One God to Rule Them All

One God to find them
One God to bring them all
And in the Darkness bind them.


[thanks MJS]

Via Lambert, the Dominionists are trying to take over the Pentagon. And rightfully, a lot of military professionals are pissed.

Dec. 13, 2006 | When a Christian group shot a video inside the Pentagon that featured uniformed senior military officers talking about their evangelical faith, Mikey Weinstein went on the attack. Himself a former Air Force lawyer and Air Force Academy grad, Weinstein, who is Jewish, is the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He founded the MRFF earlier this year to oppose the spread of religious intimidation in a military increasingly dominated by evangelical Christians.

On Monday, Weinstein held a press conference in Washington, D.C., to announce that he was asking the Department of Defense's inspector general to look into the video, and determine whether the people who appeared in it -- Air Force Maj. Gen. Jack J. Catton Jr.; Army Brig. Gen. Vince Brooks, the former public affairs director of the Army; and Undersecretary of the Army Pete Geren -- had violated military regulations. He also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the government to find out who, if anyone, had approved the video shoot...

Weinstein: "...We have a systemic problem. You sound like you're too young to remember Robert Redford in "Three Days of the Condor," but the premise of that movie was that there was a CIA within the CIA. We have a virulently dominionist, fundamentalist evangelical Christian element within the Pentagon. They would prefer this to be the "Pentecostalgon," not the Pentagon. That's what they would prefer. They're trying to turn the Pentagon into a frickin' faith-based initiative, and that is not what our military is about..."

But it is what the Dominionists are about.

Proxy Warriors

"Let's you and him fight it out."

We have the spectacle of America and at least two other nations (Saudi Arabia and Iran) going at it in Iraq. Four if you count the secular Ba'athist Sunnis allied with many in Syria. But really, the subdivisions continue to grow, until you have pretty much every tribal clan in the Middle East going at it against everyone else.

And the world's largest private equity group egging it all on and set to profit from all angles.

Lambert and Correntewire have been following this well.

The Saudis are long time financial partners and supporters of the Bu$h family and especially Dear Leader- who is himself a long time friend of Prince Bandar Bu$h.

The Saudis- including Prince Bandar- bankrolled Al Qaeda, an organization the CIA helped put together to fight in Afghanistan against the Russians and who later formed the fundamentalist Taliban.

Al Qaeda, with Saudi hijackers among others, none Iraqi, precipitated 9-11.

The Saudis encouraged the Bu$h administration to bring down the secular Sunnis in the Ba'ath party when they invaded Iraq.

Now, they insist America keep troops there, supporting a government of the Iraqi Shia, who are closely allied to Iran.

Sunni Wahhabis are fighting secuular Sunnis who are fighting Shia, whom the United States are supporting even as they send Special Forces into covert missions to fight Iranian Shia.



Chaos is the plan.

Drowning the Accountability First

You have to go over to Tennessee Guerilla Women, which it seems is not a standard web page according to the omnipotent Google, to find Paul Krugman's good post today about our Outsourcer in Chief. I've thrown in some links that the good Dr. Krugman omitted. Shown is only the part germane to my soapbox, but do read it all.

...[O]utsourcing of the government’s responsibilities — not to panels of supposed wise men, but to private companies with the right connections — has been one of the hallmarks of [t]his administration. And privatization through outsourcing is one reason the administration has failed on so many fronts.

For example, an article in Saturday’s New York Times describes how the Coast Guard has run a $17 billion modernization program: “Instead of managing the project itself, the Coast Guard hired Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, two of the nation’s largest military contractors, to plan, supervise and deliver the new vessels and helicopters.”

The result? Expensive ships that aren’t seaworthy. The Coast Guard ignored “repeated warnings from its own engineers that the boats and ships were poorly designed and perhaps unsafe,” while “the contractors failed to fulfill their obligation to make sure the government got the best price, frequently steering work to their subsidiaries or business partners instead of competitors.”

In Afghanistan, the job of training a new police force was outsourced to DynCorp International, a private contractor, under very loose supervision: when conducting a recent review, auditors couldn’t even find a copy of DynCorp’s contract to see what it called for. And $1.1 billion later, Afghanistan still doesn’t have an effective police training program.

In July 2004, Government Executive magazine published an article titled “Outsourcing Iraq,” documenting how the U.S. occupation authorities had transferred responsibility for reconstruction to private contractors, with hardly any oversight. “The only plan,” it said, “appears to have been to let the private sector manage nation-building, mostly on their own.” We all know how that turned out.

On the home front, the Bush administration outsourced many responsibilities of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. For example, the job of evacuating people from disaster areas was given to a trucking logistics firm, Landstar Express America. When Hurricane Katrina struck, Landstar didn’t even know where to get buses. According to Carey Limousine, which was eventually hired, Landstar “found us on the Web site.”

It’s now clear that there’s a fundamental error in the antigovernment ideology embraced by today’s conservative movement. Conservatives look at the virtues of market competition and leap to the conclusion that private ownership, in itself, is some kind of magic elixir. But there’s no reason to assume that a private company hired to perform a public service will do better than people employed directly by the government.

In fact, the private company will almost surely do a worse job if its political connections insulate it from accountability — which has, of course, consistently been the case under Mr. Bush. The inspectors’ report on Afghanistan’s police conspicuously avoided assessing DynCorp’s performance; even as government auditors found fault with Landstar, the company received a plaque from the Department of Transportation honoring its hurricane relief efforts.

Underlying this lack of accountability are the real motives for turning government functions over to private companies, which have little to do with efficiency. To say the obvious: when you see a story about failed outsourcing, you can be sure that the company in question is a major contributor to the Republican Party, is run by people with strong G.O.P. connections, or both.

You'd best read the whole thing, before the lawyers yank it back behind Pravda's firewall.

Not the kind of thing the guys in charge of Google want you to read these days. They do, after all, want to protect their investment in the Party.

Apparently, as Dafna Linzer notes, now Google is picking Dear Leader's targets in the War on Terra these days, too.

Soon the Bu$hCo EPA will doubtless use Google to set their standards on the lead you can drink and the soot you can breathe too.

Bad Advice, Unheeded Except for the Worst Parts

Frank Rich:

In America we like quick fixes, closure and an uplifting show. Such were the high hopes for the Iraq Study Group, and on one of the three it delivered.

The report of the 10 Washington elders was rolled out like a heartwarming Hollywood holiday release. There was a feel-good title, “The Way Forward,” unfortunately chosen as well by Ford Motor to promote its last-ditch plan to stave off bankruptcy. There was a months-long buildup, with titillating sneak previews to whip up anticipation. There was the gala publicity tour on opening day, starting with a President Bush cameo timed for morning television and building to a “Sunshine Boys” curtain call by James Baker and Lee Hamilton on “Larry King Live.”

The wizard behind it all was the public relations giant Edelman, which has lately been recruited by Wal-Mart to put down the populist insurgency threatening its bottom line. Edelman’s vice chairman is Michael Deaver, the imagineer extraordinaire of the Reagan presidency, and “The Way Forward” had a nostalgic dash of that old Morning-in-America vibe. In The Washington Post, David Broder gushingly quoted one member of the group, Alan Simpson, musing that “immigration, Social Security and all those other things that have been hung up for so long” might benefit from similar ex-officio bipartisanship. Only in Washington could an unelected panel of retirees pass for public-policy Viagra.

Mr. Simpson notwithstanding, the former senator who most comes to mind is Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. In the early 1990’s he famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to describe the erosion of civic standards for what constitutes criminal behavior. In 2006, our governmental ailment is defining reality down. “The Way Forward” is its apotheosis.

This syndrome begins at the top, with the president, who has cut and run from reality in Iraq for nearly four years. His case is extreme but hardly unique. Take Robert Gates, the next defense secretary, who was hailed as a paragon of realism by Washington last week simply for agreeing with his Senate questioners that we’re “not winning” in Iraq. While that may be a step closer to candor than Mr. Bush’s “absolutely, we’re winning” of late October, it’s hardly the whole truth and nothing but. The actual reality is that we have lost in Iraq.

That’s what Donald Rumsfeld at long last acknowledged, between the lines, as he fled the Pentagon to make way for Mr. Gates. The most revealing passage in his parting memo listing possible options for the war was his suggestion that public expectations for success be downsized so we would “therefore not ‘lose.’ ” By putting the word lose in quotes, Mr. Rumsfeld revealed his hand: the administration must not utter that L word even though lose is exactly what we’ve done. The illusion of not losing must be preserved no matter what the price in blood.

The Iraq Study Group takes a similarly disingenuous tack. Its account of how the country Mr. Bush called a “grave and gathering danger” in September 2002 has devolved into a “grave and deteriorating” catastrophe today is unsparing and accurate. But everyone except the president knew this already, and that patina of realism evaporates once the report moves from diagnosis to prescription.

Its recommendations are bogus because the few that have any teeth are completely unattainable. Of course, it would be fantastic if additional Iraqi troops would stand up en masse after an infusion of new American military advisers. And if reconciliation among the country’s warring ethnicities could be mandated on a tight schedule. And if the Bush White House could be persuaded to persuade Iran and Syria to “influence events” for America’s benefit. It would also be nice if we could all break the bank in Vegas.

The group’s coulda-woulda recommendations are either nonstarters, equivocations (it endorses withdrawal of combat troops by 2008 but is averse to timelines) or contradictions of its own findings of fact. To take just one example: Even if we could wave a magic wand and quickly create thousands more military advisers (and Arabic-speaking ones at that), there’s no reason to believe they could build a crack Iraqi army and police force where all those who came before have failed. As the report points out, the loyalties and capabilities of the existing units are suspect as it is.

Of course, the plan was dead in the water- except for embedding troops in the Iraqi Government death squads Special Forces. Dear Leader, the same boy who enjoyed feeding firecrackers to live frogs, liked that idea. As if our kids aren't coming home with enough nightmares to support the careers of an entire generation of VA psychotherapists.

But even the Iraqis have standards:

BAGHDAD, Dec. 10 — President Jalal Talabani said Sunday that the American program to train Iraq’s security forces had been a repeated failure and he denounced a plan to increase the number of American advisers working with the Iraqi Army, saying it would subvert the country’s sovereignty...

American commanders have poured more than $12 billion into training and equipping Iraq’s security forces and have tied a withdrawal of American troops to success in these efforts. But Mr. Talabani ridiculed them. “What have they done so far in training the army and the police?” he said. “What they have done is move from failure to failure.”

Mr. Talabani, who is Kurdish, said the Iraq Study Group report offered some “dangerous” recommendations that he said were “an insult to the Iraqi people” in that they undermined the country’s ability to control its own army and police.

He did not offer specific criticisms of the American training program, except to blame the Americans for inadequately screening recruits to the Shiite-dominated police to ensure their loyalties to the state rather than to a sect.

American and some Iraqi officials say some Iraqi police and army units are more beholden to Shiite militias than to the government and have helped to drive the cycles of retributive violence by attacking Sunni Arabs. Some Iraqi officials have also said that Sunni Arab officers have abetted the Sunni-led insurgency.

Even the hired help? Doesn't this man know that the world is flat? Doesn't he appreciate the spirit entrepreneurial freedom?

Pedal to the Full Metal Jacket for 2008

The Consigliere: Stay half the course.

Dear Leader: Stay the course v.2 by upping the ante Salvadorian-style.

Sunni death squads? Shiite death squads? The Sociopath-in-Chief in about to unleash 150,000 American troops as death squads, under the rationalization that they can't prosecute him for war crimes if the entire Department of Defense and United States Armed Forces is also involved.

The Company wants more of its good thing; evidence suggests that Special Forces may have been pitting partisans against each other all along.



This raises the possibility of incredible violence. Like Greg Palast says:

...Baker is more than aware that, two weeks ago, Dick Cheney dropped his Thanksgiving turkey to fly to Riyadh, at the demand of the Saudis, for a dressing down by King Abdullah. The King wants US forces to stay to baby-sit the Shias in Iraq’s army. The Saudis have made it clear that, if the US pulls out our troops, Saudi Arabians will crank up payments to their brothers, the Sunni warlords in Iraq, and Baghdad, or the entire region, will run with blood.

The outcome was foregone: King Abdullah’s wish is Cheney’s command — and Baker’s too. And so 70,000 of our soldiers will stay.

What gives King Abdullah the power to ghost-write the Iraq Study Group recommendations? It’s not because the Saudis sell us broccoli.



And therein lies the danger. Behind the fratricidal fracas in Iraq is something even more dangerous than civil war — a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia over control of Iraq’s pivotal position in OPEC, the oil cartel.

Because what is painted by Baker’s Iraq Study Group as an ancient local clash between Shia and Sunni over the Kingdom of God, is, in fact, a remote control war between Iran and Saudi Arabia over the Kingdom of Oil.

Welcome to the Midpoint.



Over the next 50 years, if nothing halts or side tracks the economic dependence on fossil fuels, expect increasingly vicious wars for energy. They won't call it that at first. But every disagreement in the Middle East, be it Israeli and Palestinian or Sunni and Shiite, will be amplified because of it.

The only way to stop this feed-forward cycle of violence is to literally stop feeding the fire with fossil fuel.

Team Xinhua realizes this, and like their moonbase, they may have photosynthesized fuels long before we do.

But of course, if our Saudi lienholders decree otherwise, we never will.

Sky-High Profitable Mistakes

Priorities like science didn't have much to do with it.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., Dec. 8 — NASA’s administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says the current period of space exploration will come to be seen as a mistake.

“Viewed from the point of history several decades out,” he said in an interview, “the period where the United States retreated from the Moon and quite deliberately focused only on low Earth orbit will be seen, to me, a mistake.”

Mr. Griffin has made similar comments before, notably a year ago in an interview with USA Today. This time, his remarks came as he waited for Thursday’s down-to-the-wire effort to launch the shuttle on a 12-day mission to rewire the International Space Station. The liftoff was scrubbed at the last minute because of weather concerns...

Mr. Griffin was appointed to head the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in 2005, a year after President Bush announced his “vision for space exploration,” which calls for returning astronauts to the Moon by 2020 and then moving on to send humans to Mars. Mr. Griffin has from the start been an enthusiastic proponent of that plan.

But it has put him in a delicate situation, as he has shifted NASA financing to the Moon initiative, while moving to complete the space station and shut down the shuttle program by 2010, and cutting back on its science activities. And in doing so, he has occasionally expressed doubts about the wisdom underlying the nation’s decision to build the shuttle and the station.

After his remarks a year ago, he issued an apologetic memorandum to NASA employees.

But if there was any discomfort in expressing such opinions once again at the Kennedy Space Center in the midst of preparations for launching, Mr. Griffin showed none. He said in the interview that his comments had been broadly misconstrued as a slap against the people who build and maintain the shuttle and space station, and emphasized that he admired the people of NASA who took on enormous challenges to create the shuttle and station.

The fault is not NASA’s, he said, adding: “The space shuttle is a response to a policy mistake — it isn’t the mistake. The mistake was tearing up all the infrastructure that we built for Apollo and saying, ‘let’s just focus on low Earth orbit...’ ”

The plan to return to the Moon by 2020 has been met with some skepticism, especially among those who doubt that the space agency can take on such a daunting project within its $17 billion annual budget. Dr. Griffin said that NASA could do the job — and could reach the moon even more quickly, with more money.

“I’m tempted to say, ‘Why the skepticism?’ ” he said, adding, “but in fairness, NASA’s recent history has not had the on-time, on-budget performance characteristic of the Apollo era. And I’m trying to restore that.”

The fact that Democrats won the majority of seats in Congress in the November election, and other political changes that will occur over time, should have little effect on the plan, he said...

DINOcrats being as easily bought as Rethuglicans.

The low orbit space station concept was boneheaded from the beginning, serving as a potential weapons plaform. A low orbit space station is constantly falling towards earth. Better to build in the more stable LaGrange orbits.

The space program has largely existed to feed the aerospace defense industry since its inception. There has been some really impressive science done, but that hasn't been the major focus even in the unmanned era. Science has served as an excuse, not a motivation for these people.

Similarly, Griffin's motivation remains Company based- as might be expected for an ex-CIA ex-CSC/ DynCorp CEA. It's just now there's the likelihood the Chinese will have a moonbase soon. [thanks Xenophon] A little competition tends to focus one on the realities.

Pay No Attention to the Oil Rig Behind the Curtain

Since the Saudi Consigliere suggested we be out of Iraq by 2008- to Dear Leader's vocal disagreement, the Rethuglicans have the potential of removing what little main$tream media attention the antiwar movement has been given since November.

Between, as Atrios calls them, factions like St. John McCain and the Wise Old Men, Dear Leader's Rethuglicans have the whole spectrum of Moderate Centri$t to NeoCon to TheoCon Crusader political persuasion.

And really, what other opinion is there on cable news these days?

Amidst all the babble in and about Washington and the main$tream media about the Iraq Study Group's findings, something went unnoticed that both Bu$hCo-Cheneyburton and the Bandar Bu$h Baker factions of the Company agree with wholeheartedly. But Antonia Juhasz, at AlterNet, caught it.

In its heavily anticipated report released on Wednesday, the Iraq Study Group made at least four truly radical proposals.

The report calls for the United States to assist in privatizing Iraq's national oil industry, opening Iraq to private foreign oil and energy companies, providing direct technical assistance for the "drafting" of a new national oil law for Iraq, and assuring that all of Iraq's oil revenues accrue to the central government.

President Bush hired an employee from the U.S. consultancy firm Bearing Point Inc. over a year ago to advise the Iraq Oil Ministry on the drafting and passage of a new national oil law. As previously drafted, the law opens Iraq's nationalized oil sector to private foreign corporate investment, but stops short of full privatization. The ISG report, however, goes further, stating that "the United States should assist Iraqi leaders to reorganize the national oil industry as a commercial enterprise." In addition, the current Constitution of Iraq is ambiguous as to whether control over Iraq's oil should be shared among its regional provinces or held under the central government. The report specifically recommends the latter: "Oil revenues should accrue to the central government and be shared on the basis of population." If these proposals are followed, Iraq's national oil industry will be privatized and opened to foreign firms, and in control of all of Iraq's oil wealth.

The proposals should come as little surprise given that two authors of the report, James A. Baker III and Lawrence Eagleburger, have each spent much of their political and corporate careers in pursuit of greater access to Iraq's oil and wealth...

At last, something all the Kennebunkport Corleones can agree on.

Refusing the Offer He Could Not Refuse

It's either high theater or Dear Leader crossing the highway with his eyes closed.

Or, possibly, both.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — President Bush moved quickly to distance himself on Thursday from the central recommendations of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, even as the panel’s co-chairmen opened an intensive lobbying effort on Capitol Hill to press Mr. Bush to adopt their report wholesale.

One day after the study group rattled Washington with its bleak assessment of conditions in Iraq, its Republican co-chairman, James A. Baker III, said the White House must not treat the report “like a fruit salad,” while the Democratic co-chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, called on Congress to abandon its “extremely timid” approach to overseeing the war.

But Mr. Bush, making his first extended comments on the study, seemed to push back against two of its most fundamental recommendations: pulling back American combat brigades from Iraq over the next 15 months, and engaging in direct talks with Iran and Syria...

Thus the reason for the DIA psy-op released the same day as the report from the Iraq Study Group. Bernhard has compared and contrasted the two as a study in the Company's schizophrenia at the moment. But it's clear which side Dear Leader prefers.

And there's the rub, increasing the violent potential of the situation.

Dear Leader ignores the consigliere of the Saudis, his Poppy, and the Company to salvage his own ego and hegemonic delusions.

Virtually all of Washington, Rethuglican and DINOcrat, went belly up and approved the Company's heir-designate to the D.o'D.

Is this what it appears to be? Dear Leader dissin' his daddy, and more importantly, the Company that $elected him and the Saudis that bailed him and his family out out countless times, increasing the likelihood of Iraq igniting the whole Middle East.

That would not be profitable for anyone, a few deluded zealots aside.

Dear Leader should remember Poppy and Babs' response when the lost their daughter to leukemia, particularly since he's already made his contribution to the bloodline.

One wonders if Cheney and Addington are more acquiescent to the Company's solvency?

King of Pain

It is not, however, the same old thing as yesterday.

The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you've been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards -- and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty.

You've just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq -- even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects.

According to documents obtained for Wired News under federal sunshine laws, the Air Force's Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games.

The ADS shoots a beam of millimeters waves, which are longer in wavelength than x-rays but shorter than microwaves -- 94 GHz (= 3 mm wavelength) compared to 2.45 GHz (= 12 cm wavelength) in a standard microwave oven.

Bullshit. 94 GHz and 3 mm waves are smack in the middle of the microwave band.

...The longer waves are thought to limit the effects of the radiation. If used properly, ADS will produce no lasting adverse affects, the military argues.

Documents acquired for Wired News using the Freedom of Information Act claim that most of the radiation (83 percent) is instantly absorbed by the top layer of the skin, heating it rapidly.

The beam produces what experimenters call the "Goodbye effect," or "prompt and highly motivated escape behavior." In human tests, most subjects reached their pain threshold within 3 seconds, and none of the subjects could endure more than 5 seconds.

"It will repel you," one test subject said. "If hit by the beam, you will move out of it -- reflexively and quickly. You for sure will not be eager to experience it again."

But while subjects may feel like they have sustained serious burns, the documents claim effects are not long-lasting. At most, "some volunteers who tolerate the heat may experience prolonged redness or even small blisters," the Air Force experiments concluded.

The reports describe an elaborate series of investigations involving human subjects.

The volunteers were military personnel: active, reserve or retired, who volunteered for the tests. They were unpaid, but the subjects would "benefit from direct knowledge that an effective nonlethal weapon system could soon be in the inventory," said one report. The tests ranged from simple exposure in the laboratory to elaborate war games involving hundreds of participants.

The military simulated crowd control situations, rescuing helicopter crews in a Black Hawk Down setting and urban assaults. More unusual tests involved alcohol, attack dogs and maze-like obstacle courses.

In more than 10,000 exposures, there were six cases of blistering and one instance of second-degree burns in a laboratory accident, the documents claim...

--[thanks Buzzflash]

They've got a pain energy weapon, one that can be set to kill if desired. It's deadliness is being downplayed not to draw the attention of the Geneva Convention war crime crowd, so it can be deployed against civilians. Thank Darth Rumsfeld for this, among other atrocities.

More on ADS weapons here and here.

This is precisely the kind of thing no one believes when you tell them.

Via Xan via ZDNet:

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

... The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the "roving bug" was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect's cell phone.

Kaplan's opinion said that the eavesdropping technique "functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." Some handsets can't be fully powered down without removing the battery; for instance, some Nokia models will wake up when turned off if an alarm is set...

The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can “remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner’s knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call.”

Nextel and Samsung handsets and the Motorola Razr are especially vulnerable to software downloads that activate their microphones, said James Atkinson, a counter-surveillance consultant who has worked closely with government agencies. “They can be remotely accessed and made to transmit room audio all the time,” he said. “You can do that without having physical access to the phone.”

Because modern handsets are miniature computers, downloaded software could modify the usual interface that always displays when a call is in progress. The spyware could then place a call to the FBI and activate the microphone—all without the owner knowing it happened. (The FBI declined to comment on Friday.)

...A BBC article from 2004 reported that intelligence agencies routinely employ the remote-activiation method. "A mobile sitting on the desk of a politician or businessman can act as a powerful, undetectable bug," the article said, "enabling them to be activated at a later date to pick up sounds even when the receiver is down."

... Surreptitious activation of built-in microphones by the FBI has been done before. A 2003 lawsuit revealed that the FBI was able to surreptitiously turn on the built-in microphones in automotive systems like General Motors' OnStar to snoop on passengers' conversations.

When FBI agents remotely activated the system and were listening in, passengers in the vehicle could not tell that their conversations were being monitored.

Malicious hackers have followed suit. A report last year said Spanish authorities had detained a man who write a Trojan horse that secretly activated a computer's video camera and forwarded him the recordings.

Learned Helplessness and Fighting the Power

The Moderates think it's a sure thing. It seems the DINOcrats on the Armed Services Committee are more than willing to let the Fixer and his boys handler Der Decider. It's like both sides want this to go through making as few waves as possible.

The Senate Armed Services Committee has voted 24 to 0 to approve Robert Gates, an unindicted co-conspirator in the Iran-Contra scandal, to be the new Secretary of Defense.

Amazing, isn't it? Some people actually still believe a bunch of Democratic Senators who've been spineless cowards as the minority will be something other than that come January.

(They won't.)

- The Dark Wraith

Some more points from the Dark Wraith worth considering:

...it is no less a sweeping statement to declare that the very same electorate that twice put a man like George W. Bush into the Oval Office has somehow in two short years had a fundamental change of mind about what constitutes desirable qualities in a President. To assume that a welcome transformation of the majority of Americans toward progressivism is underway is folly. Far more likely, the majority is looking for what George W. Bush was supposed to be as a conservative that he failed to be in that role.

Should that be what was truly behind the Democratic gains in November, the outlook is bleak. Republicans could very well hold the White House in 2008 and might even re-capture either the House or the Senate then. Any reciprocating "warmth of sentiment" Democrats might have toward the majority of voters right now must be tempered by the real possibility that a care-taker Congress has been put into place while the electorate sorts out which purveyor of Right-wing policies can best achieve the results Mr. Bush could not. This possibility makes the next two years crucial for the newly elected Democratic majorities in the House and Senate because they will have but 24 months—just one session of Congress—to do what they can to repair the damage wrought not merely by George W. Bush, but by the politics of a Republican Party that remains incapable of wise, prudent, and responsible governance.

It is altogether possible that the moral and financial mess wrought by the Republicans cannot be undone, but it is the duty of the Democrats to do what they can. Sadly, though, they should not labor under the misimpression that any repair they do will be rewarded by the voters in 2008, at least not as far as the Presidential race is concerned. The majority two years from now will be quite a bit like the majority that put a failed President back in the White House in 2004. To imagine that those voters have really learned their lesson is to ascribe to them something last month's elections did not and certainly could not demonstrate, something the Quinnipiac poll shows is still missing. The people who voted for Mr. Bush have not learned contrition, much less have they become ashamed of themselves for what they did in 2000 and 2004.

There is precious little evidence that the majority of Americans understand that George W. Bush is more than just another failed President: he is, in fact, a failed President they chose, not once, but twice.

It's worth nothing evidence does not suggest a majority supported Bu$h in either election. Unless, of course, you mean a majority of campaign dollars. Given that criteria, corporate America went for Dear Leader in a big way.

However, a majority was willing to go along with the results. It would have been interesting if a million protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks had shown up on Inauguration Day. One can always wonder what will happen in 2009 if the same kind of miscarriage of a $election happens again.



One thing is for sure: you won't catch Joe Biden, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama behind that mask.

Ministry of Piece and Truthiness

Well sand off the old finish, slap a new coat of shellac on me, and call me Furniture [thanks, MJS]. Via DefenseTech, where they actually take this stuff seriously, more on the reel-deel double-seekrit war behind the War on Terra, the Longer War behind the Long War. It ain't Eurasia, it's always been Eastasia...

"...As guys like Tom Barnett have endlessly pointed out, there are, roughly speaking, two competing camps in the Defense Department. One group -- mostly Army guys and Marines -- wants to retool our military, to go after terrorists and tackle insurgents. The other -- largely made up of Air Force and Navy-types -- thinks that Iraq and Al-Qaeda are distractions from the one mortal enemy that can really threaten America long-term: the Chinese.

"Donald Rumsfeld's words favored the first camp. "[P]repar[ing] for wider asymmetric challenges" is a "fundamental imperative" for the military, the Pentagon noted in the Quadrennial Defense Review, its every-four-years look at grand strategy. We're in the middle of a "Long War." Iraq and Afghanistan are just the opening battles.

"But follow the money, and a very different set of priorities emerges. The Pentagon is spending its $70 billion budget on new weapons like it's the Cold War all over again – with China stepping in for the Soviets. Nearly $10 billion a year goes to ballistic missile interceptors originally designed to stop Russian missiles; $9 billion to new-jack fighter jets meant to take on MiGs; $3.3 billion to next-gen tanks and fighting vehicles; $1 billion for the Trident II nuclear missile upgrade; and $2 billion for a new strategic bomber.

Gates can continue the trend. Or more than five years after 9/11, he can commit to focusing the Defense Department firmly, absolutely on the two-front war which he admits the U.S. is "not winning." That's the fundamental choice to be made. You can change tactics in Iraq –- or not. But as long as China remains front-and-center for so much of the military, it's hard to see how the U.S. winds up winning this "Long War..."

It's hard to think that somewhere people are still buying the idea it can be won. Or that winning, instead of profits, were ever a real objective. If there's one thing that is obvious, it's that a house-to-house war like Stalingrad Baghdad isn't going to sell the kind of big ticket items that keep divisions of the Company like Lockheed or Northrop-Grummon or United Defense Industries happy. There's got to be an Evil Empire somewhere.

If there isn't, we'll just run a projection, and if Dear Leader keeps intentionally weakening our dollar enough, they're bound to catch up with us!

This is the D.o'D.'s Information War, and first and foremost, they're trying to sell themselves on themselves.

[Alternatively, not to suggest anything immoderate, the government could try to, you know, get along and lessen tensions and trash the whole preemptive war schtick. Or consider no longer selling out the American Dream for cheap slave labor. Or maybe consider redeveloping an independent non fossil fuel based American energy industry and manufacturing base.

But where's the money in that for the Big Boys and their Big Toys?]

More on the D.o'D.'s budget- and everyone else's in 2007- here.

Orcish Misunderestimation

There aren't a paltry 25,000, or 50,000 private contractors in the front line of the War on Terra.

There are apparently 100,000, and possibly as many as 150,000 sub-contractors in Iraq.

More than any other war in history.

Census Counts 100,000 Contractors in Iraq
Civilian Number, Duties Are Issues

By Renae Merle
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 5, 2006; Page D01

There are about 100,000 government contractors operating in Iraq, not counting subcontractors, a total that is approaching the size of the U.S. military force there, according to the military's first census of the growing population of civilians operating in the battlefield.

The survey finding, which includes Americans, Iraqis and third-party nationals hired by companies operating under U.S. government contracts, is significantly higher and wider in scope than the Pentagon's only previous estimate, which said there were 25,000 security contractors in the country...

In addition to about 140,000 U.S. troops, Iraq is now filled with a hodgepodge of contractors. DynCorp International has about 1,500 employees in Iraq, including about 700 helping train the police force. Blackwater USA has more than 1,000 employees in the country, most of them providing private security. Kellogg, Brown and Root, one of the largest contractors in Iraq, said it does not delineate its workforce by country but that it has more than 50,000 employees and subcontractors working in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. MPRI, a unit of L-3 Communications, has about 500 employees working on 12 contracts, including providing mentors to the Iraqi Defense Ministry for strategic planning, budgeting and establishing its public affairs office. Titan, another L-3 division, has 6,500 linguists in the country.

The Pentagon's latest estimate "further demonstrates the need for Congress to finally engage in responsible, serious and aggressive oversight over the questionable and growing U.S. practice of private military contracting," said Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky (D-Ill.), who has been critical of the military's reliance on contractors.

About 650 contractors have died in Iraq since 2003, according to Labor Department statistics.

Central Command, which conducted the census, said a breakdown by nationality or job description was not immediately available because the project is still in its early stages. "This is the first time we have initiated a census of this robustness," Lt. Col. Julie Wittkoff, chief of the contracting branch at Central Command, said in an interview. Those figures do not include subcontractors, which could substantially grow the figure.

...The count increased about 15 percent from about 87,000 since Central Command began keeping a tally this summer, she said, though the increase may reflect ongoing data collection efforts. The census will be updated quarterly, Wittkoff said.

...With few industry standards, the military and contractors have sometimes lacked coordination, resulting in friendly fire incidents, according to a Government Accountability Office report last year.

"It takes a great deal of vigilance on the part of the military commander to ensure contractor compliance," said William L. Nash, a retired Army general and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. "If you're trying to win hearts and minds and the contractor is driving 90 miles per hour through the streets and running over kids, that's not helping the image of the American army. The Iraqis aren't going to distinguish between a contractor and a soldier." [via truthout]

Now there's a bunch of Faithful, making a six-figure salary every month, who aren't just going to want to throw in the towel and bring our boys and girls home over a little thing like having a reason to be there!

It's obvious for this crew the war is its' own best reason. It's existential support for the War on Terra. You could expect it only from the genius of the post-modern, almost post-industrial, President Godsend.

Centri$t$ for Bu$h

At last, an Iraqi moderate supporting Dear Leader:

Al Hakim’s resume is truly impressive. He’s an Ayatollah and a son of an Ayatollah. He speaks fluent Farsi – having spent half his entire life living in exile as an honored guest of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. As a dedicated theocrat – he allied his sectarian legions of Iraqi exiles with the Iranian army in the Iran-Iraq war. It’s safe to assume that he puts his faith based political doctrines above his country – a trait he shares with his host.

To get a measure of the man, you need to see past Hakim’s wardrobe. This guy is more than a religious missionary. He’s certainly no ordinary politician. You can’t even consider him a military man – although he was the leader of the Badr Brigades – the military wing of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq – SCIRI. Still, he’s so much more than that. The source of his political clout is his control over the Shiite death squads that have infiltrated the American-trained security forces.

And there’s more to recommend this man for the task of getting “the job done.” The death squads under Al Hakim’s command aren’t your run of the mill assassins. They usually leave their signature on their victims before grinding them up. Al Hakim’s dedicated cadres like to drill holes in other people’s skulls before dumping the mutilated cadavers on Baghdad’s streets as a warning to any real or potential adversaries.

It’s not yet clear why Bush invited Mister Death Squad to Washington. But let’s not ‘misunderestimate’ the President. This is the same POTUS who thundered from his bully pulpit that “we cannot turn a blind eye to repression because that repression is not in our back yard.” What he failed to mention was that – as the need arises - we would continue to invite vicious torturers and assassins to our front yard for tea in the Rose Garden.

Bush’s media collaborators are already calling Hakim a ‘moderate’ – compared to the mercurial Moqtada Al Sadr. Some death squad leaders are apparently more reliable than others.

What makes Hakim so special is that he seems such a mature thug – the kind of SOB that can be our SOB. The Badr militias have a reputation of being disciplined and heavily indoctrinated foot soldiers who follow the party line. Once they get orders to close down their torture dungeons, Hakim’s loyalists will likely obey his command. Of course, that also means that the torture sessions could only have started with Hakim’s explicit orders...

That's what Dear Leader likes. Grown-up, mature, thuggery. Why, give that man dual citizenship, and he could be a Senator. In either Partei, DINOcrat or Rethuglican.

Thanks, and a dip of the drill to Bernhard.

Not Your Average Kwisatz Haderach

Lambert should have never left me the keys to this. He should have known sooner or later I couldn't resist taking my little broom closet in the back of the Mighty Corrente building out for a spin in cyberspace. After all, you never know where a door will lead before you open it, only the probabilities it will contain a mop and bucket and not unanticipated alien vistas.

I just want to thank him, and proceed with the tour.

My sojourns will be cross posted at my own site Singularity, until Google decides to totally sell its soul to Big Brother. Or, as becomes more likely, buy the bastard out entirely.

For my opener tonight I'd like to lift a long loving salute to a couple of guys who've helped make my state of delusional paranoia what it is today. You know 'em: that old Contra dog himself, Robert M. Gates and his longtime flame, John D. Negroponte. Together, they're guaranteed to make the Ministry of Truth everything it was promised to be.

Gentlemen, I salute you in your defeat of Darth Rumsfeld!

Homeland Über Alles!

Where do the orcs go?

NaomiC asks a really good question: what happens when the private contractors of Iraq are brought home? In doing so she links to two interesting sites, her (and her husband's) own, and another very good but relatively new site, The Spy Who Billed Me.

When they return, most of the private contractors will find steady employment working for members of the Rethuglican party.

Assuming of course the Democrats win enough at home to end the debacle in the first place.

There will be dirty deeds in need of being done dirt cheap as the Rethuglicans seize control from the weak minded DINOcrats. Well, dirt cheap at first anyway. The private contractors, or at least their captains of industrial espionage and warfare, will realize that their only hope for another blank check will be under a Rethuglican administration.

It seems Gingrich, at least will be looking for a few good Storm Troopers. He's not interested in the popular vote. He just wants supporters powerful enough to propel him into the Presidency regardless.

The Aristocrats of the Carlyle Group haven't the faintest idea what Beast they've unleashed on themselves and the rest of us. Over 50,000 private security contractors will be brought home after Iraq ends. These are the same people (only at the DNA level) that joyride through Baghdad taking potshots at civilians. These are the same orcs that set up a business in human trafficking out of Bosnia and Iraq.

But think about it: we don't have to wait until the war's over.

In order for this to have happened in the first place, the orcs had to be here to begin with.

A Campaign About Nothing

Sirota doesn't seem to like Obama either, for reasons similar to mine:

The Ridiculousness & Danger That Is Obama '08

Think about it. The national media is swooning over Obama, begging him to run for president. Yet, at the same time, they are implicitly acknowledging that he has actually not "developed significant legislative initiatives." In other words, we are to simply accept that the the Obama for President wave has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the man HAS DONE and further, that whenever he does decide to use his enormous political capital to do something, it is all in pursuit of the White House - not any actual sense of DOING SOMETHING for the people who elected him to the Senate.

I don't blame Obama for not having accomplished much - he's been in the Senate for two years. As I wrote in the Nation, the main concern about him is that he doesn't actually seem to ASPIRE to anything outside of the Washington power structure (other than maybe running for another higher office), and doesn't seem to be interested in challenging the status quo in any fundamental way. Using his senate career as a guide, it suggests that any presidential run by him is about him, his speaking ability and his fawned over talent for "connecting" (whatever the hell that means).

For progressives, this situation is perilous indeed. Obama is a candidate who has kept his record deliberately thin, who has risked almost nothing for the bigger movement, and in fact who has sometimes gone out of his way to reinforce dishonest stereotypes about the left. This is a man who has helped launch the Hamilton Project designed to undermine Democrats pushing for fairer trade deals. This is a man who belittled Paul Wellstone as merely a "gadfly." This is a man who refused to lift a finger for Ned Lamont. Flocking to a candidate like that without demanding that he change only reinforces the damaging concept that our movement is a Seinfeld Movement about nothing.

Consider Ezra Klein's recent piece in the Los Angeles Times about Obama:

"Obama is a cipher, an easy repository for the hopes and dreams of liberals everywhere...But if Obama avoided being battle-tested in 2004 by the grace of God, it's his own timidity that has kept his name clean since. Given his national profile and formidable political talents, he could have been a potent spokesman for Democratic causes in the Senate. Instead, he has refused to expend his political or personal capital on a single controversial issue, preferring to offer anodyne pieces of legislation and sign on to the popular efforts of others...Indeed, Obama is that oddest of all creatures: a leader who's never led. There are no courageous, lonely crusades to his name, or supremely unlikely electoral battles beneath his belt. He won election running basically unopposed, and then refused to open himself to attack by making a controversial but correct issue his own."

Please read it all.

Obama has been a flag in the wind these last couple of years, and when Dear Leader blew hot air, Obama generally voted his way. Do the names Roberts and Alito mean anything? Does the phrase Patriot Act 2 mean anything?

No, it doesn't bother me in the least he's got a middle name of Hussein. It bothers me more that he has a record of cozying up to Christian fundamentalists. It bothers me he's with the rest of the Lieberman DINOcrats, advocating sending more kids to Iraq instead of bringing them home.

It bothers me tremendously he is ambitious but without any real principles, a Democrat for much the same reason Lieberman is: because it's easier for him to get ahead that way.

Newt Impalement

Here's a slimy salamander that needed impaling: Keith Olberman rips Newt a new one.

Read the text and watch the video.

Now that's what I'm talkin' about.

Acta Retracta

RIYADH (Reuters) - Saudi Arabia said there was no truth in an article by a Saudi security adviser suggesting the world's top oil exporter would back Iraq's Muslim Sunnis in the event of a wider sectarian conflict.

Nawaf Obaid, a security adviser to the Saudi government, said on Wednesday the kingdom would intervene with funding and weaponry to prevent Shi'ite militias attacking Iraq's Sunnis once the United States begins pulling out of Iraq.

He also suggested Saudi Arabia could bring down world oil prices to squeeze Shi'ite power
Iran, which Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab countries accuse of meddling in Iraq.

"There is no basis in truth to the article by the writer Nawaf Obaid in the Washington Post of November 29, 2006," the state Saudi Press Agency quoted an "official source" as saying.

"The writer does not represent any official body in Saudi Arabia. What he published only represents his personal opinion and does not in any manner at all represent the policy or positions of the kingdom," it added on Friday.

"(Riyadh) continually affirms its support for the security, unity and stability of Iraq, with all of its sectarian groups."

Obaid stressed in the article that the views were his own and not those of the Saudi government…

And pay no attention to the 800-lb gorilla behind the curtain.

[thanks to Bernhard]

Just like SPECTRE West is the Carlyle Group,

Ian Fleming got it right after all.

SPECTRE (SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion) is a fictional terrorist organisation …

A case of art mimicking life, or life mimicking art, I wonder?

…The goal of the organization is extortion and world domination. To achieve this, their basic strategy of the organization is illustrated by the analogy of the three Siamese fighting fish Blofeld keeps in an aquarium in the film version of From Russia with Love. Blofeld notes that one fish is refraining from fighting two others until their fight is concluded. Then, that cunning fish attacks the weakened victor and kills it easily. Thus SPECTRE's main strategy is to instigate conflict between two powerful enemies, namely the superpowers, hoping that they will exhaust themselves and be vulnerable when SPECTRE finally moves in to seize power…

That's so… Mayberry Machiavellian.

Wayne Madsen:
"…There is increasing evidence that the radioactive poisoning assassination of ex-KGB and FSB agent and Kremlin critic Alexander Litvinenko was the result of a plot by anti-Vladimir Putin criminal syndicates based in Britain, Israel, Ukraine, and Poland to embarrass the Russian government.

"Suspicions about the role of the exiled Russian-Israeli criminal syndicates in the poisoning of Litvinenko, including that headed by Litvinenko's friend, wanted oligarch Boris Berezovsky, re-surfaced after former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar became violently ill after eating breakfast at a conference he was attending in Dublin, Ireland. Ireland's banking secrecy laws has made it a favorite location for the Russian-Israeli Mafia.

"Gaidar's sudden illness occurred a day after Litvinenko died in a London hospital from poisoning from polonium-210, a deadly radioactive isotope when ingested. Radioactive traces were later discovered at sites around London, including Berezovsky's offices in the West End.

"Gaidar was moved from a Dublin hospital to a Moscow hospital where he received a telephone call from Putin wishing him a speedy recovery. Putin's Mafiosi critics in Britain, Israel, Moscow, and other countries have accused the Russian leader of poisoning Litvinenko and attempting to kill Gaidar.

"However, Russian officials are claiming that the attacks were carried out by Putin's criminal opponents who want to create tension between Moscow and the West.

"Their arguments appear to have merit when the choice of radioactive isotope used to kill Litvinenko is considered. Intelligence experts point out that polonium was discovered by Marie Curie (nee Maria Sklodowska) in 1897 and named after her native homeland Poland (Polonia in Latin) to express her support for Polish independence against its partition by Russia, Prussia and Austria.

"Before Putin moved in to take over Yukos Oil from the Russian criminal syndicates, there were plans to build a Russian-German gas pipeline through Poland. After Poland was taken over by a neo-con team of identical twins Lech and Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who serve as President and Prime Minister, respectively, Poland not only began to conduct a witch hunt against ex-Communists but also became a base of operations for the anti-Putin Russian-Israeli exiled gangsters and oligarchs.

"Named as Defense Minister was former American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Radek Sikorski, who also happens to be married to Washington Post editorial board member and leading neo-con journalist Anne Applebaum, also a leading critic of Putin (along with a number of so-called "liberals," including Clinton ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke).

"After Putin decided, along with former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, to bypass Poland and build the Russo-German pipeline under the Baltic Sea, Sikorski unleashed a barrage against Russia and Germany. He likened the pipeline deal to the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Agreement that carved up Eastern Europe, including Poland, between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Sikorski asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel to cancel the pipeline deal but she refused.

"We now know that Litvinenko was working on unspecified "energy issues" in London. We also know he has been described as a Russian-Israeli "double agent" and was reported to have transferred classified Russian documents in Yukos to a Russian-Israeli exiled oligarch in Tel Aviv. Double agents are always in danger from the party they are working against.

"Litvinenko's killers' use of polonium, named by Marie Curie in support of Polish independence, may mean that the assassins are more likely found in Warsaw's Russian-Israeli mob infested intelligence apparatus than in the Kremlin.

That would mean there's a SPECTRE East containing members of the American Enterprise Group and with agents on the editorial boards of major American newspapers.

It figures.

While SPECTRE East seems to dig the noir approach, SPECTRE West lately likes the patriotic Texas oil baron mystique:

Exxon Mobil CEO warns against congressional Democrats' plan to end industry tax breaks

BOSTON – Proposals by congressional Democrats to eliminate oil industry tax breaks and subsidies would set a bad example overseas and discourage new industry investments, Exxon Mobil's top executive said Thursday.

Rex W. Tillerson said moves suggested by leaders of the incoming Democratic congressional majority would encourage similar steps by governments abroad, where Exxon Mobil Corp. generates the bulk of its profit. ..

“I think the bigger concern I have is not so much the economic direct effect of the fact that they want to take a tax break off here or there. But it's the message it sends the rest of the world that you don't have to provide stable (regulatory) frameworks,” Tillerson told reporters after a speech to the Boston College Chief Executives' Club.

“And if that happens, none of us are going to be able to take the risk in this business.”

Irving, Texas-based Exxon Mobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, earns about two-thirds of its profit from oil and natural-gas production outside the United States, and production is rising in Africa, the Middle East and Russia.

U.S. tax breaks intended to encourage steps such as refinery expansion and oil exploration “are not that material” to Exxon Mobil's profit, said Tillerson, who spent years leading Exxon ventures overseas before being named chairman and CEO in January.

House Democrats have said they plan to target billions of dollars in oil company tax breaks for a quick repeal next year – moves that come partly in response to high summer fuel prices and recent huge industry profit. For example, Exxon Mobil recently reported the second-largest quarterly profit ever for a publicly traded company: $10.49 billion in this year's third quarter, second only to the $10.71 billion Exxon Mobil posted in last year's fourth quarter…

Not that Exxon would really care, it's just the idea of Exxon paying taxes is so gauche. They really wouldn't want us to look silly to the rest of the world. Now that's what I call civic-mindedness, in the best SPECTRE tradition.