Spies, Lies and No Video Tape
Filed Under Madness, Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
A major, major story, though few in the US are even aware of it.
(Illustration found here).
Via The Brad Blog on Monday, Marc Grossman, a former US ambassador to Turkey and George Jr.’s third-ranking State Department honcho — right behind Colin Powell and Richard Armitage — was targeted as part of a “decade-long investigation” by the FBI, according to an 18-year veteran manager of the bureau’s Counterintelligence and Counterespionage departments.
The disclosure for the first time confirms that the US is lying to everybody about just about everything, especially when it comes to nukes, money and power.
And the news also further authenticates under-oath testimony of Sibel Edmonds, a 39-year-old former Turkish language translator for the FBI, who turned whistleblower after too much stupid, ugly shit began to pile up around her.
The Edmonds’ saga has now endured way-more than half-a-decade, since before being “fired from her position as a language specialist at the FBI’s Washington Field Office in March, 2002, after she accused a colleague of covering up illicit activity involving foreign nationals, alleging serious acts of security breaches, cover-ups, and intentional blocking of intelligence which, she contended, presented a danger to the United States’ security.”
Whoa! A mouthful that, especially if one’s mouth is gagged.
Despite US Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in the summer of 2002, despite all kinds of mounting evidence calling for Congressional investigations, all were nil as efforts were stifled by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft with mutant-use of the State Secrets Privilege in order “to make her statements “classified” — including previously public statements and journalism quoting her on the case.”
I myself didn’t connect onto Edmonds’ story until a piece appeared in the UK’s Sunday Times in January 2008.
She’d skirted Ashcroft’s order by the written word: In a series of open letters to various officials and news media, Edmonds pleaded her case, but only since last August has she been able to talk freely about the the whole affair.
In a most-recent interview in The American Conservative magazine, Edmonds detailed the whole ugly story, including this bottom line on if any of this would ever make it to the general public:
“When I saw that Obama’s choice of chief of staff was Rahm Emanuel, knowing his relationship with Mayor Richard Daley and with the Hastert crowd, I knew we were not going to see positive changes. Changes possibly, but changes for the worse. It was no coincidence that the Turkish criminal entity’s operation centered on Chicago.”
(Illustration found here).
There have been few news stories in the US press on Edmonds — a partial list can be found here — and NONE by broadcast journalism — a damn-sad state of affairs.
The situation is not all that remarkable, considering the MSM news people and reminds me of the black-out on the New York Times‘ Pulitzer Prize winning story on the Pentagon pundit caper from last year — the story won journalism’s top award, for shit’s sake — and most US peoples haven’t a clue.
The media is a big chunk of the problem.
Take Bob Woodward (please!) of the Washington Post.
Woodward, of Watergate fame and books on everybody fame, and one of the more notorious talking heads of Washington DC “insider” journalists, broke the story last week on Gen. Stan McChrystal’s “secret assessment” of the Afghanistan war as a perfect example of a major reporter playing political tag with the DOD.
McChrystal followed that up with a “60 Minutes” interview on the same damn thing — push President Obama into sending more US troops into the Afghan wilderness.
Woodward is nothing more than a lackey for the rich and the established, the same spot were the vast, vast majority of top-tier US journalists play and practice their so-called craft.
And for instance, how does the Arab media feel about US reporters?
Via Think Progress — Nadia Bilbassy, White House correspondent for the Dubai-based satellite TV network MBC:
I found that I think they really think that if you make it to cover the White House then you must be bigger than God, therefore, you know, you have to be treated as such.
So for them the foreign media is invisible. … So I think they’re opportunistic, rude, as I said, really self-centered. … I find them, not even on like a – people again, the people at the State Department, it’s a different story altogether.
But what I’m talking to now are the people in the White House that occupy the first two, three rows, with exception to two or three people you know.
I’m talking about all the networks and all the organizations.
So I find the relationship is a bit strange.
The rest of the planet knows a lot more than the average US person.
In other words, the US media can not to be trusted.
An example just this week — the hysteria over a “newly” discovered Iranian nuke facility, which according to the New York Times on Monday (with all kinds of satellite and high-altitude photos), the mullahs are building a nuclear device to strike the US heartland within scant minutes.
A similar smell as the run-up to the Iraq invasion.
Chris Floyd has a good post here on the bat-shit crazy warmongers, and so does antiwar.com‘s Justin Raimondo, dipping into another bad-sounding bottom line:
The pro-war ads have already begun and the “liberal” media lining up behind its commander in chief.
All the actors are in their places, and now the drama — an all-too-familiar drama — begins.
“Weapons of mass destruction,” phony intelligence, a compliant media: all the ingredients are there.
All that’s needed is a spark that sets off the conflagration…
And absolutely no film at 11.
Afghan Awful
Filed Under Just Plain War, Madness, War & Politics | Leave a Comment
“On the heights of the Kabul Gorge, they still find ancient belt buckles and corroded sword hilts. You can no longer read the insignia of the British regiments of the old East India Company but their bones — those of all 16,000 of them — still lie somewhere amid the dark earth and scree of the most forbidding mountains in Afghanistan. Like the British who came later, like the Russians who were to arrive more than a century afterwards, General William Elphinstone’s campaign was surrounded with rhetoric and high principles and ended in disaster. George Bush Junior and NATO, please note.”
– Robert Fisk, The Independent, Sept. 14, 2001
(Illustration found here).
Now it’s President Obama’s turn to take note.
And from the above-mentioned journalist, Robert Fisk, who has interviewed Osama bin Laden three times, the last in March 1997: “The next year, he told me he sought God’s help “to turn America into a shadow of itself.” I wrote ‘rhetoric’ in the margin of my notebook — a mistake.”
Is Obama poised to make a really, really bad mistake — not taking history serious enough?
Last week, establishment-stalwart, larger-than-life reporter Bob Woodward of the Washington Post ran an A1 story of Gen. Stan McChrystal’s supposedly secret assessment of the Afghanistan war, which accordingly bled out the bottom line that the whole shebang “will likely result in failure” if the US does not supply a shitload more boots on the ground there — reportedly McChrystal wants at least 40,000 fresh fodder to boost US presence in country upwards to 68,000 military personnel (combined with other NATO forces, there’s already more than 100,000 Western troops fighting the insurgency).
The hard-core, nutcase general then told “60 Minutes“ Sunday night the Afghan war has turned nasty: “They’re probably a little worse,” McChrystal tells CBS’ David Martin. “I think that in some areas that the breadth of the violence, the geographic spread of violence, is a little more than I would have gathered.”
Dumb-ass Duh!
One crucial item: McChrystal wants to beef up the Afghan security/army forces.
What forces?
The so-called Afghan army is fairly-near non-existent – Writer/photographer Ann Jones, the author of Kabul in Winter: Life Without Peace In Afghanistan, describes an invisible army in a recent post at tomdispatch.
Key snippets:
American military planners and policymakers already proceed as if, with sufficient training, Afghans can be transformed into scale-model, wind-up American Marines.
That is not going to happen.
Not now.
Not ever.
No matter how many of our leaders concur that it must happen — and ever faster.
…
When 4,000 U.S. Marines were sent into Helmand Province in July to take on the Taliban in what is considered one of its strongholds, accompanying them were only about 600 Afghan security forces, some of whom were police.
Why, you might ask, didn’t the ANA, 90,000 strong after eight years of training and mentoring, handle Helmand on its own?
No explanation has been offered.
American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they?
They’re lost in that vast-vapor of ‘victory’ and success.
Success in Kabul?
Hamid Karzai leads such a corrupt, slip/shod government it’s extreme-black-humor laughable and last month’s election is considered a three-dollar bill, so much fraud with near a quarter of the votes requiring a recount.
The depth of corruption amongst Karzai’s operation would never allow for any kind of substantial government, never — the Taliban will forever fight tooth-and-toenail any puppet authority the US props up and then leaves to fall.
Afghanistan has been a quagmire for centuries — even for its own people.
And worse for foreigners.
History has a way of circling back around and biting one on the ass.
Obama is supposedly facing such discord among his own advisers on how to proceed on this Afghan-awful mess, DOD honcho Bob Gates had to respond: “General McChrystal was very explicit in saying that he thinks this assessment, this review that’s going on right now is exactly the right thing to do,” Gates told ABC television’s “This Week” in an interview taped Friday and broadcast on Sunday. “He obviously doesn’t want it to be open-ended or be a protracted kind of thing.”
A decision not to be taken lightly.
Frank Rich had another good read Sunday in the New York Times with a post aptly titled, Obama at the Precipice, likening this president’s particular Afghan-awful moment to LBJ’s decision to ramp-up the US foray into Vietnam.
Check it out.
Cash-n-Go: TARP Gone
Filed Under Finance, Madness | Leave a Comment
Naomi Klein talked with Michael Moore on his new documentary, “Capitalism: A Love Story.”
The interview in The Nation online examines the lust-for-dollars.
Says Moore:
“Well, people want to believe that it’s not the economic system that’s at the core of all this.
You know, it’s just a few bad eggs.
But the fact of the matter is that, as I said to Jay, capitalism is the legalization of this greed.
Greed has been with human beings forever.
We have a number of things in our species that you would call the dark side, and greed is one of them.
If you don’t put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
Capitalism does the opposite of that.
It not only doesn’t really put any structure or restriction on it.
It encourages it, it rewards it.”
Hear, hear!
And away the money goes.
Yesterday from HuffPost, an interview with Neil Barofsky, who tracks last September’s big-ass bailout known as the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP.
Some Barofsky observations:
1. He found hundreds of banks capable of tracking their use of the TARP money – despite claims by the U.S. Treasury that the task was impossible.
2. If the purpose of the TARP rescue was to increase lending, it has failed.
3. The U.S. financial system, now dependent on bigger and fewer banks, is shakier than ever.
And this (via ABC News) from Elizabeth Warren, chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel on TARP:
“In the last year, the apprehension that pervaded this country has turned into something else: frustration and anger. Today’s fragile stability has come at an enormous cost to the American people.”
…
“The toxic assets remain on the books of the banks…
“The commercial real estate mortgages are a coming crisis. Small banks are continuing to fail. We were talking a year ago about too big to fail.
We are now facing an industry that’s more concentrated than it was a year ago and too big to fail is up on us now in a much larger sense.”
“Until we get down to dirt, to something that’s solid, that we can put our feet on, our financial institutions are standing in a secure place, we can’t rebuild and know that we are safely past this crisis,” Warren said.
“The question about how we’re going to get these toxic assets out of here at a time when the real estate mortgage market is still in trouble and the commercial real estate mortgage market may be getting into more and more trouble — I’m not hearing the plan,” she said.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch.
Via the financial factoid site, footnoted.org, on the employment contract for Freddie Mac’s new CEO includes:
annual compensation of $3.5 million (this includes $675K in salary, $1.6 million in something called “additional annual salary” and $1.1 million in a target incentive
a $1.95 million signing bonus
immediate buyout of Kari’s house (or perhaps houses)
reimbursement for travel between Washington D.C. and Kari’s residences in Ohio, Washington and Oregon
…
Needless to say, none of this — and certainly not the ridiculous sounding additional annual salary — was included in the press release that Freddie put out earlier this week…
…
Still, you don’t have to be a tea-bagger to wonder why something like Freddie, which is being propped up by the government to the tune of billions of dollars, is able to hand out such a generous welcome package to a new executive.
Ain’t all this shit just a giant pisser?
We’re all F.U.C.K.ed.
Fragments from a place far, far away and long, long ago
Filed Under Media, Musings, Politics | Leave a Comment
Announced quietly last week was the death of Jody Powell, 65, press secretary to Jimmy Carter, ‘A leader for a change,’ whose presidency inadvertently was the last apparently in Americana’s more sane and serene view of itself as an entity of ideal.
On the cover of the Rolling Stone (left), at the height of glory in May 1977, Powell is teamed with Hamilton Jordan, Carter’s chief of staff — Powell has the tie and Ham has the hambones — in an enthusiastic stance of a White House still on a political honeymoon with the media and the US peoples.
After a series of ugly events, however, “voters strongly rejected Jimmy Carter’s honest but gloomy outlook in favor of Ronald Reagan’s telegenic optimism…” Thus, the end began.
(Illustration found here).
I’d started this post Sept. 14, the day Jody Powell died (of a heart attack reportedly), but got sidetracked — personal life before writing/blogging, most likely.
A flash memory a few days ago to some song lyrics from a Powell era group, America, and “Sister Golden Hair” (1975) and its opening words: “Well I tried to make it Sunday, but I got so damn depressed. That I set my sights on Monday and I got myself undressed…” released a sad sense of time and growing old and a lot of other shit that only somewhat-advanced age can reveal.
Coming upon my 61st birthday in November, some health issues has caused me to reconsider how I live, the foods I eat, how many cigarettes I can smoke in a 24-hour period, and even worse, how my beloved morning coffee has got to go — the old flesh and blood breaking way down — but the human-body problems I’ve experienced are more irritating and frustrating than anything else.
In reality, health-care is not of this world.
And along with this growing great-hatred for anything to do with the word, ‘bowels,’ there’s another even more compelling reason to become “so damn depressed:” This bizarre emptiness and quiet, and no exasperation feelings.
After raising five children as a single parent, now I’m alone — the kids are all off and fending for themselves, more-or-less, and although I’ve always considered myself a loner-type personality, the last three months have been different with a touch of strange.
A friend emailed a similar difference — also a recent “empty nester,” she thought not having anyone to cook for was fairly sad (sadly, I agree), which might explain my current dumb-ass diet.
Cast as mother/daddy, I lived strange, which I am originally.
And now I feel stranger still (one daughter in particular would respond that would be a lot of strange) and the combination of health and mental issues coming together at the same time led to not wanting to write — which has rarely struck me in 45 years.
Couple that shit with the extreme-ugly pessimistic, but the hard-cold reality of today’s current events: Makes a body sad.
A personal/professional news-addict all of my adult life (as a writer, I consciously began to understand literary scribblings at about age 14 and later worked in actual newsrooms for many years), the current span of people, places and things spread across the news cycle 24/7 are hugely profound — maybe not for eons, or maybe even not never, has the awful scheme of things taken such a planetary, global-like quality, while eventually will explode like an IED (unexpectedly and violently) into everyone’s existence.
(Illustration found here).
Clueless are most of western civilization, especially among the fatted, arrogant Americans.
In the US, as people go about daily lives, eating, sleeping, working, performing mundane tasks like “you help your landlady carry out her garbage,” they’re unaware of the horrors coming.
All of humanity faces two big obstacles not-too-far down the road — global warming and peak oil — I may/may not witness the impact of these two events, but my children sure will, and their children.
In many parts of the world, this hard-cold reality has already IEDed them — in eastern Africa (Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Djibouti) a savage drought has effected/affected 19 million people, and with no food: “My month-old baby boy was taken by hyaenas two weeks ago — somebody found his body 10 miles away from here a few days later,” Habiba Malim, 49, a former nomad, told Christian Aid researchers during a recent visit.
And what about the Mars-appearing Sydney, Australia?
What’s happening down under is a ‘horrific glimpse‘ into a not-so-pretty future.
And peak oil?
From Energy Bulletin in 2007:
Peak oil presents a profound challenge; one completely at odds with demand based forecasts of growth in energy consumption.
The poor standard of fundamental information relating to reserves and future production makes it easy to deny or obfuscate the likelihood of a near-term peak in global oil production.
The low level of new discoveries limits the extent to which the industry can continue delivering such a high level of new capacity.
Meanwhile, there is a real danger that decline rates in mature regions will continue to increase.
The balance between these two may tip in favor of depletion sooner than expected.
As Hirsch et al12 have noted, preparing for peak oil requires two decades of intensive, government coordinated effort. Peak oil critics propose that we take a large risk by delaying preparation.
The analysis presented here signals that making changes now would be far more prudent.
Duh!
And if one had been paying attention, most predictive-research has changed near-dramatically in just the past two years – recent studies on various climate-change and energy issues seem to indicate the situation appears worse than predicted even a year earlier.
Nowadays, this ain’t counting the weird-ass economy, two bad, horribly-run wars, and a Republican Party full of liars, buffoons and deniers — a major problem for the US is the conservative right wing, the so-aptly-called “wingnuttery.”
All enough to get one truly “so damn depressed” to stop.
Yet one must see what is ahead.
Another biggie-problem, which is most-likely tied into global warming and peak oil — getting the grub.
Last week, while sadly surfing the sad news online, I came across a discussion of food distribution at The Oil Drum, one of the better informational, factual sites, and was entitled The Thermodynamics of Local Foods.
The bottom line:
…that only a predominantly local food system will ever be sustainable.
What I mean by sustainable is the ability to endure.
Quite simply and irrefutably I conclude that the current globalized food system is a flash in the frying pan because it doesn’t respect the first law of thermodynamics.
Whatever other argument you might want to make against the global and for the local (and several legitimate ones come to mind) this fatal flaw is insurmountable.
No quibbles, qualification or value judgments need to get in the way of this basic fact.
So, some bad shit coming, huh?
Clueless: How many US peoples understand how food does not originate from Safe-Way?
There’s so much news out there it’s near-remarkable (or has it always been this way, just now there’s more options to get that news out?) and I sit in front of my laptop and watch an age draw to a dramatic conclusion — near-before my very eyes — oh, the vicious cycle of technology!
Indeed, I’m writing/blogging again.
Anyway, back to the late Jody Powell.
(Illustration found here).
In the fall of 1975, a fellow journalist and friend at the Montgomery Advertiser in Montgomery, Alabama (where I was then the paper’s police reporter), told me with forceful enthusiasm the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, would be the next president — I didn’t pay a dab of attention, as then Carter didn’t mean shit to me, and the friend, though a nice guy, was kind of a kook.
Well…
A year later, in the Advertiser‘s AP wire-room (this was 1976, remember?), my friend and I watched the hammering type proclaim Carter president, beating Gerald Ford and capping a wild political year, and in retrospect, probably the last rational US election.
And Powell was Carter’s for-real, right-hand guy.
From Time magazine in August, 1976:
Except for Campaign Manager Hamilton Jordan, none of the candidate’s 250 full-time staff members has served longer or is paid more ($22,000) than sandy-haired, chain-smoking Powell, 32.
He is also closer to the candidate than even Jordan.
“Jody probably knows me better than anyone except my wife,” Carter has said.
If the candidate wins in November, Powell will probably become one of the more powerful presidential press secretaries in decades.
And life was swell for a couple of years into Carter’s tenure in office.
In the time of the Rolling Stone cover, shown above, life had appeared to soften — the Vietnam war, Watergate, the popular turmoil of the 1960s and early ’70s had left the political/optimism air in the US a bit cleaner, as if a lot of debris had been swept away by all those events.
The US had straightened itself out, would never, ever get into another Vietnam-like situation and the future looked so bright a great many people were forced to wear shades.
However, Carter and his boys — Ham and Jody — knew exactly how to run a campaign, but not a government.
Not only were they inept at handling Congress — even pissing off Ted Kennedy on health care — they got slammed by the economy, a gasoline shortage, Three-Mile Island, among a litany of other shit, and much-of course, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Read a good overview of Carter’s presidency here.
The 1970s in this current age are most-likely similar to what the 1950s were to those in the 1970s — American Graffiti, “Happy Days,” etc. — but nowadays the nostalgia for that seemingly-so-long-ago decade is more for the supposedly lucidity of the time than anything else.
Alexander Cockburn recently posted an excellent look at how the rise of gossip in the 1970s spawned our modern tabloid-cultural society and proclaimed the ’70s “the last sane decade in American political life.”
And Jimmy Carter just a signpost: “It seemed America was tottering into the warm sunlight of sanity. It was Ronald Reagan who truly credentialed nutdom, setting the national thermostat at max degrees F for fantasy.”
And one thing about time: You can think back, but you can’t call back.
9/11/01
Filed Under Media, Orwellian | Leave a Comment
This from Josh Marshall and his fledging Talking Points Memo on Sept. 11, 2001 — unaware of even a worse horror coming:
TPM, of course, is normally all about arguments among us, among
Americans.
But all of that falls deep into the background now.
And my support, and I’m sure yours too, is with our president, our armed
services, and all of those struggling mightily to save those who can still
be saved.
Marshall, who now commands one of the best, most-insightful political sites on the Internet, was like most Americans that day, including yours truly, who watched as terror spread and infected the entire country.
(Illustration found here).
Of course, as Americans watched the events in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania on that fateful day eight years ago, we had no freakin’ idea of the events behind the attacks, didn’t understand the term, “Blowback,” didn’t know Osama bin Laden from dick, and sure didn’t know George Jr.’s obsession with Iraq.
As Chalmers Johnson wrote in The Nation (link on ‘Blowback’ above) on Sept. 27, 2001:
The suicidal assassins of September 11, 2001, did not “attack America,” as our political leaders and the news media like to maintain; they attacked American foreign policy.
And as Marshall wrote, all of the support went to the president and the military on that ugly day, but sonofabitch, did the attack on the Twin Towers open a horrible can of nasty, gross worms, or what?
No one in them days but a few knew of the August 2001 CIA memo ‘Bin Laden Determined to Strike in Us‘ and George Jr.’s comment to the CIA briefer: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
In the wake of the 2,752 innocent US lives lost that day, one must not only remember, but keep in mind the hundreds of thousands of lives lost in the aftermath — the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq and the dimwitted, horror of war thrust upon the planet gained from the “support” of ignorant Americans.
And eight years later, the US is a divided, near-ugly country as the GOP has become a bottom-feeder among Americans — the epitome of one, Joe Wilson, who screamed “You lie!” during President Obama’s speech Wednesday night.
All a lie.