no dead and only two wounded, and their wounds are slight.
Kamal: Who are these two?
Al-Anbari: To be honest, I don't know them, for people in the entire region mobilized, men and women. I didnt think people from this region had so much heroism and courage in them. Mothers even pushed their children to fight.
Kamal: As God wills it! Blessed be the Allmighty!
Al-Anbari: Imagine: I encountered a boy, he was not even 15, and he carried a weapon,but without ammunition (...). When I saw him in his heroism, I ripped out my magazin and gave it to him.
Kamal: Oh God!!! God is Great!!!
Al-Anbari: I also saw a young man, that heroically stood his ground against the Americans and threw after them, and they didnt react to it, even though they were many.
Kamal: Such news calms and strengthens the pride. (...) I would like to ask you a favor.
Al-Anbari: Sure.
Kamal: I wish to make as many copies of this story, as I can and distribute them to all Mudschahidin , that wish to have it, as a small effort on my part, to help strenghen their moral.
Al-Anbari: As God wills!"This conversation with a messenger out of Ramadi appeared today, on wednesday afternoon. As god is my witness, I know this brother, who finds himself at the gulf, for I have worked with him. He with whom he speaks, is his brother in Ramadi. In this conversation is contained news of the Mudschahidin on the battlefield"
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.
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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.
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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 have been sitting around all day reading an excellent tome about Afghanistan for my Geography class, but as I made a quick trip over to Minneapolis I heard a disturbing report that five American soldiers had been killed in a confrontation with Shiite protesters in Baghdad. There have been a lot of reports of increasing protests after the U.S. shut down militant Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper, Hawza. Now his segment of Shiites have apparently tried to take over all the police stations in the Baghdad slum of Sadr City, named for his father.
The U.S. lost seven soldiers and around 20 were wounded. There were also massive protests in the Shiite spiritual center of Najaf, where some of the international forces lost some soldiers and apparently killed around 20 protesters.
I was under the general impression that Sadr's horrid wrathfulness had been co-opted into the more mellow Sistani movement as the date of a national Shiite leadership draws nearer, while Sunnis were more likely to commit violence. Seems I overestimated how stable the Shiites really were. (is that really a surprise?)
Some well-rounded commentary, as always, can be found with Professor Cole.
Perhaps a third of Iraqi Shiites are sympathetic to the radical, Khomeini-like ideology of Sadrism, and some analysts with long experience in Iraq put it at 50%. Earlier Muqtada Al-Sadr, the movement leader, had called on his forces to avoid violence against Coalition forces. As of Sunday, he has decided that the Coalition means permanently to exclude his group from power, and has decided to launch an uprising. This uprising involves taking over police stations in Kufa, Najaf, Baghdad and possibly elsehwere. The Sadrist militia now controls Kufa, according to the New York Times, and probably controls much of Sadr City or the slums of East Baghdad, as well,
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...the violent clashes in Najaf, Baghdad, Amara and Nasiriyah may signal the beginning of a second phase, in which the US faces a two-front war, against both Sunni radicals in the center-north and Shiite militias in the South. The clashes come at a pivotal moment, since on Friday April 9, the Shiite festival of Araba'in will take place, coinciding this year with the anniversary of the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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The outbreak of Shiite/Coalition violence is a dramatic challenge to US military control of Iraq. The US is cycling out its forces in the country, bringing in a lot of reserve and national guards units, but will go from 130,000 to only 110,000 troops. It is too small a number to really provide security in Iraq, but the country has not fallen into chaos in part because the main attacks have come in the Sunni heartland and because the Coalition has depended on Shiite militias to police many southern cities. If the Shiites actively turn against the US, the whole military and security situation could become untenable.
UPI reports that "Protestor deaths leave Iraq in chaos."
A demonstration in the southern city of Najaf turned deadly as Salvadoran soldiers -- under Spanish command -- exchanged fire with supporters of radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in the city of Najaf. Reports from the scene indicate that at least 19 protesters and 4 coalition troops were killed.The violent clash has left much of the Shiite sections of Iraq in near chaos. This represents the most serious clashes between coalition forces and the Shiite population....
After the estimated 5,000 demonstrators traded gunfire with the troops in Najaf, crowds turned out in Baghdad, Kerbala, and Sadr's home village of Kufa to "declare war on the American occupation," said one supporter.
The vast Shiite slum of Sadr City -- named for Moqtada's cleric father who was killed by the Baath regime in 1999 -- went into near chaos Sunday afternoon after the news of the fighting in Najaf.
After a demonstration by hundred of people protesting Yacoubi's arrest demonstrated in a Baghdad square -- where sporadic gunfire was heard but casualties witnessed by UPI -- the members of Sadr's banned militia, the Mehdi Army, were seen arming themselves and preparing for combat outside Sadr's offices in Sadr City.
Trucks and minibuses with license tags from all over the predominantly Shiite south of Iraq were seen streaming in to Sadr City and unloading waves of young men in the black t-shirts of the Mehdi Army, which has previously never openly displayed weapons banned by the occupation forces.
In front of Sadr's headquarters, they were seen arming themselves with AK-47 assault rifles and rocket propelled grenade launchers and organizing in military formations before deploying throughout the neighborhood in cars and pickup trucks.
The men were also seen forming roadblocks to prevent entry into the neighborhood, which has upwards of 3 million people living in one of the most densely populated urban settings east of the Gaza Strip.
As night fell, U.S. military vehicles, tanks and troops could be seen setting up roadblocks around the neighborhood themselves and reports of widespread fighting in the area have been reported by sources in the neighborhood.
One resident told UPI by phone that Sadr's militia had seized all five of Sadr City's police stations are were declaring their own form of martial law. There are also reports that U.S. infantry backed by helicopters and tanks have entered the neighborhood to reclaim the police facilities from the militia.
New York Times reports "Violent Disturbances Rack Iraq From Baghdad to Southern Cities."
Iraq was racked today by its most violent civil disturbances since the occupation started, with a coordinated Shiite uprising spreading across the country, from the slums of Baghdad to several cities in the south. An American soldier and a Salvadoran soldier were killed in the unrest, news agencies reported.By day's end, witnesses said Shiite militiamen controlled the city of Kufa, south of Baghdad, with armed men loyal to a radical cleric occupying the town's police stations and checkpoints.
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At nightfall today, the Sadr City neighborhood shook with explosions and tank and machine gun fire. Black smoke choked the sky. The streets were lined with armed militiamen, dressed in all black. American tanks surrounded the area. Attack helicopters thundered overhead."The occupation is over!" people on the streets yelled. "We are now controlled by Sadr. The Americans should stay out."
Witnesses said Mr. Sadr's militiamen had tried to take over three police stations in Sadr City, a poor, mostly Shiite neighborhood of northern Baghdad named after Mr. Sadr's father.
Franco Pagetti, an Italian photographer, said he was caught in the crossfire and witnessed several American tanks firing into the ground.
"The tanks were shooting into the pavement, not at the height of the people," Mr. Pagetti said. "It looked like they were trying to clear the streets." Mr. Pagetti also said he had watched a group of militiamen launch three rocket propelled grenades at American Humvees but the militiamen had missed each time. "The situation is getting worse," Mr. Pagetti said. "I saw injured people getting put in cars. The people said they had been wounded by American helicopters."
As the fighting raged, Mr. Sadr called on his followers to "terrorize" the enemy as demonstrations were no longer any use. Last week, his weekly newspaper, Hawza, was shut down by American authorities after it had been accused of inciting violence. The closure began a week of protests that grew bigger and more unruly at each turn.
"There is no use for demonstrations, as your enemy loves to terrify and suppress opinions, and despises peoples," Mr. Sadr said in a statement distributed by his office in Kufa today.
"I ask you not to resort to demonstrations because they have become a losing card and we should seek other ways," he told his followers. "Terrorize your enemy, as we cannot remain silent over its violations."
British troops today clashed with demonstrators in the Iraqi town of al-Amara during on a day of violent protests across the country. The Ministry of Defence said that the soldiers returned fire after coming under attack from a “criminal element” in the crowd armed with guns and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).No British troops were injured in the incident although a MoD spokeswoman said that there were a number of Iraqi casualties. It was not immediately known if any of the Iraqis were killed.
The news from Iraq today of scattered clashes between US/Coalition forces and armed crowds and Shia paramilitaries is the worst news to come out of Iraq for months.
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The reality is that the US doesn't have anywhere enough soldiers in the country to control the place if there's this sort of widespread violence on an on-going basis. That could quickly lead to a vicious cycle which will put a virtual end to reconstruction and prevent the coming into being of any entity for us to hand the place off to. In Jefferson's ugly phrase, we may end up holding the wolf by the ears.
In the euphemistic headline department, WaPo says "Pakistan Struggles to Put Army on Moderate Course."
Isn't it interesting that many of the people in the CPA's press office have ties to the Republican Party? It's almost as if... they are there for partisan sugarcoating. What? Never!
So now I must return to my Afghanistan book, which is going to take all evening to finish. As I read, in my imagination I'll see that today's situation, meanwhile, is sliding ever closer to the precipice.
This evening calls for a lot of Radiohead. Two and two always makes five.
I ran into this weird info via Cosmic Iguana and had to dig into it further. A professional metals trader named Jim Sinclair now sees strange actions in the U.S. dollar, which he can't pin down on anything normal. He thinks there may be a pattern marking it as similar to the mysterious stock market manipulations just prior to 9/11.
This guy clearly seems pretty eccentric, but if my job was to track the most notoriously silly market in the world, the gold market, I would probably be batty too.
Sinclair believes this pattern immediately emerged after the assassination of HAMAS spiritual leader Sheik Yassin. Gold community heads up, March 26:
In conversation with Kenny this morning, we both noted that gold is in what I call "the technician’s nightmare" which is not that infrequent once a long trend is underway.All internals are now full-bore positive, well overbought and therefore screaming for a correction. A failure to see a relatively short-lived, but possibly sharp correction is what concerns me as I look at new market trading relationships and fish for the cause.
Al Qaeda is both a financial and military organization. My question is simple: Are we looking at the al Qaeda footprint in the market?
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You know that there was significant, unexplained -either fundamentally or technically- buying of Puts and selling calls in the airlines' stocks just before 9/11. This has never been defined or investigated.Here is what bothers me. I see a footprint in the US dollar that is not the Exchange Stabilization Fund. It is not the German Blitz-Market. It is not the Swiss Stair Ladder. It is not Pinky Green and his pal. It is the footprint I showed you last night and one that I have never seen before.
If I were Interpol, the CIA or the NSA, I would reacquisition the chart of the options on airline trading for 90 days before 9/11 and see if the footprint now in the dollar, which is unique, matched the footprint on the buy of the airline Puts and the sell of the airline Calls just before those exact airlines hit the WTC.
There is a scary combination taking place which is a skewing of relationships caused by a huge interest in the market muscling new market trading relationships between items by their execution. Please consider the following:
1. Asian currencies are strong on balance.
2. The US dollar has been accumulated over the past 7 days in a unique footprint.
3. The euro is weak on balance
4. Gold is strong, period.
5. The stock market, although it should be near a technical bounce, lost its bull appearance and has gone to neutral.
6. Commodities are quite strong, most certainly traditional war commodities.
7. We have a price crisis but not a supply crisis in energy.What fundamentally would make the relationship above come into the markets? If my little friend in Kenya, the Seer, Mahendra Sharma, gets it right, what would be the reason? Well, it is an unthinkable event in the Middle East that causes concern that Euroland is the next target because its security is lax compared to the USA which has become a thinly veiled police state. Would that not do the following?:
1. Launch gold into the stratosphere?
2. Strengthen the US dollar by default because the short side is simply ENORMOUS.
3. Cause mixed events in equity markets.
4. Put the price of oil to at least $60 if not higher.
5. If it was serious enough in light of this scenario, could it possibly postpone the November US elections?The evidence that such an event is possible is in the marketplace. This need not happen but should be thought about. If it occurs, the motivating factor that could go down in history as the modern version of the killing of Arch Duke Ferdinand is the recent elimination of the Hamas martial cleric.
Interest rates will rise this year and my wager is that the rise will occur before the election, most likely in late spring or early summer. That event will injur gold slightly for a very short time after which the price will appreciate into the election.I will refine the timing as we approach that event so broadly discussed but so meaningless. Just remember this: Once inflation bites, which it’s doing now as evidenced by the commodity price rise, inflation, the shark-like predator that it is, locks its jaws. Remember this well!
Assuming that gas prices climb to the $3 per gallon level, the American public will go BALLISTIC. After that happens, any claims by the Federal Reserve that inflation does not exist will fall on deaf ears AND PERMANENTLY DISCREDIT THE FED INTERNATIONALLY. I suspect that a significant amount of the participants at our recent Florida G7conferrence stopped by Salim Gillani’s Chevron station prior to the meeting.
Turkey knows the significance of this incident even if most Westerners don’t fully appreciate the danger. Turkey is maneuvering to get out of harm’s way. This is serious and when a government moves in such a significant way it has to tell you that the elimination of the leader of Hamas has widespread implications. The following is from my intelligence service Stratfor.com.
Turkish-Israeli Relations: An Axial Shift?
Summary
Turkey has condemned Israel's assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an act of "terrorism." This is the first time a Turkish government has criticized Israel for a position since the two states enhanced their military relationship in the mid-1990s. The mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara could not afford to remain neutral on this issue, especially because many Turkish citizens have been arrested on suspicion of ties to al Qaeda. The development could signal an initial AKP bid to realign with the Arab and Muslim world; Turkey and Israel have had diplomatic relations since 1949.Analysis
Turkey has condemned Israel's targeted assassination of Hamas founder Sheikh Ahmed Yassin as an act of terrorism. In an interview with Turkish daily Hurriyet on March 25, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stressed that the international community must examine this kind of act, adding that there can be no peace in the Middle East unless Israel gives up its strong-arm tactics. Erdogan said Israel's actions have seriously derailed any role Turkey could have played in mediations between Israelis and Palestinians, and he hinted that he might cancel a visit to Israel in April if the current atmosphere does not change.
This is an unprecedented criticism of Israel from Ankara. The mildly Islamist Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (Justice and Development Party), or AKP, is taking advantage of international outrage over the killing of Yassin to try to undo Turkey's image as a pro-Israeli state. Ankara hopes this will stave off criticism from certain parts of the populace and the Muslim world. We should note that Hamas and the AKP trace their roots back to the Muslim Brotherhood organization of Egypt.
It’s a dangerous world out there that is getting even worse. That’s good for gold but for unfortunate reasons. The US simply doesn’t have any more properly trained troops to engage in Afghanistan in the manner required to meet the challenge. With this happening and the war for the minds and hearts of Iraqi citizens a disaster, where is plan B?
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Increasingly, Alan Greenspan's reign as Chairman of the Federal Reserve is being reviewed more critically in the media. With over-the-counter derivatives out of control, householders being encouraged to borrow on their homes to finance consumer purchases, gas prices at record highs, and no indications of inflation anywhere, what can I say other than pass the Malox please.
The water of hatred is boiling all over the world but press reports are muted and seek reasons always to maintain social order.This is the most dangerous time we have faced in our lifetime. I have lived a good part of my 63 years in areas with high Islamic populations and frankly you have no idea of the hatred that is building out there every day. Nor do you appreciate the dedication that is associated with that hatred.
You do not appreciate that many more people than you can imagine are willing to die and pass along to their families the mission that this hated engenders. We do not appreciate or respect the beliefs of other cultures and that will be what history points to as the underlining cause of World War III which started long before 9/11.
Finally on April Fool's Day he posts "Rumor Control" and a bunch of Al-Qaeda news clippings when he feels that things are still afoot.
There is a high probability that what we are experiencing this morning is a very temporary blowout in the gold price from its march to the upside.Shorts are gunning for $423 on the close. Any close under $428 will encourage the short sellers. The long funds - or about 45,000 new long contracts purchased at an apparent average of $413.50 - have likely not participated in this morning's selling and will in all probability have mental stops at $423.
All this adds up to one hell of a bear trap being set up next week. The only thing I believe can prevent a temporary and healthy decline here is a significant geopolitical event. No sane person would wish for that.
There are still strange footprints in the dollar that have yet to be defined. However, the hunt is on and they will be identified. The supply of gold between $430 and $435 will be overcome but that might take some consolidation first. Markets get stretched out when they have one way runs.Gold is up over $40 since we called the bottom. That is a stretch that can only continue if the driver is a geopolitical event in the making. The crisis in energy prices continues as the falsification of economic indicators reaches a point of total absurdity.
.....
Should gold persist under $428 into tomorrow’s opening, that would call for a push to $423. At $423, the bulls will make their stand so be prepared for another shoot out at the Comex corral tomorrow.The rub is that every day the world is moving towards some sort of military/terrorist catharsis and the solutions being applied do not seems to be easing that progression.
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.
.....
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.
.....
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.
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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?
I have been very busy this week working on a group paper for International Security class responding to Richard Perle and David Frum's horrible book, "An End to Evil." The whole thing filled me with dread. I never want to look at it again.
Having said that, it has been most entertaining to watch CNN these days, as Dick Clarke brings down the Bush Administration's American Grandstanding about their competence in confronting terror. By his account, the Administration's first months were like a special cubicle hell, an inert bureaucracy staffed by cold war geriatrics "encased in amber" who invented task forces that never met and demoted Clarke, the nation's supposed counterterror guru, who tried to put the government on high alert, but found the shell of evildoers around the president almost inpenetrable. Happily, Bush's poll numbers seem to be taking a hit.
I don't quite grasp why the conservatives issue catcalls and deny credibility because Clarke has written a book about it. This is the information age. How is the public supposed to become informed, if not by the printed word?
In any case I wanted to post a link to this amazing story about the graffiti found all over the walls of Baghdad, meticulously collected and translated by an old Iraqi. It's riotously funny. Here are a some that the old man captured:
SADDAM WILL RETURN!
And written underneath:
THROUGH MY ASS!ANARCHY IS GOVERNING THROUGH A PARLIAMENT AND AN EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY
SADDAM SWALLOWED ALL THE PRICKS OF THE WORLD, AND HE STILL SAID HE WAS VICTORIOUS
SADDAM IS A WORD THAT MEANS A DISEASE THAT HITS DONKEYS
EVERYONE, SADDAM CRAPPED IN HIS TROUSERS
EVERYONE, SADDAM PIMPED HIS WIFE SAJIDAH
DEAR LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, SADDAM ATE FROM THE KAADAH! [a child's potty]
DOWN WITH AHMAD CHALABI, MAN OF CATS!
CHALABI IS THE ENGINEER OF DEMOCRACY
And underneath is written:
ZIONISTS SAID THAT!OUR WEALTH IS OUR OWN, OUR OIL WILL ENRICH US IF WE CAN GET IT BACK INTO OUR HANDS
THE GOVERNING COUNCIL IS A COUNCIL OF AGENTS, TRAITORS, SPIES, AND MERCENARIES
DONKEYS PISS HERE!
And underneath is written:
AND PIMPS AND BAATHISTSACHIEVEMENTS OF THE POST-LIBERATION IRAQ:
105 NEWSPAPERS (ALL LIES)
110 FAILED PARTIES
300 THIEVES' ORGANIZATIONS
500 UNIONS WITH NO WORK
600 HEADQUARTERS FOR PLUNDERING AND STEALING
700 MOVEMENTS WITH NO BLESSING OR GOOD
25,000 SPIES FOR THE AMERICANS
4,000 EMPLOYEES IN OFFICIAL OFFICES, ALL THIEVES
5,000 DOUBLE AGENTS FOR THE AMERICANS AND FOR SADDAM AT THE SAME TIME
2 MILLION HOMELESS FAMILIES WITH NO DIGNITY
25 MILLION IRAQIS THAT WANT TO LEAVE IRAQ
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical CitySADDAM ATE BEANS AND EMITTED STINKY AIR
LONG LIVE SADDAM, IN SPITE OF HIS FOOL CRAZIES!
And underneath is written:
SADDAM IS A PIMP; ASK YOUR SISTER!PATIENCE, BAGHDAD, PATIENCE, SADDAM IS COMING BACK SOON
And underneath is written:
TO FINISH OFF WHAT REMAINS OF THE IRAQI PEOPLE OR TO FUCK YOUR MOTHER?LET YOUR HEADS APPEAR, YOU BAATHISTS. WHERE ARE YOU HIDING? IN THE SEWAGE PIPES?
IRAQ IS THE MUSTACHE OF EVERY HONORABLE MAN--The Army of Mohammed
WE SWEAR WE WILL MAKE MASS GRAVES FROM IRAQ'S LAND FOR ALL THE TRAITORS AND ALL THE AGENTS OF THE AMERICANS AND THE ZIONISTS--Army of Mohammed
And underneath is written:
WE ALREADY KNOW MASS GRAVES ARE YOUR SPECIALTY; GOD IS OUR WITNESS ON THATINCREASE IN RATION SHARES:
100 KG. SADNESS, PAIN, AND MELANCHOLY FOR EACH CITIZEN
50 KG. WORRY, GRIEF, AND SORROW FOR EACH HEAD OF HOUSEHOLD
10 PROBLEMS PER FAMILY
4 VOLTS ELECTRICITY PER HOUSE
1 MASS CEMETERY PER CITY DISTRICT
5 RANDOMLY SHOT BULLETS PER STREET, INCREASED TO 50 BULLETS ON THURSDAYS
1 GAS CANISTER PER FAMILY PER MONTH
2 KEROSENE BOTTLES PER FAMILY PER MONTH
10 CANS OF FOOD PER FAMILY PER MONTH: VARIOUS OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN AND FULL OF DIFFERENT POISONS
NB: TRANSPORTATION COSTS ARE BORNE BY MR. BREMER
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical CityEVERYONE WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT OF IRAQ, EVEN THE PORTERS AT THE SHARJAH BAZAAR
BE FRIGHTENED OF GOD, PROSTITUTE OF JORDAN! AND YOU THE TURBANED MEN OF IRAN, AND YOU GRANDSONS OF THE OTTOMAN TURKS
WE WILL RETURN SOON!--The Baath Party
And underneath is written:
AND WE WILL WAIT FOR YOU WITH SLIPPERS, YOU DREGS!--The Al Daawa Islamic PartyKIRKUK IS FOR THE KURDS
This has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK FOR THE TURKMEN
And this has been crossed out and written instead:
KIRKUK IS FOR THE IRAQIS, YOU TRAITORS!BREMER! IF YOU DON'T KNOW, IT'S A DISASTER, AND IF YOU KNOW, THE DISASTER IS GREATER
IF SADDAM SPENT THE OIL REVENUES ON THE WELFARE OF HIS PEOPLE IRAQ WOULD BE:
THE RICHEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD
THE MOST BEAUTIFUL COUNTRY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE TWO HOUSES: ONE FOR WINTER, ONE FOR SUMMER
EVERY IRAQI WOULD HAVE THREE CARS: ONE FOR WORK, ONE FOR HIS FAMILY, AND ONE FOR PICNICS AND TRAVELING
EVERY IRAQI WOULD TRAVEL THROUGHOUT THE WORLD ANNUALLY
EVERY IRAQI WOULD BE EDUCATED TO THE HIGHEST LEVEL IN SCIENCE, KNOWLEDGE, LEARNING, AND EDUCATION
IRAQ'S POPULATION WOULD BE 50 MILLION
--Anonymous pavement newspaper tacked up on a wall near Medical City
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.
In less than 12 hours I'll be winging it out of this country for the first time in many years. The last time I flew out was Jamaica in high school. Since then, I've driven into Canada and Mexico, which is an entirely appropriate way to learn how the country ends at a line. I've given a lot of attention to what happens elsewhere but i haven't been elsewhere in so long, which is plainly negligent or even hypocritical.
Meanwhile, rumors are flying that Al-Qaeda bombed Madrid in retaliation for Iraq, an entirely reasonable idea when we remember that Al-Qaeda means "the base." So who knows what branches of the base might be involved in bombing European public transportation? There have been bomb threats against French trains, as well. It is safe to say that the security apparatus will be out in full. I haven't flown since 9/11. I'm a little edgy that there might be another incident in London during this season of the unexplained.
Yet that is why it's so important for me to go away for a while. The negative forces on the TV tell us that order is crumbling all around, that The Terror is On Our Doorstep. We Must Cower, they say.
Before Madrid, I saw that the dark thunderclouds of baseless fear and malicious disinformation were finally starting to drift away in this country.
It feels much better to step out when things are finally turning the corner than when the forces of evil blow right on your back. America this spring already seems a safer place with the idea of another four years of Bush Imperium sounding more farcical and remote by the week. Their nasty vision is falling apart.
So with that, let me round up a few key things to look for:
Wait for the good Colonel, Lt Col Karen Kwiatkoski, to start making the rounds on cable TV. The bombshell piece "The New Pentagon Papers" in Salon.com is part of a grand liberal media offensive incorporating Salon.com and the UK's Guardian. Her writings thus far, including the regular column, are an excellent expression of profoundly alarmed everyday conservatism. "Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush’s Talking-Points War ." Funny how it sounds like the whole Iraq war (mainly via the Salon piece) was propelled by one Straussian (Mr Shulsky) deploying an array of threatening talking points memos.
There is the unfolding story of the stolen Congressional computer documents.
There is (another) Halliburton investigation.
Juan Cole puts it all too well when he asks: "US Intelligence Follies: Why Haven't Cheney, Feith and Chalabi been Impeached?
Whatever happens on this trip, by the time I return, I'll be changed. It will be a before-vs.-after experience, no matter what happens. And what better moment for the clean break than now?
I might see more clearly these things which puzzle me so. I have to go.
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.
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".
Apparently Bush told intrepid and fearless reporter Tim Russert that he really really thought the damn things would turn up. Perhaps it was his inability to see out of the glass case Cheney and his people kept him in. Turns out that we now know the guy who told us about the mobile biological labs was thoroughly discredited already. The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) put out a "fabricator warning" on the Iraqi army deserter, which apparently wasn't heeded. NY Times, Feb 6.:
Agency Alert about Iraqi not Heeded, Officials Say: An Iraqi military defector identified as unreliable by the Defense Intelligence Agency provided some of the information that went into United States intelligence estimates that Iraq had stockpiles of biological weapons at the time of the American invasion last March, senior government officials said Friday.A classified "fabrication notification" about the defector, a former Iraqi major, was issued by the D.I.A. to other American intelligence agencies in May 2002, but it was then repeatedly overlooked, three senior intelligence officials said. Intelligence agencies use such notifications to alert other agencies to information they consider unreliable because its source is suspected of making up or embellishing information.
Because the warning went unheeded, the officials said, the defector's claims that Iraq had built mobile research laboratories to produce biological weapons were mistakenly included in, among other findings, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which concluded that Iraq most likely had significant biological stockpiles.
Intelligence officers from the D.I.A. interviewed the defector [and ...] concluded he had no firsthand information and might have been coached by the Iraqi National Congress, the officials said. That group, headed by Ahmad Chalabi, who had close ties to the Pentagon and Vice President Dick Cheney, had introduced the defector to American intelligence, the officials said.
Nevertheless, because of what the officials described as a mistake, the defector was among four sources cited by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council last February as having provided "eyewitness accounts" about mobile biological weapons facilities in Iraq, the officials said. The defector had described mobile biological research laboratories, as distinct from the mobile biological production factories mounted on trailers that were described by other sources.
In a related matter, the intelligence officials acknowledged that the United States still had not been able to interview two other people with access to senior Iraqi officials, and whose claims that Iraq possessed chemical and biological stockpiles were relayed to American officials in September 2002 by two foreign intelligence services.
So we have a direct connection between spoofery and suspected coaching by the INC. And we have evidence that parts of the government knew that this source shouldn't have been passing information into the National Intelligence Estimate, which is supposed to be America's key annual assessment of what's going on. This alone could be worth a grand jury. I am very curious now about the "foreign intelligence services" that have come up a lot in the news lately. It seems that countries like Germany who admitted that Saddam probably had WMD were also being misled.
Britain is faced with the imminent collapse of the famous "45 minutes" to weapons readiness claim which Blair put out before the war. It was compelling, and really undergirded whatever support the war could muster on the Isle. Yet it turns out that this too was provided by a shady exile, as well. The excellent UK source The Independent reports:
The "reliable source" who provided MI6 with the information that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons within 45 minutes was an Iraqi exile who had left the country several years previously, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. That fact alone should have prevented the intelligence being used in the Government's September 2002 dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.The 45-minute claim, repeated four times in the dossier, is at the centre of the dispute over Britain's case for war in Iraq. An IoS investigation has established at the highest level that the "reliable source" obtained the information at second hand from a serving officer in the Iraqi army, with the rank either of full colonel or brigadier....
Said to have "military knowledge", the source maintained contacts with serving officers in Saddam Hussein's armed forces. But the fact that he was not in Iraq meant that the information he provided, especially on such an important point as whether Saddam had active plans to use chemical and biological weapons, did not meet normal standards for assessing intelligence, especially as it was unsupported by documentary evidence. There was no definite information on whether chemical or biological warheads were with front-line units, which would have made it feasible that they could be used within 45 minutes, or back in secure bases which would make it impossible.
The fact that the information was "single source", and was included in the dossier at a late stage, first emerged after the BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan reported what he had been told by the weapons scientist David Kelly...
Not until the inquiry did the public learn that the original information passed on by the Iraqi exile referred only to battlefield weapons. "It related to munitions, which we had interpreted to mean battlefield mortar shells or small calibre weaponry, quite different from missiles," John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee and author of the dossier, told Lord Hutton.
Evidence at the inquiry showed that Mr Scarlett never used the word "munitions" in drafts of the dossier, allowing the claim to become inflated to one of WMD... The fate of the officer who provided the information remains a mystery. There are rumours that he is dead or missing.
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.
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 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.
There has been plenty of bad news for the Bush administration in this most difficult of August vacations. First of all, a new poll has shown that a majority of Americans would prefer 'someone else' to Bush. Now, polls can fluctuate in a range and all that (it's just a touch over 50%) but still, it shows a very large bloc of people aren't happy with things.
To put this in some perspective, you should check out the site Professor Pollkatz, which has a few interesting graphs and charts. In particular check out this graph, which shows an unquestionable slope downwards. Bush's approval ratings look like a sawtooth: his ratings jump up astronomically when the country has shifted into immediate war/reaction mode (spikes at 9/11 and this March), but as things settle the air comes out like a leaky balloon. Granted, the percentages are falling off extremely high numbers that no one expected to last. I just think its interesting that the polls pull down with such little variance. Also compare his approval rating with other recent wartime presidents, and you can see they have a rolling, up and down kind of pattern. Will this pattern bend around at a safe 55%? Why the hell would it?
And the economy. Let's have just a bit from the Scripps Howard News service:
Labor Day 2003 finds unemployment hovering near a nine-year high and people thankful to have work nevertheless feeling anxious because of the jobless recovery. Some 9.1 million Americans are officially unemployed, even though joblessness ticked down 0.2 percentage points from June's 6.4 percent high because 470,000 people quit looking for work last month. Meantime, 74.5 million adults are outside the labor force, 4 million more than when the nine-month recession started in March 2001.Happy day! The federal deficit wanders into new and exciting territory as it will reach around, oh, $480 billion or so. That's $480,000,000,000. I like it when they can just write their contributors dividend tax 'rebates' to get tossed in that phat $200 million election coffer. That's what I call prosperity."For too many working families, the current recovery is indistinguishable from the recession," said economist Jared Bernstein of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank.
High-paying manufacturing jobs have plunged by more than 2.7 million since August 2000, and the National Association of Manufacturers forecasts that U.S. factories will add back just 200,000 to 250,000 of those jobs even if the economy grows at 4 percent or better through 2004. Association president Jerry Jasinowski blames a "toxic brew" of fair and unfair foreign competition and high health care, litigation and energy costs at home for "the slowest manufacturing recovery on record since the Federal Reserve began tracking industrial production back in 1919."
On the elder Bush's watch, it took 15 months for job growth to resume, but today job growth hasn't jump-started 22 months into recovery - the worst job-creation record since the Labor Department started tracking such statistics in 1939.
The federal deficit will hit a record $480 billion next year, more than twice the level forecast just five months ago, the Congressional Budget Office said Tuesday.Then on the foreign policy front, the spread of freedom and the spirit of liberation are strong in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has liberated itself from the label of 'destroyed' and gone wreaking havoc in the provinces, which are controlled by an anarchic system of U.S.-backed warlords, in what resembles a combination of Reagan's Honduras, Khengis Khan and Lebanon. What is the secret of the Taliban's guerrilla persistence, when all had dismissed them? Human Resources! Basically they set up a bunch of religious schools in remote areas around Pakistan and Afghanistan, (with Saudi money) and these schools teach a rather remote and extreme version of Islam, generating a number of militantly motivated young kids who go off and cause trouble. There's quite a lot of trouble to get into with right now, as Israel and the United States occupy every other Muslim territory from Jerusalem to Pakistan.Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota said in a statement that "this unprecedented binge-borrowing imposes a heavy burden on Americans by increasing the cost of borrowing for businesses, home buyers and students."
If the tax cuts are extended, the CBO said, deficits would grow by an additional $1.6 trillion over the next decade, by an additional $400 billion if a drug benefit is enacted, and by another $400 billion if Congress takes steps to keep the alternative minimum income tax -- a baseline amount of tax that must be paid, even if the filer's tax calculated under standard rules falls below that level -- from affecting more middle-class families.
The nonpartisan agency said the annual budget shortfalls will total nearly $1.4 trillion over the next decade, compared with a $5.6 trillion surplus the CBO forecast in 2001. Bush didn't address the deficit directly. But in St. Paul, Minn., where he raised $1.2 million for his re-election campaign, Bush spotlighted his tax cuts, the centerpiece of his economic policy.
"Here's what I believe and here's what I know: that when Americans have more take-home pay to spend, to save or invest, the whole economy grows, and people are more likely to find a job," Bush said.
Then of course there's the Palestinian cease-fire that collapsed when Israel, in its wisdom, decided to kill the guy in Hamas that Mr. Abbas talks with, dealing a handy blow to his efforts.
Then there's the UN bombing, which has wigged out all the NGO's trying to clean up in Iraq. The Red Cross is reducing its operations, which is very depressing for Iraqis, because the Red Cross is the group which acts as a go-between with Iraqi POWs, detainees, their families, and the Americans.
So the Neo-con scheme is working out pretty smoothly, as prescribed. And we're Taking the Fight to Them! Oh yeah!
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?
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated in an interview with Haaretz that he would prefer to see an armed international force placed as a buffer between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The monitoring mechanism that will be put in place next week is a beginning and it may be enough if the parties are able to break the cycle of violence. In the interim period, I would like to see an armed peacekeeping force act as a buffer between the Israelis and Palestinians," Annan said in an interview with Haaretz...Essentially, Annan supports the approach that was adopted by Yitzhak Rabin, and later rejected by Ariel Sharon, namely, "to fight terror as if there are no negotiations and to conduct negotiations as if there is no terror." He deems it a "mistake" not to talk as long as violence continues. He is "encouraged" by Sharon's recent statements about his commitment to the peace process and says, "I have to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I expect that he will deliver and that he will engage in the peace process."
The UN secretary general, who can take credit for establishing the Quartet, also does not agree with Sharon's determination to isolate Yasser Arafat. He believes the Palestinian Authority chairman still has wide influence and that it would be better "to encourage him to work for the peace process and to work to support Mr. Abbas. They need to work together for the effort to succeed." Annan asks, "Do you influence him by not talking to him? Or do you have to talk to everyone in order to have a positive influence? The developments that led to the appointment of a prime minister who is compatible with Prime Minister Sharon and President [George] Bush came out of dealing with Chairman Arafat and getting him to take positive steps. So I think he has not been entirely negative."
Annan believes that calm will not come to the Middle East without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. "It is a crisis that inflames the masses in other countries. It is a crisis that inhibits some of the other leaders in the region from being more forthcoming in trying to achieve peace. It is a crisis that is exploited by the extremists and therefore it is absolutely essential that we resolve this conflict."
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?
Today's Star Tribune features a story on the conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Paul Wellstone. Most likely it was a random accident, but as Ted Rall said, we can't ignore the remote possibility of a harsh government killing its most powerful liberal opponent. Was Wellstone worth assassinating? I think so. i think my favorite theory is the electromagnetic pulse assassination:
Discounting weather, pilot error or mechanical problems in Wellstone's flight, Fetzer's articles have seized on the possibility of sabotage brought on by a futuristic electromagnetic pulse weapon that he said could have disabled the plane's computerized components. Evidence for this, he said in an interview, was the absence of any distress call from the pilots and the odd cell-phone experience reported by St. Louis County lobbyist John Ongaro.Ongaro, who was near the airport when Wellstone's plane went down, has dismissed the significance of his experience, in which he said his cell phone made "strange" sounds and then disconnected. "It's not unusual for cell phones to cut out, especially in northern Minnesota," he said.
The Democrats are conflicted, believe it or not. Kerry and Dean are dickering with each other, as Dean has been the most outspoken, grassroots oriented Democrat to run. Is there a conflict between the D grassroots, (Wellstone's bread and butter), versus the Democratic national leadership? (link Nick)
The contest for the 2004 Democratic nomination cannot be understood apart from two factors. One is the intense opposition to Bush at the Democratic grass roots. The other is the widely held sense that the party's older strategies and internal arguments are inadequate to its current problems. Candidates can't win if they address only one of these concerns. But addressing both at the same time will require a political magic that Democrats haven't seen yet.
Private schools in Minnesota are undergoing a growth spurt, according to an article in today's Strib. Would Mounds Park do something similar? Well, you gotta keep up with Blake and Minnehaha, dontcha?
Nick was happy with Thomas Friedman in the times yesterday, talking a big game about the whole theory of everything and generally disreputing the usual targets. Friedman is funny, I like to think of him as this guy from St. Louis Park, travelling about on an exciting personal journey to illuminate the whole everything (particularly the Middle East) for confused American liberals. Yet he seems to sugarcoat the corruption inherent in the way America has managed so much. Does he pull it off?
Why didn't nations organize militarily against the U.S.? Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World," answers: "One prominent international relations school ? the realists ? argues that when a hegemonic power, such as America, emerges in the global system other countries will naturally gang up against it. But because the world basically understands that America is a benign hegemon, the ganging up does not take the shape of warfare. Instead, it is an effort to Gulliverize America, an attempt to tie it down, using the rules of the World Trade Organization or U.N. ? and in so doing demanding a vote on how American power is used."Oh dear, the lack of weapons of mass destruction is blowing a mess all over the place. Paul Krugman is pounding away as usual today on the Bush crew and their addiction to 'spin.'
There is another reason for this nonmilitary response. America's emergence as the hyperpower is happening in the age of globalization, when economies have become so intertwined that China, Russia, France or any other rivals cannot hit the U.S. without wrecking their own economies.
The only people who use violence are rogues or nonstate actors with no stakes in the system, such as Osama bin Laden. Basically, he is in a civil war with the Saudi ruling family. But, he says to himself, "The Saudi rulers are insignificant. To destroy them you have to hit the hegemonic power that props them up ? America."
Hence, 9/11. This is where the story really gets interesting. Because suddenly, Puff the Magic Dragon ? a benign U.S. hegemon touching everyone economically and culturally ? turns into Godzilla, a wounded, angry, raging beast touching people militarily. Now, people become really frightened of us, a mood reinforced by the Bush team's unilateralism. With one swipe of our paw we smash the Taliban. Then we turn to Iraq. Then the rest of the world says, "Holy cow! Now we really want a vote over how your power is used." That is what the whole Iraq debate was about. People understood Iraq was a war of choice that would affect them, so they wanted to be part of the choosing. We said, sorry, you don't pay, you don't play.
It's long past time for this administration to be held accountable. Over the last two years we've become accustomed to the pattern. Each time the administration comes up with another whopper, partisan supporters ? a group that includes a large segment of the news media ? obediently insist that black is white and up is down. Meanwhile the "liberal" media report only that some people say that black is black and up is up. And some Democratic politicians offer the administration invaluable cover by making excuses and playing down the extent of the lies.Sounds like nothing but liberal excuses to me. Bill O'Reilly and Al Franken got in a huge argument over liberal media bias on CSPAN. However what was shown on TV was edited to provide its own perspective. (The fair and balanced Fox News story) I can't seem to find a transcript of the argument around, but here is a story about the whole book fair they were at, which seems to have been overtly political this year. (AP)If this same lack of accountability extends to matters of war and peace, we're in very deep trouble. The British seem to understand this: Max Hastings, the veteran war correspondent ? who supported Britain's participation in the war ? writes that "the prime minister committed British troops and sacrificed British lives on the basis of a deceit, and it stinks."
?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.
The mysterious and vocal rift between the United States and France continues to deepen as House Republicans acted to change menu wording in their 3 cafeterias. Starting immediately, House office buildings will quit serving 'French' fries and 'French' toast.
"This action today is a small, but symbolic effort to show the strong displeasure of many on Capitol Hill with the actions of our so-called ally, France," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, the chairman of the Committee on House Administration.Like that one diner, they are now serving 'freedom fries' and 'freedom toast.' Yes, the most prudent thing to do is continue slapping the French with more white gloves, until they surrender the right to dissent. A Gaul countermove? Perhaps they should demand we return the statue of liberty. Thanx to Schwartz for the link.
Two prisoners of the US military were beaten to death at an interrogation prison in Afghanistan, according to a March 7 article in the UK's Guardian. The autopsies verified that both died of blunt force injuries and have been classified as 'homicides.' But we are in the land of the free, which means that the government hasn't really covered it up. But has this story been covered in the United States?
It is believed that the recently captured Al-Qaeda leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is also being held at this base. I wonder how the CIA is interrogating him.
