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Links May 3 09
- Bernard Chazelle – The Big Lie About Torture – (ATR)
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Insightful – torture and domestic politics – (anna missed)
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al-Sadr in Ankara and Istanbul – Reclusive Iraqi Cleric Visits Turkey – (WSL)
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As we expected – No Signs of Sustained Global Spread of Swine Flu – (NYT)
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Embarrassing – ARMS TRANSFERS DATA, 2008 – (Sipri (pdf))
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They shall have no food – Israel warplanes strike Gaza border tunnels – (LAT)
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The war lobby – AIPAC set to push Iran legislation at major conference – (JPost)
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Important distinctions: Jerome – The cost of wind, the price of wind, the value of wind – (D-Kos)
Please share your links, news and views in the comments.
@ annamissed, #5:
I’ve thought about precisely this possibility you write of, but i have also noticed a phenomenon that seems to counter it.
The most extreme of the U.S. right — and most extremely cloaked — manage certain bits of information and public opinion quite adroitly, far in advance of the knowledge becoming mainstream. To give some examples:
* The recent “FEMA Concentration Camps” were actually a rumor going back to the Reagan administration, back when Ollie North was in charge of FEMA. The story went something like: the U.S. far right wing was laying the groundwork for a coup back during the time when the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld junta was running amok across Central America. There has never been a lot of concrete evidence to back it up, but IIRC there were purported lists of the first 3,000 people who would be targeted that were in Samizdat circulation. Now, however, Glenn Beck has succeeded in shifting that backstory onto the Obama administration, while at the same time negating any possible means of the mainstream media ever taking that story seriously.
* During the Clinton administration, Lord Conrad Black and his lackey, Ambrose-Evans Pritchards, managed to concoct a long and widely circulated right-wing backstory about Clinton working with the Tyson chicken king and the CIA to import cocaine into the U.S in chicken carcasses. This was just before and a long time after the Mercury News expose on the CIA-Contra cocaine connection. It succeeded in convincing a large swathe of the country of one of two things:
A) Any idea that the CIA is involved in the illicit drug trade is completely the invention of a bunch of radical nutjobs, or
B) If the CIA is involved, it’s not the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld junta responsible, but rather the Clinton clique.
Of course, the only involvement with cocaine that the Clinton clique ever had were as buyers, while there’s an enormous sub-mainstream literature of corroborating evidence showing how right-wing mercenaries like Oliver North, Colin Powell, other members of the CIA (Lansdale and Chennault, for instance) and their people were directly involved in profits from the illicit drug trade.
Now, of course, we see the right wing starting up a bunch of hubbub about how Obama’s going to be the president who brings us Communism under a velvet fist, how he’s going to help out the terrorists and put us all at risk.
From my perspective, i see your article at #5 as being a very real possibility, but with one fatal flaw: Obama and his clique, like Jimmy Carter, don’t yet understand that they need to prepare for some very real violence, and the very real possibility of some (more?) false-flag operations aimed at destablizing and defaming their efforts. The groundwork is already being laid, and I’m sure Obama’s aware of it.
Obama may be a good man, with the right intentions, but unless he’s got some serious loyalty with some serious, combat-ready generals who are ready to defend him, going back as deep into the military establishment as you can go while still keeping loyalty to our vision of the constitution, then i worry that, like Jimmy Carter, he’s going to be backed into a corner by the MSM and rendered unable to achieve his intended reforms, ultimately hounded out of office by Reagan II (i.e. — an amiable actor giving surface legitimacy to a shadow governnment) at the end of his first four years (the Iran hostage affair only began about six or eight months before the end of Carter’s first term, right? So there’s still plenty of time, and aren’t we still in a “war on terrorism”?).
Or let’s flip it around and say he really does have that loyalty — then in that case, i’d say the U.S. is pretty much headed for civil war. The right wing elite are that strong, as Cheney-Bush proved, they are unquestionably that evil, and as the t.v. shows every day, an awful lot of those gun-toting “Christian” rednecks are quite that stupid.
Anyhow, that’s all presuming Obama’s really intending to make some changes. So far, he has made only baby-steps in that direction. It may only be 100 days, but until i start seeing some backbone on Israel, Central Asian pullouts, habeas corpus, human rights/torture, government transparency, the economy and health-care, i’ll stay unconvinced. So far, Obama is merely the Bush regime with a better, more realistic brain behind it.
So whatever way you look at it, the outlook is grim: Obama succeeds in moderate reform, but at the cost of his presidency and the ascension of yet another Junta stage manager. Obama fails in his reform, and the status quo simply grinds along. Obama has no intent of reform, and increases the injustices. Or Obama intends reform, succeeds, but ushers in an era of open conflict in the streets.
Now, let me say that i don’t think there’s going to be conflict in the streets. So far, my expectations run more along the lines of: more prisons, more police, more military, more wars, more economic stratification. By following that course, the MSM and the elite can all pretend together that things really aren’t all that bad.
But really, the U.S. is in such a state that right now it’s damned if you do, don’t, do, don’t, do — whichever way you look at it, sane people in the U.S. are up against a stupefyingly powerful right wing threat, and a terrifyingly vicious military-industrial alliance. Barring some sort of grass-roots movement that’s dedicated enough to line themselves up like the Wobblies or the 30’s era socialists (in the iPod age? Get real.), i don’t see a lot of hope for its future.
Posted by: china_hand2 | May 4 2009 4:06 utc | 23
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