January 11, 2008
| Hard-Wired For Fear | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
Fear trumps reason. It's hard-wired in the brain. Newsweek (via Bruce Schneier):
The brain structure that processes perceptions and thoughts and tags them with the warning "Be afraid, be very afraid!" is the amygdala. Located near the brain's center, this almond-shaped bundle of neurons evolved long before the neocortex, the seat of conscious awareness. There is good reason for the fear circuitry to be laid down first, explains neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux of New York University. Any proto-humans who lacked a well-honed fear response did not survive long enough to evolve higher-order thinking; unable to react quickly and intuitively to rustling bushes or advancing shadows, they instead became some carnivore's dinner. Specifically, fear evolved because it promotes survival by triggering an individual to respond instantly to a threat — that is, without cogitating on it until the tiger has pounced. [...]The evolutionary primacy of the brain's fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain's reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions — neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear ("I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can"), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear "far, far more powerful than reason," says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. "It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there's nothing more important than that."
Fear is not only more powerful than reason, however. It is also (sometimes absurdly) easy to evoke for reasons that also lie deep in our evolutionary past. Reacting to a nonexistent threat, such as fleeing from what you thought was a venomous snake that turned out to be a harmless one, isn't as dangerous as failing to react to actual threats. The brain is therefore wired to flinch first and ask questions later. [...]
The results of targeting the amygdala in a way that overrides the thoughtful cortex can be ludicrous or tragic, but frequently irrational. In a classic experiment, scientists compared people's responses to offers of flight insurance that would cover "death by any cause" or "death by terrorism." The latter, of course, is but a small subset of the former. Yet the specificity of the word "terrorism," combined with the stark images the word evokes, triggers the amygdala's fear response in a way that "by any cause" does not. Result: people are willing to spend more for terrorism insurance than death-by-any-cause insurance. [...]
"Negative emotions such as fear, hatred and disgust tend to provoke behavior more than positive emotions such as hope and happiness do," says Harvard University psychology researcher Daniel Gilbert. Perhaps paradoxically, the power of fear to move voters can be most easily understood when it fails to — that is, when an issue lacks the ability to strike terror in citizens' hearts. Global warming is such an issue. Yes, Hurricane Katrina was a terrifying example of what a greenhouse world would be like, and Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" scared some people into changing their light bulbs to energy-miserly models. But barely 5 percent of voters rank global warming as the issue that most concerns them. There is little public clamor to spend the kind of money that would be needed to change our energy mix to one with a smaller carbon footprint, or to make any real personal sacrifices.
A big reason is that global warming, as an issue, lacks the characteristics that trigger fear, says Gilbert. The human brain has evolved to fear humans and human actions (such as airplane bombers), not accidents and impersonal forces (carbon dioxide, even when it is the product of human activities). If global warming were caused by the nefarious deeds of an evil empire — lofting military satellites that deliver carbon dioxide into the stratosphere, say, rather than the "innocent" actions of people heating their homes and driving their children to school — "the war on warming would be this nation's top priority," Gilbert wrote in the Los Angeles Times.
Besides needing that human component, events loom scariest when they pose a threat next week, not next decade or beyond. Climate change is already here, but the worst of it would arrive if the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets melt, which is decades away. "The brain is adapted to deal with the here and now," says Gilbert — the lethal-tusked mastodon right over there, not the herd of them that will migrate through your encampment next spring. It's little wonder, then, that warnings about the eventual insolvency of Medicare or Social Security fail to move voters, and that global warming "fails to trip the brain's alarm," he says. But the prospect of illegal immigrants' changing the face of neighborhoods today does.
The primitive nature of fear means that it can be triggered most powerfully not by wordy arguments but by images that make a beeline for the brain's emotion regions.
Images are the key. No images in history had such a high-voltage effect on the amygdala of the world as the World Trade Center images from 9/11. The planes hitting the towers; the towers collapsing. Those images made 9/11 the most successful psyops operation of all time, turning the country around on a dime, rechanneling it in a radically different direction. Whoever dreamed it up, it was genius. Evil genius, but genius.
And they've been whanging away on that fear circuitry ever since. Which is why this message (also via Bruce Schneier) is such an important one to convey to our elected officials, wherever we live:
I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.
Send it to your elected officials, or at least take it to heart. Refuse to be terrorized. Just because you have an amygdala doesn't mean you have to act like it.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:41 PM
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November 15, 2007
| "Suicide Epidemic" Among US Vets | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iraq War and Peace |
A CBS news investigation has found that US veterans are committing suicide at an alarming rate, led by young veterans of the US "war on terror." Herald Sun:
The US military is experiencing a "suicide epidemic" with veterans killing themselves at the rate of 120 a week, according to an investigation by US television network CBS.At least 6256 US veterans committed suicide in 2005 - an average of 17 a day - the network reported, with veterans overall more than twice as likely to take their own lives as the rest of the general population.
While the suicide rate among the general population was 8.9 per 100,000, the level among veterans was between 18.7 and 20.8 per 100,000.
That figure rose to 22.9 to 31.9 suicides per 100,000 among veterans aged 20 to 24 - almost four times the non-veteran average for the age group.
"Those numbers clearly show an epidemic of mental health problems," CBS quoted veterans' rights advocate Paul Sullivan as saying.
CBS quoted the father of a 23-year-old soldier who shot himself in 2005 as saying the military did not want the true scale of the problem to be known.
"Nobody wants to tally it up in the form of a government total," Mike Bowman said.
"They don't want the true numbers of casualties to really be known." [...]
"Not everyone comes home from the war wounded, but the bottom line is nobody comes home unchanged," Paul Rieckhoff, a former Marine and founder of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans for America said on CBS.
It's not just the horror and stress of combat. It's hard getting most people to kill, so recruits have to be subjected to intense conditioning. The military's gotten very good at this. I read somewhere that during the Second World War, only 25% of US soldiers actually fired their weapons in battle; in Korea, it was up to 50%; in Vietnam, 95%. But people aren't machines. You change their programming, and it's hard to change it back. Too little thought is given to the large-scale consequences of taking a significant fraction of young people, conditioning them in this way, and then returning them to the general population with their whole lives lying before them. It's hard on the veterans, obviously, but it also warps the psychological climate and culture of American society as a whole, and not in a good way. Yet another uncounted cost of war.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:37 AM
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October 15, 2007
| The Real Rudy: FDNY Radios | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics |
Watch this:
Be sure to catch Rudy's moment of testimony near the end. The guy never stops lying.
Now go sign the petition.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:49 PM
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October 04, 2007
| Heart Of Darkness | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iran Palestine/Middle East |
You can't listen to Neocon éminence grise Norman Podhoretz, our bloodthirsty warmonger-in-chief, who says he "hopes and prays" that the US will bomb Iran, who never shuts up about his fantasy that the US is fighting for its very life in "World War IV" against "Islamofascism" — you can't listen to all his bluster and hyperbole and half-assed machismo and not conclude that the guy's wildly over-compensating for something. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the guy's nuts.
I just didn't realize how nuts. Via Glenn Greenwald, here's an excerpt from an essay of Podhoretz's from 1963, when he was already 33 years old and editor-in-chief of Commentary. It's one of the most appalling things I've ever read:
To me, at the age of twelve, it seemed very clear that Negores were better off than Jews — indeed, than all whites....[I]n my world it was the whites, the Italians and Jews, who feared the Negroes, not the other way around. The Negroes were tougher than we were, more ruthless, and on the whole were better athletes....I was still afraid of Negroes. And I still hated them with all my heart....The orphanage across the street is torn down, a city housing project begins to rise in its place, and on the marvelous vacant lot next to the old orphanage they are building a playground....A week later, some us are swatting flies on the playground's inadequate little ball field. A gang of Negro kids, pretty much our own age, enter from the other side and order us out of the park. We refuse, proudly and indignantly, with superb masculine fervor. There is a fight, they win, and we retreat, half whimpering, half with bravado. My first nauseating experience of cowardice...
Gradually we abandon the place and use the streets instead. The streets are safer, though we do not admit this to ourselves. We are not, after all, sissies — the most dreaded epithet of an American boyhood...
That day in school the teacher had asked a surly Negro boy named Quentin a question he was unable to answer. As usual I had waved my arm eagerly...and, the right answer bursting from my lips, I was held up lovingly by the teacher as an example to the class. I had seen Quentin's face — a very dark, very cruel, very Oriental-looking face — harden, and there had been enough threat in his eyes to make me run all the way home for fear that he might catch me outside....
For me as a child the life lived on the other side of the playground and down the block on Ralph Avenue seemed the very embodiment of the values of the street — free, independent, reckless, brave, masculine, erotic....
The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself. It no longer has, as for me it once did, any cause or justification (except, perhaps that I am constantly being denied my right to an honest expression of the things I earned the right as a child to feel). How, then, do I know that this hatred has never entirely disappeared? I know it from the insane rage that can stir in me at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism; I know it from the disgusting prurience that can stir in me at the sight of a mixed couple; and I know it from the violence that can stir in me whenever I encounter that special brand of paranoid touchiness to which many Negroes are prone....
There were plenty of bad boys among the whites — this was, after all, a neighborhood with a long tradition of crime as a career open to aspiring talents — but the Negroes were really bad, bad in a way that beckoned to one, and made one feel inadequate. [Emphasis in the original]
What a twisted, malevolent little shit. Bush gave this guy the Presidential Medal of Freedom and just recently sought his counsel on Iran. Rudy Giuliani made him his Senior Foreign Policy Advisor. How many Iranians and brown-skinned others will have to die because of the psychosexual disfigurement of Podhoretz and people like him?
Posted by Jonathan at 11:16 PM
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September 23, 2007
| I'm So Proud | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iraq Politics |
Our president:
(Via Cryptogon)
Posted by Jonathan at 05:01 PM
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September 16, 2007
| Cashing In On Shock | 9/11, "War On Terror" Black Ops Disasters |
I'm a big fan of Naomi Klein (see this, this, this, this, this, this, this), who's got a new book, Shock Doctine, coming out this week. Pre-ordered mine a month ago. While we wait, here's an intro made for her by filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, who made the wonderful Children of Men:
She's really onto something. Check it out.
And you know that once they figured out all the uses that shock could be put to, they started looking for ways to create the needed shocks — 9/11 being the mother of them all.
[Thanks, Miles]
Posted by Jonathan at 08:38 PM
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September 07, 2007
| Liar | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics |
Watch Rudy lie through his teeth:
Posted by Jonathan at 05:13 PM
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August 24, 2007
| America To The Rescue | 9/11, "War On Terror" Humor & Fun Iran Iraq |
A little history lesson from Jon Stewart:
Posted by Jonathan at 09:41 AM
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July 31, 2007
| "Defend America" | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
Some of it's pretty hilarious, actually, in a blackly bitter sort of way, like some particularly dark and vicious issue of The Onion. For example, this. Cheerful, tin-eared, totalitarian. Gawd.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:49 PM
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July 30, 2007
| All About The Data-Mining After All | 9/11, "War On Terror" Black Ops Politics |
As has been pointed out here at PastPeak a number of times, the whole FISA warrant/wiretapping story was really about a whole lot more than wiretapping: the collection and data-mining of massive databases tracking Americans' phone calls, emails, financial transactions, etc., etc. The NYT reported Saturday that it was this data-mining that was the real story behind the contention between Congress and the White House (and within the Justice Department iself) on the FISA warrants. Pretty much like we've said all along. NYT:
A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency's secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.
The NSA's data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.
The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the NSA program.
Mr. Gonzales insisted before the Senate this week that the 2004 dispute did not involve the Terrorist Surveillance Program "confirmed" by President Bush, who has acknowledged eavesdropping without warrants but has never acknowledged the data mining.
If the dispute chiefly involved data mining, rather than eavesdropping, Mr. Gonzales’ defenders may maintain that his narrowly crafted answers, while legalistic, were technically correct.
But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who have been briefed on the program, called the testimony deceptive.
"I've had the opportunity to review the classified matters at issue here, and I believe that his testimony was misleading at best," said Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, joining three other Democrats in calling Thursday for a perjury investigation of Mr. Gonzales.
"This has gone on long enough," Mr. Feingold said. "It is time for a special counsel to investigate whether criminal charges should be brought."
The senators' comments, along with those of other members of Congress briefed on the program, suggested that they considered the eavesdropping and data mining so closely tied that they were part of a single program. Both activities, which ordinarily require warrants, were started without court approval as the Bush administration intensified counterterrorism efforts soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. [Emphasis added]
So Gonzales has been denying the dispute was about eavesdropping — because it really was about something that was much more serious. I guess it depends on what the meaning of "is" is.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:58 PM
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July 20, 2007
| Lying Liars' Lies | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iraq Politics |
As they say, if you're not pissed off, you're not paying attention.
Well, this should help:
A nation of suckers, that's us.
[Thanks, Kevin]
Posted by Jonathan at 04:18 PM
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June 25, 2007
| Rudy And Ground Zero | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics |
Rudy Giuliani, hero of 9/11. NY Daily News (via Xymphora):
In an upcoming interview with WNBC-TV, former head of the EPA Christie Whitman says former Mayor Rudy Giuliani blocked her efforts to force WTC workers to wear respirators. [...]She also said city officials didn't want EPA workers wearing haz-mat suits because they "didn't want this image of a city falling apart."
In an interview scheduled to run the day before Whitman testifies in front of Congress on Monday, she told WNBC-TV she warned the city of the risks almost every day.
And she said she believes illnesses killing first responders can be blamed on the city's lack of action.
"I'm not a scientist ... but I do [believe that]," she told WNBC's Brian Thompson.
"I mean, we wouldn't have been saying that the workers should wear respirators if ... we didn't think there might be health consequences."
She said the city had the responsibility to make sure workers wore respirators. But many took them off, complaining of heat. She said workers without respirators were barred from cleanup efforts at the Pentagon.
"We were certainly frustrated at not being able to get people to wear respirators because we thought that was critically important to workers on The Pile," Whitman said.
"Every day, there would be telephone calls, telephone meetings and meetings in person ... with the city when we repeated the message of the necessity of wearing respirators."
But her concern at the time only involved breathing air on The Pile.
Only seven days after the 9/11 attacks, as fires still raged at the site, she said, "I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that the air is safe to breathe."
Whitman also criticized Giuliani's handling of a suspected anthrax attack at NBC's Rockefeller Center headquarters weeks after 9/11.
"There was concern by the city that EPA workers not be seen in the haz-mat suits," she said. "They didn't want this image of a city falling apart. I said, 'Well, that's not acceptable.'" [Emphasis added]
Ground Zero workers paid the price. AP:
A study of more than 20,000 people by Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York concluded that, since the attacks, 70 percent of ground zero workers have suffered some sort of respiratory illness. A separate study released last month found that rescue workers and firefighters contracted sarcoidosis, a serious lung-scarring disease, at a rate more than five times as high as in the years before the attacks. [Emphasis added]
Yes, but respirators wouldn't have looked good on the teevee.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:55 PM
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May 06, 2007
| Premise Four | 9/11, "War On Terror" Activism Ethics Rights, Law |
Footage of the LAPD attack on the peaceful May Day immigration rights rally in LA. I recommend you watch it. The LAPD decided it was time for the people to leave and go home — "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances" apparently having expired. They waded in with batons (i.e., clubs) and shotguns firing rubber bullets.
Bradblog (via Feral Scholar) has some amateur video, too, via the participatory panopticon. An LAPD helicopter flies over for a few minutes telling people to go home, then the black-uniformed lines of police march into the park and begin clubbing everyone within reach and firing rubber bullets at the almost universally peaceful crowd that included many families, women, children. You've probably read about it. But watch the videos.
It's food for thought on a number of levels.
For one thing, it's a stark reminder of the ongoing militarization of the nation's police forces. The police put on their black SWAT gear and inevitably their mindset is transformed. "To protect and to serve" becomes "to intimidate and to coerce." See also this — SWAT team deployments were once the last resort but are now happening more than 100 times a day, on average. Police forces everywhere want to play "war on terror."
For another thing, the usual rationale for the deployment of non-lethal weapons — that they will decrease the level of violence — clearly has it backwards. If the choice were between rubber bullets and real bullets, rubber bullets are better. Of course. But when it comes to domestic crowd control, that's almost never the choice. Instead, it's a choice between asking people to move along or opening fire with rubber bullets to force them to. Give a militarized police force non-lethal weapons and their use soon becomes the default. But "non-lethal" is light years away from appropriate, let alone harmless.
But the point I most want to make is this. In his masterful two-volume critique of civilization, Endgame, Derrick Jensen lists the twenty premises that inform his work. Here's the premise Jensen calls his favorite:
Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
One group of Americans puts on black uniforms and attacks another group of Americans who have done nothing to provoke the attack. But because the first group is directing its violence down the hierarchy, the violence is, at worst, regarded as a bit excessive. But imagine if the people in the park had attacked the police with clubs and shotguns firing rubber bullets. The response would have been apocalyptic.
Premise Four is such a fact of life that we scarcely notice it. But once it's pointed out to you, things never look the same again.
Posted by Jonathan at 07:03 PM
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April 04, 2007
| Secret Ethiopian Prisons: "Decentralized, Outsourced Guantánamo" | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
Mail & Guardian (via Jerome-a-Paris):
CIA and FBI agents hunting for al-Qaeda militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according to an investigation by the Associated Press.Human rights groups, lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners, who include women and children, have been transferred secretly and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia, where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.
The detainees include at least one United States citizen and some are from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained by AP. [...]
[S]ome US allies have expressed consternation at the transfers to the prisons. One Western diplomat in Nairobi, who agreed to speak to AP only if not quoted to avoid angering US officials, said he sees the US as playing a guiding role in the operation.
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch expert on counterterrorism, went further. He said in an email that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in what he labelled a "decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo." [Emphasis added]
As Bill Hicks used to ask, "How does it feel to find out we are the Evil Empire?"
Posted by Jonathan at 10:34 AM
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March 24, 2007
| Gates: Close Gitmo — Cheney: No | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics |
When Robert Gates started as Secretary of Defense, he wanted to close the Guantanamo prison. Bush himself has said that he'd like to close Guantanamo. But Cheney says no. NYT:
In his first weeks as defense secretary, Robert M. Gates repeatedly argued that the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had become so tainted abroad that legal proceedings at Guantánamo would be viewed as illegitimate, according to senior administration officials. He told President Bush and others that it should be shut down as quickly as possible.Mr. Gates's appeal was an effort to turn Mr. Bush's publicly stated desire to close Guantánamo into a specific plan for action, the officials said. In particular, Mr. Gates urged that trials of terrorism suspects be moved to the United States, both to make them more credible and because Guantánamo's continued existence hampered the broader war effort, administration officials said.
Mr. Gates's arguments were rejected after Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and some other government lawyers expressed strong objections to moving detainees to the United States, a stance that was backed by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney, administration officials said. [Emphasis added]
In case you were wondering who's really in charge.
Proof that time travel will never be invented: no one came back from the future to strangle Dick Cheney at birth.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:41 PM
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March 12, 2007
| Canadian Report: War In Afghanistan To Last For "Generations" | 9/11, "War On Terror" Afghanistan |
Afghanistan was supposed to be the easy one. A done deal. So how's that working out? ConsortiumNews:
Canadian lawmakers have written an Afghanistan version of the Iraq Study Group report, reaching a conclusion that the conditions on that original battlefront in the "war on terror" are grave and deteriorating.The 16-page Canadian Senate report, entitled "Taking a Hard Look at a Hard Mission," foresees a conflict that could drag on for generations and might well fail unless NATO significantly increases its commitment of money and troops.
"It is in our view doubtful that this mission can be accomplished given the limited resources that NATO is currently investing in Afghanistan," said the report by the Standing Committee on National Security and Defence. "The current NATO contingent doesn't have enough troops to go toe-to-toe with the Taliban."
Former Canadian Ambassador to Afghanistan Chris Alexander told the committee that it would take five generations to "make a difference in Afghanistan," while Land Forces Commander Andrew Leslie estimated that it would take at least two decades to complete the mission. [Emphasis added]
Mission Accomplished. Bring 'em on. Last throes.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:34 PM
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March 07, 2007
| Seven Countries In Five Years | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iran Iraq Politics |
I'm astonished that this hasn't been all over the news. On February 27, Amy Goodman interviewed General Wesley Clark. Clark said this:
About ten days after 9/11, I went through the Pentagon and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz. I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in. He said, "Sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second." I said, "Well, you're too busy." He said, "No, no." He says, "We've made the decision we're going to war with Iraq." This was on or about the 20th of September. I said, "We're going to war with Iraq? Why?" He said, "I don't know." He said, "I guess they don't know what else to do." So I said, "Well, did they find some information connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda?" He said, "No, no." He says, "There's nothing new that way. They just made the decision to go to war with Iraq." He said, "I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but we've got a good military and we can take down governments." And he said, "I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail."So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan. I said, "Are we still going to war with Iraq?" And he said, "Oh, it's worse than that." He reached over on his desk. He picked up a piece of paper. And he said, "I just got this down from upstairs" — meaning the Secretary of Defense's office — "today." And he said, "This is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq, and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and, finishing off, Iran." I said, "Is it classified?" He said, "Yes, sir." I said, "Well, don’t show it to me." And I saw him a year or so ago, and I said, "You remember that?" He said, "Sir, I didn't show you that memo! I didn't show it to you!" [Emphasis added]
It seems inconceivable that Clark is just making this up. So I guess it's official: we're in the hands of complete and utter lunatics. Seven countries — seven unprovoked, preemptive wars — in five years. They think they're Hitler, or Napoleon, or Alexander the Great — with nukes. In their minds, the Republic is over; it's Empire time.
People who think like this, what are the chances they're going to accept defeat in Iraq quietly? If you're not scared yet, you should be.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:06 PM
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February 07, 2007
| Preemptive Strike? | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iran Iraq |
You know things are bad when former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski starts to sound like the sanest guy in the room. Here's an excerpt from Brzezinski's testimony last week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:
If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD's in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America's involvement in World War II.
This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran — though gaining in regional influence — is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Deplorably, the Administration's foreign policy in the Middle East region has lately relied almost entirely on such sloganeering. Vague and inflammatory talk about "a new strategic context" which is based on "clarity" and which prompts "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" is breeding intensifying anti-Americanism and is increasing the danger of a long-term collision between the United States and the Islamic world. [...]
One should note here also that practically no country in the world shares the Manichean delusions that the Administration so passionately articulates. The result is growing political isolation of, and pervasive popular antagonism toward the U.S. global posture. [Emphasis added]
The section highlighted in red above clearly suggests that the White House may seek to use a terrorist incident as a pretext to push the country into war with Iran. Possibly even that the White House may fabricate such an incident. An amazing suggestion for a national-security insider like Brzezinski to make in open testimony. Draw your own conclusions, but it seems to me that Brzezinski knew exactly what he was doing. It was a prepared statement, and Brzezinski's too careful and experienced an operator not to understand how his words would be taken. Note also the quotation marks around "defensive."
In the Q&A, Brzezinski had more to say along these lines. Barry Grey (via RI):
Following his opening remarks, in response to questions from the senators, Brzezinski reiterated his warning of a provocation.He called the senators' attention to a March 27, 2006 report in the New York Times on "a private meeting between the president and Prime Minister Blair, two months before the war, based on a memorandum prepared by the British official present at this meeting." In the article, Brzezinski said, "the president is cited as saying he is concerned that there may not be weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, and that there must be some consideration given to finding a different basis for undertaking the action."
He continued: "I'll just read you what this memo allegedly says, according to the New York Times: 'The memo states that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation.'
"He described the several ways in which this could be done. I won't go into that... the ways were quite sensational, at least one of them.
"If one is of the view that one is dealing with an implacable enemy that has to be removed, that course of action may under certain circumstances be appealing. I'm afraid that if this situation in Iraq continues to deteriorate, and if Iran is perceived as in some fashion involved or responsible, or a potential beneficiary, that temptation could arise." [Emphasis added]
The "sensational" provocation that Brzezinski alluded to was this (NYT):
"The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours," the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach."
As I say, draw your own conclusions, but one has to ask why someone like Brzezinski would want to open this particular can of worms in public. It may have been a sort of preemptive strike: an attempt to create enough suspicion before the fact that the White House would be discouraged from trying to carry out the kinds of provocations Brzezinski warned about.
None of this received any coverage in the major US media.
Posted by Jonathan at 02:19 PM
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January 15, 2007
| Iraq Fuels "Worldwide Surge In Islamic Radicalism" (Duh) | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iraq |
Intel director John Negroponte gave Congress a sobering assessment last week of the continued threats from groups like Al Qaeda and Hizbullah. But even gloomier comments came from Henry Crumpton, the outgoing State Department terror coordinator. An ex-CIA operative, Crumpton told Newsweek that a worldwide surge in Islamic radicalism has worsened recently, increasing the number of potential terrorists and setting back U.S. efforts in the terror war. "Certainly, we haven't made any progress," said Crumpton. "In fact, we've lost ground." He cites Iraq as a factor; the war has fueled resentment against the United States. [Emphasis added]
As has been obvious from day one.
Posted by Jonathan at 05:48 PM
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December 21, 2006
| French Soldiers Twice Had Bin Laden In Their Crosshairs | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
The White House, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and their allies in "defense" industries all have a lot riding on the continued existence of enemies who can excite the public appetite for war. From a marketing perspective, the best kind of enemy is one personified by an individual person who is easy to hate — Saddam Hussein, Muammar Khaddafi, Manuel Noriega, Osama bin Laden. Brand names (and faces). And if you've established a successful brand, you want to protect it.
Get out your tin-foil hats. AFP:
French soldiers in Afghanistan had Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden in their crosshairs — twice — but did not receive the order from their US commander to open fire, a French documentary reported.The filmed report, by journalists Eric de Lavarene and Emmanuel Razavi, asserts that the French troops had bin Laden in their rifle scopes in 2003 and then again six months later in 2004.
Four French soldiers assigned to a 200-strong special forces unit in Afghanistan under US military control all confirmed — "at different times and in different places" — that they could have killed bin Laden but that the order to shoot was not forthcoming, the report claims. [Emphasis added]
When people talk about any kind of conspiracy theory, the argument you always hear is that if a conspiracy involves a large number of people surely someone would talk. But the truth is that people do talk, but no one believes them when they do. So this French report will be written off as bogus and forgotten.
And for all I know, it is bogus. Or not. See also this.
Posted by Jonathan at 10:19 AM
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December 17, 2006
| AP: Hundreds Of Gitmo Prisoners Found Guiltless | 9/11, "War On Terror" Rights, Law |
The Bush administration would have us believe that the prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay are so dangerous, so vicious, that the extraordinary conditions of their treatment are both justifiable and necessary. AP, however, found that when prisoners from Gitmo were released into the custody of other nations, the great majority were determined to be guilty of nothing and freed. Excerpts:
The Pentagon called them "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth," sweeping them up after Sept. 11 and hauling them in chains to a U.S. military prison in southeastern Cuba.Since then, hundreds of the men have been transferred from Guantanamo Bay to other countries, many of them for "continued detention."
And then set free.
Decisions by more than a dozen countries in the Middle East, Europe and South Asia to release the former detainees raise questions about whether they were really as dangerous as the United States claimed, or whether some of America's staunchest allies have set terrorists and militants free. [...]
[T]hrough interviews with justice and police officials, detainees and their families, and using reports from human rights groups and local media, The Associated Press was able to track 245 of those formerly held at Guantanamo. The investigation, which spanned 17 countries, found:
Once the detainees arrived in other countries, 205 of the 245 were either freed without being charged or were cleared of charges related to their detention at Guantanamo. Forty either stand charged with crimes or continue to be detained.
Only a tiny fraction of transferred detainees have been put on trial. The AP identified 14 trials, in which eight men were acquitted and six are awaiting verdicts. Two of the cases involving acquittals — one in Kuwait, one in Spain — initially resulted in convictions that were overturned on appeal.
The Afghan government has freed every one of the more than 83 Afghans sent home. Lawmaker Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, the head of Afghanistan's reconciliation commission, said many were innocent and wound up at Guantanamo because of tribal or personal rivalries.
At least 67 of 70 repatriated Pakistanis are free after spending a year in Adiala Jail. A senior Pakistani Interior Ministry official said investigators determined that most had been "sold" for bounties to U.S. forces by Afghan warlords who invented links between the men and al-Qaida. "We consider them innocent," said the official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the issue.
All 29 detainees who were repatriated to Britain, Spain, Germany, Russia, Australia, Turkey, Denmark, Bahrain and the Maldives were freed, some within hours after being sent home for "continued detention."
Some former detainees say they never intended to harm the United States and are bitter.
"I can't wash the three long years of pain, trouble and humiliation from my memory," said Badarzaman Badar, an Afghan who was freed in Pakistan. "It is like a cancer in my mind that makes me disturbed every time I think of those terrible days." [...]
When four Britons were sent home from Guantanamo in January 2005, Britain said it would detain and investigate them — then released them after only 18 hours. Five Britons repatriated earlier were also rapidly released with no charges.
Murat Kurnaz, a German-born Turkish citizen, was also quickly freed when he was flown to Germany in August, bound hand and foot, after more than four years at Guantanamo.
U.S. officials maintained he was a member of al-Qaida, based on what they said was secret evidence. But his New Jersey-based lawyer, Baher Azmy, said he was shown the classified evidence and was shocked to find how unpersuasive it was.
"It contains five or six statements exonerating him," Azmy said. [Emphasis added]
As a measure of how disgustingly corrupt US governance has become, consider how far-fetched it now seems to imagine the US government admitting culpability and making any sort of apology to the hundreds of innocent people it has held at Guantanamo without charge or trial, for years. Never happen.
The corrupting impact trickles down. The message: tag someone a "terrorist" and customary legal procedure can be tossed aside. Who's a terrorist? All sorts of protestors and activists, for one. But it doesn't stop there. The Oregon legislature, for example, has repeatedly considered legislation that would make it a crime of terrorism, punishable by life in prison, to "disrupt commerce." Tom Paine spins in his grave.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:57 PM
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November 29, 2006
| Gingrich: "Reexamine Freedom Of Speech" | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics |
Newt Gingrich proves once again that he's a dangerous extremist:
Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich yesterday said the country will be forced to reexamine freedom of speech to meet the threat of terrorism.Gingrich, speaking at a Manchester awards banquet, said a "different set of rules" may be needed to reduce terrorists' ability to use the Internet and free speech to recruit and get out their message.
"We need to get ahead of the curve before we actually lose a city, which I think could happen in the next decade," said Gingrich, a Republican who helped engineer the GOP's takeover of Congress in 1994. [Emphasis added]
The well-worn recipe: make people afraid enough, and they'll give their freedom away, bit by bit. But once you give it away, you never get it back. Not without a fight.
Posted by Jonathan at 08:52 PM
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November 18, 2006
| Gonzales: Spying Foes A Grave Threat To Liberty And Security | 9/11, "War On Terror" Politics Rights, Law |
Alberto Gonzales says foes of the administration's warrantless electronic surveillance are a "grave threat" to the "liberty and security of the American people." AP:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some critics of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that presents a "grave threat" to U.S. security.Gonzales was the second administration official in two days to attack a federal judge's ruling last August that the program was unconstitutional. Vice President Dick Cheney on Friday called the decision "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."
Gonzales, in remarks prepared for delivery at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, said that some see the program as on the verge of stifling freedom rather that protecting the country.
"But this view is shortsighted," he said. "Its definition of freedom — one utterly divorced from civic responsibility — is superficial and is itself a grave threat to the liberty and security of the American people."
Gonzales and Cheney's attacks on the court order came as the administration was urging the lame-duck Congress to approve legislation authorizing the warrantless surveillance. The bill's chances are in doubt, however, because of Democratic opposition in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to end debate and vote. [...]
In August, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor in Detroit struck down the warrantless surveillance program, saying it violated the rights to free speech and privacy and the constitutional separation of powers. She was the first judge to rule on the legality of the program, which is operated by the National Security Agency.
Bush and other administration officials sharply criticized the ruling, which the government appealed. They argued that the program is legal under the president's constitutional powers and saved lives by helping to disrupt terrorist plots.
Cheney, in an address Friday to the Federalist Society, said Taylor's order was troubling because it was "tying the hands of the president of the United States in the conduct of a war." He added: "And this is a matter entirely outside the competence of the judiciary."
In his prepared remarks, Gonzales dismissed as "myth" the charge that civil liberties were being sacrificed in the fight against terrorism. He defended the USA Patriot Act and the handling of detainees at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. [Emphasis added]
Criticism of warrantless wiretapping a grave threat to liberty. Orwell lives.
Posted by Jonathan at 06:08 PM
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October 23, 2006
| Perspective | 9/11, "War On Terror" Humor & Fun Politics |
Doonesbury (via Bruce Schneier) explains faulty risk assessment and the politics of fear:
First cartoon
Second
Third
Fourth
Fifth
Sixth
Seventh
A voice of reason.
Posted by Jonathan at 04:43 PM
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September 26, 2006
| Islam And The Sword: Setting The Record Straight | 9/11, "War On Terror" Palestine/Middle East |
Pope Benedict XVI recently caused a world-wide furor by asserting that Muslims are commanded by the Prophet Muhammad to spread Islam "by the sword". Israel's Uri Avnery, writer and peace activist, sets the record straight in an extremely important essay. Excerpts:
Between the present Pope, Benedict XVI, and the present Emperor, George Bush II, there exists a wonderful harmony. Last week's speech by the Pope, which aroused a world-wide storm, went well with Bush's crusade against "Islamofascism", in the context of the "Clash of Civilizations".In his lecture at a German university, the 265th Pope described what he sees as a huge difference between Christianity and Islam: while Christianity is based on reason, Islam denies it. While Christians see the logic of God's actions, Muslims deny that there is any such logic in the actions of Allah. [...]
In order to prove the lack of reason in Islam, the Pope asserts that the prophet Muhammad ordered his followers to spread their religion by the sword. According to the Pope, that is unreasonable, because faith is born of the soul, not of the body. How can the sword influence the soul?
To support his case, the Pope quoted — of all people — a Byzantine Emperor, who belonged, of course, to the competing Eastern Church. At the end of the 14th century, the Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus told of a debate he had — or so he said (its occurrence is in doubt) — with an unnamed Persian Muslim scholar. In the heat of the argument, the Emperor (according to himself) flung the following words at his adversary:
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached". [...]
When Manuel II wrote his treatise, he was the head of a dying empire. He assumed power in 1391, when only a few provinces of the once illustrious empire remained. These, too, were already under Turkish threat.
At that point in time, the Ottoman Turks had reached the banks of the Danube...In 1453, only a few years after Manuel's death, his capital, Constantinople (the present Istanbul) fell to the Turks, putting an end to the Empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.
During his reign, Manuel made the rounds of the capitals of Europe in an attempt to drum up support. He promised to reunite the church. There is no doubt that he wrote his religious treatise in order to incite the Christian countries against the Turks and convince them to start a new crusade. The aim was practical, theology was serving politics.
In this sense, the quote serves exactly the requirements of the present Emperor, George Bush II. He, too, wants to unite the Christian world against the mainly Muslim "Axis of Evil". Moreover, the Turks are again knocking on the doors of Europe, this time peacefully. It is well known that the Pope supports the forces that object to the entry of Turkey into the European Union.
Is there any truth in Manuel's argument?
The pope himself threw in a word of caution. As a serious and renowned theologian, he could not afford to falsify written texts. Therefore, he admitted that the Qur'an specifically forbade the spreading of the faith by force. He quoted the second Sura, verse 256 (strangely fallible, for a pope, he meant verse 257) which says: "There must be no coercion in matters of faith". [...]
Jesus said: "You will recognize them by their fruits." The treatment of other religions by Islam must be judged by a simple test: How did the Muslim rulers behave for more than a thousand years, when they had the power to "spread the faith by the sword"?
Well, they just did not.
For many centuries, the Muslims ruled Greece. Did the Greeks become Muslims? Did anyone even try to Islamize them? On the contrary, Christian Greeks held the highest positions in the Ottoman administration. The Bulgarians, Serbs, Romanians, Hungarians and other European nations lived at one time or another under Ottoman rule and clung to their Christian faith. Nobody compelled them to become Muslims and all of them remained devoutly Christian.
True, the Albanians did convert to Islam, and so did the Bosniaks. But nobody argues that they did this under duress. They adopted Islam in order to become favorites of the government and enjoy the fruits.
In 1099, the Crusaders conquered Jerusalem and massacred its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants indiscriminately, in the name of the gentle Jesus. At that time, 400 years into the occupation of Palestine by the Muslims, Christians were still the majority in the country. Throughout this long period, no effort was made to impose Islam on them. Only after the expulsion of the Crusaders from the country, did the majority of the inhabitants start to adopt the Arabic language and the Muslim faith — and they were the forefathers of most of today's Palestinians.
There is no evidence whatsoever of any attempt to impose Islam on the Jews. As is well known, under Muslim rule the Jews of Spain enjoyed a bloom the like of which the Jews did not enjoy anywhere else until almost our time. Poets like Yehuda Halevy wrote in Arabic, as did the great Maimonides. In Muslim Spain, Jews were ministers, poets, scientists. In Muslim Toledo, Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars worked together and translated the ancient Greek philosophical and scientific texts. That was, indeed, the Golden Age. How would this have been possible, had the Prophet decreed the "spreading of the faith by the sword"?
What happened afterwards is even more telling. When the Catholics re-conquered Spain from the Muslims, they instituted a reign of religious terror. The Jews and the Muslims were presented with a cruel choice: to become Christians, to be massacred or to leave. And where did the hundreds of thousand of Jews, who refused to abandon their faith, escape? Almost all of them were received with open arms in the Muslim countries. The Sephardi ("Spanish") Jews settled all over the Muslim world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, from Bulgaria (then part of the Ottoman Empire) in the north to Sudan in the south. Nowhere were they persecuted. They knew nothing like the tortures of the Inquisition, the flames of the auto-da-fe, the pogroms, the terrible mass-expulsions that took place in almost all Christian countries, up to the Holocaust.
Why? Because Islam expressly prohibited any persecution of the "peoples of the book". In Islamic society, a special place was reserved for Jews and Christians. They did not enjoy completely equal rights, but almost. They had to pay a special poll-tax, but were exempted from military service — a trade-off that was quite welcome to many Jews. It has been said that Muslim rulers frowned upon any attempt to convert Jews to Islam even by gentle persuasion — because it entailed the loss of taxes.
Every honest Jew who knows the history of his people cannot but feel a deep sense of gratitude to Islam, which has protected the Jews for fifty generations, while the Christian world persecuted the Jews and tried many times "by the sword" to get them to abandon their faith.
The story about "spreading the faith by the sword" is an evil legend, one of the myths that grew up in Europe during the great wars against the Muslims — the reconquista of Spain by the Christians, the Crusades and the repulsion of the Turks, who almost conquered Vienna. I suspect that the German Pope, too, honestly believes in these fables. That means that the leader of the Catholic world, who is a Christian theologian in his own right, did not make the effort to study the history of other religions.
Why did he utter these words in public? And why now?
There is no escape from viewing them against the background of the new Crusade of Bush and his evangelist supporters, with his slogans of "Islamofascism" and the "Global War on Terrorism" — when "terrorism" has become a synonym for Muslims. For Bush's handlers, this is a cynical attempt to justify the domination of the world's oil resources. Not for the first time in history, a religious robe is spread to cover the nakedness of economic interests; not for the first time, a robbers' expedition becomes a Crusade.
The speech of the Pope blends into this effort. Who can foretell the dire consequences? [Emphasis added]
As usual, Americans' appalling ignorance of history makes us easy marks for propaganda. You'd think we'd know better. We look at Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, for example, and wonder how the German people could have allowed themselves to be taken in by the hideous and absurdly exaggerated stereotypes of Jews. How could they have been so gullible, so willing to act as accomplices, so utterly dumb? I guess now we know, first-hand.
[Thanks, Miles]
Posted by Jonathan at 10:16 PM
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September 20, 2006
| Olbermann Demands An Apology | 9/11, "War On Terror" Media Politics |
[Thanks, Kevin]
Posted by Jonathan at 01:25 PM
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September 15, 2006
| Decline And Fall | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
This is interesting, and this. The more things change...
Posted by Jonathan at 04:31 PM
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September 12, 2006
| 9/11 Commentary By Olbermann | 9/11, "War On Terror" |
A blistering commentary by Keith Olbermann on the fifth anniversary of 9/11:
Posted by Jonathan at 11:02 AM
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September 06, 2006
| CIA Task Force On Iraq Ramped Up Months Before 9/11 | 9/11, "War On Terror" Iraq Politics |
David Corn drops some bombshells in an article on what it was Valerie Plame Wilson really did at the CIA:
In the spring of 2002 Dick Cheney made one of his periodic trips to CIA headquarters. Officers and analysts were summoned to brief him on Iraq. Paramilitary specialists updated the Vice President on an extensive covert action program in motion that was designed to pave the way to a US invasion. Cheney questioned analysts about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. How could they be used against US troops? Which Iraqi units had chemical and biological weapons? He was not seeking information on whether Saddam posed a threat because he possessed such weapons. His queries, according to a CIA officer at the briefing, were pegged to the assumptions that Iraq had these weapons and would be invaded — as if a decision had been made.Though Cheney was already looking toward war, the officers of the agency's Joint Task Force on Iraq — part of the Counterproliferation Division of the agency's clandestine Directorate of Operations — were frantically toiling away in the basement, mounting espionage operations to gather information on the WMD programs Iraq might have. The JTFI was trying to find evidence that would back up the White House's assertion that Iraq was a WMD danger. Its chief of operations was a career undercover officer named Valerie [Plame] Wilson. [...]
In July 2003 — four months after the invasion of Iraq — Wilson would be outed as a CIA "operative on weapons of mass destruction" in a column by conservative journalist Robert Novak, who would cite two "senior administration officials" as his sources. (...[O]ne was Richard Armitage, the number-two at the State Department; Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist, was the other. I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Cheney's chief of staff, also talked to two reporters about her.) Novak revealed her CIA identity — using her maiden name, Valerie Plame — in the midst of the controversy ignited by former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, her husband, who had written a New York Times op-ed accusing the Bush Administration of having "twisted" intelligence "to exaggerate the Iraqi threat."
The Novak column triggered a scandal and a criminal investigation. At issue was whether Novak's sources had violated a little-known law that makes it a federal crime for a government official to disclose identifying information about a covert US officer (if that official knew the officer was undercover). A key question was, what did Valerie Wilson do at the CIA? Was she truly undercover? In a subsequent column, Novak reported that she was "an analyst, not in covert operations." White House press secretary Scott McClellan suggested that her employment at the CIA was no secret. Jonah Goldberg of National Review claimed, "Wilson's wife is a desk jockey and much of the Washington cocktail circuit knew that already."
Valerie Wilson was no analyst or paper-pusher. She was an operations officer working on a top priority of the Bush Administration. Armitage, Rove and Libby had revealed information about a CIA officer who had searched for proof of the President's case. In doing so, they harmed her career and put at risk operations she had worked on and foreign agents and sources she had handled. [...]
In the early 1990s, she became what's known as a nonofficial cover officer. NOCs are the most clandestine of the CIA's frontline officers. They do not pretend to work for the US government; they do not have the protection of diplomatic immunity. They might claim to be a businessperson. She told people she was with an energy firm. Her main mission remained the same: to gather agents for the CIA.
In 1997 she returned to CIA headquarters and joined the Counterproliferation Division. (About this time, she moved in with Joseph Wilson; they later married.) She was eventually given a choice: North Korea or Iraq. She selected the latter. Come the spring of 2001, she was in the CPD's modest Iraq branch. But that summer — before 9/11 — word came down from the brass: We're ramping up on Iraq. Her unit was expanded and renamed the Joint Task Force on Iraq. Within months of 9/11, the JTFI grew to fifty or so employees. Valerie Wilson was placed in charge of its operations group. [...]
"We knew nothing about what was going on in Iraq," a CIA official recalled. "We were way behind the eight ball. We had to look under every rock." Wilson, too, occasionally flew overseas to monitor operations. She also went to Jordan to work with Jordanian intelligence officials who had intercepted a shipment of aluminum tubes heading to Iraq that CIA analysts were claiming — wrongly — were for a nuclear weapons program. [...]
The JTFI found nothing. The few scientists it managed to reach insisted Saddam had no WMD programs. Task force officers sent reports detailing the denials into the CIA bureaucracy. The defectors were duds — fabricators and embellishers. (JTFI officials came to suspect that some had been sent their way by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, an exile group that desired a US invasion of Iraq.) The results were frustrating for the officers. Were they not doing their job well enough — or did Saddam not have an arsenal of unconventional weapons? Valerie Wilson and other JTFI officers were almost too overwhelmed to consider the possibility that their small number of operations was, in a way, coming up with the correct answer: There was no intelligence to find on Saddam's WMDs because the weapons did not exist. Still, she and her colleagues kept looking. (She also assisted operations involving Iran and WMDs.) [...]
As a CIA employee still sworn to secrecy, she wasn't able to explain publicly that she had spent nearly two years searching for evidence to support the Administration's justification for war and had come up empty. [Emphasis added]
It's been pretty obvious that the Bush team had Iraq in their crosshairs from the very beginning, but this is the first published evidence I can recall that months before 9/11 the administration already had the CIA ramping up a major effort on Iraq. Then 9/11 came along and triggered the military phase of the plan. How very convenient, that.
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