Old Gods of Eternity

Don't you hate it when the memes of ancient gods try to intrude into our space-time?

Hiroshima, 1945, August 6, sixteen minutes past 8 AM.

Who really gave that order?

Answer: Control. The Ugly American, the instrument of Control.

Question: If Control’s control is absolute, why does Control need to control?

Answer: Control… needs time.

Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Why does Control need humans, as you call them?

Answer: Wait… wait! Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

Question: And what does Death need time for?

Answer: The answer is sooo simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in...

We have a new type of rule now.

Not one man rule, or rule of aristocracy, or plutocracy, but of small groups elevated to positions of absolute power by random pressures and subject to political and economic factors that leave little room for decision.

They are representatives of abstract forces who’ve reached power through surrender of self. The iron-willed dictator is a thing of the past. There will be no more Stalins, no more Hitlers.

The rulers of this most insecure of all worlds are rulers by accident, inept, frightened pilots at the controls of a vast machine they cannot understand, calling in experts to tell them which buttons to push.

The thing about the ancient god-meme of Dominion is that it's a dragon eating itself. Avedon yesterday, on Corruption:

...Fundamental to the freedoms of our society is the idea that we try to prevent corruption throughout the system. Although we have never perfected that, we have managed to maintain at least the ideal that we prosecute officials who are involved in bribery, extortion, or other abuses of the system for personal or partisan gain.

The parts of the world we have always regarded as barbarous have been those where bribes and cronyism were more the standard than the exception. It is taken for granted there that prosecutions are matters of political favor, that people are tortured, that bribery and extortion are how the government runs.

And those things are illegal in the United States, and it used to be illegal for any American official or company to be involved in bribery in dealings abroad. Is it still? Who can tell? For the last six years, we've seen it happen even on the Senate floor.

But at rock bottom, a system of law that applies equally to all, and a judicial system that, at least when it works, works to root out corruption in high places, is the assumption that makes our system possible. Without it, we can't even make a start at saying America is "a free country".

We never helped create a judicial system in Iraq.

As they have done in our own country, the administration has helped "elect" leaders in Iraq that are chosen not for their ability to administrate a troubled country, but to satisfy their political (and business) needs. The result for Iraq has been, obviously, a catastrophe. And Katrina was the flash that exposed this same philosophy for the American public - another catastrophe.

But an even larger disaster is waiting for us down the road if we do not stop them in their tracks. We cannot come to any conclusion in Iraq, we cannot restore our economy, we cannot begin to rebuild all that we've lost over the last six years, let alone what we lost from the beginning of the Reagan administration, if we don't first make a definitive statement that this is not what America is about and we will not put up with it - and that the price will be high for anyone who has been involved with it, or who tries it on us again...

Beyond any short term financial perks for the perpetrators of the Bush crime syndicate, this is the real goal of the group of aristocrat wanna-bees who would rule us: far more than hating liberalism per se, they want absolute control.

And so we come to the question: how to put an old demonic meme, the Worm Ouroboros of human nature, with genuine belief that "...better a hundred such [commoners] should die than one great man's hand be hampered," to rest?

  ¶ 7:10 AM 1 comments links to this post

  Bu$hie Wacking

From the Editorial page of The New York Pravda:

In his Senate testimony yesterday, Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, tried to be a “loyal Bushie,” a term Mr. Sampson used in his infamous e-mail message to describe what he was looking for in United States attorneys. But if Mr. Sampson was trying to fall on his sword, he had horrible aim. In testimony that got so embarrassing for the White House that the Republicans tried to cut it off, Mr. Sampson simply ended up making it clearer than ever that the eight prosecutors were fired for political reasons.

He provided more evidence, also, that the attorney general and other top Justice Department officials were dishonest in their initial statements about the firings.

Mr. Sampson flatly contradicted the attorney general’s claim that he did not participate in the selection of the prosecutors to be fired and never had a conversation about “where things stood.” Mr. Sampson testified that Mr. Gonzales was “aware of this process from the beginning,” and that the two men regularly discussed where things stood. Mr. Sampson also confirmed that Mr. Gonzales was at the Nov. 27 meeting where the selected prosecutors’ fates were sealed.

The hearing brought out evidence that Mr. Sampson also may have made false statements. A Feb. 23 letter to Congress based on information from Mr. Sampson stated that Karl Rove was not involved in replacing the United States attorney in Arkansas with Timothy Griffin, Mr. Rove’s former aide. Mr. Sampson could not convincingly explain why he wrote that, when he had said in an e-mail message two months earlier that getting Mr. Griffin appointed was “important” to Mr. Rove. He finally acknowledged that he had discussed the appointment with Mr. Rove’s two top aides.



The senators questioning Mr. Sampson pointed to a troubling pattern: many of the fired prosecutors were investigating high-ranking Republicans. He was asked if he was aware that the fired United States attorney in Nevada was investigating a Republican governor, that the fired prosecutor in Arkansas was investigating the Republican governor of Missouri, or that the prosecutor in Arizona was investigating two Republican members of Congress.

Mr. Sampson’s claim that he had only casual knowledge of these highly sensitive investigations was implausible, unless we are to believe that Mr. Gonzales runs a department in which the chief of staff is merely a political hack who has no hand in its substantive work. He added to the suspicions that partisan politics were involved when he made the alarming admission that in the middle of the Scooter Libby investigation, he suggested firing Patrick Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago who was the special prosecutor in the case.

The administration insists that purge was not about partisan politics. But Mr. Sampson’s alternative explanation was not very credible — that the decision about which of these distinguished prosecutors should be fired was left in the hands of someone as young and inept as Mr. Sampson. If this were an aboveboard, professional process, it strains credulity that virtually no documents were produced when decisions were made, and that none of his recommendations to Mr. Gonzales were in writing.

It is no wonder that the White House is trying to stop Congress from questioning Mr. Rove, Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, and other top officials in public, under oath and with a transcript. The more the administration tries to spin the prosecutor purge, the worse it looks.

  ¶ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  You can lead a NeoCon to knowledge, but you can't make him think.

Item:

HOUSTON - A Texas-sized area of Antarctica is thinning and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly in the long-term, polar ice experts said in wrapping up a three-day conference.



"Surprisingly rapid changes" are occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, an ice drainage system that faces the southern Pacific Ocean, the experts said in a statement, adding that more study was needed to determine how fast it was melting and how much it could cause sea levels to rise.



The warning came Wednesday at the end of a conference of U.S. and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin...

[thanks for the tip, Woody]

Item:

HOBART, Australia - The impact of global warming on the vast Southern Ocean around Antarctica is starting to pose a threat to ocean currents that distribute heat around the world, Australian scientists say, citing new deep-water data.

Melting ice-sheets and glaciers in Antarctica are releasing fresh water, interfering with the formation of dense "bottom water," which sinks 2-3 miles to the ocean floor and helps drive the world's ocean circulation system.

A slowdown in the system known as "overturning circulation" would affect the way the ocean, which absorbs 85 percent of atmospheric heat, carries heat around the globe...

"If the water gets fresh enough ... then it won't matter how much ice we form, we won't be able to make this water cold and salty enough to sink," said Steve Rintoul, a senior scientist at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency...

Water dense enough to sink to the ocean floor is formed in polar regions by surface water freezing, which concentrates salt in very cold water beneath the ice. The dense water then sinks.

Only a few places around Antarctica and in the northern Atlantic create water dense enough to sink to the ocean floor, making Antarctic "bottom water" crucial to global ocean currents.

But the freshening of Antarctic deep water was a sign that the "overturning circulation" system in the world's oceans might be slowing down, Rintoul said, and similar trends are occurring in the North Atlantic...

Rintoul, who has led teams tracking water density around the Antarctic through decades of readings, said his findings add to concerns about a "strangling" of the Southern Ocean by greenhouse gases and global warming.

Australian scientists warned last month that waters surrounding Antarctica were also becoming more acidic as they absorbed more carbon dioxide produced by nations burning fossil fuels.

Acidification of the ocean is affecting the ability of plankton — microscopic marine plants, animals and bacteria — to absorb carbon dioxide, reducing the ocean's ability to sink greenhouse gases to the bottom of the sea.

Rintoul said that global warming was also changing wind patterns in the Antarctic region, drawing them south away from the Australian mainland and causing declining rainfall in western and possibly eastern coastal areas.

This was contributing to drought in Australia, one of the world's top agricultural producers, he said.

And from behind Teh New York Pravda's Select firewall:

A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role.

In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip A. Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Mr. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

They were the first public statements on the issue by Mr. Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, he was the ''climate team leader'' for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby.

He was hired by Exxon Mobil after resigning in 2005 following reports on the editing in The New York Times. The White House said his resignation was not related to the disclosures...

And so it goes. How much ice melted in Antartica this winter? The data are there, even if they're not being released.

...Just a few years ago, the world's climate scientists predicted that Greenland wouldn't have much impact at all on sea level in the coming decades. But recent measurements show that Greenland's ice cap is melting much faster than expected.

These new data come from the NASA/German Aerospace Center's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace). Launched in March 2002, the twin Grace satellites circle the globe using gravity to map changes in Earth's mass 500 kilometers (310 miles) below. They are providing a unique way to monitor and understand Earth's great ice sheets and glaciers.



Grace measurements have revealed that in just four years, from 2002 to 2006, Greenland lost between 150 and 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year. One cubic kilometer is equal to about 264 billion gallons of water. That's enough melting ice to account for an increase in global sea level of as much as 0.5 millimeters (0.019 inches) per year, according to Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr of the University of Colorado, Boulder. They published their results in the scientific journal Nature last fall. Since global sea level has risen an average of three millimeters (0.1 inch) per year since 1993, Greenland's rapidly increasing contribution can't be overlooked.



"Before Grace, the change of Greenland's ice sheet was inferred by a combination of more regional radar and altimeter studies pieced together over many years, but Grace can measure changes in the weight of the ice directly and cover the entire ice sheet of Greenland every month," says Michael Watkins, Grace project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. However, as anyone who has ever been concerned about his or her weight knows, a number on a scale is just the beginning. In the five years that Grace has been flying, scientists have found ways to make the most of this new set of observations.

"Grace has a big footprint," says Watkins. "We can locate regions of greatest loss, but we can't see individual glaciers." However, Grace's spatial resolution is continually improving. In the most recent studies, he says, Grace has observed large ice losses in the southeast of Greenland, while other areas, such as the west coast, have shown losses as well...

As Grace celebrates its fifth birthday and begins its extended mission, "we're getting the picture into better focus," says Watkins, "and we're going to have a new wave of discoveries. Improving the post-glacial rebound model is going to help, especially in Antarctica, where post-glacial rebound has a big effect on the gravity signal. We're also going to be able to pinpoint areas of loss and better understand how the losses change from one particular year to the next. This will tell us more about the types and mechanisms of ice mass loss so we can make better predictions in the future."

While Grace provides a new and independent way to study Earth's ice sheets, it will take a combination of different tools, including laser altimeters, radar, and field studies, to sort out more clearly what's happening. "All technologies have different strengths and weaknesses," says Watkins. "Grace is the new piece. It shows us the big picture, while other measurements look at a smaller scale. We need to use them all together."

"We have to pay attention," Velicogna adds. "These ice sheets are changing much faster than we were expecting. Observations are the most powerful tool we have to know what is going on, especially when the changes - and what's causing them - are not obvious."

Well, they would be obvious, if the NOAA scientists could speak without a Commissar listening for Party purity and trying to axe the jobs of those stepping outside the Party line.  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Ignorance as the Bane of the Republic

The old South had its propagation of slavery as its distinguishing disfigurement.

I think the War was more about the Northern aristocracy wanting what the Southern aristocracy had than anything else. And vice versa. But you can not talk people into dying for anything less than a high and noble cause. Google "9/11" and "Iraq" and "Bush" if you contest this point. So slavery it became.

After the Civil War the Union robber barons moved in and took control. And hearts and minds. And with time even the Cause of the Confederacy. A whole new version of slavery developed without the nasty label but for the Almighty Dollar, good credit, and the American Dream.

Don't blame Southerners alone for the Empire. Admittedly, there is a historically high concentration of ignorant and scared wage slaves there, but believe it, they're everywhere. Outside of Detroit and Ann Arbor, the Confederate flag is as common in Michigan as Alabama. It seems every American to some extent has been brainwashed to support the aristocrats in their quest for Dominion.  ¶ 10:23 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Cyber Mercenaries Fightin' Terra by Controlling Your Information



Your tax dollars (damned sure not Bu$hie's Ba$e) Privately Contracting Out the War on Terra:

Opportunity Information:
Title: Information Warfare: Offensive and Defensive Counterinformation
Solicitation #: BAA-06-12-IFKA
Post Date: 2/8/2006
Response Date:
Document Type: Presolicitation Notice
NAICS Code: 541710 -- Research and Development in the Physical, Engineering, and Life Sciences

Description:
ANNOUNCEMENT TYPE: Initial announcement.
FUNDING OPPORTUNITY NUMBER: BAA 06-12-IFKA
CFDA Number: 12.800

DATES: It is recommended white papers be received by the following dates to maximize the possibility of award: FY 06 by 10 Mar 06; FY 07 by 1 May 06; FY 08 by 1 May 07 and, FY 09 by 1 May 08. White papers will be accepted until 2:00 p.m. Eastern time on 31 December 2009, but it is less likely that funding will be available in each respective fiscal year after the dates cited. FORMAL PROPOSALS ARE NOT BEING REQUESTED AT THIS TIME. See Section IV of this announcement for further details.

I. FUNDING OPPORTUNITY DESCRIPTION:

AFRL/IF is soliciting white papers to identify and develop technologies to enable a distributed information infrastructure that provides all the mechanisms and services required to allow the warfighters to craft their C4I information environments, including ability to establish distributed virtual staffs, to share a common consistent perception of the battlespace, and construct distributed task teams among sensors, shooters, movers, and command posts. These technologies will be applied across the full spectrum of cyber operations, in support of Air Force mission requirements. Specific technologies include, but are not limited to: network protocols, information adaptation, network management, routing technologies, adaptive interfaces, distributed information environments, multimedia services, adaptive security services, global resource management, architectures, computer and network risk assessment/management, vulnerability assessment, assurance techniques, detection of intrusions and misuse, network security, wireless information assurance, assessment of information damage, cyber forensics, recovery of information systems and computer networks to operational levels, and a full spectrum of active response and computer network attack techniques.

Information superiority is an integral part of air and space superiority, an Air Force doctrine. This gives the commander freedom from attack, the freedom to maneuver and the freedom to attack. Information superiority is that degree of information advantage of one force over another that permits the conduct of operations at a given time and place without prohibitive opposition. Information operations are not focused exclusively on information superiority and information operations alone is not sufficient to achieve information superiority. AFRL/IF has developed a responsive R&D technology program to help the US achieve information superiority. The technology research in this BAA will be focused in the following areas of information operations: influence operations, network warfare operations and electronic warfare operations.

Influence Operations: Focused on affecting the perceptions and behaviors of leaders, groups, or entire populations. Influence operations employ capabilities to affect behaviors, protect operations, communicate commander's intent and project accurate information to achieve desired effects across the cognitive domain. These effects should result in differing objectives. The military capabilities of influence operations are psychological operations, military deception, operations security, counterintelligence operations, counterpropoganda operations and public affairs operations.

Network Warfare Operations: The integrated planning, employment, and assessment of military capabilities to achieve desired effects across the interconnected analog and digital network portion of the battle space. Network warfare operations are conducted in the information domain through the combination of hardware, software, data and human interaction. The operational activities of network warfare operations are network attack, network defense and network warfare support...

[thanks Noah, who's the Man when it comes to this stuff]



I particularly like the idea of "Influence Operations: Focused on affecting the perceptions and behaviors of leaders, groups, or entire populations."

  ¶ 10:27 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Motivations and Incentives

Noah Shachtman points to this:

Defying a veto threat, the Democratic-controlled Senate narrowly signaled support Tuesday for the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraq by next March.

Noah asks:

Is John McCain right, that even "a second-year cadet at West Point will tell you if you announce to the enemy that you’re leaving, it’s a recipe for defeat?"

McCain knows better. You can not win a war without objectives. Over 600,000 Iraqi civilians are dead from this war. We can win every battle and still not win the good will of the Iraqi people.

The real motivation behind this war is the oil. Not as much as to sell it on the market, but to keep it in the ground, to be sold at a higher price on a later day. This is not a war worthy of the United States military.

This is a war that is draining the blood and the will from the best of us.

It seems that is an objective of this war, although it is not an objective of our forces.

There are people who don't like what America stands for.

People do attack us. But instead of declaring war- the opposition of one nation against the other- there are better ways to deal with such people.

Because these people attacking us are a not a nation. Armies and war are not the way to fight them. Their tactics beat our tactics even though we win every battle.

Why? Because the terrorists don't play the same game the military does. A blind crusading endless war plays exactly into the hands of the enemies of America. When our nation throws away its principles for an Empire, the terrorists win and our nation loses.

You can have a Democracy, or you can have an Empire, but you can not have both for long.  ¶ 7:25 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Unauthorized Biography

Dick Cheney by the Canadian Broadcasting Company, 2004.  ¶ 9:30 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Conspiracy Theory

Think Progress:

By a 329-78 vote, the House today followed the Senate in passing legislation that repeals a Patriot Act provision “that grants the Attorney General the authority to make indefinite interim appointments of U.S. Attorneys, who can then serve indefinitely without Senate confirmation.” The Gavel has details and video from the floor debate.

Gonzo's minions are pleading the 5th.

And this excellent comment by Abby strikes me:

There are conspiracy theories and then there are conspiracy theories…

How about this one:

The Patriot Act, a massive piece of complicated legislation was signed into law, in it’s final form, within 45 days of 9/11. That feat is impossible to achieve even in the best of circumstances, let alone at a time when every boss you need to consult is unavailable because the country just suffered the biggest attack on it’s home soil.

So when was it really written and why?

And by whom? As Spudge_Boy later says, the authors of the PNAC documents?

I agree with Jeff Wells about this. Why spend all of our time digging up six year old forensic evidence about 9/11, when the arrogance of the perpetrators is in print for all to see? These aren't superspy criminals we're after, they're corporate aristocrats, lazy, indolent, and clumsy. They like to gloat about their crimes, and all the evidence needs is a little sunlight to grow into an airtight case against them.  ¶ 9:03 PM 0 comments links to this post

  From the Department of Justice, With Love

The Ministry of Truth has nothing on these boys and girls. Laura Rozen:

John Doe in the Post: My National Security Letter Gag Order:

"Three years ago, I received a national security letter (NSL) in my capacity as the president of a small Internet access and consulting business. The letter ordered me to provide sensitive information about one of my clients. There was no indication that a judge had reviewed or approved the letter, and it turned out that none had. The letter came with a gag provision that prohibited me from telling anyone, including my client, that the FBI was seeking this information. Based on the context of the demand -- a context that the FBI still won't let me discuss publicly -- I suspected that the FBI was abusing its power and that the letter sought information to which the FBI was not entitled."

Read the whole thing. Kafkaesque and un-American. As John Doe writes:

"I recognize that there may sometimes be a need for secrecy in certain national security investigations. But I've now been under a broad gag order for three years, and other NSL recipients have been silenced for even longer. At some point -- a point we passed long ago -- the secrecy itself becomes a threat to our democracy. In the wake of the recent revelations, I believe more strongly than ever that the secrecy surrounding the government's use of the national security letters power is unwarranted and dangerous. I hope that Congress will at last recognize the same thing.

"There've been 140,000 such gag orders in this country with almost no terrorism prosecutions to show for the abuses, and no probable cause established. That is just over one for every 30,000 Americans, man woman and child. Is the gag order so the FBI can avoid accountability? So the public is not the wiser for the abuses taking place? Where are the folks with honor inside the FBI raising concerns about the abuses? Is Congress going to mandate DOJ Inspector General Glenn Fine to establish whether such abuses were committed intentionally or not in the next round?"

Update: It's against the law for the FBI to misuse NSLs and exigent circumstance letters as the DOJ IG has established it has, but a law to date violated by the law enforcers and therefore with no enforcement. What would be the result for "John Doe" to violate his seemingly unlawful gag order and appear say on 60 Minutes and blow this out of the water? For the ACLU to line up all of the recipients of NSLs it has been asked to represent? What would that be? A dozen? Twenty? A hundred? Five hundred? Or perhaps, that a TV news investigation program show them anonymously, in accordance with their gag orders, as various tools (voice disguise, etc.) would allow? Officials would be resigning and fired faster than you can say "Walter Reed," one can imagine. And let's just imagine that at some point in the next two years, not just the recipients of the unlawful NLSs, e.g. the Internet service providers, banks and telephone companies, but the targets of the illegal information requests, are identified? What will be their recourse to hold their government accountable? Most of all, how much of this will be determined to have been about issues unrelated to terrorism at all? How much of this was an excuse to spy on lots of people for whom it couldn't get warrants? 140,000 NSLs is a lot; is every one in 30,000 Americans really a legitimate subject in a terrorism investigation? That's kind of hard to believe.

  ¶ 1:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Der Plan

  ¶ 7:51 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Shadow Government and Proxy Servers

Tom over at Correntewire picked up on a post by Citizen 92 revealing the White House use of RNC email proxies to avoid official detection.

Lambert and Xan seem to be running with the ball in the comments. The practice is to say the least widespread. And unsurprising.  ¶ 6:40 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Can you call it a Democracy Without Votes?

Or a Republic without Representation?

Bill Moyers, to Occidental College in Los Angeles:

...Our political system is melting down, right here where you live.

A recent poll by the Public Policy Institute of California found that only 20% of voters last November believe your state will be a better place to live in the year 2025; 51% say it will be worse. Another poll by the New American Foundation - summed up in an article by Steven Hill in the January 28th San Francisco Chronicle - found that for the first time in modern California history, a majority of adults are not registered with either of the two major parties. Furthermore, writes Hill, "There is a widening breach between most of the 39 million people residing in California and the fewer than 9 million who actually vote." Here we are getting to the heart of the crisis today - the great divide that has opened in American life.

According to that New American Foundation study, frequent voters [in California] tend to be 45 and older, have household incomes of $60,000 or more, are homeowners, and have college degrees. In contrast, the 12 million nonvoters (7 million of whom are eligible to vote but are not registered) tend to be younger than 45, rent instead of own, have not been to College, and have incomes less than $60,000.

In other words, "Considering that California often has one of the lowest voter participation rates in the nation - in some elections only a little more that 1/3 of eligible voters participate - a small group of frequent voters, who are richer, whiter, and older than their nonvoting neighbors, form the majority that decides which candidates win and which ballot measures pass." The author of that report (Mark Baldassare) concludes: "Only about 15% of adult people make the decisions and that 15% doesn't look much life California overall."

We should not be surprised by the consequences: "Two Californias have emerged. One that votes and one that does not. Both sides inhabit the same state and must share the same resources, but only one side is electing the political leaders who divide up the pie."

You've got a big problem here. But don't feel alone. Across the country our 18th political system is failing to deal with basic realities. Despite Thomas Jefferson's counsel that we would need a revolution every 25 years to enable our governance to serve new generations, our structure - practically deified for 225 years - has essentially stayed the same while science and technology have raced ahead. A young writer I know, named Jan Frel, one of the most thoughtful practitioners of the emerging world of Web journalism, wrote me the other day to say: "We've gone way past ourselves. I see the unfathomable numbers in the national debt and deficit, and the way that the Federal government was physically unable to respond to Hurricane Katrina. I look at Iraq; where 50% of the question is how to get out, and the other 50% is how did so few people have the power to start the invasion in the first place. If the Republic were functioning, they would have never had that power."

Yet the inertia of the political process seems virtually unstoppable. Frel reminds me that the chairman of the Senate Budget Committee can shepherd a $2.8 trillion dollar budget through the Senate and then admit: "It's hard to understand what a trillion is. I don't know what it is." Is it fair to expect anyone to understand what a trillion is, my young friend asks, or how to behave with it in any democratic fashion?" He goes on: "But the political system and culture are forcing 535 members of Congress and a President who are often thousands of miles away from their 300 million constituents to do so. It is frightening to watch the American media culture from progressive to hard right being totally sold on the idea of one President for 300 million people, as though the Presidency is still fit to human scale. I'm at a point where the idea of a political savior in the guise of a Presidential candidate or congressional majority sounds downright scary, and at the same time, with very few exceptions, the writers and journalists across the slate are completely sold on it."

Our political system is promiscuous as well as primitive. The first modern fundraiser in American politics - Mark Hanna, who shook down the corporations to make William McKinley President of the United States in 1896 - once said there are two important things in politics. "One is money, and I can't remember the other one." Because our system feeds on campaign contributions, the powerful and the privileged shape it to their will. Only 12% of American households had incomes over $100,000 in 2000, but they made up 95% of the substantial donors to campaigns and have been the big winners in Washington ever since...

...
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether "We, the People" is a spiritual idea embedded in a political reality - one nation, indivisible - or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.

We seem to be holding our breath today, trying to decide what kind of country we want to be. But in this state of suspension, powerful interests are making off with the booty. They remind me of the card shark in Texas who said to his competitor in the poker game: "Now play the cards fairly Reuben. I know what I dealt you."

For years now a small fraction of American households have been garnering a larger and larger concentration of wealth and income, while large corporations and financial institutions have obtained unprecedented power over who wins and who loses. Inequality in America is greater than it's been in 50 years. In 1960 the gap in terms of wealth between the top 20% and the bottom 20% was 30 fold. Today it's more than 75 fold.

Such concentrations of wealth would be far less of an issue if the rest of society were benefiting proportionally. But that is not the case. Throughout our industrial history incomes grew at 30% to 50% or more every quarter, and in the quarter century after WWII, gains reached more than 100% for all income categories. Since the late 1970s, only the top 1% of households increased their income by 100%.

Once upon a time, according to Isabel Sawhill and Sara McLanahan in The Future of Children, the American ideal of classless society was 'one in which all children have roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they were born. That's changing fast. The Economist Jeffrey Madrick writes that just a couple of decades ago, only 20% of one's future income was determined by the income of one's father. New research suggests that today 60% of a son's income is determined by the level of his father's income. In other words, children no longer have a roughly equal chance of success regardless of the economic status of the family into which they are born. Their chances of success are greatly improved if they are born on third base and their father has been tipping the umpire.

As all of you know, a college education today is practically a necessity if you are to hold your own, much less climb the next rung. More than 40% of all new jobs now require a college degree. There are real world consequences to this, and Madrick drives them home. Since the 1970s, median wages of men with college degrees have risen about 14%. But median wages for high school graduates have fallen about 15%. Not surprisingly, nearly 24% of American workers with only a high school diploma have no health insurance, compared with less than 10% of those with college degrees.

Such statistics can bring glaze to the eyes, but Oscar Wilde once said that it is the mark of truly educated people to be deeply moved by statistics. All of you are educated, and I know you can envision the stress these economic realities are putting on working people and on family life. As incomes have stagnated, higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen faster in price than typical family incomes, so that life, says Jeffrey Madrick, "has grown neither calm nor secure for most Americans, by any means..."

..."Things have reached such a state of affairs," the journalist George Orwell once wrote, "that the first duty of every intelligent person is to pay attention to the obvious." The editors of The Economist have done just that. The pro-business magazine considered by many to be the most influential defender of capitalism on the newsstand, produced a sobering analysis of what is happening to the old notion that any American child can get to the top. A growing body of evidence - some of it I have already cited - led the editors to conclude that with "income inequality growing to levels not seen since the Gilded Age and social mobility falling behind, the United States risks calcifying into a European-style class-based society." The editors point to an "education system increasingly stratified by social class" in which poor children "attend schools with fewer resources than those of their richer contemporaries" and great universities that are "increasingly reinforcing rather than reducing these educational inequalities." They conclude that America's great companies have made it harder than ever "for people to start at the bottom and rise up the company hierarchies by dint of hard work and self-improvement."

It is eerie to read assessments like that and then read the anthropologist Jared Diamond's book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Succeed or Fail He describes an America society in which elites cocoon themselves "in gated communities, guarded by private security guards, and filled with people who drink bottled water, depend on private pensions, and send their children to private schools." Gradually, they lose the motivation "to support the police force, the municipal water supply, Social Security, and public schools." Any society contains a built-in blueprint for failure, warns Jared Diamond, if elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions.

So it is that in a study of its own, The American Political Science Association found that "increasing inequalities threaten the American ideal of equal citizenship and that progress toward real democracy may have stalled in this country and even reversed..."

Beginning a quarter of a century ago a movement of corporate, political, and religious fundamentalists gained ascendancy over politics and made inequality their goal. They launched a crusade to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that have held private power. And they had the money to back up their ambition.

Let me read you something:

When powerful interests shower Washington with millions in campaign contributions, they often get what they want. But it is ordinary citizens and firms that pay the price and most of them never see it coming. This is what happens if you don't contribute to their campaigns or spend generously on lobbying. You pick up a disproportionate share of America's tax bill. You pay higher prices for a broad range of products from peanuts to prescriptions. You pay taxes that others in a similar situation have been excused from paying. You're compelled to abide by laws while others are granted immunity from them. You must pay debts that you incur while others do not. You're barred from writing off on your tax returns some of the money spent on necessities while others deduct the cost of their entertainment. You must run your business by one set of rules, while the government creates another set for your competitors. In contrast, the fortunate few who contribute to the right politicians and hire the right lobbyists enjoy all the benefits of their special status. Make a bad business deal; the government bails them out. If they want to hire workers at below market wages, the government provides the means to do so. If they want more time to pay their debts, the government gives them an extension. If they want immunity from certain laws, the government gives it. If they want to ignore rules their competition must comply with, the government gives its approval. If they want to kill legislation that is intended for the public, it gets killed.

I'm not quoting from Karl Marx's Das Kapital or Mao's Little Red Book. I'm quoting Time Magazine. From the heart of America's media establishment comes the judgment that America now has "government for the few at the expense of the many..."

  ¶ 9:32 PM 2 comments links to this post

  The Message of the Circle of Life

From the day we arrive on the planet
And, blinking, step into the sun
There's more to see than can ever be seen
More to do than can ever be done

There's far too much to take in here
More to find than can ever be found
But the sun rolling high
Through the sapphire sky
Keeps great and small on the endless round

It's the Circle of Life
And it moves us all
Through despair and hope
Through faith and love

Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life...

[Spring, 2001]

Poppy: Look, Dubya. Everything the light touches is our kingdom.
Dubya: Wow.

{The camera revolves around them, during
Poppy's speech, from a reverse view to a frontal shot.}



Poppy: A king's time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. One day, Dubya, the sun will set on my time here, and will rise with you as the new king.
Dubya: And this will all be mine?

Poppy: Everything.
Dubya: Everything the light touches. {Dubya looks all around. He sees a map in Poppy's daily intellgence briefing in his golf bag, picks it out an examines it while Poppy eyes his next shot.} What about that shadowy place?

Poppy: That's beyond our borders. You must never go there, Dubya.
Dubya: But I thought a king can do whatever he wants.

Poppy: Oh, there's more to being king than... getting your way all the time.

{Poppy starts back down the golf course}

Dubya: {Awed} There's more?

Poppy: {Chuckles} Dubya...

{Camera switch. Poppy and Dubya are out walking on the green.}

Poppy: Everything you see exists together, in a delicate balance. As king, you need to understand that balance, and respect all the creatures-- from the crawling factory worker to the leaping limousine liberal.
Dubya: But, Dad, don't we eat the DINOcrat?

Poppy: Yes, Dubya, but let me explain. When we die, our bodies become the grass. And the Democrats buy the grass. And so we are all connected in the great Circle of Life. It's okay to be prey, it's good to be the king, but the best lives belong to those who help us in the hunt.




...

Till we find our place
On the path unwinding
In the Circle
The Circle of Life

A place for every human, and every human in their place. And it's okay to be prey. This is the message of the circle of life to the compassionate conservative, who has his own.  ¶ 2:43 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Better PR Than the Merchant Alliance

From The Spy Who Billed Me:

...DynCorp is still fretting over its bad press from the January Special Inspector General Report for Iraqi Reconstruction alleged DynCorp had improperly spent funds on 20 VIP trailers and an Olympic-size pool as well as over $36 million for body armor, armored vehicles and weapons it couldn't account. It's response: hire Qorvis, PR firm to the Saudi government...

Subvert the Republic for Empire, spread Fear in your misguided quest for Order throughout the Galaxy, some would respect you for that. But pastels?  ¶ 9:32 PM 0 comments links to this post

  One Stop Gonzogate Digest

Like cd points out, the attempted firing of the U.S. Prosecutors isn't just political, it's a sound business decision from the Company point of view.

It saved the tobacco industry $120 billion!

Corrente has had a lot to say about Gonzogate today.

Not Again, WaPo, More Covering Up For the White House?, Bush: revealing my crimes hurts the victims, cd's piece above, What's at stake in the USA firings [the Anonymous answer: "Complete politicization of the Justice Department empowers the administration to immunize criminals and to criminalize innocents"], Menu Foods Knew They Were Killing Your Dog ["No Gonzogate here"? What happens when corporations know they won't be prosecuted? You and your pooch go to the dogs], Rove: Still Safe from Congress?, Froomkin cranks knobs up to 11, brings the shrill, and No compromise on USA firings!

Let's hope not.  ¶ 8:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Ex-Agents Speak to the Company

Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) tries to communicate with the Dem Senate the same way it tried to tell the 'Thuglicans and the Preznit that Colin Powell (among others) was blowing gas at them about Iraq's WMD. But the Flatulence-in-Chief knew that all along. It was his gas, after all.

It's current talking points?

* The vast majority of the violence in Iraq is sectarian in nature and involves a multifaceted civil war mostly pitting Sunnis against Shias. However, the violence also entails secular Sunnis fighting Sunni extremists linked to al-Qaeda and secular Shias battling Shia extremists. The civil war aspect includes (as the January NIE put it) "the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements": in other words, a rabid dog fight with our troops in between. The only thing the various factions share is unflinching opposition to US occupation. But the notion that there is a monolithic group of "insurgents" or "enemy" falls far wide of the mark.

* Strategy in Iraq is based on the false assumptions that the "people" and the "insurgents" in Iraq are two distinct and opposing groups, and that US and Iraqi forces will be able to "clear" the insurgents and "hold" the people. In fact, the resistance will be suppressed in one area, only to re-emerge somewhere else (the attempt to suppress is appropriately called "Operation Whack-a-Mole"). It goes against virtually all historical precedent to suppose that an unwelcome invader with 150,000 troops - and Iraqi security forces that the NIE judged to be "persistently weak" - can occupy and subdue a large country with a population of 26 million and long-porous borders.

* The United States does not have enough military forces on the ground in Iraq to provide effective control of the cities and key regions to prevent violence and destroy insurgent infrastructure. Moreover, the US lacks sufficient soldiers and Marines in its current globally deployed force to provide sustained reinforcements. And absent is the political will to bring back the draft to obtain the number of troops required to get better control of the situation on the ground in Iraq. Even with a draft, the United States would require two years at a minimum to train and organize the new units for any mission in Iraq. Given these facts, there is no military solution to the situation in Iraq.

* A surge in US troops in specific areas, specifically Baghdad, may bring more than a momentary lessening in the violence, but it will not end the fighting. In fact, this concentrated surge will enable insurgent forces in other areas of the country to expand their operations and control. A de facto partitioning of Iraq is under way. Since the surge started, we have already seen an increase in violence in the Kurdish-controlled north.

* At current casualty rates, twelve more months will mean at least 1,000 additional US troops killed and 18 more months will bring at least 1,500 - not to mention Iraqis killed, and thousands upon thousands seriously wounded. The various Iraqi insurgent groups will probably fade into the woodwork for a while, but at a time and place of their choosing they will surely be back, in force. In the end, aside from the deaths, nothing lasting will have been achieved.

* Senior US civilian and military officials still don't get it. "They can't beat us in a stand-up fight," bragged our vice president just two months ago, echoing recent words of a US Army colonel in Iraq. This completely misses the point, and calls to mind the sad month of April 1975, when Col. Harry Summers was sent to negotiate with a North Vietnamese colonel the terms of American withdrawal from Vietnam. Summers reported the following exchange: "'You know, you never beat us on the battlefield,' I said to Colonel Tu, my North Vietnamese counterpart. 'That may be so,' he said, 'but it is also irrelevant.'"

* The critical parts of Iraq - Baghdad and southern Iraq - will be under the control of the Shia. Iran in turn will try to expand its aid and influence among both the Shia populace and the secular Sunnis.

* The US occupation continues to be a windfall for terrorist recruiters. An NIE of April 2006 on terrorism noted that the war in Iraq has become a primary recruitment vehicle for violent Islamic extremists, whose numbers, it said, may be increasing faster than the US can reduce the threat. There is wide consensus among experienced observers that the war in Iraq makes it immensely more difficult to deal with the real threat of international terrorism.

* Violence in Iraq, at least for the midterm, will continue regardless of the presence. Once a departure is under way, there is an increased likelihood that the Sunnis and Shias will move toward a political accommodation of some sort, since at that point neither can count on the United States to fight on their side. The only thing in doubt is the timing of the US departure, and whether it can be accomplished without the massacres the British experienced trying to extricate themselves from earlier expeditions into Iraq. The lack of a substantial military presence in Iraq will have the counterintuitive effect of increasing the likelihood that neighboring countries will be more willing to take steps to help reduce the violence in Iraq.

Not that the Company cares, but it's nice to know somebody does.  ¶ 9:27 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The New Phantom Menace

Jeff Wells doesn't go for the "KSM did it all" and the "Forget Al-Qaeda, we've got bigger problems!" meme. He thinks we've got bigger problems alright, but forgeting Al-Qaeda is not just a bug, it's a feature of the worm.

[By the way, what do you think happened to his kids? I'd confess to pimping for Bill Clinton too, if it'd keep my kids from getting raped in Abu Gitmo...]

It's a recent trend of the 9-11 conspiracy chic to forget about Osama, whether propagated by internet flamethrowers or the White House. For example see the disinformational "Loose Change", where Osama is asserted as the fall guy if not written out of the plot altogether. Remember, the slickest way to lie is to tell part of the truth.

Coincidently, it's also the tack the Cheneyburton administration has been taking for awhile now. KSM was da man, Osama's a bit player, they say, really the danger is Iran, we've got the real perps, and pay no attention to the Saudis behind the curtain. Or the wealthy western oilmen, either. Or the people on the ground in Iraq.

Jeff Wells reminds us of the 2004 9/11 Citizens' Commission:

...watch anti-fascist researcher John Judge deconstruct the official Commission report, beginning with the simple question, "Who wrote it?" Authorship is unascribed, but it's written in a "lucid, almost novelistic" fashion, with a single voice. Judge mentions the Warren Commission Report also had a single, anonymous author, brought over from the Pentagon's Army Historical Division. Otto Winnacker's previous employer had been Adolph Hitler, as one of 26 official historians of Nazi Germany.

Watch Michael Springmann, former State Department diplomat, testify that the CIA were running the Jeddah consulate, instructing officials to issue visas to terrorists for reasons of "national security." Fifteen of the 9/11 hijackers received their visas through Jeddah.

Watch Indira Singh describe her discovery of PTech's deep black links to both US security infrastructure and global narco-terror ("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," says Singh), the sheltering of al qaeda financier Yassin al-Qadi (he "talked very highly of his relationship" with Dick Cheney, claims PTech's CEO Oussama Ziade), and the two years PTech spent with Mitre in the "FAA's basement" prior to 911.

Watch Paul Thompson rattle off ignored intelligence, the Randy Glass story (which some may find of particular interest since Glass claims he was told by Pakistani intelligence prior to 9/11 that "those towers are coming down"), and the triangulation of the ISI, the CIA and al Qaeda. Then there are the wargames, the reconstruction of Cheney's command and control, Sibel Edmonds.....

Any wagers on how often controlled demolition is mentioned?

It's a bit wistful and over the shoulder, viewing these now: this Truth Movement moment seems much longer ago than a mere three years. Is this the same 9/11 I hear about today? Because I hear none of these things anymore. Is this the same "Truth Movement"? Because today's sounds nothing like this. Is this even the same truth?

...Some of the most damning evidence presented by Classic Truth is that which ties state power to supra-state terror and criminality. Peter Dale Scott's definition of Deep Politics is "the constant, everyday interaction between the constitutionally elected government and forces of violence, forces of crime, which appear to be the enemies of that government." Al Qaeda, a creature of intelligence agencies, is one such node of contemporary deep politics. As recently as the mid-90s its Mujahadeen were NATO's unambiguous partner in Bosnia, helping to secure and profit by the Balkan trade route of Afghan heroin into Europe. The CIA were demanding visas for al Qaeda operatives in the consulate of bin Laden's hometown, and an al Qaeda financier was also hardwired into Washington's security apparatus. 9/11 cells were hosted by FBI informants and their flight schools were up to their altimeters in Iran-Contra-like narco-dollars. Al Qaeda's structure was penetrated up to the senior operational level, possibly including assets of ambiguous loyalty who helped plan and fund the attacks. (For instance Fort Bragg instructor and FBI informant Ali Mohammed, who trained those involved in the 1993 WTC bombing, oversaw al Qaeda's relocation to Afghanistan and taught hijackers how to smuggle box cutters onto aircraft.)

New Truth hamstrings itself - and perhaps on the part of some, that's the entire point of New Truth - by clearing the table of everything pertaining to al Qaeda and defining "inside job" as merely "inside the Beltway." Because it is by their parapolitical linkages to, and patronage of, the very forces of violence which appear to be their enemy, that governments most condemn themselves.

Doing away with all that does away with much of the High Crime, which a few might think a good thing. Watch the 2004 videos. How does the health and rigor and scope of New Truth compare? Which do you think the High Criminals prefer?

  ¶ 9:09 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Centurion's Lament

Chris Floyd has two interesting and informative pieces up today.

First, the Centurions need more denari and probably a slave army or two might help.

Rarely has the imperial hubris that lies at the basis of U.S. foreign policy – the unspoken, unquestioned assumption of America's right to global domination by force – been so nakedly revealed than in the recent Washington Post story decrying the degraded state of the Pentagon's military preparedness. ("Military is Ill-Prepared for Other Conflicts.") What makes the story so remarkable, and so valuable as a diagnostic tool for the health of the Republic (which could perhaps be most accurately described as "the sickness unto death") is that none of the generals or politicians quoted in the story – nor the writer herself – betray the slightest awareness of the moral obscenity upon which all their earnest concerns and diligent fact-finding are based.

On its surface, at the level of meaning it intends to convey to readers, the story is disturbing enough. The upshot is that Bush's reckless and stupid war of aggression in Iraq has plunged American military stocks and manpower reserves into a "death spiral" of depletion that will take years – and untold billions of dollars – to replenish. This in turn has put the United States in a horribly exposed strategic position, with the Pentagon incapable of responding "quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises," as the Post puts it. For example, the Army no longer has even a single brigade "ready to deploy within hours to an overseas hot spot," we're told. The highest brass – Joint Chief Chairman Gen. Peter Pace, Army chief of staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker, and his vice chief, Gen. Richard Cody – attest, under oath, to the woeful state of unreadiness. Anonymous "senior officers" interviewed by the reporter then make clear the implications of their bosses' plaintive but coded warnings: the Iraq War is bleeding us dry.

On the second level of meaning – which the reporter may or may not have consciously intended to put across – we find something equally disturbing. Note well what the nation's top military officer, General Pace, has to say about this state of unreadiness:

In earlier House testimony, Pace said the military, using the Navy, Air Force and reserves, could handle one of three major contingencies, involving North Korea or -- although he did not name them -- Iran or China. But, he said, "It will not be as precise as we would like, nor will it be on the timelines that we would prefer, because we would then, while engaged in one fight, have to reallocate resources and remobilize the Guard and reserves."


The true import here is not so much the casualness with which these Beltway players – the generals, the legislators and the reporters – regard the prospect of war with North Korea, Iran and China as an unavoidable natural fact, something that is bound to happen sooner or later, and for which we must be massively steeled. This attitude is troubling, of course, but it's hardly news. No, what gives cause for the greatest immediate concern in Pace's remarks is his observation that in a coming "major contingency" – such as the all-but-inevitable attack on Iran – the Pentagon's campaign "will not be as precise as we would like." What is this but a tacit admission that when push comes to shove with Tehran, the United States will have to go in with a sledgehammer, lashing out left and right – no "surgical strike" against alleged nuclear facilities, but a blunderbuss assault, with the attendant "collateral damage" and destruction of civilian infrastructure that we have seen in Iraq (twice), Kosovo, Panama, Vietnam and other "contingencies."

Again, all of this is bad enough in itself. But it is the third level of meaning – never expressed either directly or indirectly but embodied by the story as a whole -- that is the most profoundly disturbing. The present state of affairs leaves the nation at grave risk, we are told. Why? Because it leaves the United States somewhat hobbled in its ability to impose its will military on any nation or region it so chooses. Again, attend to General Pace as he tells Congress that he is "not comfortable" with the Army's readiness:

"You take a lap around the globe -- you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There's no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces," Pace warned in his testimony.

This is not the statement of a military officer serving in the armed forces of a democratic republic devoted to the life, liberty and pursuit of happiness of its citizens. This is the action list of a Roman general seeking more funds so that he might fulfill Caesar's commands for further conquests and punitive raids beyond the frontiers of the Empire...

But why go abroad when you can serve your Caesar at home? There seem to be lots of wanna-bee Centurions- brave as long as they're backed by someone else's real muscle.

This weekend someone tried to create a situation that could precipitate an invocation of martial law:

Winter Patriot has an important post up at his place, with eyewitness accounts of the treatment doled out to anti-war protestors in Washington on Saturday by bellicose"counter-protestors," who were sometimes backed by the authorities on the scene in their attacks and attempts to block legitimate, patriotic dissent.

Of course, it's not surprising that a group of pro-war marchers came out in opposition to the anti-war rally. That's a good thing; it represents freedom of speech, politics in action, etc. What is disturbing, however, is that many of counter-demonstrators were spurred to action -- and anger -- by patently false reports disseminated by the right-wing propaganda network: ludicrous charges that the anti-war protestors planned to deface the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. As one of WP's correspondents put it:

Somehow they felt a bunch of peace activists were going to damage the national monument which bears the names of over 55,000 dead soldiers who gave their lives in the illegal, immoral war for profit of 40 years ago...To me, it was nothing less than astonishing to see that a number of people have been so brainwashed to believe that we are anti-troop, don’t know the value of freedom and are “anti-democracy”. What was more astonishing were those that were completely ignorant of the Bill of Rights, that they challenged and acted physically aggressive to the peace activists, minding their own business, trying to get to the march.

The baseless call to "defend" the Memorial was almost certainly a deliberate "psy-ops" action designed to foment rage and disrupt the protest. No doubt its designers hoped that the anti-war protestors would react with violence to the often extreme provocations they faced from the stirred-up pro-war packs. They failed in this aim, but the response they drew from the false and virulent propaganda could well serve as a template for further, larger actions along the same lines.

Whether this plan emerged directly from the clotted bowels of the Bush Administration itself or sprang from one of the many private right-wing hate factories makes little difference; the official and non-official wings of the extremist Right have long since merged...

Sadly, No gives us "The Anatomy of a Con Job," detailing just how the Malkinite toadies hyped the imaginary "threat" to the Memorial -- and how they are now busily constructing an alternate reality trumpeting the success of their "Eagles" in preventing an imaginary threat by showing up in imaginary numbers. (The wingnut wire universally claims that 30,000 pro-war whoopers came out on the march, offering non-existent estimates by government agencies as "proof" of their fantasizing...)

A psychological operation apparently designed by non-professionals and implemented upon the ignorant.  ¶ 9:48 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Long Doublethink on Terra

What more can I add to Frank Rich's The Ides of March 2003?

...March 6, 2003

President Bush holds his last prewar news conference. The New York Observer writes that he interchanged Iraq with the attacks of 9/11 eight times, “and eight times he was unchallenged.” The ABC News White House correspondent, Terry Moran, says the Washington press corps was left “looking like zombies.”

March 7, 2003

Appearing before the United Nations Security Council on the same day that the United States and three allies (Britain, Spain and Bulgaria) put forth their resolution demanding that Iraq disarm by March 17, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Mohamed ElBaradei, reports there is “no evidence or plausible indication of the revival of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq.”. He adds that documents “which formed the basis for the report of recent uranium transaction between Iraq and Niger are in fact not authentic.” None of the three broadcast networks’ evening newscasts mention his findings.

[In 2005 ElBaradei was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.]

March 10, 2003

Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks tells an audience in England, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Boycotts, death threats and anti-Dixie Chicks demonstrations follow.

[In 2007, the Dixie Chicks won five Grammy Awards, including best song for “Not Ready to Make Nice.”]

March 12, 2003

A senior military planner tells The Daily News “an attack on Iraq could last as few as seven days.”

“Isn’t it more likely that antipathy toward the United States in the Islamic world might diminish amid the demonstrations of jubilant Iraqis celebrating the end of a regime that has few equals in its ruthlessness?”

— John McCain, writing for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times.

“The Pentagon still has not given a name to the Iraqi war. Somehow ‘Operation Re-elect Bush’ doesn’t seem to be popular.”

— Jay Leno, “The Tonight Show.”

March 14, 2003

Senator John D. Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, asks the F.B.I. to investigate the forged documents cited a week earlier by El Baradei and alleging an Iraq-Niger uranium transaction: “There is a possibility that the fabrication of these documents may be part of a larger deception campaign aimed at manipulating public opinion and foreign policy regarding Iraq.”

March 16, 2003

On “Meet the Press,” Dick Cheney says that American troops will be “greeted as liberators,” that Saddam “has a longstanding relationship with various terrorist groups, including the Al Qaeda organization,” and that it is an “overstatement” to suggest that several hundred thousand troops will be needed in Iraq after it is liberated. Asked by Tim Russert about ElBaradei’s statement that Iraq does not have a nuclear program, the vice president says, “I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong.”

“There will be new recruits, new recruits probably because of the war that’s about to happen. So we haven’t seen the last of Al Qaeda.”

— Richard Clarke, former White House counterterrorism czar, on ABC’s “This Week.”

[From the recently declassified “key judgments” of the National Intelligence Estimate of April 2006: “The Iraq conflict has become the cause célèbre for jihadists, breeding a deep resentment of U.S. involvement in the Muslim world and cultivating supporters for the global jihadist movement.”]

“Despite the Bush administration’s claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, U.S. intelligence agencies have been unable to give Congress or the Pentagon specific information about the amounts of banned weapons or where they are hidden, according to administration officials and members of Congress. Senior intelligence analysts say they feel caught between the demands from White House, Pentagon and other government policy makers for intelligence that would make the administration’s case ‘and what they say is a lack of hard facts,’ one official said.”

— “U.S. Lacks Specifics on Banned Arms,” by Walter Pincus (with additional reporting by Bob Woodward), The Washington Post, Page A17.

March 17, 2003

Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, who voted for the Iraq war resolution, writes the president to ask why the administration has repeatedly used W.M.D. evidence that has turned out to be “a hoax” — “correspondence that indicates that Iraq sought to obtain nuclear weapons from an African country, Niger.”

[Still waiting for “an adequate explanation” of the bogus Niger claim four years later, Waxman, now chairman of the chief oversight committee in the House, wrote Condoleezza Rice on March 12, 2007, seeking a response “to multiple letters I sent you about this matter.”]

In a prime-time address, President Bush tells Saddam to leave Iraq within 48 hours: “Every measure has been made to avoid war, and every measure will be taken to win it.” After the speech, NBC rushes through its analysis to join a hit show in progress, “Fear Factor,” where men and women walk with bare feet over broken glass to win $50,000.

March 18, 2003

Barbara Bush tells Diane Sawyer on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that she will not watch televised coverage of the war: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths, and how many, what day it’s going to happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it’s, it’s not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?”

[Visiting the homeless victims of another cataclysm, Hurricane Katrina, at the Houston Astrodome in 2005, Mrs. Bush said, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this — this is working very well for them.”]

In one of its editorials strongly endorsing the war, The Wall Street Journal writes, “There is plenty of evidence that Iraq has harbored Al Qaeda members.”

[In a Feb. 12, 2007, editorial defending the White House’s use of prewar intelligence, The Journal wrote, “Any links between Al Qaeda and Iraq is a separate issue that was barely mentioned in the run-up to war.”]

In an article headlined “Post-war ‘Occupation’ of Iraq Could Result in Chaos,” Mark McDonald of Knight Ridder Newspapers quotes a “senior leader of one of Iraq’s closest Arab neighbors,” who says, “We’re worried that the outcome will be civil war.”

A questioner at a White House news briefing asserts that “every other war has been accompanied by fiscal austerity of some sort, often including tax increases” and asks, “What’s different about this war?” Ari Fleischer responds, “The most important thing, war or no war, is for the economy to grow,” adding that in the president’s judgment, “the best way to help the economy to grow is to stimulate the economy by providing tax relief.”

After consulting with the homeland security secretary, Tom Ridge, the N.C.A.A. announces that the men’s basketball tournament will tip off this week as scheduled. The N.C.A.A. president, Myles Brand, says, “We were not going to let a tyrant determine how we were going to lead our lives.”

March 19, 2003

“I’d guess that if it goes beyond three weeks, Bush will be in real trouble.”

— Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army colonel teaching at Boston University, quoted in The Washington Post.

[“Many parts of Iraq are stable. But of course what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.”

— Laura Bush, “Larry King Live,” Feb. 26, 2007.]

[The March 2007 installment of the Congressionally mandated Pentagon assessment “Measuring Stability and Security in Iraq” reported (.pdf) that from Jan. 1 to Feb. 9, 2007, there were more than 1,000 weekly attacks, up from about 400 in spring 2004.]

Robert McIlvaine, whose 26-year-old son was killed at the World Trade Center 18 months earlier, is arrested at a peace demonstration at the Capitol in Washington. He tells The Washington Post: “It’s very insulting to hear President Bush say this is for Sept. 11.”

“I don’t think it is reasonable to close the door on inspections after three and a half months,” when Iraq’s government is providing more cooperation than it has in more than a decade.

— Hans Blix, chief weapons inspector for the United Nations.

The Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that 71 percent of Americans support going to war in Iraq, up from 59 percent before the president’s March 17 speech.

“When the president talks about sacrifice, I think the American people clearly understand what the president is talking about.”

— Ari Fleischer

[Asked in January 2007 how Americans have sacrificed, President Bush answered: “I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.”]

Pentagon units will “locate and survey at least 130 and as many as 1,400 possible weapons sites.”

— “Disarming Saddam Hussein; Teams of Experts to Hunt Iraq Arms” by Judith Miller, The Times, Page A1.

President Bush declares war from the Oval Office in a national address: “Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly, yet our purpose is sure.”

Price of a share of Halliburton stock: $20.50

[Value of that Halliburton share on March 16, 2007, adjusted for a split in 2006: $64.12.]

March 20, 2003

“The pictures you’re seeing are absolutely phenomenal. These are live pictures of the Seventh Cavalry racing across the deserts in southern Iraq. They will — it will be days before they get to Baghdad, but you’ve never seen battlefield pictures like these before.”

— Walter Rodgers, an embedded CNN correspondent...

“Coalition forces suffered their first casualties in a helicopter crash that left 12 Britons and 4 Americans dead.”

— The Associated Press...

March 21, 2003

“I don’t mean to be glib about this, or make it sound trite, but it really is a symphony that has to be orchestrated by a conductor.”

— Retired Maj. Gen. Donald Shepperd, CNN military analyst, speaking to Wolf Blitzer of the bombardment of Baghdad during Shock and Awe...

“The president may occasionally turn on the TV, but that’s not how he gets his news or his information. ... He is the president, he’s made his decisions and the American people are watching him.”

— Ari Fleischer.

[The former press secretary received immunity from prosecution in the Valerie Wilson leak case and testified in the perjury trial of Scooter Libby in 2007.]

“Peter, I may be going out on a limb, but I’m not sure that the first stage of this Shock and Awe campaign is really going to frighten the Iraqi people. In fact, it may have just the opposite effect. If they feel that they’ve survived the most that the United States can throw at them and they’re still standing, and they’re still able to go about their lives, well, then they might be rather emboldened. They might feel that, well, look, we can stand a lot more than this.”

— Richard Engel, a Baghdad correspondent speaking to Peter Jennings on ABC’s “World News Tonight.”

Perhaps a recap of the War on Terra at the Ides of March 2007, by David Michael Green:

...Has there ever been an American administration which wrapped itself so tightly in the flag? Have we ever had a government which hid its policies so carefully behind their supposed interest in the welfare of the troops? If you didn’t know any better (which was precisely the idea) you’d have thought these people were tough American war veterans themselves, tempered in the crucible of battle, and now just empathetically looking out for the welfare of today’s kids in situations similar to those in which they had once found themselves.

Never mind that none of them bothered to make their way over to Nam and pitch-in during their day. Except, of course, the only one who opposed the war (privately, that is, while he was selling it publicly at the United Nations). The same one they dumped right after the next election. But Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Rice – somehow none of these hyperpatriots ever managed to translate their jingoistic enthusiasm into actually putting themselves into harm’s way.

And yet any American – even (or is it especially?) a real combat veteran – who dares doubt the wisdom of the president’s breathtakingly transparent folly in Iraq has his or her patriotism publicly called into suspicion, always in the name of supporting the troops. To speak the truth is to risk accusations of treason.

Somehow, to call for our soldiers to be removed from a chaotic civil war which was sold on lies from the beginning, and cannot be won but only prolonged until this gang is safely out of office, is failing to support the troops. But sacrificing these soldiers – over three thousand now, with tens of thousands if not as many as a hundred thousand of them gravely injured – for these lies, and to protect this president’s pride, is supporting the troops.

Somehow, calling for these troops to come home safely is undermining them. But sending them on a mission invading an ancient civilization, when the fool who sent them there had only learned of the distinction between Sunni and Shiite Muslims months after he had decided to go to war, is supporting the troops.

Somehow, criticizing the war is an unpatriotic act that disrespects the troops, but sending them to Iraq in insufficient numbers to possibly succeed in order to test the pet theory of a now-fired Secretary of Defense is supporting them.

Somehow, criticizing a commander-in-chief who can’t be bothered to attend a single military funeral is undermining our war effort. But his failing to equip our soldiers with proper armor – to this day, four years into the war – such that their home communities have literally held bake sales to properly outfit them with life-saving protection, that is supporting the troops.

Somehow, it is unpatriotic blasphemy to complain that Americans are being kept, for the first time ever, from seeing the caskets of their fallen soldiers returning to American soil at Dover Air Force Base. But leaving the injured ones to rot in squalid conditions at Walter Reed and elsewhere (haven’t they given enough yet, Mr. Bush?) is supporting the troops.

Somehow, it’s okay for the president to run around the world talking about the importance of freedom, as if he had the faintest clue. While at home his administration has been intimidating and silencing these very same injured soldiers, threatening them if they talk to the press. All in the name of supporting them, of course.

Somehow, the administration can question the patriotism of Congress when it contemplates conditioning war appropriations with requirements that the troops be adequately trained, equipped and rested. But the same administration ‘supports’ those troops by denying and delaying disability benefits to injured veterans in order to help maintain the public lie about the fiscal costs of the war.

Somehow, believing that the burdens of national security – not to mention the momentous policy of invading and occupying another country – ought to be shared by all Americans through a military draft is some kind of socialist plot. But sending Guard and Reserve troops who were never intended for this sort of deployment into three, four and five rotations, not relieving them with regular military draftees, and sticking them alongside highly paid no-bid contractor mercenaries who comprise nearly half the forces on site, that is supporting the troops.

Somehow, criticizing the administration for torturing, humiliating and murdering POWS in hell-holes like Abu Ghraib or Guantánamo, while trashing the Geneva Conventions as “obsolete” and “quaint”, is being soft on terrorism. But the president was supporting the troops when he said of five Americans captured early in the war, “We expect them to be treated humanely, just like we'll treat any prisoners of theirs that we capture humanely”. God help American soldiers if they are treated the way we’ve treated theirs.

Somehow, caring for the wounded returning from Iraq represents some sort of vaguely liberal anti-American project that ‘compassionate conservatives’ (the oxymoron of the century) find all too suspect. But returning them to the battlefield, as this administration is now doing, even before they’ve recovered from their wounds is a fine case of supporting the troops.

And somehow, arguing that the Iraq war was a ridiculous and tragic diversion from the campaign against al Qaeda only betrays the naiveté of the fools – including former high officials in the Reagan, Bush and even Bush Junior administrations – dumb enough to make such comments. (We either fight them over there or we fight them here, you know.) But creating international chaos, global antipathy toward the United States and legions of angry new terrorists today, whom our soldiers can expect to have to face in battle tomorrow, is supporting the troops...

The Big Lie is still alive and well, and the big liars are doing quite nicely still.  ¶ 8:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre

Bill Maher on sacrifice:

Maher: And finally, new rule: liberals must stop saying President Bush hasn't asked Americans to sacrifice for the War on Terror. On the contrary, he's asked us to sacrifice something enormous: Our civil rights.

Now, when I heard George Bush was reading my e-mails, I probably had the same reaction you did–George Bush can read?! (Laughter.) Yes he can, and this administration has read your phone records, credit card statements, mail, internet logs… I can't tell if their fighting the War on Terror or producing the next season of Cheater. (Laughter.) I mail myself a copy of the Consitution every morning, just on the hope they'll open it and see what it says! (Laughter and applause).

So when it comes to sacrifice, don't kid yourself–you *have* given up a lot! You've given up faith in your government's honesty, the good will of people overseas, and 6/10 of the Bill of Rights. Here's what you've sacrificed: search and seizure, warrents, self incrimination, trial by jury, cruel and unusual punishment. Here's what you have left: handguns, religion, and they can't make you quarter a British soldier. If Prince Harry invades the inland empire, he has to bring a tent. (Laughter).

You know, in previous wars, Americans on the homefront made a very different kind of sacrifice. During World War II, we endured rationing, payed higher taxes, bought war bonds, and in the interest of national unity, people even pretended Bob Hope was funny. (Laughter.) Right–like you laughed at him!

Women donated their silk undergarments so they could be sewn into parachutes. Can you imagine nowadays a Britney Spears or a Lindsay Lohan going without underwear? (Laughter.) Bad example, but look, George Bush has never been too bright about understanding "furriners", but he does know Americans. He asked *this* generation to sacrifice the things he knew we would not miss–our privacy and our morality. He let us keep the money. But he made a cynical bet, that we wouldn't much care if we became a Big Brother country that has now tortured a lot of random people.

And yet no one asks the tough questions, like "Is torture necessary?", "Who will watch the watchers?" and "When does Jack Bauer go to the bathroom?" (Laughter.) I mean, it's been five years–is he wearing one of those astronaut diapers?

In conclusion, after September 11, President Bush told us Osama bin Laden "could run but he can't hide". But he ran and hid. (Laughter.) So Bush went to Plan B: pissing on the Constitution and torturing random people. Conservatives always say the great thing Reagan did was make us feel good about America again. Well, do you feel good about America now?

I'll give you my answer. And to get it out of me, you don't even need to hold my head under water and have a snarling guard dog rip my nuts off. (Laughter). No, I don't feel very good about that. They say evil happens when good men do nothing. Well, the Democrats proved it also happens when mediocre people do nothing.

  ¶ 7:56 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Reality Calls for RICO

No theory, it's a fact.

What digby says"

Ron Brownstein and Matt Cooper were on Hardball today (a refreshingly excellent show when it's hosted by David Gregory instead of you-know-who) discussing the Plame hearing. Brownstein is a good reporter who usually gets it right, but today he betrayed a little bit of that beltway reflexive dismissiveness of anything "the left" finds important. He said that Waxman needed to pick his battles better because playing to the liberal blogosphere with hearings like this will create the same problems for Democrats that Republicans found themselves in when they went after Clinton. Setting aside the fact that the Republicans' "problems" resulted in them holding all three branches of government for six years, this sounds to me like one of those tired GOP talking points that reporters love to parrot because it distances them from the hippies.

It's especially ironic since we've just seen the mainstream press sporting dripping oozing egg yolk all over their faces over the US Attorney scandal, which they also dismissed as a figment of hippy conspiracy mongerer's imaginations. This knee jerk loathing of the left tends to lead them astray and they should check themselves before they do it.

Matt Cooper and David Gregory ably argued that the Democrats can hardly be called overly zealous since this is only the second hearing the congress ever held on the issue and Cooper pointed out that this is hardly a settled issue what with the possible pardon and all. Furthermore, the underlying "crime" that Waxman is getting at isn't the covert agent act which the lying Gorgon Toensing insists on arguing every five minutes. The crime was lying and misleading the United States of America into war, something that the congress damned well should be investigating. Valerie Plame's outing is a window into that crime and the Democrats are wise to explore her story to show just how far the administration was willing to go to cover their tracks. What a prosecutor cannot do --- prosecute a political crime --- the congress surely can.

There is a huge need for the Democrats to develop the record on this administration's many crimes. It's important for our future and it's important for history. What they have done should never, ever be repeated. You had the highest reaches of the white house casually revealing what was clearly "need to know" classified information (which they had no "need to know" in the first place) to reporters, for purely political purposes. The same people who did this later turned around and said that reporters for the Washington Post and NY Times should be investigated by the Justice Department for revealing classified information that was not released purely to punish a political enemy, but rather in true whistleblower fashion, to tell the nation what its government was illegally doing.

We now know that in the case of the NSA spying stories, the Attorney General personally intervened to stop an internal investigation of the program when it came too close to him, but allowed those who were investigating that alleged treason of the NY Times to carry on.

This is all part of a very large mosaic of government secrecy, political backstabbing and abuse of power. Those of us who were screaming about this until we are hoarse were dismissed out of hand when we argued that no administration should be allowed to seize such unchecked power and the assumption among the establishment was that it was just more of our "unhinged" hysteria.

It wasn't. This stuff happened and it's likely only the tip of the iceberg. If the press can get past their loathing of the dirty hippies for five minutes they will see that not only have we been right, we have been flogging some amazingly good stories for the past six years that had they bothered to report them would have been journalistic coups. We really aren't that nuts --- and the Bush administration really is that bad.

  ¶ 8:03 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Substantially Less Than 6 degrees of Separation.

Via Avedon, via vendetta911, Kevin Ryan:

When Matthew Rothschild, editor of the online magazine The Progressive, wrote an article called “Enough of the 9/11 Conspiracies, Already”, we all knew he was not talking about the conspiracy theory that the US government sells us to justify the expanding 9/11 Wars. To the contrary, in writing that article Mr. Rothschild was selling that same theory himself. What he actually meant was that people should not question the US government’s story of terror because credentialed experts have been found to support it. But the fact is that the experts found to support the official conspiracy theory of 9/11 are predominantly those who profit from doing so. That’s not to say that all of these people were “part of the conspiracy”. But they are, whether consciously or not, a part of the cover-up. And that, of course, is the greater crime...

Matthew Rothschild points to some interesting characters when he says that “I made a few calls myself”, including to Gene Corley and to Mete Sozen. Additionally, Rothschild says that he consulted “some of the top building design and engineering firms”, like Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Greenhorne & O’Mara. To emphasize just how solid the government’s story is, he adds that he “also contacted engineering professors at MIT and other leading universities in the country, and none of them puts any stock in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.”

What Mr. Rothschild failed to tell us is that Gene Corley and Mete Sozen not only created the reports that he is defending, but have also, for many years, worked for the US Department of Defense (DOD) through the Blast Mitigation for Structures Program (BMSP). Since 1997, this program has provided the DOD with expertise in explosives, and has been funded at $10 million annually. After 9/11, astronomical increases in DOD funding were likely to have benefited all DOD partners and programs, like DOD’s Nunn-Perry award winner, Greenhorne & O’Mara, and those involved with the BMSP. Of course, the DOD was probably already awash in black-budget funds prior to 9/11, as indicated by the missing trillions reported by the DOD on 9/10/01...

This goes far too long to reproduce entirely here. Suffice it to say, the documentation's extensive. All the Official Authorities were a part of the party.  ¶ 10:44 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Dominion of the Reconstruction

Christianist reconstruction, that is, recently restated as favored by Dear Leader himself and discussed by Chris Floyd and Glenn Greenwald. No matter what anyone else thinks.

Here's a few of their positions on moral issues- like slavery:

The bible permits slavery. This statement will come as a shock to most people. The laws in the Bible concerning slavery have very seldom been studied, much less preached upon. But the biblical laws concerning slavery are among the most beneficent in all the Bible....

1. Obtaining slaves. Kidnapping is forbidden as a method of acquiring slaves, and deserves capital punishment (Exodus 21:16). Basically, there are only four legal ways to get slaves. They may be purchased (Leviticus 25:44-46), captured in war (Numbers 31:32-35; Deuteronomy 21:10-14), enslaved as punishment for theft (Exodus 22:1-3), or enslaved to pay off debts (Leviticus 25:39; Exodus 21:7). We should especially note God's merciful justice here. Heathen slaves who were purchased or captured in war were actually favored by this law, since It placed them in contact with believers. They received the relatively lenient treatment of the biblical slavery regulations, and they were also able to hear the liberating message of the gospel....

2. The care of slaves. Slaves have no economic incentive to work, since they cannot improve their situation regardless of how hard they labor. Therefore the master is allowed to provide that incentive by beating them (Exodus 21:20-27). Obviously, the slave is not regarded as having equal rights as a free man. But this very fact would keep a man from entering slavery too hastily. Slavery has certain benefits (job security, etc.), but it has serious drawbacks as well. Slavery was not allowed to become irresponsible welfare or paternalism. The law limited the master, however. If he murdered his slave, he was executed (Exodus 21:20). On the other hand, if the slave survived a beating and died a day or two later, there was no punishment (Exodus 21:21); there was no evidence that the master had actually intended to murder him. Again, this risk was a serious incentive against enslaving oneself. God did not want men to heedlessly abandon their freedom, and this law would tend to keep men working hard and living responsibly in order to avoid the threat of losing their liberty and civil rights. Relatively minor but permanent injuries (such as the loss of an eye or a tooth) resulted in the slave's freedom (Exodus 21:26-27). This was also an economic incentive to keep the master from hitting the slave in the face, since a heavy blow could mean the loss of his "investment." Naturally, this law protected slaves from severe mutilation.

Naturally.

Or freedom of religion:

So let us be blunt about it: we must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.

Floyd isn't kidding.

...one of the Institute's most prominent board members is Howard Ahmanson Jr., the rightwing moneybags who for many years was the principal funder of the "Christian Reconstructionist" movement. This movement, many of whose adherents and allies now have ready access to the corridors of power and exercise great influence on the formation of government policy, advocates the imposition of a totalitarian theocratic state, with every aspect of public and private life governed by a Sharia-like blanket of religious law. Some of the fearsome strictures openly championed by the Reconstructionists include slavery for the poor who fall into debt, execution – by stoning -- for homosexuals and other transgressors, revocation of citizenship for non-believers, and a worldwide jihad to exert God's dominion over the globe. Bush, of course, is very much at home with such lumpish, grunting, primitive minds; but one suspects that Churchill – much less Jefferson, Madison and Franklin -- would find a dinner with these cretins pretty heavy going...

The bloodthirsty baying of these servile ministers is the only voice that Bush attends to. Witness the "surge" in Iraq, launched in arrogant defiance not only of the will of the American people (neither party pays any attention to that) but also of a broad swathe of the Establishment elite, including the faction of Bush's own father. Instead, Bush turned to Frederick Kagan -- yet another well-wadded neocon courtier with absolutely no expertise in the Middle East, no knowledge of Iraq, no military experience, no qualifications at all save for his adherence to militarism, empire and the inherent greatness of George W. Bush. Bush will follow their lunatic agenda of "creative destruction" and imperial conquest to the end – because it is his agenda. Greenwald's conclusion is grim, but all too true:

"Irving Kristol [husband of luncheon attendee Gertrude Himmelfarb] has written in the past about the need to exploit religious and moral concepts in order to manipulate the masses, and his intellectual North Star, Leo Strauss, has advocated -- as Strauss scholar Shadia Drury documented -- that "those in power must invent noble lies and pious frauds to keep the people in the stupor for which they are supremely fit" -- a view Kristol has endorsed. One can see that dynamic powerfully at work in the interaction between these neoconservatives and the President. They have seized upon the President's evangelical fervor and equated his "calling" to wage war for Good in the world with the neoconservative agenda of endless wars in the Middle East.

And the more unpopular the President becomes as a result, the more of a failure these policies are, the more strongly they tell him to ignore all of that, that none of it matters, that his God and history will conclude that he did The Right Thing, provided that he continues steadfastly to pursue their agenda. And the President believes that..."

The Christianist TheoCons really believe Bu$hie when he says this kind of thing. When he says it, who knows, the old dry drunk may even believe it himself as much as he believes anything. It's doubtful Dear Leader's beliefs are much deeper or longer than his attention span.

It's a sure bet Cheney doesn't believe it. After all, Control is for Control's sake.

It's a sure bet Poppy doesn't believe it, and his Consigliere and the old guard are all on the record as being a little dismayed by the Decider's style. It's curious that the Clintons parrot exactly the same strategery to Pravda (but not her voter base) that the Saudi Royals and their Consigliere espouse.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton foresees a “remaining military as well as political mission” in Iraq, and says that if elected president, she would keep a reduced military force there to fight Al Qaeda, deter Iranian aggression, protect the Kurds and possibly support the Iraqi military...

Mrs. Clinton said the scaled-down American military force that she would maintain would stay off the streets in Baghdad and would no longer try to protect Iraqis from sectarian violence — even if it descended into ethnic cleansing.

In outlining how she would handle Iraq as commander in chief, Mrs. Clinton articulated a more nuanced position than the one she has provided at her campaign events, where she has backed the goal of “bringing the troops home.”

She said in the interview that there were “remaining vital national security interests in Iraq” that would require a continuing deployment of American troops.

The United States’ security would be undermined if parts of Iraq turned into a failed state “that serves as a petri dish for insurgents and Al Qaeda,” she said. “It is right in the heart of the oil region,” she said. “It is directly in opposition to our interests, to the interests of regimes, to Israel’s interests...”

Sure, do it for the Oil and the Royals, blame it on the Jews in a left-handed way, make the rubes think you're doing it for the good of Israel, and inflame their zealots to support you, too. Triangulate like a snake.

The inattentive doubtless view her position, or the Fixer's, as moderation. Others would view it as protecting their investment. Naturally.  ¶ 10:01 PM 2 comments links to this post

  Under Pressure



He will also doubtless confess to being responsible for the roaches at Walter Reed, coming up with the idea to fire all 93 U.S. Attorneys, the death of John Paul, and pimping Interns for Bill Clinton if Dear Leader keeps him at Gitmo long enough.

You would, too. Whether or not you did it. That's what torture's all about.  ¶ 9:34 PM 1 comments links to this post

  A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Congress

Tom Englehardt:

Let me see if I've got this straight. Perhaps two years ago, an "informal" meeting of "veterans" of the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal -- holding positions in the Bush administration -- was convened by Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams. Discussed were the "lessons learned" from that labyrinthine, secret, and illegal arms-for-money-for-arms deal involving the Israelis, the Iranians, the Saudis, and the Contras of Nicaragua, among others -- and meant to evade the Boland Amendment, a congressionally passed attempt to outlaw Reagan administration assistance to the anti-communist Contras. In terms of getting around Congress, the Iran-Contra vets concluded, the complex operation had been a success -- and would have worked far better if the CIA and the military had been kept out of the loop and the whole thing had been run out of the Vice President's office.

Subsequently, some of those conspirators, once again with the financial support and help of the Saudis (and probably the Israelis and the Brits), began running a similar operation, aimed at avoiding congressional scrutiny or public accountability of any sort, out of Vice President Cheney's office. They dipped into "black pools of money," possibly stolen from the billions of Iraqi oil dollars that have never been accounted for since the American occupation began. Some of these funds, as well as Saudi ones, were evidently funneled through the embattled, Sunni-dominated Lebanese government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora to the sort of Sunni jihadi groups ("some sympathetic to al-Qaeda") whose members might normally fear ending up in Guantanamo and to a group, or groups, associated with the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood.

All of this was being done as part of a "sea change" in the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policies aimed at rallying friendly Sunni regimes against Shiite Iran, as well as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Syrian government -- and launching secret operations to undermine, roll back, or destroy all of the above. Despite the fact that the Bush administration is officially at war with Sunni extremism in Iraq (and in the more general Global War on Terror), despite its support for the largely Shiite government, allied to Iran, that it has brought to power in Iraq, and despite its dislike for the Sunni-Shiite civil war in that country, some of its top officials may be covertly encouraging a far greater Sunni-Shiite rift in the region.

Imagine. All this and much more (including news of U.S. military border-crossings into Iran, new preparations that would allow George W. Bush to order a massive air attack on that land with only 24-hours notice, and a brief window this spring when the staggering power of four U.S. aircraft-carrier battle groups might be available to the President in the Persian Gulf) was revealed, often in remarkable detail, just over a week ago in "The Redirection," a Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker. Hersh, the man who first broke the My Lai story in the Vietnam era, has never been off his game since. In recent years, from the Abu Ghraib scandal on, he has consistently released explosive news about the plans and acts of the Bush administration.

Imagine, in addition, that Hersh went on Democracy Now!, Fresh Air, Hardball with Chris Matthews, and CNN Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer and actually elaborated on these claims and revelations, some of which, on the face of it, seem like potentially illegal and impeachable offenses, if they do indeed reach up to the Vice President or President.

Now imagine the response: Front-page headlines; editorials nationwide calling for answers, Congressional hearings, or even the appointment of a special prosecutor to look into some of the claims; a raft of op-ed page pieces by the nation's leading columnists asking questions, demanding answers, reminding us of the history of Iran-Contra; bold reporters from a recently freed media standing up in White House and Defense Department press briefings to demand more information on Hersh's various charges; calls in Congress for hearings and investigations into why the people's representatives were left so totally out of this loop.

Uh…

All I can say is: If any of this happened, I haven't been able to discover it...

Read it all, please.

But seriously, Impeachment? The Ides of March is only a few hours away, but the only people with a lean and hungry look in Washington are mopping the floors.

Empires are just so incredibly funny. You can never guess what the slaves will be up to next with all their quaint ideas. "Democracy". A "Free Press". "Freedom of Speech". "The Congressional responsibility to declare war". "The Constitution".  ¶ 9:59 PM 0 comments links to this post

  When War is the Product, Who Speculates on the Market?

Who are the inside traders? Who leads the bull market for chaos?

The entrepreneurial privatization of war proceeds at a good pace. More spy networks for the highest bidder emerge to take advantage of the blank check for endless war.

...Total Intelligence Solutions, LLC (Total Intel) provides full-spectrum intelligence, research and analysis, and security consulting services to an international client base. It merges the best-in-class capabilities of several organizations...

Behind a firewall:

CEO Robert Richer, and President Matthew Devost will tap into their expertise and contacts in the intelligence community with new consulting firm Total Intelligence Solutions...

The mastermind behind the company -- which came together through merging three security consulting firms -- is none other than Erik Prince, owner of controversial defense contractor Blackwater USA and heir to his late father's auto-parts fortune.

More here on this brand new privateer on the high seas of industrial warfare: check out their Global Intelligence Map. It lists Blackwater, NetWitness, and Greystone as $trategeric partners, and The Black Group, Terrorism Research Center, Inc., and Technical Defense, Inc. as $ubsidiaries.

One wonders exactly who they regard as a threat to their business, and how they expand their profit base?

.  ¶ 10:20 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Spice Must Flow



Robert Parry asks, Are Democrats Afraid of a Myth?

Over the next few weeks, the congressional Democratic majorities must decide how scared they still are of George W. Bush and his right-wing attack machine. Or put differently, can a weakened President still intimidate Democrats by questioning their patriotism or doubting their support for the troops?

Short answer: Yes.

A blank check for war with Iran, courtesy of the DINOcrat Congress [via cd].

WASHINGTON - Top House Democrats retreated Monday from an attempt to limit Bush’s authority for taking military action against Iran as the leadership concentrated on a looming confrontation with the White House over the Iraq war.

Officials said Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record) and other members of the leadership had decided to strip from a major military spending bill a requirement for Bush to gain approval from Congress before moving against Iran.

Conservative Democrats as well as lawmakers concerned about the possible impact on Israel had argued for the change in strategy...

Somehow this sounds more like strategery than strategy... pardon my cynicism, but to paraphrase an old saying, they wouldn't be bipartisan if they didn't suck.  ¶ 9:46 PM 0 comments links to this post

  You Can't Fool All of the People All of the Time

And when Time starts to ask the right questions, you're fooling precious few of them. Karen Tumulty:

Is this about tax breaks? Getting beyond the reach of congressional subpoenas? And what about all that sensitive information that Halliburton has had access to? At a minimum, reincorporating in Dubai would mean that Halliburton will be paying less taxes to the U.S. Treasury, even as it collects billions from government contracts.

The last paragraph of the FT story begins to answer the questions about Halliburton's, uh, interestingly timed decision to move its corporate headquarters:

Dubai has long positioned itself as a regional business hub, with a laisser faire attitude to business regulations. The government has launched several free zones allowing foreign firms to circumvent laws barring foreigners owning businesses.

UPDATE: Henry Waxman is likely to hold a hearing on this, an aide tells me.

UPDATE UPDATE: Flounder's comment made me wonder precisely where Halliburton is incorporated now. According to this 2004 GAO report [.pdf], the company is incorporated in Delaware, but has (or had at that time) 17 subsidiaries in tax-haven countries. Halliburton says it will remain incorporated in the United States.

Read the comments. I bet the editors at Time are really happy with Ms. Tumulty right about now. Keep up the good work, lady. More like this, Time and less like Joke Line.  ¶ 5:10 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Columbia Clean

Demobilization made easy.

Sounds like Dear Leader's fixin' to buy some for down home to help with the Democrat party and the War on Terra...  ¶ 9:16 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Better to Hide the Records With

Via Think Progress, no surprise:

“U.S. oil services giant Halliburton Co. will shift its corporate headquarters from Houston to Dubai,” the Wall Street Journal reports. Halliburton’s new location “will be better placed to focus on relations with the Gulf’s enormous national oil companies.”

The easier for the King Abdullah to run things here in the Colonies, one supposes. He's had Cheneyburton manage from Washington, but those phone bills have been one beotch.  ¶ 4:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Passing of Two Jeffersonian Democracies

From Republic into Empire before the rubes figure out the shell game.

Pravda on Gonzales:

...He has never stopped being consigliere to Mr. Bush’s imperial presidency. If anyone, outside Mr. Bush’s rapidly shrinking circle of enablers, still had doubts about that, the events of last week should have erased them.

First, there was Mr. Gonzales’s lame op-ed article in USA Today trying to defend the obviously politically motivated firing of eight United States attorneys, which he dismissed as an “overblown personnel matter.” Then his inspector general exposed the way the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been abusing yet another unnecessary new power that Mr. Gonzales helped wring out of the Republican-dominated Congress in the name of fighting terrorism.

The F.B.I. has been using powers it obtained under the Patriot Act to get financial, business and telephone records of Americans by issuing tens of thousands of “national security letters,” a euphemism for warrants that are issued without any judicial review or avenue of appeal. The administration said that, as with many powers it has arrogated since the 9/11 attacks, this radical change was essential to fast and nimble antiterrorism efforts, and it promised to police the use of the letters carefully.

But like so many of the administration’s promises, this one evaporated before the ink on those letters could dry. The F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller, admitted Friday that his agency had used the new powers improperly.

Mr. Gonzales does not directly run the F.B.I., but it is part of his department and has clearly gotten the message that promises (and civil rights) are meant to be broken.

It was Mr. Gonzales, after all, who repeatedly defended Mr. Bush’s decision to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on Americans’ international calls and e-mail. He was an eager public champion of the absurd notion that as commander in chief during a time of war, Mr. Bush can ignore laws that he thinks get in his way. Mr. Gonzales was disdainful of any attempt by Congress to examine the spying program, let alone control it.

The attorney general helped formulate and later defended the policies that repudiated the Geneva Conventions in the war against terror, and that sanctioned the use of kidnapping, secret detentions, abuse and torture. He has been central to the administration’s assault on the courts, which he recently said had no right to judge national security policies, and on the constitutional separation of powers.

His Justice Department has abandoned its duties as guardian of election integrity and voting rights. It approved a Georgia photo-ID law that a federal judge later likened to a poll tax, a case in which Mr. Gonzales’s political team overrode the objections of the department’s professional staff.

The Justice Department has been shamefully indifferent to complaints of voter suppression aimed at minority voters. But it has managed to find the time to sue a group of black political leaders in Mississippi for discriminating against white voters.

We opposed Mr. Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general. His résumé was weak, centered around producing legal briefs for Mr. Bush that assured him that the law said what he wanted it to say. More than anyone in the administration, except perhaps Vice President Dick Cheney, Mr. Gonzales symbolizes Mr. Bush’s disdain for the separation of powers, civil liberties and the rule of law.

On Thursday, Senator Arlen Specter, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, hinted very obliquely that perhaps Mr. Gonzales’s time was up. We’re not going to be oblique. Mr. Bush should dismiss Mr. Gonzales and finally appoint an attorney general who will use the job to enforce the law and defend the Constitution.

In the context of Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton, that last line is grimly hilarious. They don't need no steenkin' Constitution.

Which brings us to Democracy on Steroids, in the 51st state:

...So let us ask again: is Israeli democracy in danger? This democracy is young, evolving, and certainly not indestructible. For a while it has been showing clear signs of strain; not least, the inability to maintain reasonable political stability amid the frequent turnovers of ministers and administrations. Now it is showing even clearer signs of deep crisis. According to every survey and poll, levels of popular confidence in the system have never been so low. People are turning their backs on politics as never before. Indeed, the very violence with which the public is pouncing on every falling public figure is a sign of how deep the anger runs. The present void might well encourage those who promise a radical cleansing of the Augean stables in return for a different kind of political rule – and is it such a stretch of the imagination to see them succeeding?

Two figures, indeed, have already been making such a pitch, and should therefore be listened to carefully. Both, probably not coincidentally, are Russian immigrants – and thus even less wed to the Israeli democratic tradition, such as it is. One is a minister in the current Israeli government, Avigdor Lieberman, a self-proclaimed “strong man” with an abiding hatred of the legal system (and a few brushes with it in his past) who has already put forth a suggestion to turn Israel into more of a presidential system with few restraints on the chief executive (as Ben Lynfield reported in the Nation, Dec. 26th 2006). Lieberman’s popularity keeps going up even as that of the political system falls. But in terms of being the most authentic symptom of how deep the malaise goes, as well as having the greater potential to change the rules of the game, Lieberman pales in comparison to a man who chose this same past week to announce his own arrival on the political scene: Arkadi Gaydamak.

Gaydamak is a Russian born billionaire who owes his wealth in part to shady arms dealings in Angola that led the French to issue arrest warrants for illegal arms dealings and money laundering. Having successfully fended off extradition to France, the oligarch has turned his attention in recent years to philanthropic work in Israel, with a keen interest on using it to create a public image for himself. When it turned out during the 2006 Lebanon war that the government was ineffective in caring for the civilian population under missile attacks in the north of Israel, Gaydamak stepped into the void and set up a ‘tent city’ on the Mediterranean beach for refugees, thus becoming Israel’s most popular public figure at precisely the moment the political class was experiencing its greatest failure. No less dramatically – and Gaydamak has nothing if not a flair for dramatic public relations – when Sderot, a small town near the border with Gaza that is home to Minister of Defense Amir Peretz, was showered with Kassam missiles in the fall of 2006 and Peretz and his colleagues in government were wringing their hands, Gaydamak sent buses to take several thousand inhabitants for a vacation at the Red Sea. Peretz’s angry reaction to this public gesture only underscored how impotent the establishment looked by comparison to this philanthropist with his bottomless pockets.

A couple of days ago Gaydamak announced, in a lavishly organized event, the foundation of a new political party called “Social Justice.” At a moment when all other politicians are seen as guilty, at least by association, for sticking their hand in the till (or somewhere else where it does not belong), the founder of “Social Justice” is the gift that keeps on giving, rather than taking. Gaydamak does not want to enter politics himself – or so he says. Indeed, he cannot even speak Hebrew – his speeches are all translated. What Gaydamak wants, and says almost explicitly, is to use his money to become the king maker of Israeli politics: he wants to choose singlehandedly the next Israeli prime minister. And based on current polls, his ambitions cannot be set aside lightly. But if Gaydamak is convinced that the Israeli electorate is for sale, and if the voters are willing to prove him right; and if this transaction is now happening in the public eye, and met with more applause than dismay; then the problem is not one of the political class alone. Israeli democracy is in severe crisis: the friends of the Jewish state should be mobilizing post-haste to help Israeli citizens, jaded, disappointed and angry as they might be, ensure it is not a fatal one.

[via Empire Burlesque]

Steroids? At home and abroad, the name of the game is Rome on crack, as crime families move in to offer Protection. Our Entertainment Tonite government has moved from 24 to The Sopranos, and according to People, the ratings are smashing.  ¶ 9:17 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Turning Point: When a Fear Cult Becomes a Death Cult

Exactly when does a cult of fear turn into a cult of death? When the fear gets old? When the children look under the bed and see dust instead of monsters? Perhaps the first stage is its transformation into a cult of control.

...In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, terms like 'Total Information Awareness' and Terrorism Information Awareness' sprang up, and governments, (most notably the US and British) established a 'cult of information', or 'cult of awareness' allegedly for the purpose of gathering information on "terrorism". This philosophy and it's importance is promoted and implemented from the top level both in government and corporate circles to the extent that civil liberties that were thought to be foundational to the concept of 'Democracy' have been virtually eradicated.

Since 9/11 the Bush government has bombarded the population with fear-based propaganda in the attempt to promote, or rather instill the concept of a "cult of awareness" into the minds of the populace, the goal being to create an environment or atmosphere wherein the population will be convinced that it is in their own interest or that of the country (and thus their 'patriotic duty') to funnel information about their fellow citizens upwards to their 'leaders.' Neighbours are encouraged to keep a watch on each other and report "suspicious behavior", with the list of just what defines "suspicious behavior" being supplied by the office of Homeland Security. Furthermore we have been told many times that mere disgruntled citizens may well constitute the 'enemy in our midst'.

The masses are told that the benefits of compliance with the requirements of the cult of information lie in the fact that we will be safer; more secure in our beds at night. In short, the cult of information is essentially a cult of fear. Fear must first be instilled in the minds of the masses to inspire them to feed this upward flowing stream of information to their leaders - designed to facilitate the extirpation of any contrary source of information - and fear is a principle that humans seem somehow pre-designed and preprogrammed to wholeheartedly embrace.

What this boils down to is this: if you control the knowledge that people have, you control the people. As such, it is not hard to see that if governments understand knowledge as power, and they seek to retain power, they must seek to control the flow of information the aim of which must be to limit knowledge.

If you control the spread of information you can control what people think. If you control what people think, you are, effectively, controlling their minds. And we come around in a circle to what is truly Cultic.

From this point of view, logically, any group that threatens the government monopoly on information and power, and therefore their control of the people, is perceived as a threat that must be dealt with.

As Richard Dolan has written:

"Anyone who has lived in a repressive society knows that official manipulation of the truth occurs daily. But societies have their many and their few. In all times and all places, it is the few who rule, and the few who exert dominant influence over what we may call official culture. - All elites take care to manipulate public information to maintain existing structures of power. It's an old game."

As noted above, the allegation that 'mind control' is used on cult members is often made when labeling any group as a "cult." However, there can be many forms of 'mind control' - including the largely censored mass media coverage of the Iraq war or the Israeli treatment of Palestinians - although these deceptions are not generally understood as mind control. And if we are to rely on the criteria on which assertions of 'cult' are based, that is observation of the results of 'mind control', i.e. members joining 'communes' giving up possessions, extreme devotion and allegiance to a leader, and in a few cases giving up their lives by way of apparent suicide, we certainly find reasonable justification for labeling the current US administration as a cult for persuading hundreds of thousands of Americans to give up their possessions and join the commune of the US military out of extreme devotion to a proven liar, George W. Bush, resulting in what could be termed apparent suicide in Iraq.

So what happens when a cult runs out of steam? What happens when the Empire can't pay its Praetorians?

Chomsky (the original is available for a limited time):

...For the US, the primary issue in the Middle East has been, and remains, effective control of its unparalleled energy resources. Access is a secondary matter. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. Control is understood to be an instrument of global dominance. Iranian influence in the "crescent" challenges US control. By an accident of geography, the world's major oil resources are in largely Shia areas of the Middle East: southern Iraq, adjacent regions of Saudi Arabia and Iran, with some of the major reserves of natural gas as well. Washington's worst nightmare would be a loose Shia alliance controlling most of the world's oil and independent of the US.

Such a bloc, if it emerges, might even join the Asian Energy Security Grid based in China. Iran could be a lynchpin. If the Bush planners bring that about, they will have seriously undermined the US position of power in the world.

To Washington, Tehran's principal offence has been its defiance, going back to the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the hostage crisis at the US embassy. In retribution, Washington turned to support Saddam Hussein's aggression against Iran, which left hundreds of thousands dead. Then came murderous sanctions and, under Bush, rejection of Iranian diplomatic efforts.

Last July, Israel invaded Lebanon, the fifth invasion since 1978. As before, US support was a critical factor, the pretexts quickly collapse on inspection, and the consequences for the people of Lebanon are severe. Among the reasons for the US-Israel invasion is that Hizbullah's rockets could be a deterrent to a US-Israeli attack on Iran. Despite the sabre-rattling it is, I suspect, unlikely that the Bush administration will attack Iran. Public opinion in the US and around the world is overwhelmingly opposed. It appears that the US military and intelligence community is also opposed. Iran cannot defend itself against US attack, but it can respond in other ways, among them by inciting even more havoc in Iraq. Some issue warnings that are far more grave, among them the British military historian Corelli Barnett, who writes that "an attack on Iran would effectively launch world war three".

Then again, a predator becomes even more dangerous, and less predictable, when wounded. In desperation to salvage something, the administration might risk even greater disasters. The Bush administration has created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. It has been unable to establish a reliable client state within, and cannot withdraw without facing the possible loss of control of the Middle East's energy resources...

That wiff of desperation is enough to make the Cheneyburton Corporation seriously suggest using nukes on Iran- starting a pre-emptive nuclear war- in order to regain control of the situation for the Company.

...Question: If Control’s control is absolute, why does Control need to control?

Answer: Control… needs time.

Question: Is Control controlled by its need to control?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Why does Control need humans, as you call them?

Answer: Wait… wait! Time, a landing field. Death needs time like a junkie needs junk.

Question: And what does Death need time for?

Answer: The answer is sooo simple. Death needs time for what it kills to grow in...

  ¶ 11:28 PM 0 comments links to this post

  These Aren't The Mercenaries You're Looking For

But that old Jedi mind trick doesn't seem to work on Henry Waxman.

There's a $400 million question facing the Pentagon's largest contractor, KBR, the former Halliburton subsidiary responsible for more than 50,000 personnel in Iraq and billions in government contracts: Will the mammoth corporation be forced to repay the government nearly half a billion dollars because it hired private security forces in Iraq, including Blackwater USA, when the Army itself was supposed to be providing it with protection?

It's a scandal that has been brewing for more than two years, kept alive largely through the efforts of Representative Henry Waxman. The California Democrat has been on a warpath against Halliburton and KBR almost since the Bush Administration took power in 2000. But it was actually an incident involving the private military company Blackwater USA that sparked the current controversy, which could result in the hefty KBR repayment to the government.

It began with one of the most iconic incidents of the Iraq War: the March 31, 2004, ambush of four Blackwater contractors in the Sunni city of Falluja. The men were burned, dragged through the streets and strung from a bridge. For many in Congress--and the broader population--it was the first they had heard of private soldiers operating in the war zone. Finding out who exactly they were working for in Falluja that day would take nearly three years.

As Waxman investigated the circumstances surrounding the ambush, one fact in particular bothered him: The contract the Blackwater men were working under indicated that they were ultimately servicing KBR. For its part, KBR initially denied this, and Waxman became increasingly frustrated that for eighteen months he could not get the military, KBR or any of the companies involved to explain whom taxpayers were ultimately paying for the Blackwater security services, and how much.

That question was finally answered in early February, when Waxman convened a heated hearing of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee to investigate the Falluja incident: The contract was indeed traceable to KBR...

Under the terms of KBR's master contract, the Army is specifically tasked with providing force protection for KBR's thousands of employees. Since 2002 KBR has held what is known as the LOGCAP III contract, which stands for Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. Under that contract it provides support services for the Army ranging from serving meals to delivering fuel, washing laundry and delivering mail, duties that used to be handled by the Army itself.

An official military document called LOGCAP 101 explains that "contractors and their employees are not combatants, but civilians accompanying the force. This status must not be jeopardized by the ways in which they provide contracted support. The government has a duty to provide them with Force Protection for this reason." Indeed, in a July 2006 letter to Waxman, then-Secretary of the Army Francis White (who recently resigned in the wake of the Walter Reed scandal) asserted, "Under the provisions of the LOGCAP contract, the US military provides all armed forces protection from KBR unless otherwise directed."

At the February hearing George Seagle, director of security for KBR's government and infrastructure division, admitted that "KBR uses private security on our non-LOGCAP work and, in certain circumstances, our LOGCAP subcontractors did, as well." The theory seemed to be that while KBR, under its LOGCAP contract, could not directly hire private security, its subcontractors could do whatever they wanted.

Here's the problem: The line Seagle floated to Congress is contradicted by KBR's own internal communications dating back nearly three years, when KBR officials appeared to be not only aware of the general prohibition against hiring private security under LOGCAP but also aware that if any of KBR's subcontractors used private forces, that was tantamount to KBR using them...

The situation could be so serious for KBR that, as the company officially informed its investors a month after the Waxman hearing, it might be forced to return up to $400 million in payments stemming from alleged subcontracted private security services in Iraq.

Many disturbing questions linger: If the Army was responsible for providing security for KBR's 50,000 employees, why didn't it do so? Is the command and control in Iraq in such disarray that $400 million in private security services that should have been provided by the Army was not, and no one noticed? Did no one realize that tens of thousands of private soldiers were performing the Army's security duties?

...As the hearing progressed, both KBR and Army officials professed ignorance as to how security was--or was not--being provided to the 50,000 people working under KBR. Much to the amazement of legislators, not only did they not know, they seemed to not want to know...

"We haven't asked any subcontractors to contract for security," Seagle said. According to the Army, KBR never asked it for protection either. Ballard told the committee the military has "in writing from KBR that [neither] they, nor any of their subs, ever requested in writing for this security."

When Seagle said that he didn't know whether one of his subcontractors had negotiated with Blackwater for security, Shays shot back, "OK, I understand you don't know, but it's not comforting because what it's like is, you can be Pontius Pilate and wash your hands of it. In other words, you contract with someone else, they get the job done and it's their responsibility and not your responsibility. That's what you're saying."

Seagle continued to insist that he had no idea who his subcontractors employ, frustrating Shays. "I'm going to just tell you what I think," Shays told him. "I think you should know. I think the system should somehow require it. I think there should be some responsibility to it.... I just can't believe that if I were doing a contract for a building and I was subcontracting, that I would be oblivious to who my subcontractors were dealing with."

Shays then turned his attention to Ballard and said, "I'm surprised that you can't give us an idea of the number of contracts and the number of contracts in-theater. Is that because you just tired out from the first and then from then on, you don't feel you have an interest or a responsibility to know who they subcontracted? In other words, once you put out that contract, whoever is subcontracted is not your interest or responsibility?"

Ballard stumbled in her response, mentioning a "quality surveillance plan" for contractors before Shays cut her off. "I don't know what that means," he said. "I honestly don't."

In the bigger picture, $400 million is a drop in the bucket to KBR--the company has raked in more than $17 billion from Iraq-related work since 2003. But what remains unanswered is why alarm bells weren't sounded about tens of thousands of civilians running around Iraq, servicing the military, apparently without protection? And why, if KBR was supposed to be provided with security, did it not request it, since it would have avoided having to pay private companies? Did KBR and an overstretched Army essentially collude in a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding security in Iraq?

KBR and the Army are apparently still negotiating whether the company will be stripped of the $400 million it is estimated that its subcontractors spent on private security. KBR says the Army has informed the company it will dock KBR "unless [KBR] can provide timely information sufficient to show that such action is not necessary to protect the government's interest. We are working with the Army to provide the additional information they have requested."

It took nearly two years for the Army and KBR to provide Waxman with details of the contract that resulted in it being docked $20 million for using Blackwater's security services. KBR has sixty days before the Army begins suspending payments. It will be interesting to see if its ability to answer questions drastically improves. That is the $400 million question.

The other unasked question is: what is KBR-Cheneyburton doing in Iraq that they don't want the American military to see?  ¶ 9:40 PM 0 comments links to this post

  A Panopticon Friendster for Discriminating Fascists

Lambert's caught another one and put it in context:

Gonzo: FBI "snooping" broke law

...The FBI program that uses the letters is a “Friendster for Fascists,” which is the part of the story that’s getting buried...

... The numbers look really bad.

In 2000, for example, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 requests. That number peaked in 2004 with 56,000. Overall, the FBI reported issuing 143,074 requests in national security letters between 2003 and 2005.

But that did not include an additional 8,850 requests that were never recorded in the FBI’s database, the audit found. A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.

And now, from a Corrente post w-a-a-a-y back in 2005, here are some things that the AP story does not mention about the information that the FBI has been gathering.

1. These records are private records; for example, financial records of ordinary Americans who had “casual or unwitting contact” with a suspect.

2. The record-keeping is not reviewed after the fact for accuracy.

3. The records are widely shared among Federal agencies, the states, localities, and “appropriate private sector entities.” (Wackenhut? The RNC?)

4. The records are never discarded.

5. The records are gathered using a technique called “contact chaining,” meaning that if Alice is a suspect and knows Bob, then Bob is surveilled, and if Bob knows Carol, Carla, and Charles, they are surveilled. And since everyone in the world can be connected via “six degrees of separation,” that means that the number of people surveilled under this program will grow exponentially if left unchecked...

The program, for which the National Security letters are just a tool, really is a Friendster for Fascists.

So if the Pentagon's planning on doing this too, does that mean there will be at least two such databases? Because neither of these groups exactly likes to share either credit or blame. Then there's the NSA's, and the CIA's pet databases too. Probably CSC/ DynCorp will add their own just for grins. And AT&T will want a copy too. Not to mention Google. But access for the discerning di$creet clients only!

Back to Lambert's original 2005 post:

Well, the outlaw Bush regime—surely not excessive rhetoric, with so many Republicans indicted—is having the FBI build a panopticon, using the Patriot [cough] Act as their excuse. (WaPo, The “FBI’s Secret Scrutiny: In Hunt for Terrorists, Bureau Examines Records of Ordinary Americans”) What’s a panopticon?

'The concept of the [panopticon’s] design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell if they are being observed or not, thus conveying a “sentiment of an invisible omniscience...” '

...The surprise: By the math of the “Six Degrees of Separation” theory, the Republicans really are going to end up surveilling everybody. And about everything. They really are building a Panopticon; it’s not a metaphor or a rhetorical flight. Read on:

A little background on “Six Degrees” theory:

Stanley Milgram’s “Six Degrees of Separation” theory is a (well-tested) theory about social relationships; code implementing it has been patented, and it’s the formalism that underlies technologies like friendster. You may have played the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” game, which demonstrates the theory in game form, in the movie industry. Briefly, the Six Degrees theory states that:

"[A]nyone on earth can be connected to any other person on the planet through a chain of acquaintances that has no more than five intermediaries..."

Here’s what WaPo has to say... :

' “National security letters,” created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, originated as narrow exceptions in consumer privacy law, enabling the FBI to review in secret the customer records of suspected foreign agents. The Patriot Act, and Bush administration guidelines for its use, transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

'The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. The letters — one of which can be used to sweep up the records of many people — are extending the bureau’s reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans...

'Issued by FBI field supervisors, national security letters do not need the imprimatur of a prosecutor, grand jury or judge. They receive no review after the fact by the Justice Department or Congress. The executive branch maintains only statistics [Yeah, right], which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting, and has offered no example in which the use of a national security letter helped disrupt a terrorist plot...

'Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for “state, local and tribal” governments and for “appropriate private sector entities,” which are not defined. '

Hmm… Appropriate private sector entities… Like, say, Wackenhut? Nah. Crazy talk. The Republicans would never privatize domestic surveillance! Let’s be reasonable!

...Let’s review. Using a National Security Letter:>=

1. The FBI can collect information on one individual, that individual’s contacts, those individual’s contacts, all the way out to Six Degrees.

2. The FBI can get any information it wants, with no review or oversight.

3. The FBI “shall” store this information permanently.

4. The FBI can use this information to build a “model” of any individual through data mining and transactional analysis

5. Do the math, using conservative estimates 30,0000 National letters (above) * 10 years * 10 contacts (as above) * 10 of their contacts * 10 of their contacts (i.e., three Degrees of Seperation) = 300,000,000.

So, in 10 years at the outside, just doing the math, the FBI could have a complete permanent record of every citizen, including behavior models based on consumer purchases from transactional analysis.

I can see how a theocracy would find this very useful—it sure would help with tithing—but it’s hard to see what use a free society would have for this. Eh? So, if the Republican’s have their way, we’ll shortly be living in a very small world indeed…

A small world run by even smaller people with tiny little agendas designed to amass large amounts of money and power.  ¶ 7:41 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Mercenary Peacekeepers

Not just your average oxymorons.

Not only are the masterminds of the War on Terra going for the livers and pancreas when they should be trying to win hearts and minds, they're awfully persistent with their misadventures.

Noah Shachtman just keeps noting some very interesting events:

Congress could not have made itself any clearer: Do not build a whole bunch of conventionally-armed Trident ballistic missiles to go after terrorists, it told the Pentagon. The idea is half-baked, the scenarios you have come up with are far-fetched, and the weapon -- which looks and flies almost exactly like a nuke -- could very well start World War III. To force you to comply, we are cutting your funds for this program by 80%. Go put your thinking caps back on before you ask for more cash. Oh, and get a National Academies study done, too. And a haircut.

But when it comes to these "Global Strike" weapons, the Defense Department doesn't seem to be able to take no for an answer. According to Inside Defense, "the Navy has budgeted $175 million for the project in fiscal year 2008 -- nearly $50 million more than the service requested in FY-07 and $150 million more than Congress actually appropriated for the so-called Conventional Trident Modification, or 'CTM,' during the current fiscal year." (My spies are giving me slightly different budget breakdowns; but the pig-headed idea is the same.)

Like using mercenaries for police actions, using conventional explosives in missiles that might be mistaken for nukes is willfully stupid if keeping the peace is the plan.

It isn't. Keeping the cash rolling in to the Base is the objective. To do that, chaos is the plan .  ¶ 9:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  It Would Be Good Humor, But He's Serious

Falwell on Gingrich, via digby:

...As a pastor with more than a half-century of experience of working with fallible people, I have ministered to a few men who have experienced moral collapse. I have usually been able to tell which of these men was genuinely seeking forgiveness for their actions. My sense tells me that Mr. Gingrich is such a man. He is today happily married to wife Callista, and committed to be the husband he should be...

  ¶ 4:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Duty

Watch Ted Kennedy give the Senate Reptilicans and their Dear Leader hell for daring to suggest the right of collective bargaining for health benefits and other grievances would make the homeland less secure.

The White House has threatened to veto a critical 9/11 Commission security bill if it includes legislation giving federal airport screeners collective bargaining rights and whistle-blower protections.

Senate conservatives have argued that providing basic workers’ rights to TSA employees endangers our national security. “It’s absolutely absurd,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC). “Terrorists don’t go on strike. Terrorists don’t call their union to negotiate before they attack.”

Today on the Senate floor, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-MA) ripped into the right wing for suggesting that our first-line defenders would sacrifice America’s security. “What is it about the other side that questions that these are men and women of dignity that will do their job when this nation is threatened?” he said. “As the smoke was coming out of the buildings in New York, when we saw the collapse of the first buildings and men and women under collective bargaining agreements were asked to go into those fiery infernos, no one was talking about collective bargaining agreements! They were talking about doing their duty to the United States of America...”

...The good news: the Senate held the line and voted 51-48 to approve the workers’ protections.

  ¶ 9:26 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Best Justice Cheneyburton Can Buy

With the eminent pardon of Scooter Libby in the wings, you have to admire the efforts of the Cheneyburton administration to minimize its' interference in the rulings of the judiciary, by control of who or what actually goes to court.



Stacking the deck of the docket is such a crude yet assonant phrase. The cards are reviewed today in The New York Pravda:

The Gonzales Eight

Americans often suspect that their political leaders are arrogant and out of touch. But even then it is nearly impossible to fathom what self-delusion could have convinced Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico that he had a right to call a federal prosecutor at home and question him about a politically sensitive investigation.

That disturbing tale is one of several revealed this week in Congressional hearings called to look into the firing of eight United States attorneys. The hearings left little doubt that the Bush administration had all eight — an unprecedented number — ousted for political reasons. But it points to even wider abuse; prosecutors suggest that three Republican members of Congress may have tried to pressure the attorneys into doing their political bidding.

It already seemed clear that the Bush administration’s purge had trampled on prosecutorial independence. Now Congress and the Justice Department need to investigate possible ethics violations, and perhaps illegality. Two of the fired prosecutors testified that they had been dismissed after resisting what they suspected were importunings to use their offices to help Republicans win elections. A third described what may have been a threat of retaliation if he talked publicly about his firing.

David Iglesias, who was removed as the United States attorney in Albuquerque, said that he was first contacted before last fall’s election by Representative Heather Wilson, Republican of New Mexico. Ms. Wilson, who was in a tough re-election fight, asked about sealed indictments — criminal charges that are not public.

Two weeks later, he said, he got a call from Senator Pete Domenici, Republican of New Mexico, asking whether he intended to indict Democrats before the election in a high-profile corruption case. When Mr. Iglesias said no, he said, Mr. Domenici replied that he was very sorry to hear it, and the line went dead. Mr. Iglesias said he’d felt “sick.” Within six weeks, he was fired. Ms. Wilson and Mr. Domenici both deny that they had tried to exert pressure.

John McKay of Seattle testified that the chief of staff for Representative Doc Hastings, Republican of Washington, called to ask whether he intended to investigate the 2004 governor’s race, which a Democrat won after two recounts. Mr. McKay says that when he went to the White House later to discuss a possible judicial nomination (which he did not get), he was told of concerns about how he’d handled the election. H. E. Cummins, a fired prosecutor from Arkansas, said that a Justice Department official, in what appeared to be a warning, said that if he kept talking about his firing, the department would release negative information about him…

Paul Kiel at TPM Muckraker dredges it up further:

Let's review what happened. In a February 19th article in The Washington Post, Cummins was quoted on the firings:

"They're [the Justice Department] entitled to make these changes for any reason or no reason or even for an idiotic reason,... But if they are trying to suggest that people have inferior performance to hide whatever their true agenda is, that is wrong. They should retract those statements."

The next day, Cummins got a call from Elston. And very unfortunately for the Justice Department, Cummins sent out an email no more than an hour after the call to the other fired prosecutors (you can see it here):

' The essence of his message was that they feel like they are taking unnecessary flak to avoid trashing each of us specificially or further, but if they feel like any of us intend to continue to offer quotes to the press, or organize behind the scenes congressional pressure, then they would feel forced to somehow pull their gloves off and offer public criticisms to defend their actions more fully.... I was tempted to challenge him and say something movie-like such as "are you threatening ME???", but instead I kind of shrugged it off...'

Cummins, a lifelong Republican, continues in the email to refer to Elston's "threat of retaliation" and the "threatening undercurrent in the call." So it was abundantly clear to him that he was being threatened.

The most inflammatory part of the email is Cummins' description of Elston's reaction to the idea of the fired prosecutors testifying before Congress:

"He reacted quite a bit to the idea of anyone voluntarily testifying and it seemed clear that they would see that as a major escalation of the conflict meriting some kind of unspecified form of retaliation."

It was based on this that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) in his questioning yesterday, drew an analogy between Elston's call and obstruction of justice in a criminal investigation -- an analogy which all four prosecutors agreed to.

But of course, like all the rest of the icebergs melting from the activities of the Cheneyburton enterprise, it gets bigger the closer you look at it. The biggest part is hidden from sight.

They're not only knocking off the good prosecutors, they're installing their own criminal patsies in prosecutorial positions. And they're stupid enough to brag to each other about it. Greg Palast, via Truthout:

There's only one thing worse than sacking an honest prosecutor. That's replacing an honest prosecutor with a criminal.

There was one big hoohah in Washington yesterday as House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers pulled down the pants on George Bush's firing of US Attorneys to expose a scheme to punish prosecutors who wouldn't bend to political pressure.

But the Committee missed a big one: Timothy Griffin, Karl Rove's assistant, the President's pick as US Attorney for the Eastern District of Arkansas. Griffin, according to BBC Television, was the hidden hand behind a scheme to wipe out the voting rights of 70,000 citizens prior to the 2004 election.

Key voters on Griffin's hit list: Black soldiers and homeless men and women. Nice guy, eh? Naughty or nice, however, is not the issue. Targeting voters where race is a factor is a felony crime under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

In October 2004, our investigations team at BBC Newsnight received a series of astonishing emails from Mr. Griffin, then Research Director for the Republican National Committee. He didn't mean to send them to us. They were highly confidential memos meant only for RNC honchos.

However, Griffin made a wee mistake. Instead of sending the emails - potential evidence of a crime - to email addresses ending with the domain name "@GeorgeWBush.com" he sent them to "@GeorgeWBush.ORG," a website run by prankster John Wooden, who owns "GeorgeWBush.org." When Wooden got the treasure trove of Rove-ian ravings, he sent them to us.

And we dug in, decoding, and mapping the voters on what Griffin called "Caging" lists, spreadsheets with 70,000 names of voters marked for challenge. Overwhelmingly, these were Black and Hispanic voters from Democratic precincts.

The Griffin scheme was sickly brilliant. We learned that the RNC sent first-class letters to new voters in minority precincts, marked "Do not forward." Several sheets contained nothing but soldiers, other sheets, homeless shelters. Targets included the Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida and that city's State Street Rescue Mission. Another target, Edward Waters College, a school for African-Americans.

If these voters were not currently at their home voting address, they were tagged as "suspect" and their registration wiped out or their ballot challenged and not counted. Of course, these 'cages' captured thousands of students, the homeless and those in the military though they are legitimate voters.

We telephoned those on the hit list, including one Randall Prausa. His wife admitted he wasn't living at his voting address: Randall was a soldier shipped overseas.

Randall and other soldiers like him who sent in absentee ballots, when challenged, would lose their vote. And they wouldn't even know it.

And by the way, it's not illegal for soldiers to vote from overseas - even if they're Black…

  ¶ 12:47 PM 0 comments links to this post

  When the Marshalls Wear Black Hats

Via lukery at kos:

Two FBI Whistleblowers Confirm Illegal Wiretapping of Government Officials and Misuse of FISA: State Secrets Privilege Was Used to Cover Up Corruption and Silence Whistleblowers

...On April 2, 2002, Graham filed with the DOJ-OIG a classified protected disclosure, which provided a detailed account of FISA violations involving misuse of FISA warrants to engage in domestic surveillance. In his unclassified report SA Graham states: “It is the complainant’s reasonable belief that the request for ELSUR [electronic surveillance] coverage was a subterfuge to collect evidentiary information concerning public corruption matters.” Graham blew the whistle on this illegal behavior, but the actions were covered up by the Department of Justice and the Attorney General’s office.

Click here (.pdf) to read the unclassified version of SA Graham’s Official Report.

The report filed by SA Graham bolsters another FBI whistleblower’s case that became public several months after Graham’s official filing with the Justice Department in 2002. Sibel Edmonds, former FBI Language Specialist, also worked for the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO), and her assignments included the translations of Turkish Counterintelligence documents and audiotapes, some of which were part of espionage investigations led by SA Graham. After she filed her complaint with the DOJ-OIG and Congress, she was retaliated against by the FBI and ultimately fired in March 2002. Court proceedings in Edmonds’ case were blocked by the assertion of the State Secrets Privilege by then Attorney General John Ashcroft, and the Congress gagged and prevented from investigating her case through retroactive re-classification of documents by DOJ. To read the timeline on Edmonds’ case Click here.

Edmonds’ complaint included allegations of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities. In its September 2005 issue, Vanity Fair ran a comprehensive piece on Edmonds’ case by reporter David Rose, in which several former and current congressional and Justice Department officials identified former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as being involved in illegal activities with the Turkish organizations and personnel targeted in FBI investigations. In addition, Rose reported: “…much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.” In January 2005, DOJ-OIG released an unclassified summary of its investigation into Edmonds' termination. The report concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by convincing evidence.

Another Former Veteran FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Specialist at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC also filed similar reports with DOJ-OIG and several congressional offices regarding violations of FISA implementation and the covering up of several espionage cases involving FBI Language Specialists and public corruption cases by the Bureau. The cases reported by this whistleblower corroborate those reported by SA Graham and Sibel Edmonds. In an interview with NSWBC investigators the former FBI Specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, stated: “…you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure. No wonder they invoked the state secrets privilege in Edmonds’ case.”

William Weaver, NSWBC Senior Advisor noted that,”These abuses of power are precisely why we must pay attention to whistleblowers. Preservation of the balance of powers between the branches of government increasingly relies on information provided by whistleblowers, especially in the face of aggressive and expanding executive power. Through illegal surveillance members of Congress and other officials may be controlled by the executive branch, thereby dissolving the matrix of our democracy. The abuse of two powers of secrecy, FISA and the state secrets privilege, are working hand in hand to subvert the Constitution. In an abominably perverse arrangement, the abuse of FISA is being covered up by abuse of the state secrets privilege. Only whistleblowers and the congressional and judicial oversight their revelations spawn can bring our system back into balance.”

  ¶ 11:57 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Psychopaths Who Would Rule Us



You want to see some seriously sick programming?

"Our Children's Children's War"

Well, not if I can help it. Look here, though, at the complacent banality of evil:

...If you expect the War on Terror to end with the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, or with the establishment of a stable government in Afghanistan, you may be in for an unpleasant surprise. While the eyes of the world focus on those conflicts, the U.S. military is fighting an unconventional war that could last generations.

Widely known as the "War on Terror," the outgoing commander of the U.S. military's Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, refers to it as "The Long War." Ted Koppel presents an in-depth special report on a war that may last longer than any in which the U.S. has been involved before.

U.S. military officials point out that al-Qaeda and other terror organizations are not thinking in terms of a campaign that will end in five, 10 or even 20 years. Instead, they are looking as far as 100 years into the future, and the U.S. has no choice but to do the same...

The third chapter in this trilogy is something that the Pentagon calls "The Long War." And what they're really referring to is the battle against terrorism, which many of the leaders in the Pentagon now perceive as being an endless battle — one that may go on for 20 years, 30 years or more.

So they have begun to preach the gospel that we have to adapt to this notion that we are in a permanent state of war, and that what we are doing in Iraq and Afghanistan and Somalia and certain other parts of the world right now and the way that we are fighting this, this war, requires a certain level of adaptation and we have to adapt to these new realities.

So the 9/11 show and how it's changed America, Iran and the influence that it's exerting throughout the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, and the Long War, those are all, in a sense, three chapters of the same story...

Where to start with this propaganda and disinformation?

Destroy the social and economic forces that create Al Qaeda. Come up with alternative energy sources removing the incentive of the war for oil. Don't support the people who want to attack Civilization and replace it with religious theocracy, whether Muslim, Christian, or any religion.

The Pentagon and the Company behind it see two real things in this: the blank check for endless war, and the prospect for Control.

What other motivation for this?

...Reuters yesterday reported on a recently issued study on future technologies written by the Pentagon's Defense Science Board. More than anything, it seems these outside advisers want a surveillance system that would put Big Brother to shame, and they're looking at the commercial sector to provide it:

William Schneider, the board's chairman, said a key finding was a need to track individuals, objects and activities -- much smaller targets than the Cold War's regiments, battalions and naval battle groups.

"It's really an appeal to capture and put into military systems the know-how that's already available in the market place," Schneider said in a telephone interview.

So, after reviewing the available technology, what specific types of things do they suggest the military needs? Well, one example, is the Pentagon wants TiVo, according the report (available as a PDF here):

"To counter these new threats, technology exists, or could be developed, to provide new levels of spatial, temporal, and spectral resolution and diversity. Furthermore, the ability to record terabyte and larger databases will provide an omnipresent knowledge of the present and the past that can be used to rewind battle space observations in TiVo-like fashion and to run recorded time backwards to help identify and locate even low-level enemy forces. For example, after a car bomb detonates, one would have the ability to play high-resolution data backward in time to follows the vehicle back to the source, and then use that knowledge to focus collection and gain additional information by organizing and searching through archived data."

Much of the report comes as little surprise: the science advisers want to move away from Cold War-era weapons and toward technologies that can be used in urban conflicts. Small sensors, finding better ways to use data, and an emphasis on increasingly popular "influence operations" all figure big...

They're proposing total surveillance of the population, continuously, captured digitally for all time, promoted and performed by "the commercial sector", for the Security State. The commercial sector, performing government funded "influence operations". Wait a minute: they're already doing that.

Do you need any further evidence the people proposing this are authoritarian psychopaths?  ¶ 8:01 AM 4 comments links to this post

  Bird Brains of a Feather

Chris Floyd:

When he's not globetrotting with rightwing bagman and arms-dealing cult godling Sun Myung Moon, or being served with free prostitutes while bagging Red Army cash and insider fixings in China, little presidential brother Neil Bush can often be found in the balmy climes of Saudi Arabia, soaking up the largess of Bush Family business partners like the royal Sauds and the wealthy bin Ladens -- and peddling his latest business wheeze, a boondoggle aimed at wringing money from public education systems dependent on government favor to survive...

Thus Arab News, the Saudi English-language paper, finds the peripatetic Neil "building bridges" at the Jeddah Economic Forum this week...

He only really came to life at the end of the talk, speaking of the "anguish" he feels over the way the Saudi's medieval kingdom of rampant nepotistic corruption, intolerant religious extremism and suffocating social and political repression is portrayed in the outside world.

To Bush, the fact that Saudi Arabia is a kleptocratic authoritarian oligarchy dominated by a single family whose power rests on a "base" of religious fanatics and oil money is not a bad thing; it's just a "different" kind of democracy...

The Saudi way of governance obviously has much to recommend it, especially to superior families -- the natural rulers of society -- who find that the prissy restrictions and public clamor of Western-style Jeffersonian representative democracy tends to put a crimp in the efficient exercise of their power.

P.S. For more on the highly remunerative relationship between the Bush Family and the mephitic messiah from Korea, see Robert Parry's "Moon/Bush 'Ongoing Crime Enterprise'" and his archive of stories on "The Dark Side of Rev. Moon," plus John Gorenfeld's continuing updates on the bizarro GOP moneybags.

Chris being on something of a roll this week- basically, Chris is always on a roll if you ask me- elaborates on some of Arthur Silber's work. Let's face it, the Bu$h family is nothing if not a pack of enduring idiots.

...Arthur Silber, as always, talks good and damning sense about the maddening moral idiocy of the entire American establishment and the whole "national debate" about the Iraq war. He limns with brutal accuracy the inability of our movers and shakers -- and most of the public they manipulate so thoroughly -- to comprehend the true nature of this bloodsoaked hell: that it is a monstrous crime, conceived in evil, steeped in murder, breeding death, brutality and corruption in everything it touches:

"Moreover, this catastrophe without end has severely damaged our nation's military, making us more vulnerable to actual threats we might face in the future. And no, Mr. Bush, Senator Reid, and assorted "major liberal bloggers," the answer is not to enthusiastically and very expensively create a still "bigger military." We already spend more on defense than most of the rest of the world combined. Why in God's name should our military, in the words of Chalmers Johnson, regularly "deploy[] well over half a million soldiers, spies, technicians, teachers, dependents, and civilian contractors in other nations" -- and why should we have over 700 bases in 130 countries around the globe? There is only one reason for insanity of this kind: we are absolutely convinced we are "entitled" to rule the world, by military force on a scale never before seen in all of world history. If that is what you believe, then say so -- and be damned."

That last line says it all. It's time to stop all the baby talk, time to strip off the sugar-coating over the reality of what these policies really mean, and have always meant. And it's time -- way past time -- to damn the authoritarians, the imperialists, and the silk-suited murderers for what they are, and drive them out of office, out of public life, and into the prisons where they belong.

Nice idea. But who among us can bell the cats?

Chris goes on to quote Silber again:

"The truth is infinitely worse than that these lives have been "wasted": these deaths have served to strengthen our enemies and weaken our own country in countless ways that our actual enemies could never have achieved on their own. That these lives have been "wasted" is the best one can say, not the worst. They are the greatest boon our enemies could dream of. These lives have not been "wasted": they are the precious tribute laid at the feet of our enemies, by our own leaders in the pursuit of indefensible and criminal aims.

Of course, the recognition of this truth requires that we act like adults, and that we are capable of coherent thought, shorn of lies. We must be willing to give up the myth of the "noble soldier" who "selflessly sacrifices" his life for the glory of the Perfect and Good United States -- and see that these individuals died in a criminal war of aggression launched to consolidate and expand America's hegemonic role, a goal embraced by almost every leading politician, Republican and Democratic, over many decades of entirely avoidable conflict, chaos and death."

Oh: and by the way, I guess this makes me yet another uncivil extremist. As if no one could tell.  ¶ 3:06 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Caught With Their Centrifuges Down

The Washington Pravda comes out with a nice synopsis of the news this week from Bu$hCo that North Korea isn't quite the looming threat its been made out to be:

Earlier this week, the Bush administration backed away from claims that North Korea has an active uranium-enrichment program, reversing the stance U.S. intelligence officials have taken since 2002. The LAT thinks the intelligence failure sounds too familiar to the run-up to the Iraq war: For "the second time, serious questions have been raised about the credibility of U.S. assessments of the potential nuclear threat posed by an enemy nation. Are these charges justified?" The NYT hopes that the administration's candor stems from an understanding of "how dangerous and counterproductive it is to hype intelligence," but bets that the admission is coming now because "Pyongyang has agreed to readmit nuclear inspectors -- who probably won't be able to find the active uranium enrichment program the administration has been alleging for more than four years" ... the WaPo admits that American intelligence officials may have overreached in their assessments, but argues that North Korea officials still must account for the 20 centrifuges and other equipment they secretly purchased that would make it possible to construct a large-scale enrichment facility ...the WSJ decries the reversal, calling the move "bizarre" given the "volumes of public evidence that North Korea's uranium-enrichment program is very real."

[thanks Ruth]

North Korea allegedly exploded a small nuke underground last fall. With no enrichment process of their own, you can't help but wonder where they got it, or if it was a large simulated explosion of conventional explosives, or if it even happened at all.  ¶ 7:17 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Hey Big Brother

Hey big brother, as soon as you arrive
You better, get in touch with the people, big brother
Better get them on your side, big brother
And keep them satisfied

Welcome to the beat of the city street
Walk on now and don't be shy
Take a closer look at the people you meet
And notice the fear in their eyes
watching the time passing by.....

Focus your eye on the filthy sky
Just as far as you can see
Everybody's getting kinda tired of waiting
Cause nobody wants to cry
And nobody wants to die....

Now that you've got the picture
What you going to do?

Hey big brother, I know you're out there somewhere
If we don't get our thing together, big brother will be watching us
He ain't gonna get me, are you gonna let him get you?
He'll never get me, he'll never get me, no

Big brother's coming
No he'll never get me, no no no no...

-Rare Earth

That may turn out to be wishful thinking [thanks Noah]:

Homeland Security officials released long-delayed guidelines that turn state-issued identification cards into de facto internal passports Thursday, estimating the changes will cost states and individuals $23 billion over 10 years...

"Raising the security standards on driver's licenses establishes another layer of protection to prevent terrorists from obtaining and using fake documents to plan or carry out an attack," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a press release.

The 162 pages of proposed rules (.pdf) require:

* Applicants must present a valid passport, certified birth certificate, green card or other valid visa documents to get a license and states must check all other states' databases to ensure the person doesn't have a license from another state.
* States must use a card stock that glows under ultraviolet light, and check digits, hologramlike images and secret markers.
* Identity documents must expire before eight years and must include legal name, date of birth, gender, digital photo, home address and a signature. States can propose ways to let judges, police officers and victims of domestic violence keep their addresses off the cards. There are no religious exemptions for veils or scarves for photos.
* States must keep copies of all documents, such as birth certificates, Social Security cards and utility bills, for seven to 10 years...

However, many difficult questions, such as how state databases will be linked or how homeless people can get identity documents, were left unanswered by the proposed rules. Citizens of states that don't abide by the guidelines will not be able to enter federal courthouses or use their identity cards to board a commercial flight.

Sophia Cope, a staff attorney at the centrist Center for Democracy and Technology, says the rules only mention privacy once.

"The Real ID Act does not include language that lets DHS prescribe privacy requirements, so there are no privacy regulations related to exchange of personal information between the states, none about skimming of the data on the magnetic stripe, and no limits on use of information by the feds," Cope said.

The Real ID Act, slipped into an emergency federal funding bill without hearings, originally required states to begin issuing the ID documents by May 2008...

So that's how the Rethuglicans are going to throw the 2008 $election. No National ID, no vote!  ¶ 8:49 PM 0 comments links to this post

  The Nature of the Bubble

You need to take an hour and go over to watch and listen to the slideshow "The Dark Side of the Looking Glass" in order to understand what's happening to the markets. And the results on our society.

It gets technical, but you can handle it if a stock broker can.  ¶ 10:04 AM 0 comments links to this post

  Maybe They'll Unionize

It's about time somebody went on strike against the War.

Via Noah Shachtman at Wired:

...The United Nations report disclosing the presence of Filipino mercenaries in Iraq will be formally made public in March. But it is now known that the mainly American companies that have been recruiting the mercenary fighters have not done the right thing.

Now that's understatement if I've ever heard it.

Many of the recruits come from police and military forces in the Philippines, Peru and Ecuador.

The security personnel recruited are not adequately prepared to face the rigors of serving in the vast and unending civil-war front that is Iraq.

The chief of the UN working-group on the use of mercenaries, Jose Luis Gomez del Prado, who gave the press advance knowledge of the report, speak of the recruits being “trained quickly” and coming out of the training “unprepared for armed conflict situations.”

“They are sent there, they receive M16 [assault rifles] and are placed in very dangerous areas like the Green Zone [in Baghdad], convoys and embassies,” del Prado, according to Agence France-Presse, said. He also said that sometimes the recruits do “important and honorable tasks like protecting humanitarian organization convoys.”

But del Prado also warns that, not having been given the necessary physical, combat and psychological training to be in the hazard posts that they are in the recruits could end up violating human rights, injuring or killing innocent civilians. Without being properly armed psychologically they could finish their mission as mentally damaged as many American soldiers have been.

Del Prado is also worried about the participation of these recruits in destroying the ecology of the places they police or do explosives work at. He is especially concerned about those working for western mining companies.

These private security guards serving western companies in Iraq make up the second highest number of armed forces now in that country after the US military. There are more of these recruits than the British troops.

Del Prado is also worried about the labor rights of these mercenaries.

The recruits are entitled to the worker’s rights applied in the country where the company hiring them has is headquarters, but the UN expert pointed out that it is hard to imagine “a poor Peruvian filing suit in an American court.”

Their assignments and activities do not fall exactly under the strict definition of “mercenary” found in the UN-sponsored 1989 “International Convention Against the Use, Recruitment, Financing and Training of Mercenaries.” Del Prado finds that not being truly covered by the definition, the recruits are in a legal vacuum. They can of course sue their companies. Obviously, they can’t go to an Iraqi court. If any suing is to be done it has to be in the United States for an American company or the UK for a British company. Del Prado can’t imagine a poor Peruvian or Ecuadorian going to the United States and hiring lawyers there...

I can, just before the Immigration Service handed him or her off to a private prison camp to do slave labor [thanks to Xenophon, where you can get the gist of the article if the L.A. Times link goes bad].

You want outrage? Click through the Photo Gallery on the family prisons for immigrants and read the captions.  ¶ 9:08 PM 0 comments links to this post

  Privateers of the Caribbean

A gathering of the bloodthirsty and the undead is noted by Sam Urquhart at GNN:

...This week, a (self-declared) important section of the ‘intelligence community’ will be meeting in St. Petersburg, Florida for its second “International Intelligence Summit,” where they will be discussing how best to fight their Global War on Terror. Among them will be a motley crew of Iranian exiles, Israeli intelligence officials, repentent Islamists, neocon warriors and scions of the British secret service...



Much of the intelligence that led us all to war with Iraq came from a tiny nucleus of emigres, think tank hacks and well placed officials. They in turn can be traced back to public relations agents that they hold in common. Benador Associates, for example, handles the public schedules of Michael Ledeen (the U.S.’ number one Iran hawk), Richard Perle (the U.S.’ number one Iraq hawk), Kenneth Timmerman (Mr “it’ll be a cakewalk”), Charles Krauthammer, Iraqi emigre Kanan Makiya, Israeli neocon Natan Sharansky and ex CIA chief turned uber-hawk James Woolsey.



Benador Associates is part of a wider cluster of institutions that has expanded since 2001 and exerts a key influence in pushing the U.S. media and political system towards war. The Orwellian-named Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, for example which was founded in 2002 under the wing of those who around the same time resurrected the Cold War-era Committee on the Present Danger, which then gathered together extremist hawks to confront Soviet Russia. The FDD has found no trouble attracting funds to wage war against today’s ‘terror’ – attracting $250,000 from healthcare magnate Leonard Abramson and a staggering $1.5 million from Ameriquest capital, a firm widely reviled as a predatory mortgage lender. With that small fortune, the FDD has thrust itself into the media spotlight (averaging seven media appearances by its staff per day in the international media in 2007) and onto American university campuses “at a time when college campuses are under the sway of apologists for terrorism” according to its non-profit tax return.

A number of workhorses have emerged from this stable, not least of them is the Intelligence Summit – a meeting point for likeminded hawks, gadflies and corporate representatives with a common passion for war...



...[An] attendee at 2006’s Intelligence Summit was Iranian exile Alireza Jafarzadeh, who has made the extraordinary transition from refugee to being “a FOX News Channel Foreign Affairs Analyst,” while for twelve years he served as “the chief congressional liaison and media spokesperson for the US representative office of Iran’s parliament in exile, the National Council of Resistance of Iran.” In 2003, it was information supplied by Jafarzadeh and his associates which fuelled the drive by the Bush administration to seek stringent sanctions on the Iranian government and, eventually, to a UN security council referral. Information supplied by Jafarzadeh – that Iran was running a secret nuclear weapons programme parallel to its nuclear energy activities – generated sufficient anxiety on the council to make the demand for the cessation of uranium enrichment a shoo-in.

However, as the Guardian reported on 22 February, much of this information has proved incorrect. Julian Borger reported that “most of the tip-offs about supposed secret weapons sites provided by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies have led to dead ends when investigated by IAEA inspectors, according to informed sources in Vienna.”

Along with distributing alarmist (and plain wrong) assertions about the nuclear intentions of the Islamic Republic, Jafarzadeh’s group has made many more accusations that haven’t led anywhere but have increased international attention on Iran. In 2003, for example, the National Council of Resistance in Iran released information claiming that Iran was producing a massive variety of bioweapons ranging from smallpox microbial bombs to anthrax spores and typhoid fever. More recently, he has claimed that the Iranian government has taken 32,000 mercenaries onto its payroll to cause havoc in Iran (an assertion he made on Lou Dobbs’ CNN slot). Whenever these assertions are made, and proved either overblown or plain wrong, Jafarzadeh’s credibility seems to have survived intact...



The ranks of its speakers are full of connections to neoconservative think-tanks and the more shadowy arms of the military industrial complex. Pauline Neville-Jones, for example, who serves as Chairman of QinetiQ – a growing contractor of government intelligence functions as well as a high-tech weapons manufacturer – sits on the advisory board alongside Wayne Simmons, an ex U.S. Navy Special operative in a unit “That was not only prepared to die for America, but they were prepared to go anywhere and do virtually anything when ordered.” Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch (a virulently Islamophobic website), sits alongside General Tom McInerny – who runs an advocacy group for the defense industry called Government Reform Through Technology and lobbies to “introduce advanced technology into the public sector.”



But it’s not just industry shills and talking heads who are involved in the Summit. As its website describes, “The Summit recruits active serving members of the government like Harold Rhode, from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to serve as neutral moderators.” That would be the same Harold Rhode who cut a swathe of destruction through the Department of Defense after his appointment as deputy to arch-neocon Douglas Feith in 2002. According to Sourcewatch, working at the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, “Rhode helped Feith lay down the law about the department’s new anti-Iraq, and broadly anti-Arab, orientation” while he also “worked with Feith to purge career Defense officials who weren’t sufficiently enthusiastic about the muscular anti-Iraq crusade that Paul D. Wolfowitz and Feith wanted.” Second rate analysts were pulled from “nooks and crannies of the Defense Intelligence Agency and other places” according to a former Pentagon analyst, as Rhode reshaped the strategic wing of the Pentagon ready for war with Iraq.

It would be certainly interesting to know what aspects of the summit were taken on board by members of the U.S. government and intelligence services.

I wonder what Harold Rhode and any other “neutral moderators” made of the contribution of private security consultant Ali Koknar who suggested that governments deploy “pseudo-terrorists” to flush out the bad guys. As Koknar began his speech in 2006, “Deployment of ‘Pseudo Terrorists’ (PTs) is recommended as a ‘quick and dirty’ solution to the lingering absence of actionable human intelligence, which the US counterterrorism effort suffers from” before adding that “In places such as Central Iraq, Eastern Afghanistan, and Northwest Pakistan, where traditional intelligence sources are scarce due to local support for the terrorist cause, PTs may prove to be a vital factor in providing the actionable intelligence necessary for the United States to successfully counter terrorists.”

This year’s Intelligence Summit, which will be taking place in St Petersburg, Florida from 5-7 March, promises to be paranoid feast. With Dr Jill Dekker expounding upon the “Syrian Biological Weapons Threat and Regional Security,” Alireza Jafarzadeh speaking about “Iranian Nuclear Facilities” and the bloodthirsty Wayne Simmons explaining “Joint Agency Operations” there should be something for everybody. Jafarzadeh and ex-CIA analyst Clare Lopez will be double teaming on the “Iranian threat” – Lopez in her role as the head of the estimable Iran Policy Committee, the primary lobby group pushing for the U.S. to ‘unleash’ the mystical terrorists in the Mujaheddin e-Khalq upon the Iranian people.



It also promises to be a laboratory for new foreign interventions. As the website of the summit notes, “Particular emphasis is placed on inviting émigré groups from soon to be emerging democracies.” That’s a quaint way of describing plans for regime change.

So it’s no surprise that if you name a hawk from the push towards Baghdad – Perle, Rhode, Kenneth Timmermann – they’re on board and networking. It would be interesting to know which Bush administration officials will be the “neutral moderators” this time around, but alas that’s “not for distribution” and who knows, which plucky Democrats will be wandering the exhibition hall? As the attendee brochure promises, there is the chance to “mingle with congressional leaders” and “top CEOs.” Who could resist?

You can scoff at the colorful, absurd, and disturbing imagery I've sprinkled throughout this post, but far more disturbing is the system that selects for people who regard such imagery and action as heroic and desirable sincerely believing they can use their Rings of Power to accomplish good.

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