at-Largely

Plumbers = Authorities now?

Okay boys and girls, let us read this article together and see what the actual scandal is (see poll after):

Ohio Attorney General Marc Dann, who led investigations into companies blamed for the state's subprime mortgage mess, resigned under a cloud on Wednesday after admitting to an affair with a female staff member.

"Unfortunately, it is now clear that the last step I must take to fix these problems is to resign as attorney general effective immediately," Dann told reporters.

In addition to Dann's relationship with a member of his staff, his office was roiled by sexual harassment claims.

Also, local media reported that authorities staged a raid on the attorney general's offices on Wednesday, carting away documents as part of an undisclosed investigation.

Well, can you spot the actual scandal in this story?

Brian Williams' "Truthiness" in Advertising

Posted by Brad Jacobson

For some time now, MSNBC has been running commercials touting their election coverage team's commitment to providing information that better enables Americans to make informed choices at the voting booth. But in context of the unfolding Pentagon TV war analysts scandal, one of these promos (which I believe is new) stood out for its particular hypocrisy.

To a melodramatic background score that's one part patriotic sentimentality (scene in Mel Gibson movie after character's army triumphs), one part childhood wonder (kids riding bikes in the sky to silhouette of the moon in E.T.), and one part lovers reuniting after a long separation (archetypal open-armed sprint across verdant meadow), this is the TV promo's content:

TEXT GRAPHIC: Decision 2008

TEXT GRAPHIC: Why Do People Care About Politics?

IMAGE: "VOTE HERE" sign with people standing in line behind it.

BRIAN WILLIAMS VOICEOVER: This is a participatory democracy.

TEXT GRAPHIC: Know

IMAGE: Black and white shot of people voting in the foreground; full-color American flag hanging prominently in the background.

BRIAN WILLIAMS VOICEOVER: I think you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on.

IMAGE: Old man (again in black and white), holding an American flag (again in full color) and seated on a bench, is gazing out toward the New York harbor.

TEXT GRAPHIC: That's Why You Care

TEXT GRAPHIC: That's Why We Cover It

IMAGE: Brian Williams' face, then the major faces of MSNBC election coverage.

TEXT GRAPHIC: MSNBC Decision 2008

TEXT GRAPHIC: MSNBC The Place for Politics

To this day, however, Brian Williams and MSNBC, along with CNN, Fox News, ABC, CBS and NBC, have failed to respond to a PBS NewsHour request for an interview about The New York Times exposé, which revealed ex-generals-turned-TV war analysts, shilling directly for the Pentagon, appeared regularly on their programs. (Yesterday, Media Matters published a study that found "since January 1, 2002, the analysts named in the Times article -- many identified as having ties to the defense industry -- collectively appeared or were quoted as experts more than 4,500 times on ABC, ABC News Now, CBS, CBS Radio Network, NBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, and NPR.")

Williams, who in that MSNBC promo says, "This is a participatory democracy" in which "you owe it to your democracy to know as much as you can about what's going on," has, along with his network colleagues, prevented millions of people from knowing what's gone on in the run-up to the war in Iraq and over the course of the occupation. Williams champions our participatory democracy in MSNBC's ad yet fails to share with his viewers any information about what President Eisenhower, in his farewell address, presciently predicted would be the single greatest threat to our democracy - the "military-industrial complex."

On January 17, 1961, Eisenhower - a Republican president, former lifetime military man and war hero - explicitly cautioned: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together."

Yet here's Williams only acknowledgment of his network's involvement with these Pentagon-shilling TV war generals - not from behind his anchor desk but on his NBC Nightly News blog The Daily Nightly (April 29, 2008):

Chess, Poker, Global Thermonuclear War?

Um, folks, this is a bit disturbing via Wired:

"The Air Force wants a suite of hacker tools, to give it "access" to -- and "full control" of -- any kind of computer there is.  And once the info warriors are in, the Air Force wants them to keep tabs on their "adversaries' information infrastructure completely undetected."

The government is growing increasingly interested in waging war online.  The Air Force recently put together a "Cyberspace Command," with a charter to rule networks the way its fighter jets rule the skies. The Department of Homeland Security, Darpa, and other agencies are teaming up for a five-year, $30 billion "national cybersecurity initiative."  That includes an electronic test range, where federally-funded hackers can test out the latest electronic attacks.  "You used to need an army to wage a war," a recent Air Force commercial notes.  "Now, all you need is an Internet connection."

Liquid Lunching With Rummie

Posted By Cernig

Audio segments from the Pentagon's document dump reveal that fun and games were had by all at a Christmastime 2006 luncheon hosted by Donald Rumsfield for the Pentagon's pet military analysts:

As documented by Newsvine, it all went down at a valedictory luncheon Rumsfeld hosted for those analysts on December 12, 2006. Many of the "message force multipliers" named in the original New York Times piece were in attendance, including David L. Grange, Donald W. Sheppard, James Marks, Rick Francona, Wayne Downing, and Robert H. Scales, Jr. They were treated to an extraordinary conversation (Newsvine has highlights, the hour-long clip of which can be found here) with Rumsfeld, that included many jaw-dropping moments, such as Rumsfeld admitting that in Iraq, the U.S. "can't lose militarily, but...can't win by military means alone," an agreement that Iraq could use a Syngman Rhee-type dictator (because that's what democracy smells like!), and a lengthy passage where Rumsfeld jokingly offers a bottle of champagne to anyone who could kill Moqtada al Sadr. You sure don't see too many people joking on al Sadr these days!

But by far the most extraordinary part of this luncheon is the antipathy the gathered members exhibit toward the American people for having the temerity to vote the Democrats back into power. When Lt. Gen. Michael DeLong bemoans the lack of "sympathetic ears" on Capitol Hill, Rumsfeld offers that the American people lack "the maturity to recognize the seriousness of the threats." What's to be done? According to Rumsfeld, "The correction for that, I suppose, is [another] attack."

Meddlers!

By Cernig

We've heard a lot recently about US allegations that Iran is interfering in Iraq, aiding insurgents with weaponry and training, but Iran has also long said that both the US and Britain back insurgents inside Iran and we hear rather less about that.

That might change if Iran goes ahead with a lawsuits, as it claimed today, against both nations for aiding terrorists who allegedly blew up a mosque.

Iran's judiciary said on Monday it would file international lawsuits against the United States and Britain, accusing them of providing financial support to those behind a blast in a mosque that killed 14 people.

Iran's intelligence minister last week said Iran had arrested five or six members of a terrorist group with links to Britain and the United States who he said were involved in the explosion that also wounded 200 in the southern city of Shiraz. Iranian officials had previously said the April 12 blast, during an evening prayer sermon by a prominent local cleric, was caused by explosives left over from an exhibition commemorating the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.

Judiciary spokesman Ali-Reza Jamshidi told state television the terrorists behind the bombing were agents of the U.S. and British governments in Iran. "The relationship of those who planted the bombs in Shiraz with the U.S. and Britain was identified and they were being financially supported and in fact they acted as foreign agents in Iran," he said. "In view of the documents obtained the judiciary in cooperation with the government and the Foreign Ministry will file lawsuits with international authorities against their supporters, who on the one hand claim to fight terrorists and on the other hand provide them with equipment," he said.

He was clearly referring to Britain and the United States, but did not give details on how Tehran would take legal action against them. Iran has in the past accused the two countries of trying to destabilize the Islamic Republic by supporting rebels, mainly those in sensitive border areas.

The British government recently failed to prevent judges from ordering the removal of the main suspect in foreign-backed meddling in Iran, the MeK, from being removed from the UK's terror list. Iran isn't too happy about that, summoning the British ambassador to protest the removal - and in truth the British government didn't try too hard to keep the MeK on the list. Neoconservatives and rightwing regime-change advocates have given the MeK heavy political backing in the last few years in both the US and UK and it seems likley that the US State Department will follow suit when it next reviews the MeK's inclusion in October.

Red Alert - While you were counting polls...

My good friend and former CIA spook Phil Giraldi has some disturbing news in the American Conservative:

"There is considerable speculation and buzz in Washington today suggesting that the National Security Council has agreed in principle to proceed with plans to attack an Iranian al-Qods-run camp that is believed to be training Iraqi militants.  The camp that will be targeted is one of several located near Tehran. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was the only senior official urging delay in taking any offensive action.  The decision to go ahead with plans to attack Iran is the direct result of concerns being expressed over the deteriorating situation in Lebanon, where Iranian ally Hezbollah appears to have gained the upper hand against government forces and might be able to dominate the fractious political situation.  The White House contacted the Iranian government directly yesterday through a channel provided by the leadership of the Kurdish region in Iraq, which has traditionally had close ties to Tehran.

<snip>

It is to be presumed that the attack will be as “pinpoint” and limited as possible, intended to target only al-Qods and avoid civilian casualties.  The decision to proceed with plans for an attack is not final.  The President will still have to give the order to launch after all preparations are made."

I have said this before and I will say it again. I am convinced that the Cheney-side of the Bush-Cheney administration will take a scorchand burn policy on their way out. They know a Democrat will take the White House, so I suspect strongly that sometime after the November election, but before the new President is sworn in, this bunch will launch a hit on Iran and leave the mess for the new administration. If we only had a Congress who could decide on matters of war... oh well.

Yes, We Do Body Counts

Posted By Cernig

Over at Salon today there's a disturbing story of the kind of hyperkinetic and ultimately harmful counter-insurgency tactics which are being driven by a top-down demand for results in Iraq. The article explores the events surrounding the murder of an Iraqi farmer by a U.S. sniper team and relates it to pressure for body counts by commanders who then walk away untouched by the legal fallout of their subordinates' actions.

A review of thousands of pages of documents from the legal proceedings obtained by Salon shows that in the months prior to [the Iraqi farmer, Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi]’s death, the young snipers, already frustrated by guerrilla tactics, were pressed to their physical limits and pushed by officers to stretch the bounds of the laws of war in order to increase the enemy body count. When the United States wallowed in Vietnam’s counterinsurgency quagmire decades ago, the same pressure placed on soldiers resulted in some of the worst atrocities of that war.[…]

The pressure from above for more bodies was also toxic in Iraq, where the isolated, outnumbered and outgunned snipers of the 1st Battalion had to make split-second life-or-death decisions. When those decisions landed them in a military court, it was the lowest-ranking soldiers, not the brass, who paid the price, and a sergeant who said he was pushed into taking a fatal shot who wound up with a long prison sentence. It was battalion commander Lt. Col Robert Balcavage, who pushed for a higher body count, who initiated the prosecution of three of the battalion’s snipers.

The original article is several pages long and bears reading carefully. Matt Duss at The Wonk Room observes:

I think we’ve seen this “dead bodies=success” mentality bleed out into pro-war blogs as well, where the numbers of insurgent dead are credulously relayed and uncritically reported as progress, irrespective of the collateral damage incurred in those deaths and of the galvanizing effects that this has on support for insurgency. (Of course, if you’re someone who believes that trying not to create more insurgents is irrelevant to the task of counterinsurgency, then no big deal. I suppose one could always apply the Bush Doctrine on the ground in Iraq, and justify the murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi on the theory that he might, one day, have joined the insurgency. But then you’d have to kill his son, and then all his friends, too. Nice war we’ve got going here, huh?)

The murder of Genei Nesir Khudair al-Janabi, and the atmosphere in which it occurred, is reminiscent of the Abu Ghraib abuses. In both cases, a high-pressure environment, hazy rules of engagement, and pressure from above to produce usable intelligence/dead “insurgents” led to atrocity. In both cases, the lowest men down were punished for carrying out the directives of their commanders (and Commander-in-Chief), while those commanders were left untouched.

It appears that the Vietnamization of the military is inevitable whenever the officer corps is decimated by principled junior officers quitting after multiple stressful tours, leaving too many tough guy/big ego/inferiority complex guys in command who are unfit for leading COIN operations. The moral is to not get into wars of choice in the first place, but the damage may take a generation to repair.

"CounterProductive," I Respectfully Disagree

My good friend Jeff Huber, a retired military man and author whom I respect and who blogs here, has in his recent post compared Andrew Cockburn's piece in CounterPunch to the propaganda of Judith Miller and Michael Gordon of The New York Times. I must very respectfully disagree. Jeff writes:

At least one high profile war critic sounds alarmed by a recent revelation that Mr. Bush signed a “secret finding” against “the Iranian regime” six weeks ago.  I’m frankly less than agog about it.

In a May 2 CounterPunch article, Andrew Cockburn wrote that Bush has launched a “covert offensive” on Iran that is "unprecedented in its scope."  The “directive covers actions across a huge geographic area – from Lebanon to Afghanistan.”  The directive, according to Cockburn, also permits an expanded range of actions, “up to and including the assassination of targeted officials.

<snip>

Cockburn seems to want us to get excited that this Lebanon-to-Afghanistan offensive may involve assassination.  H.G. Wells’ bells, fellow citizens, we’re already assassinating people in Somalia with freaking cruise missiles.  We’re doing the same thing in Pakistan with Hellfire missiles fired from pilotless spy planes; the folks who pickle off the missles are dweebs sitting at consoles in an Air Force base in Nevada. "

Let's go to my reporting on Iran (which has been on hold while I have been covering selective prosecution):

War Stenography

Posted By Cernig

Michael "Judy In Drag" Gordon today re-earned his place as the Bush administration's stenographer-in-chief with an anonymously-sourced report alleging that Iran is using Hizbullah as a proxy to train other proxies among Iraq's Shiite militants. Glenn Greenwald writes:

As usual with Gordon's articles, nothing is done here other than uncritically repeating Bush administration claims under the cover of anonymity. Virtually every paragraph in this article is nothing more a mindless recitation of uncorroborated assertions which he copies from Bush officials and then weaves into a news narrative, with the phrase "American officials say" tacked on at the end or the phrase "according to officials" unobtrusively interspersed in the middle.

With the fact that this might as well be an official White House briefing taken for granted, Dr. iRack at Abu Muqawama blog writes that he suspects the claims are still "at least mostly" true. However, even "at least mostly" leaves a lot of gap for the most important aspect of the story, the intent of the Iranian leadership, as well as particular details of the "evidence", to fall through.

Dr. iRack notes that:

existence of 2008 vintage Iranian weapons per se is not evidence of direct involvement by the Iranian government (or the Quds force), since they theoretically could have been sold on the black market.

But sources out with the White House indicate that such trade is more than simply theoretical. Ever since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and then Iraq, the regional black trade in arms has been at an all-time high. From Pakistan to the Lebanon, prices for weapons have more than tripled since the invasion of Iraq. Three Pakistani arms-dealers were among the first arrested when the Iraqi Army moved into Basra recently - presumably selling the wares of Pakistan's huge cottage-industry arms bazaars who boast they can copy any weapon so well, right down to the markings, that even its designer cannot tell the difference.

American weapons such as Glock pistols which were "mislaid" in Iraq in 2004 have turned up, by the score, in the hands of Kurdish terrorists and even ordinary criminals in Turkey - yet no-one is accusing the U.S. government of deliberately aiding such groups. These arms travel through the region along Silk Road smuggling paths which were old in Jesus' time, making a joke of secure borders. Just as was the case with many missing American items in Iraq, these trades are often fuelled by individual officials enriching themselves by surreptitiously selling off their national arsenals or re-directing imports to the benefit of their own offshore bank accounts. Evcery nation in the region, too, sells weaponry - home produced and imported for re-export - to anyone who wants them. Shipments of arms by the Saudi government have turned up in Iraq too, to rather less publicity than Iranian ones.

If Only He Were Yankin' Our Cheney

Posted by Brad Jacobson

Unfortunately, he's not (h/t Raw Story):

The world is a better place because of George W. Bush's presidency, Vice President Dick Cheney assured Oklahoma Republicans on Friday evening.

"When the history is written, it will be said this is a safer country and more hopeful world because George Bush was president," Cheney said.

I won't state the obvious and run through the litany of death, destruction and misery these two despotic war criminals have unleashed during their watch. But, surprisingly, the shameless mendacity of these two thugs still shocks at this late date.

Here's our freedom-loving president discussing his own future:

"I'm interested in promoting ... the whole philosophy behind the freedom agenda. I think it's going to be very important to be kept in the forefront of American philosophical thought. And I'm going to build a presidential library at SMU — it's where Laura went to university, there in Dallas. And I'd like to have a think tank. This isn't a political precinct, this will be a place where we get the thinkers from around the world to come and write about and articulate the transformative power of freedom, abroad and at home."

Paging Dr. Orwell. Dr. Orwell, please pick up:

"And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" - George Orwell, 1984

"Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary." - George Orwell, 1984

So who's future will it be? Who's past? Who's present?

Dr. Martin Luther King said, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." A comforting thought. But our leaders today and many members of our media, acting as their mouthpieces, have worked to obliterate the idea of a moral universe.

Consider this: we have a media that expresses outrage over a teen star showing too much skin in a photo shoot, but universally yawns and fails to report studies that estimate over 1 million Iraqi citizens have died because of the 2003 US invasion.

If the US continues on this path, who's to say Cheney won't be right about how President Bush's legacy is viewed ten, twenty, thirty years down the road?