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December 26, 2005
OT – 05-132
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U.S. Missteps Leave Iraqis in the Dark
The massive U.S. effort will leave behind this legacy: Iraqis will actually have, on average, fewer hours per day of electricity in their homes than they did before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003.
“The money was not effective,” Muhsin Shalash, Iraq’s minister of electricity, said in an interview. “The contracting was wrong. The whole planning was wrong…. It’s a big problem.”
U.S. officials have blamed insurgent attacks, unchecked demand and the poor conditions of Iraq’s power plants for hobbling the bid to restore electricity. But interviews with dozens of U.S. and Iraqi officials reveal that poor decisions by the United States also played a significant role.
Perhaps most serious was the decision to expand a program begun under Saddam Hussein to install dozens of natural-gas-fired electrical generators, U.S. and Iraqi officials said. Iraq has such gas in abundance, but it uses only a fraction of it. The rest is burned off during oil production.
The U.S. spent hundreds of millions of dollars to purchase and install natural-gas-fired generators in electricity plants throughout Iraq. But pipelines needed to transport the gas weren’t built because Iraq’s Oil Ministry, with U.S. encouragement, concentrated instead on boosting oil production to bring in hard currency for the nation’s cash-starved economy.
In at least one case, the U.S. paid San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. $69 million for a natural-gas-fired plant that was never built, according to State Department documents and U.S. officials.
All told, of 26 natural gas turbines installed at seven plants in Iraq — ranging in cost from a few million dollars to more than $40 million — only seven are burning natural gas, reconstruction officials said.
There’s a talking heads show on the BBC Monday morning in NZ that prolly makes it Sunday afternoon in UK. It features reporters from media outlets around the globe who are based in london plus one Englishman from an English Daily.
It used to have a good selection of alternative voices but since the Bliar blame the Beeb for being caught lying affair it has toned down. To the point where some Israeli thug from Mossad or something was on every week. Before that the Israelis called in would frequently be peace advocates etc. Still didn’t stop the earnest fools from putting their foot in it though. The voice of Arabs was/is a chap by the name of Bari who works as a stringer in London for a number of ME papers plus has his own paper in the UK for arab ex-pats.
The chattering classes were blithering on with their nice middle of the road opinions one night. They were all of the opinion that the Palestinian right of return was ‘silly’ and being used by the Palestinians to hold up the peace process. All definite two state solutioners they also didn’t want to say anything that might get them in trouble with whatever lobby group was enforcing the israeli line by censorship in the UK that year. Anyway during a break in the conversation Bari who had been silent up until that point said. “I’m a Palestinian refugee. We were driven out of our home when I was seven and I don’t think that refugees wanting to go home and reclaim what has been taken from them by force of arms are being ‘silly’. It kinda took the wind outta their sails cause Bari was one of them. He’d been on every week (chiefly to appease the viewers in the ME who would have got a bit hot under the collar if all the pronouncements made about them hadn’t had some sort of reality check). The fact that these journos had worked with Bari for a couple of years and hadn’t even worked out he was a Palestinian says heaps about their depth of knowledge about the ME. A subject which always cops about 30% of the chattering time on this show. Everyone has an opinion about the best way to move 4 million humans around like chess pieces.
Anyway since those days it has got much worse and as I said above; following the bliar’s post hutton whitewash purge the show had this likud mouthpiece on every week whilst Bari was called in much less often. Not because he was a troublemaker unless you consider Bari’s quiet reasoning trouble but because at this time BBC coverage of Palestine went thru a 180 degree shift. No more stories of kids being shot for throwing stones or queries about whether the US fundies picking up Israel’s tab knew that their money was being spent on state subsidized abortion. Every action by the Palestinian resistance was covered in blood curdling detail complete with picture and howling relations but the murder of the Palestian leadership largely ignored.
Anyway the mossad man went a bit too far about the middle of the year when Bliar was pretending to care about te people of africa who have copped the short end of the stick ever since white fellas have been stealing (oops sorry mining) their resources.
The question was should the IMF scrub the debt that had been used to get most Afican nations so far into hock that selling everything they had ever owned would still leave them too short to pay the copyright on H.I.V. drugs.
The mossad man blew us all away he said something like “I had some cousins who lived in Africa for a while. He told be that ‘they’ are all too lazy to get out of their own way so giving them money which could be used to fight the war on terra (ie given to Israel) would be stupid. They’ll just piss it up against the wall as per usual.”
I exploded with a guffaw when I saw the look on the po faced Beeb mans fault. Th Israeli didn’t understand what he had done wrong he had made similar comments about Arabs and no one minded. That was the whole problem of course to have someone spouting off about the poor black people who were still ‘cool’ in th same way he spouted off about Palestinians wasn’t needed lest someone make the obvious comparison.
Anyway millions wrote to the beeb pointing out the error of this blokes ways and we haven’t seen them since.
I switched over for a while about 3.00am and they were discussing blogs on this show.
It turned out to be another great moment of self immolation as the amerikan (from newsweek afaik) claimed that as a great standard bearer of the truth he was sure that everything on the net and in particular bloggs had parted ways with the truth long ago!
He went on to say something like “I’ve been covering international politics all my life and to have these young relations try and tell me they know as much about it as I just takes my breath away. Another guffaw escaped Did’s lips.
The mainstream media that purveyor of whatever subjective reality that they are told to sell trying to claim the ethical high ground.
I think that a couple of the others realised that it had gone too far because after some crack about the thousands of emails from irate bloggers they would have to ignore, one of them made some remark about dropping subscription and circulation.
It became apparent that there was a real depth to the resentment the mainstream media were expressing toward the online community.
Not only had they now been shown up as liars, dolts or both over things that the bloggers had either uncovered or drawn to the attention of the public, the net community is no longer allowing the MSM to set the agenda. People such as the newsweek hack really resent the loss of power.
And that of course means bloggers must be doing something right.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 26 2005 10:52 utc | 2
U.S. Congress approves transfer of $600 million in aid to Israel
While cutting social programs here at home.
So basically, the poor here in Merica are supporting the war in the M.E. W/flesh and cash. I saw somewhere, (can’t find the link now) a side by side chart of the cuts to social programs w/in the increase of aid to Israel since the begining of 2000. The thesis of the article was how we are spending even more than what is being shown on the war in Iraq by proxy of
“aid”. Some estimates say as we send $10 Billion Yearly to Israel , alone. Not including U.S. aid subsidizes of potent weapons again, to Israel. I’m wondering in gerneral how much “aid” we send to all other countries,-always w/the mask of humanitarian goodness-in which is really to further our own interests. While katrina victims here live in tents. Any one got statistics on all yearly foreign aid?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 26 2005 11:50 utc | 3
Not to change the subject, but perhaps amplify it, Pat Buchanan’s column in Antiwar.com today concludes: “America needs a new vision. America needs a new foreign policy.”
I favor deployment of U.S. military forces to defend our national borders, current total of 50 United States, plus any who care to apply for statehood on an equal footing with Idaho or New Jersey. I see nothing wrong with a bigger union or a more ethnically diverse Congress. A couple dozen Muslim, Mexican, Asian, and black African U.S. senators would honor the American idea: Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, with liberty and justice for all, etc.
Posted by: Wolf DeVoon | Dec 26 2005 14:00 utc | 4
Interesting article here about the demise of a moronic propaganda mag targeted to Middle East hipsters here.
Nice quote explaining why our policy of unconditional support for Israel’s murderous subjugation of the Palestinians is not negotiable:
Exhibit A in the Council’s report is US support for Israel, which the authors contend can be better explained to the world with reference to the constraints imposed on Washington by democratically expressed domestic opinion.
Hmmm, “democratically expressed domestic opinion”. Guess that’s a euphemism for well-financed pro-Israel lobbying groups that makes sure anyone in power that goes off the reservation on our shitty little “ally” (has there ever been a more one-sided alliance? We write the 10-figure checks, they do whatever the fuck they want to) soon lives to regret it.
I’ve seen US polls where the majority believe we should be neutral in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but that’s not the sort of “democratically expressed domestic opinion” that carries any weight around these parts.
Posted by: ran | Dec 26 2005 14:14 utc | 5
Back when I owned a TV, I was watching Fox News Sunday morning, 06/17/01, being hosted in the first segment then by Tony Snow. The lead off guest was now former the US Secretary of State, Colin Powell . Mr.Powell gave an excellent recitation relevant to foreign affair matters.
I was strongly motivated, and sent many e-mail communications at the time, (pre blogs) based on a statement made by Mr. Powell during his recitation of that day. Mr. Powell during the entire interview was very confident, and spoke without hesitation throughout the entire interview excluding for a few seconds period, after one specific statement made by him as he was talking about the Russian peoples. When he realized the consequences of making this disclosure indirectly to the American public, he froze for a second, his eyes rolled back as he realized what he had said, fear flashed across his face for a nano second, and then he continued without further pause for the rest of the interview.
In my lifetime, I had never sent out to others a post relevant to a quote I heard while watching a news program. In this case, the significance of what was said in the flow of truth coming from Mr. Powell, is a statement that establishes the primary reality of intent per the politics and operative structure coming from government in this country today. I had to immediately share what I had heard with others back then, and in light of recent events I re-share it now:
Mr. Powell was discussing Mr. Bush’s trip to Europe, and was at a point in his recitation covering certain concerns regarding Russia, and Russia being requested to cooperate with the United States too track down lost Nuclear materials i.e suitcase/backpack Nukes and scientists who were unaccounted for after the break up of Russia, that now may be in the hands of, or in the case of the missing scientists, working for adversaries of the USA.
The quote from Mr. Powell, per the Russian Scientists that every American “NEEDS” to hear immediately is as follows:
[Colin Powell] – “Finding the Russian scientists may be a problem being that Russia does not have a Social Security System, as here in America, that allows us to monitor, track down and capture every man, woman, child or American citizen on this continent and abroad.
EMPHASIS added to the words MONITOR and CAPTURE!
The significance of Mr. Powell’s statement is profound, and essential to be heard by all in this country at this time.
I thanked Mr. Mi Lai Powell for inadvertently being honest towards the underlying intent of the US Government, reaffirmed by his admission back on that day. But it was not until the b’s recent post did I recall my first political act of dissent on the internets mentioned above. That, (b’s post) and a recent times article clicked something in my head but it didn’t resolve itself until I started thinking about baby powell.
About that time, former FCC (Federal Communications Commission) chairman Michael Powell was selling off the public trust. I at the time could not see the whole of the issues then, however,
The recent NYT article made a few things click in my mind, on baby and popa Powell’s ulterior motives…
Do you think recent events have anything to do with FCC decisions of the past few years?
Again, with recent events into the monolithic proportions of Stalinist like architecture of Data Mining we have to ask ourselves what has really been going on, aside from
the blantant neopotism.
“As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.”
So if they have access to ‘streams’ of communications from the Tier 1 Points Of Presecne (POPs) of the major carriers, basically they’re packet snooping on the voice and data traffic of a large portion of the country. Yes, probably something greater than 99.9% is sniffed and ignored, but that’s a guess and I could be wrong. Point is it’s sniffed in the first place, in warentless fashion, and that kind of data mining even if approved by a warrant would set a frightening precedent. And buried later in the story…
“One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.”
Now that I know this was a vast and sweeping data mining operation, I actually feel a little better. Civil liberties violations divided by 290 million must be a smaller number than civil liberties violations divided by, say, American Muslims and the residents of Berkley. And all this time I thought baby Powell was just a lackey for the ILECs while all along he was actually a lackey for Cheney.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 26 2005 14:48 utc | 6
BIRD FLU PREPPING – BROKAW HAS DONE IT, KOPPEL PLANS TO
Meet the Press, Dec. 25, 2005 – excerpt from transcript
MR. RUSSERT: Let me talk about an issue that is of grave concern to people but we don’t know much about it and that’s the avian flu, the potential for pandemic. We had Dr. Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization on MEET THE PRESS. Let’s listen to him and come back and talk about how to deal with this.
(Videotape, November 20, 2005):
DR. MICHAEL RYAN (World Health Organization): The avian flu strain has the potential to become a pandemic strain. It is very worrying that we see this virus transmitting across the species barrier into humans and the virus itself is evolving and we are probably closer to a pandemic at any time in the last 37 years, since the last pandemic of ’68. This virus has crossed the species barrier. It has infected humans. It’s killing a high proportion of those human beings and we need to prepare for the possibility of a pandemic.
(End videotape)
MR. RUSSERT: Ted Koppel, how do you cover a story like that without alarming people and still do your job as a journalist to prepare people?
MR. KOPPEL: You can’t. You have to alarm people because until people are sufficiently alarmed they’re not going to listen to what has to happen. You know, what you don’t hear in that sound bite, and what is rarely spoken of, especially among the politicians, is that the kind of vaccine that would be necessary to treat the avian flu does not exist. It cannot exist until the strain of avian flu is developed and can be sampled and can be tested and then, and only then, can you begin to develop the vaccine. In order to develop sufficient quantities of that vaccine, to vaccinate people twice, you’re going to need so many hundreds of millions of doses that it will take a minimum of two to three years to get them. In other words, by the time you get them, it’ll be too late to treat most of the people that would get the flu.
Now, you know, obviously, that raises questions as to what needs to be done, what can be done. I tried, just before I left “Nightline” to do a broadcast in which we brought some of the best experts on and said, “Tell us what we need to know. Tell us what we need to do.” Among the things we need to do, and it sounds horrific, to say it, is to put in a decent supply of food and water and whatever medicine is needed by a family in each American home now, before it’s too late, so that if, and when, a flu hits an area, like, let’s say, our area here in Washington, the people, especially older people, or people who have breathing problems, lung problems, people who have heart problems, can afford to stay home for two or three weeks, or longer.
MR. BROKAW: Have you done that at your house?
MR. KOPPEL: No, in truth. Have you?
MR. BROKAW: We have.
MR. KOPPEL: Have you?
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Good for you.
MR. BROKAW: Well, we did it for a couple of reasons. Meredith–we live in New York and we have a house outside of New York and Meredith said, “This is going to be our sanctuary. We have to be prepared in case something happens.” And we did put in a small supply of food and water and…
MR. KOPPEL: Yeah.
MR. BROKAW: …other things to have on the ready. It’s also–the avian flu and the pandemic possibilities are a real commentary on the world in which we’re living now. The mobility of people to move across places that–the crush of population everywhere, how rapidly these things spread. And I think that leads in this country to a kind of unsettled feeling on the part of a lot of people. They have so much access to information now. They don’t feel that they have their own sanctuary because it all happens at warp speed and I think politicians are not doing a very good job in my impression.
MR. KOPPEL: But, you see, doing what Tom and Meredith have done, and what my wife and I have not done, yet–will do, I promise–wouldn’t at this stage cause any shortages…
MR. BROKAW: No.
MR. KOPPEL: …it wouldn’t cause any panic. I’m not suggesting that people go out and instantly buy a four-week supply of medicine…
MR. BROKAW: Right.
MR. KOPPEL: …food, water. But if you start…
MR. BROKAW: You have to think about it. Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: …over a period of the next three months…
MR. RUSSERT: And that’s the hard truth, it’s probably the only thing you can do.
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: Just–it’s the only thing that the individual can do…
MR. BROKAW: Yeah.
MR. KOPPEL: …so that at the very least, if the pandemic hits your community, you can stay at home, don’t go out.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10531436/
Posted by: mistah charley | Dec 26 2005 15:38 utc | 7
@mistah charley
If your familiar w/torrents the following may be of interest:
Torrent name: Meet The Press – 2005.12.25 – Tom Brokaw, Ted Koppel (TVRip.SoS)
Size: 248.52 MB
“A special holiday edition of Meet the Press with television veterans Tom Brokaw & Ted Koppel, on politics, the press and 2005 in review. Also, poet Robert Frost, in a Christmas Meet the Press Minute from 50 years ago.”
==
runtime = 51mins
xvid.544×416.573kbps.mp3.96.vbr
Info Hash: 06599d02ded7fb2be574cd6c87d3ddb75147a177
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 26 2005 16:27 utc | 8
Israel To Expand West Bank Settlements
Comment is superfluous.
Posted by: tgs | Dec 26 2005 16:38 utc | 9
With regards to Israel:
Torrent name: BBC Israel’s Secret Weapons
Size: 279.37 MB
Description:
BBC Israel’s Secret Weapons 2003.03.16 mp4
While the United States wallows in its indulgence of an unnecessary war in Iraq, purportedly motivated by WMD never found and were most likely knowingly not there, it is again pumping up the rhetoric against Iran on similar specious grounds.
All the while its client state, Israel is an unregulated nuclear power and also in the possession of chemical-biological weapons beyond inspection of any kind, within Israel or by international observers.
Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s nuclear whistleblower, was jailed in 1986 for publishing photographs of Israel’s nuclear bomb factory at Dimona. Olenka Frenkiel reveals the extent of Israel’s nuclear gagging.
After evelations hit the press in October 1986, he was lured to Rome where the Mossad abducted him and smuggled him to Israel.
Vanunu spent 18 years in jail, 11 of which were in a minute solitary confinement cell. Vananuu is now free but cannot yet leave Israel.
Sunday Times journalist Peter Hounam heard rumours in 1986 that an Israeli whistleblower was offering proof of what the world had long suspected. Vanunu was that whistleblower.
His revelations confirmed that Israel was building advanced nuclear weapons and other investigations point to chemical and biological warfare weapons developed outside and all remaining outside international inspection procedures demanded of all other countries.
He was tried in secret, convicted of treason and spying, he spent 11 years of the sentence under the torturous conditions of solitary confinement.
The continuing cloak of absolute secrecy and the intimidation of others are viewed by many as threat to Israeli democracy and is a cancer in Israeli body politic.
Meanwhile, chemical gas attacks plague Gaza with untreatable convulsive effects on civilians as Israel withholds possible antidotes.
————
Content Type: [Documentary]
Info Hash: 0f4b077af236b5a2e3810b6dc4c78a1fc822147d
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 26 2005 17:27 utc | 10
Jesus General has found out what you get when you google “Baby Jesus”
@b,
thanks for the unintentional hilarity for imagining what would happen if US companies started blaming the “American people” for “unchecked demand” on electricity. No sir, that’s an American right.
Posted by: Rowan | Dec 26 2005 19:02 utc | 12
Polyponesian, Polyponesian, Polyponesian
Say that three times fast….
We have been lied to, we are being lied to,
and we will increasingly be lied to by this
Bush Administration. It is as if the captain
of the Titanic were rushing about on the deck,
enthusing to everyone what a wonderful starry
night it is out, but aren’t you getting a bit
cold standing around the rails, and why don’t
you’all go back into the ballroom for a little
after-Xmas shopping, I hear there’s a sale on,
hey, they’re playing Nearer My G-d to Thee!
I mean, when they start blaming MicroSoft for
weak gaming sales because of slow delivery of
their new XBox, how elliptical does it have to
become, before everyone realizes we are cows
with SS ear tags, we’re all wired for sound,
and we’d better get to eating and making milk,
otherwise, they’re gonna get US all busy dying.
Then it had occurred to me, crash test dummy
that I am, the middle class in America are
the crush-zone for the elites. They *have* to
lie to get US up every morning and out fighting
to earn the last few shekels we’re gonna see,
so they can metric-ate and actuals-ize our cost-
structure, and plan when to bump up the lever
on the Treasury printing presses another notch.
We’re the crush-zone of a coming train wreck.
Only this time there’ll be no soup kitchens
and flop houses for anybody to go to, only
church camps turned into detention centers.
I was telling a friend how in the mid-70’s,
after the oil spike trainwrecked our economy,
and we were all huddled in our Bowery flat
around crackers and peanut butter, how I’d
volunteered to go look for work, and walked
from Manhattan across the bridge to Jersey,
before I could hitch a ride to New England.
A couple days later, I was flopped in an old
farmhouse in Vermont, with a family from down
in North Carolina who migrated with farm work,
living on flat-bread ground up from goat feed,
the milk from their goats, and a fish trap we
kept out in the pond. Pretty good tucker!
That fallback is gone now. The small farms and
orchards are all gone, and all those abandoned
homesteads are summer places for rich NYC’rs.
Once you fall on migrant work, you can never
get back on your feet again, never have a car,
never get an apartment, never get your kids in
school, never find any kind of retail work.
You’d probably end up on a Homeland Security
wanted poster for not having a home, then from
there, first time they pick you up, into jail,
and from there, with a record, soon to prison.
A far cry from 30 years ago, when the Vermont
sheriff would let you sleep overnight in the
jail, and bring you a peanut butter sandwich,
and nobody tracked humans on computer tape.
It changed so fast when Reagan came to power.
The pilferage and police state, hand in hand.
35,000,000 Americans right now are one misstep,
one paycheck, one rental hike, one power bill,
one credit card late payment away from being
homeless, with no food to eat, then invisible.
But Colin Powell thinks, “it’s OK that we’re
being spied on”, and “Condi Rice’s polls are
rising”, even as Bush/Cheney’s are sun-setting.
If you believe that, you deserve to be a cow.
[from GlobalBeat.org]
Iraq Vote Sinks Another U.S. ‘Best-Case’ Scenario
U.S. officials made no secret, in the months preceding Iraq’s latest election, that their withdrawal strategy was premised – in the first instance – on a regime change: the replacement of the current, strongly pro-Iran government dominated by the Shiite religious parties by a more secular, moderate, U.S.-friendly administration that would make compromises to draw in Iraq’s alienated Sunnis who make up the social base of the insurgency. The hope was that Iraqi voters would blame the poor security and economic situation on the incumbents, and turn to more secular alternatives such as the first prime minister picked by the U.S., Iyad Allawi, or even former Pentagon favorite Ahmed Chalabi. At the very least, it was hoped that the power of the alliance led by the two main Shiite religious parties would lose its parliamentary majority, and be forced both to choose more moderate leaders from within its ranks, and to accept a part in a more secular coalition. Preliminary results released by the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, however, have poured cold water on those scenarios: So far, the religious Shiite bloc has garnered around 44 percent of the vote; the Sunni religious parties dominated in that community and the Kurdish nationalist bloc did likewise among their own people — Allawi’s list around 8 percent and Chalabi’s less than 0.5 percent (not enough to claim a single seat in the legislature). So on current indications, the new parliament is going to look a lot like the old one except for the addition of a Sunni religious bloc that inclines towards sympathy with the nationalist insurgency.
That outcome would leave the U.S. facing the same uphill struggle to persuade the Shiite leadership to do more to accommodate the Sunnis. Indeed, the LA Times notes that the achievement of U.S. goals will now necessitate the Bush administration seeking a more active partnership with the regime in Tehran, which as M.K. Bhadrakumar notes, was once again the big winner in Iraq’s election.
From the point of view of U.S. plans for Iraqi stability, however, worse than the election outcome is the fact that the results have already been summarily rejected by the main Sunni parties, in conjunction with Allawi, who have demanded a new poll and threatened to boycott the Assembly if the results are allowed to stand. Far from stabilizing the situation, the election – in which voters appear to have largely voted on ethnic and sectarian lines, may have set the stage for an intensification of civil conflict.
(LA Times, December 21, 2005)
Posted by: Loose Shanks | Dec 27 2005 3:48 utc | 13
I wish we knew more of the specifics of the electoral fraud because neither the Iraqi government nor the US will say anything other than”serious allegations have been made which even if true wouldn’t effect the outcome.’
yeah right you know that…how?
What the US mean is “we strained all our goodwill with the assholes we’ve given iraq to. If we had to try and get them to have another election anytime in the next 50 years they’ll be sending us off with no bases and no oil. At least this way if we smile nicely and bend over when asked, we may get first option on all existing oil fields in Iraq and maybe just maybe if we’re really nice they’ll let us sell the Iranian oil to china.” Dream on fools your time has been and gone. Perhaps if the US got serious about stopping Israel from attacking Iran and gave back all of the assets illegally confiscated prior to the ‘hostage’ crisis the iranians might give them an ‘audience’
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 27 2005 8:16 utc | 14
Debs,
the US position with regard to the elections has/is exemplified through their support of Chalabi and Alawi (which i guess was also substantial in monetary terms). Both these guys have customized their profile in accomadation to US interests, especially Chalabi, making lots of press in the states — as “our man in Baghdad”. What the elections have made very clear, is that this position has virtually no currency in Iraq, and in all likelyhood, it is because both men were so associated as “agents” of the US that they did so poorly. So now the US is put into the position, to protect their position (of influence), of backing away from — if not repudiating, the election results. What a bummer, that they must now rain on their own parade, but “baby the rain must fall” — and fall if it must, even if it means further negotiations and deals with the players formerly known as insurgents, being as it is and always has been, the majority voice of non–secularism, which is the only real hope for democratic institutions in a multi–ethnic/religious society. And time for a nice Baath.
Posted by: anna missed | Dec 27 2005 9:06 utc | 15
Secret court modified wiretap requests
Intervention may have led Bush to bypass panel
I’d bet the farm, Cheneyco has been snoopin on Fitzy’s office…what say you?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 27 2005 15:11 utc | 16
MSNBC has an impeachment poll up. First I have seen and it looks bad for the chimp.
Posted by: dan of steele | Dec 28 2005 0:11 utc | 17
Although I must admit a certain glee flushes my visage when I find evidence of English perfidy, I link to this story because it has within it the certain outcomes of combining completely wanton and unregulated telephone snooping, kidnapping in foreign countries and torture. This was all powered by a regime desperate to divert attention from the real cause; a greedy failed and unjust Middle East policy. So by blaming Muslim Fundamentalism the morally bankrupt leadership could ‘slip off the hook’. Sound familiar?
In a nutshell the brits who were justifiably upset at the murders of july 7th needed to be manipulated by a quick result to prove Bliar’s point that these murders were completely unconnected to the Brit’s illegal invasion of Iraq.
The cellphone records of the dead bombers were poured over. Then the people who called and were called by them followed by people who called and were called by those people then…you get the picture….
If there is truly only 8 degrees of seperation between all people then it doesn’t take very long at all for most of the planet to end up on the list.
In fact the whole program sounds to me to be yet another variation on the phoenix program first trialled in Vietnam in the 60’s. I’m not talking about the murder and assassination part which by the CIA’s own estimates resulted in the deaths of some 40,000 civilians from 8/68 thru mid 71.
The concept of making somebody ‘a person of interest’ merely because he/she has been associated with one or more other ‘persons of interest’ is a recipe for having 50% of a country’s population spying on the other 50%.
The Australian Federal Police Anti-drugs Unit ran a similar program in the 80’s as I’m sure most ‘soldiers of The War On Drugs’ did at that time. The rationale was that the use of criminal informatants while effective also had a corrupting and corrosive effect on agents. Therefore rather than get to know your enemy by interviewing him/her or speaking to associates, agents would run about the place laboriously collecting data to compose Social network diagrams . The diagram I have included is that of John Cairncross who has been described as the unamed ‘fifth man’ in the Philby Burgess and MacLean spy scandal. There is a diverse range of people included some of whom may well have been left leaning in their university days but you should also note the presence of the likes of Sir Alec Douglas-Home (pronounced hume). He was one of the last of the classic old school high tory English PMs. I say english even though lord Home would have claimed to be a scotsman. He was a scot just like Negroponte was an Iraqi. In other words he was a colonist whose family had stayed for centuries but who never lost their allegiance to London.
Whew I’ve strayed a bit here. I almost got on to the ‘squat’ of Home’s townhouse in the 70’s and how that joint really rocked when the ‘colonials’ had free-for-all real dinner parties utilising the silver, china, and glassware in a fashion to which it had been hitherto unaccustomed.
The point being that these lists of associates are indiscriminate and can cause innocents a great deal of trouble for no reason.
Apparently someone who had been called by one of the July 7 bombers had also had a few phone calls with a Pakistani migrant worker in Greece on or about the date of the murders. Sure that may warrant further investigation. However kidnapping the bloke and 27 of his best friends, then torturing them and holding them incommunicado for seven days hardly seems to be the best way to elicit co-operation.
It should also be noted that the networks were developed from phone calls made prior to 7/7. In other words the security services were able to ‘winnow’ the data after the bombs had exploded. To do that they had to have kept recordings of all phonecalls made in britan before 7/7. Apparently the english didn’t know any of this in advance so we should assume that recording all phone calls is a routine exercise in england.
Now lets apply that back to the USA. There is a good blog on this subject called Balkinization . You will need to scroll down a ways to find a section entitled ‘Data Storage and the Fourth Amendment’.
Some of the gems:
“As storage costs decrease to zero, it makes sense to keep a copy of everything you collect so that you can index and search through it later. If you think that the amount of traffic that goes through a system like Carnivore (or like Echelon) is simply too great to collect, you are using yesterday’s assumptions. Given Moore’s Law with respect to decreasing cost of computing power and its rough equivalent with respect to the decreasing costs of storage space, you should assume that if the government can invest in large server farms to store data (as Google already does) it will do so. Remember that Google already keeps a cached copy of almost everything it searches for on the Internet. And Google mail keeps a copy of all of your e-mail on its servers. Storage of enormous amounts of data is part of its business model. Why do we assume this capacity is beyond the United States government?”….
….”the key issue is not whether the data collection was done by a human being or by a computer program. The key issue is whether the results of the data collection are stored somewhere on a computer (or, more likely, a server farm) to which government agents have access.
Unless there is a policy requiring automatic destruction of the data after a specified time, the data will remain on the computer because as storage costs decrease it is cheaper to keep data than to spend the time figuring out what to get rid of. (Once again, think about Google Mail, which assumes that you will keep all your e-mail messages, no matter how trival, on its servers because it takes too long to sift through and delete the messages you don’t need any more.). When storage costs approach zero, data collection increasingly means permanent data storage unless there is a specific policy to counteract it. (To put some perspective on this, the Defense Department appears to have adopted a 90 day retention policy for a different database of suspicious incidents collected about American citizens, but it also seems not to have followed its own data destruction policy.)”
In a nutshell the reducing costs of data storage means that all telephone calls emails, IRC messages, ICQ, M$ Messenger, blogs, the works in fact, can be stored and held on server farms for easy access. Because’unfortunately’ the cost of seperating the wheat from the chaff and ‘only’ keeping the ‘good’ stuff is higher than keeping everything, everything IS kept!
Forever?….
Why not? It doesn’t suddenly become cheaper as it gets older, most likely the reverse. We can all imagine the banner headlines and beatups if a piece of data which later proved to be significant in protecting people from terrorism was destroyed because of “some arbitrary anti-sticky beak law”.
So there it is. No statute of limitations on some felonies means that anyone entering the political arena or trying to sqeeze into the elites some other way can expect to have every electronic communication they’ve ever had to be ‘mined’ for any ‘fact’ which could put them in the sheeple’s bad books.
And of course those ordinary souls going about their business who through no fault of their own get in the way of the elites can expect to never see the light of day again. I mean who can really withstand that level of scrutiny?
Like their bossfella said “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
That is where the alleged ‘protection from terra’ is taking the USA.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 28 2005 0:27 utc | 18
@ DID
Fascinating and informative post. By the way, I love
social network diagrams, although the one’s I can access
at namebase.org always seem old and incomplete (because,
if I understand correctly, they are based on references
to the interested parties in published books). We the
unwashed can (potentially) use them against our watchers too. Indeed, I suspect that nothing is more likely to produce legislation protecting individual privacy than
“wildcat” hackers finding out more about our betters than we are supposed to know. (Needless to say, the putative legislation is highly be “assymmetric” in favor of the powerful, so we may well be better off with the present anarchy.)
Thanks also for the link to Balkinization, which seems
excellent. (Cf. also my post on another thread.)
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 28 2005 6:57 utc | 19
Now I really must have lost my mind. When was the last time I blew up a wedding?
In Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the holidays, his spokesman, Trent Duffy, defended what he called a “limited program.”
“This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner,” he told reporters. “These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches.”
In this interview
Noam Chomsky once again reveals that he’s really a moderate bible-quoting fundie. Would that there were more like him!
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 28 2005 8:10 utc | 21
Hanna,
great interview with chomsky:
…………..
it’s not so much a matter of gaining access to Iraq’s resources, you can get access even if you don’t control a country. I mean the oil market is something of a market. What matters is control, not access. It’s a very big difference. The main theme of US policy since the Second World War has been to control the resources of the Middle East, the energy resources. That would give what George Cannon, one of the early planners, called ‘veto power’ over their allies, they wouldn’t get out of line because we’d have our hand on the spicket. Now at that time, for about 30 years, North America was the major oil exporter. The US wasn’t using any Middle East oil, but it nevertheless was dedicated and it was the main theme of US policy to maintain control over it. If you look at US intelligence projections for the future, they project that the US must control Middle East oil, but that it itself will rely on more stable Atlantic Basin resources, Western Africa, Western Hemisphere resources. Europe and Japan will rely on the less stable Middle East resources, but the US will control them. That’s the way you prevent independence from developing. That’s why the Asian Energy Security Grid and the Shanghai Cooperation Council are regarded as such a threat by the US. The meetings right now, the Malaysian meetings, East Asian meetings, that’s a threat, it’s a coalescence of power moving independently of the US. You look back through the history of the Cold War, and it was the same with regard to Europe, a major concern throughout the Cold War was what was called European Third Force, which might find a way independent of the US in Europe, and there was every effort made to prevent that. A long story, and that makes sense if you want to run the world, you want to make sure there are not independent forces out of your control.
Posted by: anna missed | Dec 28 2005 11:28 utc | 23
Thanks for that Chomsky bit.
—
CIA Probes Renditions of Terror Suspects
The
CIA’s independent watchdog is investigating fewer than 10 cases where terror suspects may have been mistakenly swept away to foreign countries by the spy agency, a figure lower than published reports but enough to raise some concerns….
How exactly do I know that I will not be next one to “mistakenly renditioned”? How do you know?
@b
The blow up a wedding bit is probably W’s guilty conscience because although weddings have been blown up by terrarists; eg Jordan. That bombing if you’ll forgive the pun didn’t seem quite kosher. Being as there were some odd stories about some people having been warned and other stories about senior leaders of the Iraqi insurgency being part of the collateral damage by the terrarists. But even attributing those particular exploding nuptials to the forces of darkness can’t absolve the US from the numbers of Iraqi weddings that have disappeared in an aerosol of blood and meat following an overflight by US airforce bombers.
The US always claim that this was because the ‘meetings’ they blew up, were hit because of the presence of insurgency leaders, which is kind of disingenuous.
Weddings are an integral part of tribal arabic culture and are likely to be amongst the largest celebrations a clan has during the year. There are extremely complex interactions related not only to the status of tribal elders but also to their benevolence. All normal stuff, but if the US knew there was a ‘meeting’ going to take place at X spot on Y day they also certainly knew the ‘meeting’ was in fact a wedding. In many cultures such occasions are times when personal rivalries, disputes feuds etc are put to one side. The group is celebrating it’s immortality by saluting the development of a successful partnership and the imminent arrival of a new generation.
Ceremonies such as this are the time to cast bitterness aside and look to the future. In general the Iraqi resistance has been pretty stoic about attacks on it’s leadership or battles where it hasn’t had the best of the conflict.
Not the case when weddings were blown up though. They were shocked and appalled. “No one does that surely not”. Our rivals are in effect saying that they want to kill us all they will not be happy unless our clan and our culture cease to exist. Not even Saddam did that. Look at his trial He didn’t kill every male and kidnap every family in Dujail. It is hard to get the gist from the patchwork of testimony that has been allowed past the censors but it seems that the families from Dujail that were persecuted and murdered had a connection of some sort to the assassination attempt. The attack was mounted from their orchard or the body of one of their direct family members was amongst those of the dead rebels. I’m not trying to excuse Hussein here because his crimes are inexcusable but one thing he cannot be accused of is the sort of genocidal attack upon a whole tribe or clan that the US forces have undertaken with the bombings of these weddings.
Some may say that the US operates to it’s own standards and shouldn’t be made to follow the intricacies of another culture when fighting it . That is a bullshit argument because the US culture is not so vastly different. Back in the day when ‘organised crime’ was perceived to be the major threat to the amerikan way of life, the feds would turn up at large Italian-American weddings and photograph everyone but I’m unaware of instances where they marched in and RICO’d all the guests. To have done so would have provoked community outrage just as it did in Iraq.
Not only was bombing of weddings a cruel and genocidal act, as I said above it conveyed to Sunni Iraqis that the US wanted them all dead which is not a good way to elicit co-operation or negotiation. Further the effect has been for the Sunni tribes to forgo these large gatherings until the invaders have been driven out. In other words it provides a powerful unifying incentive for the resistance.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 28 2005 19:40 utc | 25
@DiD – you are right about the weddings in question, but I was wondering why they scan my calls and emails to the U.S. I really don´t remember blowing up a wedding, commuter train or a church.
Robert Fisk yesterday had a nice OpEd in the LA Times about the U.S. media problem:
Telling it like it isn’t
This is only the tip of the semantic iceberg that has crashed into American journalism in the Middle East. Illegal Jewish settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land are clearly “colonies,” and we used to call them that. I cannot trace the moment when we started using the word “settlements.” But I can remember the moment around two years ago when the word “settlements” was replaced by “Jewish neighborhoods” — or even, in some cases, “outposts.”
Similarly, “occupied” Palestinian land was softened in many American media reports into “disputed” Palestinian land — just after then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, in 2001, instructed U.S. embassies in the Middle East to refer to the West Bank as “disputed” rather than “occupied” territory.
…
The semantic effect of this journalistic obfuscation is clear. If Palestinian land is not occupied but merely part of a legal dispute that might be resolved in law courts or discussions over tea, then a Palestinian child who throws a stone at an Israeli soldier in this territory is clearly acting insanely.
If a Jewish colony built illegally on Arab land is simply a nice friendly “neighborhood,” then any Palestinian who attacks it must be carrying out a mindless terrorist act.
…
American journalists frequently used the words of U.S. officials in the early days of the Iraqi insurgency — referring to those who attacked American troops as “rebels” or “terrorists” or “remnants” of the former regime. The language of the second U.S. pro-consul in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer III, was taken up obediently — and grotesquely — by American journalists.
American television, meanwhile, continues to present war as a bloodless sandpit in which the horrors of conflict — the mutilated bodies of the victims of aerial bombing, torn apart in the desert by wild dogs — are kept off the screen. Editors in New York and London make sure that viewers’ “sensitivities” don’t suffer, that we don’t indulge in the “pornography” of death (which is exactly what war is) or “dishonor” the dead whom we have just killed.
Our prudish video coverage makes war easier to support, and journalists long ago became complicit with governments in making conflict and death more acceptable to viewers. Television journalism has thus become a lethal adjunct to war.
Back in the old days, we used to believe — did we not? — that journalists should “tell it how it is.” Read the great journalism of World War II and you’ll see what I mean. The Ed Murrows and Richard Dimblebys, the Howard K. Smiths and Alan Moorheads didn’t mince their words or change their descriptions or run mealy-mouthed from the truth because listeners or readers didn’t want to know or preferred a different version.
So let’s call a colony a colony, let’s call occupation what it is, let’s call a wall a wall. And maybe express the reality of war by showing that it represents not, primarily, victory or defeat, but the total failure of the human spirit.
@b I kinda guessed that and when I went off at a tangent I wasn’t trying to make light of anyone who communicates into and out of the US and suffers fascist intrusion. In fact the only real difference is that presumably those communications were protected up until BushCo took over whereas all others (ie communications that orginated and terminated outside the US) were not.
The local NZ branch office of Echelon isn’t too far from here (less than 200 kilometres) and has been for a couple of generations. I can remember back in the late 60’s early 70’s we would turn up there once a year for a ritual rumble. The thing was tho we never got to lay a finger on the USuk assholes who were actually committing these acts of aggression but ended up in a blue with the NZ police who were sent by the government of the day to defend them. After a group of anarchists (a mob that I have been known to have a bit of time for) shot a policeman, but thankfully didn’t kill him I sort of lost interest in going to the annual punch up. There are much better ways to skin that cat!
Anyway back to the topic; it is fucking aggravating that these petty little suits who claim moral superiority over the rest of the world shove their sticky little snouts into our private communications, not least of all because since they are generally relying on incomplete data, they tend to get the story wrong. However I have always felt that letting it get to me is an indication that they are succeeding in their harrassment. I’m sure you feel the same b so all we can really do is more of what we are doing now eg publicising it, (tip of the hat to Bernhard for providing this excellent forum which provides one way of getting the truth out) and developing ways to resist and overcome it.
Yes it would be nice if the whole world used secure encryption on all their communications because even if ‘they’ do have the computing power to ‘crack’ it I would be surprised to discover that even the US govt has the resources to brute force large quantities of secure encryption.
That is why when I have nothing better to do I send off long swathes from biblical tracts pgp’d in Dos to the gunnels and sent through an anonymiser to a wide variety of unsuspecting recipients.
Yeah pretty childish but nevertheless an essential (for me) occasional act of resistance.
But I’m lucky because at the moment the level of intrusion is much less obvious than it has been. People who visit me don’t get pulled over after leaving my house and have to undergo searches as well as harrassment. Someone saying something silly over our phone doesn’t result in an anonymous late model vehicle turning up in the street within minutes etc. We actually used to have a bit of fun with all this but really by doing so we were just buying into the drama and encouraging them, so nowadays I don’t go out of my way to poke any ‘watchers’ (that is if there are any) with a stick.
It is offensive, intrusive and a complete breach of any community’s etiquette but since actions that have that amount of negativity, immorality, bad karma, or whatever you want to call it about them usually come undone of their own accord, I console myself with the knowledge that their efforts are unlikely to be rewarded, and in fact the whole operation is likely to come a cropper.
It’s difficult to acknowledge this to oneself when the opposing forces can appear omnipotent but every repressive regime throughout history has lost it’s grip normally sooner rather than later. Plus developments in communications over the last few centuries have caused the length of the reign of force to get shorter and shorter and shorter.
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 28 2005 21:16 utc | 29
Here’s a chuckle it appears to be some BushCo publicist or whitehouse spinner’s quick draft up of the sort of books that Dubya should read over the holidays.
” While he still has a full three years of his term left, his spokesman has revealed his holiday reading list contains a biography of Theodore Roosevelt’s life after leaving office.
Mr Bush is also reading about the lives of the ordinary US soldiers he has dispatched to various parts of the globe – a legacy likely to be a key factor when his presidency is judged.”
but the kicker that tells us that Dubya was off on planet Martini (easy on the vermouth) or somewhere akin when a flunky drew up this press release is this:
“”The President is a history buff,” a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said at Mr Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas, where he is spending the holidays. “So he picked it up and he’s reading it. He is an avid reader.” Mr Duffy added: “The President knows full well that he’s got a lot of time left in this second term, and he’s going to accomplish big things, as he has talked about repeatedly.”
That’s a kicker because if anything Woodward says can still be believed THIS was Dubya’s view on history not so long ago:
“I just asked, ‘Well, how is history likely to judge your Iraq war,’” says Woodward.
“And he said, ‘History,’ and then he took his hands out of his pocket and kind of shrugged and extended his hands as if this is a way off. And then he said, ‘History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.’””
What we need is someone to run a book giving odds on whether a reporter asks him for his opinion on Teddy Roosevelt in retirement or a really brave reporter asking W what he thought of Robert Kaplan’s crticism of Bush’s ‘War on Terra’.
W will do his well known impression of a fish outta water ie wide eyed, flip-flopping, and making glub glub glub sounds cause I doubt he can read the directions on the bottom of a norwegian beer bottle (open other end).
Posted by: Debs is dead | Dec 29 2005 4:05 utc | 30
Wayne Madsen keeps the FISA spigot dripping. The Bushites will have no trouble defending
the (alleged) actions; more doubtful souls will wonder when the dam is going to break.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 29 2005 9:12 utc | 31
From HKOL’s link:
…WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies — including the CIA and DIA — and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program, code named “Firstfruits,” was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss.
….
Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times’ James Risen, the Washington Post’s Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times’ Bill Gertz, UPI’s John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen]….
Now things begin to make more sense. The intelligence community, the CIA in particular, has been an adversary in the Cheney administration’s drive to consolidate power and maintain secrecy. The CIA resisted producing and endorsing Cheney’s manufactured intelligence about Iraq and the intelligence community has been the source of some public leaks damaging to the administration. Goss was sent to the CIA to contain their resistance as much as possible. The CIA was also banished from being represented at White House meetings (representation now handled by loyalist Michael Chertoff). The journalist names are people who have published information Cheney @ Co saw as harmful or critical. The spying is an attempt to find and punish leakers so that internal sources of damaging information dry up. The journalists are believed to be likely receivers of leaked information.
The primary purpose of the spying program is probably to find leakers and close them down, punishing them severely enough that no one else will be tempted to leak. In addition, those receiving and publishing leaked information might also be targets of administration leaks designed to destroy their reputations based on data uncovered during the spying operations. I’d like to see some Congressional investigation into whose communications were selected for review; it wouldn’t surprise me if there were more journalists and spooks on the list than potential terrorists.
Posted by: lonesomeG | Dec 29 2005 13:38 utc | 32
“Goss was sent to the CIA to contain their resistance as much as possible.”
Goss was/is too small for the job. It finally took the DCI to read the riot act to all and sudry…two weeks ago.
A day late and a dollar short perhaps, but everyone got their big, steaming cup of STFU. OR ELSE.
Posted by: Pat | Dec 30 2005 1:31 utc | 33
So where the hell are the regulars?
this place has been near dead since xmass. Whats up?
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Dec 30 2005 3:43 utc | 35
lonesomeG- The primary purpose of the spying program is probably to find leakers and close them down, punishing them severely enough that no one else will be tempted to leak.
that’s what gwb gave away when he flubbed his lines a couple weeks back:
I authorized the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known leaks…links to AQ blah blah blah…
as chomsky keeps pointing out
you’ve got to keep the population ignorant because if they know what’s going on, they are not going to tolerate it. I’ve done a lot of work on internal secret declassified documents, the US happens to be a very free society in this respect then most of the world so, have a lot of records. Take a look at declassified documents, secret documents. Why is it kept secret? [It’s] almost never for security reasons, not from the enemy, they mostly know it anyway. It’s mostly a weapon against the domestic population. You don’t want the domestic population to know what you are doing in their name. It’s the main reason for secrecy and obviously the main reason for propaganda. These are attacks on the domestic population. I mean, the elites quite rightly are terrified of democracy. It’s lethal [for them], how could [they] tolerate it? So they do as many things as they can to undermine it. And one of the things you do is lie, deceive, have secrecy and so on.
and if WH spokesperson trent duffy really said of gwb, “He is an avid reader.”, that’s more than a chuckle, debs, that’s enough to make a person’s cage start hurtin’.
Posted by: b real | Dec 30 2005 5:08 utc | 36
“Take a look at declassified documents, secret documents. Why is it kept secret? [It’s] almost never for security reasons, not from the enemy, they mostly know it anyway.”
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, please.
Posted by: Pat | Dec 30 2005 6:44 utc | 37
maybe you’re parsing the terms “enemy” or “mostly” differently than noam, pat. those who are at the receiving end of most u.s. foreign policy seem to have a pretty clear idea of what’s going on & why. they might not break all of the military communications, but the larger policies/details are known. this is the information age, after all.
there no doubt are activist or advocacy groups w/i this country that are missing the signals, but that’s the payoff for the millions of dollars put into propaganda.
on secrecy, john stockwell wrote of his experience:
…many of the thousands of major CIA covert operations were effectively if not literally secret at the time. Even if a few people managed to figure them out, there was little national exposure. The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation’s leaders are doing. Secrecy is power. Secrecy is license. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption. A classic non-CIA example was the “secret” bombing of Cambodia in 1970 that eventually became a major political scandal for the Nixon administration. I submit to you that the Cambodian people know that they were being bombed; it was no secret to them. Unfortunately, there was nothing on the face of the earth that the Cambodian people could do to stop the bombing. However, the people of the United States could stop the bombing, or at least raise an effective protest of it. Hence it was vital to President Nixon that the bombing remain secret here at home.
now that the air war has stepped up again in iraq, surely a parallel to stockwell’s example can be made. but it’s not exactly a secret either, as that we know about it already here at home. the problem is that secrecy is only possible when people want to remain willfully ignorant, and those usually at the receiving end don’t have that luxury.
according to volume 15, number 42 of the CQ Researcher, there were 15.6 million secret federal docs created in 2004 (81% more than in 2000), which has been criticised as “massively unnecessary secrecy” by the national security archive. many of these were documents which had previously been unclassified & in the public sphere.
Without disputing the need to protect some diplomatic and military secrets, critics say overclassification inevitably results from “the iron law of bureaucracy,” as [Thomas] Blanton of the National Security Archive calls it. “Secrecy is the fundamental tool of a bureaucrat to protect turf, to protect power,” he explains.
. . .
Despite bureaucrats’ inherent tendencies toward overclassificiation, many experts say the Bush administration has raised secrecy to new levels. The policy reflects the adminstration’s broad view of executive power along with a push to limit criticism or interference, these experts say critically. “It’s an attempt to return to the imperial presidency,” says Blanton.
Posted by: b real | Dec 30 2005 8:06 utc | 38
Editorial Note:
My PC went up in smoke yesterday. I am now typing on an old Apple which I otherwise only to test layouts. So all my tools, bookmarks, logins etc. are on an unaccessable disk until I replace the burned out motherboard.
In other words, I´ll be busy for some hours to get my net-environment going again. Please bare with me for not posting.
Thanks
Good luck with that, b.
Take your time, rebuild the data. We can wait for you to get back online so don’t rush!
Posted by: jonku | Dec 30 2005 9:18 utc | 40
The Yorkshire Ranter has an excellent post on US complicity in torture in Uzbekistan, by a credible and well-informed source. Required reading.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 30 2005 9:33 utc | 41
Oops, bad link.
It should be to the Yorkshire Ranter.
Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Dec 30 2005 9:37 utc | 42