"Bailey runs a television station in Chicago. Travis is breeding guard dogs in New Mexico. Venus owns a clothing company called "Upwardly Mobile." Jennifer married and bought herself an entire island off the coast of Sardinia. Les Nessman? The Republican whip of the United States Senate!"
-- The Ghost of Johnny Fever, WKRP in Cincinnati
Barack Obama works for us and, as his employers, we should demand that he competently execute the duties we elected him to perform, within the limits of what it humanly possible given the complete psychotic implosion of the GOP and the gummy uselessness of most of the media....None of us in this generation can truly know how it must have felt to be black, to have come out of the long night of slavery, into the clutches of revanchists, to have survived only to see your great ambassador slaughtered like a dog. Barack Obama doesn't know anything about this. None of us know anything about this. None of us can really know how deep that pain must have cut. Anger is human. It is fantastic to see the head of the same American state that created the ghettoes (which predictably exploded) attack the people imprisoned there for being self-defeating.
Like Du Bois, Barack Obama has taken the stage at a moment when it is popular to assert that black people are the agents of their own doom. The response to Trayvon Martin, indeed the response to Barack Obama himself, has been to attack black morality, to highlight black criminality and thus change the conversation from what the American state has done to black people, to what black people have done to themselves. Like Du Bois, Barack Obama believes that these people have a point. Du Bois's biographer, David Levering Lewis, says that Du Bois came to look back back on that speech with some embarrassment. I don't know that Barack Obama will ever reach such a conclusion.Indeed, if we are -- as the president asks us to be -- honest with ourselves, we will see that we have elected a president who claims to oppose racial profiling one minute, and then flirts with inaugurating the country's greatest racial profiler the next. If we are honest with ourselves we will see that we have a president who can condemn the riots as "self-defeating," but can't see his way clear to enforce the fair housing law that came out of them. If we are honest with ourselves we will see a president who believes in particular black morality, but eschews particular black policy....
I'm sorry for all the people who don't invite Glenn Greenwald to dinner, but this is actual whistleblowing.
The CIA's dominant position will likely stun outside experts. It represents a remarkable recovery for an agency that seemed poised to lose power and prestige after acknowledging intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.The surge in resources for the agency funded secret prisons, a controversial interrogation program, the deployment of lethal drones and a huge expansion of its counterterrorism center. The agency was transformed from a spy service struggling to emerge from the Cold War into a paramilitary force.
There are a number of things we learn -- or have confirmed, which is just as important -- here. First, that the CIA remains a formidable adversary in the political knife-fight between the intelligence agencies. Second, that it now conducts itself in a way that is as distant from its original mandate as discovering one morning that NASA has opened a fruit stand, and in a way manifestly more dangerous and fraught with unintended consequences as anything the agency has done since it was deposing Mossadegh aand Arbenz back in the day. ...All of those things are worthy of public discussion and loud public debate, which is what journalism is supposed to do in this country. ...
"Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro- and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of 'heroic ambivalence.' The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for 'still more discussion' on whether or not to go to war.
"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."Mr. Brooks, for those of you late to the party, is a man who (as one long-forgotten wag put it) once:
...nearly sprained his back giving himself the full, Neocon reacharound by cramming both "Chomsky" and "luxuriate" into the same paragraph -- in an article he wrote shortly after he had been handed his job-for-life at the New York Times where Our Mr. Brooks explains why anyone who questioned the motives or honesty of his fellow pro-Bush Neocons was obviously an Anti-Semitic prick who was also "unhinged from reality".Mr. Brooks -- Yale's very own professor of Humility -- is a man who has to my knowledge never once apologized or retracted a single word he has written. Mr. Brooks -- a lecturer on reticence and honesty -- is a man who was videotaped by your humble scrivener a few years ago flatly denying he ever said or wrote any of what he said and wrote. Mr. Brooks -- former pro-Iraq War logorrhea sufferer -- is a man who marked the occasion of the 10th anniversary of everyone's favorite Worst Foreign Policy Debacle In American History, by stammering out less than 60 seconds of vague, uncomfortable twaddle on the virtues of modesty.
Oh my! Was America's Greatest and Most Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual really spouting stupid, lying shit like that just a few short years ago?
Yes. Yes he was (emphasis added):
"You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue. You will find books, blowhards and candidates playing to your delusions, and you can emigrate to your own version of Planet Chomsky. You can live there unburdened by ambiguity."
One Great Big WarBy DAVID BROOKSPublished: August 29, 2013
What’s the biggest threat to world peace right now? Despite the horror, it’s not chemical weapons in Syria. It’s not even, for the moment, an Iranian nuclear weapon. Instead, it’s the possibility of a wave of sectarian strife building across the Middle East...
As the death toll in Syria rises to Rwanda-like proportions...(For the record, the death toll on all side in Syria now stands at around 100,000. And as horrible as that number is, the Rwanda Genocide killed somewhere between five and ten times that many human beings.)
It is pretty clear that the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal and nation-building at home has not helped matters. The United States could have left more troops in Iraq and tamped down violence there. We could have intervened in Syria back when there was still something to be done and some reasonable opposition to mold.
To hunt Osama bin Laden, satellites watched over Abbottabad, Pakistan, and Navy SEALsBy Craig Whitlock and Barton Gellman, Thursday, August 29, 1:53 PM
The U.S. commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden was guided from space by a fleet of satellites, which aimed dozens of separate receivers over Pakistan to collect a torrent of electronic and signals intelligence as the mission unfolded, according to a top-secret U.S. intelligence document.The National Security Agency was also able to penetrate guarded communications among al-Qaeda operatives by tracking calls from mobile phones identified by specific calling patterns, the document shows. Analysts from the Central Intelligence Agency pinpointed the geographic location of one of the phones and tied it to the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where an accumulation of other evidence suggested bin Laden was hiding.The new disclosures about the hunt for bin Laden are contained in classified documents that detail this year’s “black budget” for U.S. intelligence agencies, including the NSA and CIA. The documents, provided to The Washington Post by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, make only brief references to the bin Laden operation. But the mission is portrayed as a singular example of counter-terrorism cooperation among the U.S. government’s numerous intelligence agencies.
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Snowden gave no instructions & has no role in story choices. He asked that I select for news & avoid damage. @freefree0bobbie @bobcesca_go— Barton Gellman (@bartongellman) August 29, 2013
Perhaps some form of camp or reservation system is in order?YOU WILL DEFINITELY BELIEVE HOW RACIST THIS DAILY CALLER ARTICLE ISby ALEX RUTHRAUFFWe’ve seen a lot of racist nonsense in our time, but this contribution from the Daily Caller and Major General US Army Jerry Curry Retired Thank Goodness is truly special, a diamond-encrusted nuclear butt plug of are-you-even-serious-dude that makes us wonder if Jerry Curry, who served semi-prominently under Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr., is feeling okay. Because holy. fucking. shit (emphasis ours):The question is can [black] families and communities ever be reconstituted again, and do we have a sufficient number of black leaders who can and are able to shoulder the vision and burdens of a Martin Luther King, Jr.? Can Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton do it? If the answer is no, and I believe it is, then America’s white leadership will have to get rid of them and select their replacements.Why don’t I suggest that Black Democrats select the replacements? Because Black Democrats are fine for house work, but not for doing heavy lifting. Name one that has put forward a meaningful call to action with a plan to restore the black family and community.We, uh… but like… no way, right? There is no actual way that a man who could write these words and mean them ever served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense under Carter, Acting Press Secretary to the Secretary of Defense under Reagan, and Administrator of the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration under Bush Sr...
"And a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they've been liberated. And it is getting easier every day for Iraqis to express that sense of liberation."
The Era of DistortionBy DAVID BROOKSPublished: January 06, 2004Do you ever get the sense the whole world is becoming unhinged from reality? I started feeling that way awhile ago, when I was still working for The Weekly Standard and all these articles began appearing about how Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Bill Kristol and a bunch of ''neoconservatives'' at the magazine had taken over U.S. foreign policy....The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles.We'd sit around the magazine guffawing at the ludicrous stories that kept sprouting, but belief in shadowy neocon influence has now hardened into common knowledge. Wesley Clark, among others, cannot go a week without bringing it up.In truth, the people labeled neocons (con is short for ''conservative'' and neo is short for ''Jewish'') travel in widely different circles and don't actually have much contact with one another. The ones outside government have almost no contact with President Bush. There have been hundreds of references, for example, to Richard Perle's insidious power over administration policy, but I've been told by senior administration officials that he has had no significant meetings with Bush or Cheney since they assumed office. If he's shaping their decisions, he must be microwaving his ideas into their fillings.It's true that both Bush and the people labeled neocons agree that Saddam Hussein represented a unique threat to world peace. But correlation does not mean causation. All evidence suggests that Bush formed his conclusions independently. Besides, if he wanted to follow the neocon line, Bush wouldn't know where to turn because while the neocons agree on Saddam, they disagree vituperatively on just about everything else. (If you ever read a sentence that starts with ''Neocons believe,'' there is a 99.44 percent chance everything else in that sentence will be untrue.)Still, there are apparently millions of people who cling to the notion that the world is controlled by well-organized and malevolent forces. And for a subset of these people, Jews are a handy explanation for everything....Improvements in information technology have not made public debate more realistic. On the contrary, anti-Semitism is resurgent. Conspiracy theories are prevalent. Partisanship has left many people unhinged.Welcome to election year, 2004.
Where Iraq's Maliki pins the blame for Baghdad bombings
Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki says the Syrian war has awakened dormant Sunni-Shiite tensions.
A series of bombs ripped through Baghdad on Wednesday morning. At least 30 people were killed and 170 injured, according to a ministry of interior official. Attackers coordinated at least 14 car bombs, two roadside bombs, and one suicide bomb between the early morning and 11:00 am.
The explosions targeted predominately Shiite neighborhoods during rush hour. No one has claimed responsibility for the attacks yet, but similar attacks have been carried out by the Islamic State of Iraq, a Sunni insurgent group formerly known as Al Qaeda in Iraq.
The attacks continue an upward trend of violence in Iraq that has brought a level of bloodshed not seen here since 2008. Last month alone 1,057 people lost their lives and another 2,326 were injured in violent attacks throughout Iraq. This year more than 4,000 Iraqis have died and more than 10,000 have been injured by attacks like today's. Baghdad has suffered more attacks than any other area of the country.
In a weekly televised address shortly after Wednesday’s bombings, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki directly linked his country’s deteriorating security to the conflict in Syria. “The internal situation in Syria is playing a major role with what’s happening in Iraq,” he said.
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Chicago blogger driftglass gives up on Obama.And for a moment across these internets I was famous: greeted in indignation chorus comment sections throughout the land as beloved lodge-brother because I had finally abandoned that Worse-Than-Bush-Cubed monster and become Of The Body!
As the president mounts the podium at the Lincoln Memorial today to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Dr. King's speech, we are reminded (ceaselessly) about one thing that Dr. King said in his address:I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.There it is. That's the great loophole. It is an otherwise unremarkable sentiment given the context of the entire address, but, for the people who almost certainly would have lined up on the other side of the movement in 1963, it subsequently has been used as an opening through which all manner of historically backsliding mischief has come a'wandering in, from "reverse discrimination" to Allan Bakke, to what is going on today with the franchise in too many places, to the reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Modern conservatives have used that line to conscript Dr. King into their ideology, now that he's dead and unable to speak for himself. It's the only line in the speech that they remember. They sure as hell don't remember this part.It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.This occurred as recently as today, when the longtime white-supremacist journal, National Review, poured the water over its own head and declared itself healed...
Exclusive: Intercepted Calls Prove Syrian Army Used Nerve Gas, U.S. Spies SayLast Wednesday, in the hours after a horrific chemical attack east of Damascus, an official at the Syrian Ministry of Defense exchanged panicked phone calls with a leader of a chemical weapons unit, demanding answers for a nerve agent strike that killed more than 1,000 people. Those conversations were overheard by U.S. intelligence services, The Cable has learned. And that is the major reason why American officials now say they're certain that the attacks were the work of the Bashar al-Assad regime -- and why the U.S. military is likely to attack that regime in a matter of days.But the intercept raises questions about culpability for the chemical massacre, even as it answers others: Was the attack on Aug. 21 the work of a Syrian officer overstepping his bounds? Or was the strike explicitly directed by senior members of the Assad regime? "It's unclear where control lies," one U.S. intelligence official told The Cable. "Is there just some sort of general blessing to use these things? Or are there explicit orders for each attack?"Nor are U.S. analysts sure of the Syrian military's rationale for launching the strike -- if it had a rationale at all. Perhaps it was a lone general putting a long-standing battle plan in motion; perhaps it was a miscalculation by the Assad government. Whatever the reason, the attack has triggered worldwide outrage, and put the Obama administration on the brink of launching a strike of its own in Syria. "We don't know exactly why it happened," the intelligence official added. "We just know it was pretty fucking stupid."American intelligence analysts are certain that chemical weapons were used on Aug. 21 -- the captured phone calls, combined with local doctors' accounts and video documentation of the tragedy -- are considered proof positive. That is why the U.S. government, from the president on down, has been unequivocal in its declarations that the Syrian military gassed thousands of civilians in the East Ghouta region.However, U.S. spy services still have not acquired the evidence traditionally considered to be the gold standard in chemical weapons cases: soil, blood, and other environmental samples that test positive for reactions with nerve agent. That's the kind of proof that America and its allies processed from earlier, small-scale attacks that the White House described in equivocal tones, and declined to muster a military response to in retaliation.
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Russia says Western attack on Syria would be ‘catastrophic’MOSCOW — A Western military attack on Syria would only create more problems in the region, lead to more bloodshed and result in the same sort of “catastrophe” as previous such interventions in Iraq and Libya, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, said Monday.“Hysteria is growing, and confrontation is incited,” Lavrov said in what he portrayed as an emergency news conference. He said the United States and its European allies have condemned the regime of Bashar al-Assad without any evidence that it actually used chemical weapons in an attack in the Damascus suburbs on Wednesday.Turkey, Britain and France indicated Monday that they would back the Obama administration if it decided to act against Syria in response to the alleged chemical weapons attack, even without a mandate from the United Nations.Russia has been a stalwart ally of Assad, refusing to allow U.N. action to intervene in Syria’s conflict. On Monday, the Russian newspaper Izvestia published an interview with Assad in which he warned the West against military intervention and noted that Moscow continues to sell arms to Damascus under the terms of existing contracts....
Cop Charged With Lying About Arrest Of NY Times Photographer
An NYPD officer has been charged with falsifying documents relating to the beating and arrest of New York Times photographer Robert Stolarik on a shoot in the Bronx last August. According to a release, Officer Michael Ackermann of the 44th precinct claimed that Stolarik repeatedly discharged his camera's flash in Ackermann's face while he was trying to arrest a 15-year-old girl, "blinding him and preventing him from performing his duties." In fact, police later found that no flash was attached to Stolarik's camera, and none had been used that night.At the time, the NYPD also accused Stolarik, a photographer for the Times for more than ten years, of striking an officer in the face with his camera. Before his arrest, Stolarik says he was kicked in the back and head by several officers. His equipment and press credentials were confiscated, and he was charged with obstructing governmental administration and resisting arrest. Both those charges have been dropped, and Stolarik's credentials were eventually returned to him."As we've seen so many times in this narrative, very often the officer's version is a work of fiction," Mickey Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association tells us. "I think the officer in this case decided to get a little too creative with the flash business...Robert doesn't even own a flash."Ackermann, 30, was formally indicted by a grand jury with two counts of falsifying business records, two counts of tampering with public records, offering a false instrument for filing in the first and second degrees, making a punishable false written statement, and official misconduct. Tampering with public records is a class D felony, punishable by a sentence of up to 7 years in jail....
It Rubs the Lotion On Its Skin Or It Gets the Hose Again...Check out the big brain on Bob [Cesca]! He can wrap his head around every detail of Greenwald perfidy, real and mostly imagined, but that’s all he has room for! He can’t possibly also field a discussion about the actual NSA abuses- he’s just too fucking busy reaching for the fainting couch because some of the reporters involved just aren’t up to his standards. Drama Queens! Melodramatic fags! Suck on that, Ackerman and others.
Were it not for the melodramatic personal struggles of the reporters and their source, along with the link-bait and bad reporting that constantly demands careful inspection, we might be talking about ways to improve and reform America’s surveillance operations.
The Iraq supergroup reunion
by digby
If you weren't skeptical about intervention in Syria before, this should make you think twice:
Dear Mr. President:
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has once again violated your red line, using chemical weapons to kill as many as 1,400 people in the suburbs of Damascus. You have said that large-scale use of chemical weapons in Syria would implicate “core national interests,” including “making sure that weapons of mass destruction are not proliferating, as well as needing to protect our allies [and] our bases in the region.” The world—including Iran, North Korea, and other potential aggressors who seek or possess weapons of mass of destruction—is now watching to see how you respond.
...
Sincerely,
Ammar Abdulhamid
Elliott Abrams
Dr. Fouad Ajami
Dr. Michael Auslin
Gary Bauer
Paul Berman
Max Boot
Ellen Bork
Ambassador L. Paul Bremer
Matthew R. J. Brodsky
Dr. Eliot A. Cohen
Senator Norm Coleman
Ambassador William Courtney
Seth Cropsey
James S. Denton
Paula A. DeSutter
Larry Diamond
Dr. Paula J. Dobriansky
Thomas Donnelly
Dr. Michael Doran
Mark Dubowitz
Dr. Colin Dueck
Dr. Nicholas Eberstadt
Ambassador Eric S. Edelman
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Abe Greenwald
Christopher J. Griffin
John P. Hannah
Bruce Pitcairn Jackson
Ash Jain
Dr. Kenneth Jensen
Allison Johnson
Dr. Robert G. Joseph
Dr. Robert Kagan
Lawrence F. Kaplan
Jamie Kirchick
Irina Krasovskaya
Dr. William Kristol
Bernard-Henri Levy
Dr. Robert J. Lieber
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman
Tod Lindberg
Dr. Thomas G. Mahnken
Dr. Michael Makovsky
Ann Marlowe
Dr. Clifford D. May
Dr. Alan Mendoza
Dr. Joshua Muravchik
Governor Tim Pawlenty
Martin Peretz
Danielle Pletka
Dr. David Pollock
Arch Puddington
Karl Rove
Randy Scheunemann
Dan Senor
Ambassador John Shattuck
Lee Smith
Henry D. Sokolski
James Traub
Ambassador Mark D. Wallace
Michael Weiss
Leon Wieseltier
Khawla Yusuf
Robert Zarate
Dr. Radwan Ziadeh
I'm not sure why Ken Adelman and Frank Gaffney aren't on board, but perhaps they're pushing for a full scale invasion...
There are prominent journalists and politicians in the United States who have called for my arrest.
-- Glenn Greenwald, August 26, 2013 repeating this claim for at least the 3rd time
...
Mr. Greenwald “says that he’s got it all and now is an expert on the program,” Mr. Rogers said on the ABC program “This Week.” “He doesn’t have a clue how this thing works. Neither did the person” – presumably in government – “who released just enough information to literally be dangerous.”
He added, “I absolutely think they should be prosecuted."
Senator Dianne Feinstein, chairwoman of the Senate intelligence committee, said on the same program that she agreed.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You described your source as a reader of yours who trusted how you would handle the materials. The source has also been described as a career government official, who was concerned about these programs. A former prosecutor called the source a double-agent. I know you're not going to reveal the source, obviously, but what more can you tell us about the individual's motivations?
GREENWALD: Well, first of all, I am not going to confirm that there is only one individual, there could be one or more than one...
STEPHANOPOULOS: Finally, we're just about -- sorry, we're just about out of time. I just want a quick answer from each of you on this. We saw that a crimes investigation has been opened. Is it fair to say that both of you believe that this investigation should be pursued and the source, if found, should be prosecuted?
ROGERS: I absolutely believe that someone did not have authorization to release this information. And why that's so important, George, is because they didn't have all of the information. I know your reported that you interviewed, Greenwald, says that he's got it all and now is an expert on the program. He doesn't have a clue how this thing works. Nether did the person who released just enough information to literally be dangerous.
I argue that there's other methods. He could come to the committees, if they had concern. We have IGs that they can go to in a classified way if they have concern. Taking a very sensitive classified program that targets foreign person on foreign lands, and putting just enough out there to be dangerous, is dangerous to us, it's dangerous to our national security and it violates the oath of which that person took. I absolutely think they should be prosecuted.
It seems that several respectable media outlets are sensing that the NSA revelations that came about thanks to the efforts of Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, represent a bigger story than whether or not Glenn Greenwald is somebody you'd like to take to prom...
For the benefit of anyone for whom reading is perhaps not fundamental, Glenn Greenwald's personality, and the peripatetic globe-trotting of Edward Snowden, are not the story here. If you decide to make them the story, then you are taking yourself off the real story, and that's your fault, not Greenwald's or Snowden's. Unless, of course, you think the Times, and now ProPublica, are acting the way Lyndon LaRouche's people did. I remind folks who get caught up in the vessel and miss what's inside that, on November 3, 1986, there was an oddball story in an obscure Lebanese weekly newspaper called al-Shiraa about arms transfers in the Middle East. This story was flatly denied by everyone in this country -- including President Ronald Reagan -- and al Shiraa was treated as though it was being put out by two guys with a mimeograph machine in their mother's basement. This, boys and girls, was how the Iran-Contra scandal began....
JF: Was there a time when Snowden was thinking about turning himself in in the USA? Or going public in the USA? I hear rumors that there was talk of a [Washington, D.C.-based] National Press Club-type appearance?
GG: No, I never heard anything like that. My understanding from the start is that he believed that the US is not a safe place for whistle-blowers, that whistle-blowers cannot get a fair trial in the United States and that he wanted to participate in the debate that he helped to prompt rather than spending the rest of his life in a cage or incommunicado. So I never understood that he had planned to come back to the United States.
