NYT on the Generals' Revolt

Coming as it does after years of promoting Judith Miller and other liars on their front page - which some have seen as either craven kowtowing to the power elites or else burying their heads in the sand - the editors of the New York Times seem to have thrown caution to the wind and published a scathing article critical of this sitting president's conduct of the Iraq occupation, and specifically how his administration - and Donald Rumsfeld in particular - using the very generals various news programs call upon to give unbiased, professional military commentary - attempted to mold public perceptions about the situation on the ground in Iraq with what can only be characterized as no less than an illegal PsyOps against the American people. In other words, brainwashing by the Pentagon.

Given the track record of the entire mainstream media and its (choose one) naive, cynical or manipulative reporting (or lack) of the Long War, I am moved to ask the following:

Q: Are the Bilderbergs actually beginning to think that this engineered recession might not be such a good idea after all, and looked the other way as the NYT published this article? or,

Q: Is the NYT becoming a real newspaper again, and published this article despite the Bilderbergs?

Q: Are the Cowboys beginning to lose ground to the Yankees in the war for the Republic? (1) (2) (3)

Q: Is there light at the end of the tunnel?

Q: Will the Chicago Cubs take the pennant this year, or will they wimp out and blame it on the start of WWIII?


Inquiring minds want to know.


Thanks and a tip 'o the hat to Chris Locke

Update: PDF of a transcript of one of Rumsfeld's meeting with his pet media generals is here.

Update: Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Colin Powell, in an interview with the Guardian newspaper yesterday talked about the travel plans of the Bush administration lawyers who wrote the Guantanamo torture memos,

"Haynes, Feith, Yoo, Bybee, Gonzalez and - at the apex - Addington, should never travel outside the US, except perhaps to Saudi Arabia and Israel. They broke the law; they violated their professional ethical code. In future, some government may build the case necessary to prosecute them in a foreign court, or in an international court."

current-events

One monkey don't stop no show

"Thanks for taking the bullet for me, Gonzo"

The cabal that runs the White House must have thanked whatever dark lords presently preside over this country when former Attorney General John Ashcroft quit.

Ashcroft is no pushover. In fact, he is a deeply religious and somewhat morally rigid man, who would no longer put up with the neocons' immoral shenanigans and interference with his Justice Department. He announced that he was out of there.

The neocons were at a loss; they desperately needed a frontman to help push their consolidation of presidential power and John Yoo was occupied elsewhere spinning webs of lies and deceit. But - low and behold! - right there in their midst was a weak-willed, shifty, and easily manipulable sycophant that they could plop into the Attorney General's chair. He would do what he was told, and then conveniently forget about it: Gonzo the Forgetful.

It wasn't just that this guy possessed no critical faculties - which he doesn't - but his brain had grown so mushy in the dank and fetid air of the underground West Wing office that he occupied as counsel to the President that, like Golum, he could no longer tell right from wrong, or yesterday from the month before.

Yesterday's performance before the Senate Judiciary Oversight committee was beautiful - a tour de force of the high political drama of lies, evasions, prevarications, and just downright stupidity that is the modus operandi of the neocon architects of the New American Century.

It's not that the neocons don't think that their stupid ideas are stupid and won't hold up under close scrutiny, it's that they can't be bothered having to explain their vision of a Pax Americana to the likes of you or me, or for that matter, to the Congress. So they just go and do what they do: kidnap and torture suspected enemies of the state, lie about their reasons for invading foreign countries, fire federal prosecutors when they get too close to the money, and - when finally questioned by previously supine Congress-critters - shove a fall guy out in front. When their stupidity is exposed they simply (like Rumsfeld) move down the hall, or (like Paul Wolfowitz) bail and take up posts at the World Bank, where they try to pull the same shit all over again. Except the World Bank is not staffed by myopic political dirtbags; it's run by hard-nosed moneymen who don't tolerate fucking with their institutional reputations.

So the Gonzo sideshow is over, but the circus hasn't left town yet. There's lots more demonstrations of levitation and porous memory to come, and possibly another Shock and Awe waiting in the wings. And don't be too surprised if a major city is vaporized by a stolen nuclear bomb (they still haven't found any of the missing 20-100 nuclear devices from the former Soviet Union stockpile). Finding those missing nukes (or bin Laden, for that matter) would be doing their job, a distraction from spreading their fungus over Washington.

As for us patsies, don't expect Congress to do it's job and impeach these criminal assholes; that would be too real, and there's a 1% chance they might not get reelected as a result, which for them is the center ring and the only thing that really counts.

Have a great weekend.

The dog ate my email

Hard drive failure, maybe?

This is rich: Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on the Senate floor yesterday, in response to the assertion that this incompetent Bush administration can't find the Gonzo's emails.

"They say they have not been preserved. I don't believe that!" Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy shouted from the Senate floor.

"You can't erase e-mails, not today. They've gone through too many servers," said Leahy, D-Vt. "Those e-mails are there, they just don't want to produce them. We'll subpoena them if necessary."

Well, good luck on that, Senator. Just bear in mind that these are the same people who have bugged every telephone in the country (and most of the rest of the world, to boot), but can't find a 6'5" dialysis-machine-toting terrorist, wanted in every state and most of the territories, with both hands and a road map.

Update: Scratch that last. Make it a dozen intelligence agencies, a seeing-eye dog, and a road map.

On Gonzo's loose management style

Alberto "Gonzo" Gonzales, erstwhile Attorney General of the whole United States - as opposed to his previous job as personal attorney to George W Bush - has once again muddied the waters by claiming that while he did his job properly in signing off on the recent firing of a group of federal attorneys, he didn't know who or why he was firing them. All he did was "review" the list of targeted federal prosecutors and approve those firings.

“I didn’t focus on specific concerns about individuals,” he said. “My primary focus was insuring that the White House was kept advised of what we were doing and that Kyle [a lower-level flunky] was consulting with the appropriate D.O.J. senior officials who knew about the performance of the U.S. attorneys.”

[By implication, Gonzo has no idea about the performance of his employees. How's that for a management style?]

He said, “at the end of the process, Kyle brought recommendations to me. I considered them his recommendations as well as recommendations of senior officials he consulted with.”

He said that he signed off on the recommendations and the implementation plan, and “that was the extent of my involvement.”

If what he is saying is correct, the "extent of [his]involvement" is the career termination of highly prominent federal officials. The impression that Gonzo is leaving (at least in my mind) is that he didn't ask who these people were or why they specifically were being recommended for termination. Additionally, their actual firing seems to have happened more or less magically. I mean, who does the actual firing? Gonzo again leaves the impression that he has washed his hands of the termination of these rather important federal prosecutors.

And based on what? He "didn’t focus on specific concerns about individuals." What criteria did he use? Did he have concerns? Criteria? What? Or did he just say, "Hey, our budget is tight so let's lose some prosecutors, and I don't care about the who they are?"

If the latter is the case, then Gonzo is derelict in his job on yet another

Rummy still hanging around

Yikes! I thought we had gotten rid of this guy. Well, the SecDef that didn't know when to quit is alive and well and still working in the Pentagon - as a paid consultant, no less.

Jim Hightower has the skinny.

Iraq - A History Lesson

Map by GlobalSecurity.org

The following is an excerpt from "Winston Churchill Strikes Again: The Map of Iraq," Encyclopedia Idiotica: history’s worst decisions and the people who made them, Stephen Weir (Barron’s Educational Series, 2005)

One result of World War I was that the Ottoman’s foolish last-minute alliance with the Kaiser and the Austrians led to the almost complete dismemberment of their empire. Turkey itself, empowered to some extent by the victory in the Dardanelles became a secular state bridging Europe and Asia. The rest of the empire was left without rule, but not entirely in chaos. The Byzantine nature of the empire meant that provinces were to some extent self-governing and could soldier along on their own…The new nationalisms that had exploded in the Balkans and had begun the whole decline of the Ottoman Empire swiftly spread into the newly-liberated Ottoman provinces, and bitter riots against any attempt at British rule began. The home audience had no stomach for this:

"How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population and elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?" asked The Times.

…Perhaps the only one who really did care was Sir Mark Sykes appointed by General Kitchener in 1915 as his personal representative to a prime ministerial committee to determine the future of the Middle East. He worked tirelessly to establish proper British control in the region…but in 1919 Sykes unexpectedly died [and was replaced] by Winston Churchill.

Churchill had no time for any of this policy. He wanted the army demobilized: he wanted the Arabs rebellions put down, and the map redrawn…A British protectorate was finally set up in 1917, but the hold on Iraq was tenuous…There was strong opposition to British rule… The Ottomans had divided the region into three provinces, more or less ethnically centered around Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra in an attempt to keep the warring Sunni and Shiite populations apart…

By 1920 all of this had boiled over into full-scale revolt across the region. Horrifically, Churchill was not the least bit interested in working out what to do with whom. His view was …"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am utterly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes." … [P]oison gas was used regularly across the region to put down the revolt…Airpower, the dropping of bombs containing gas, was used extensively for almost the first time in history to save ground forces and expense; indeed, the whole revolt was put down with the loss of 2,000 British soldiers.

The problem remained of what to do with Iraq once the revolt had been put down. Essentially, the decision was made to hand over all of Arabia to whatever local strongmen could be relied on to support British rule in return for being allowed unlimited control over local populations. It didn’t really matter which populations, whether they wanted to be under that leader, or who their new countrymen might be. The careful planning of Sykes was all for naught. Churchill held a 10-day conference at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo on March 12, 1921, to work out the new frontiers…[Ibn Saud was given] the heart of Arabia…the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra were no longer separate but were thrown together into the new state of Iraq…Local observers were horrified. An American missionary noted, "You are flying in the face of four millennia of history." The British civil commissioner in Baghdad, Captain Arnold Wilson, warned that it was a recipe for disaster because the enduring Shia-Sunni conflict would result in the "antithesis of democratic government."…The Kurds were lured into the new kingdom, rather than becoming a part of Turkey, by promises of self-rule, not the first or last time such a promise from the West was instantly broken.

The conference blithely gave a large portion of what should have been Saudi Arabia – west of the Euphrates – to Iraq. In return, Ibn Saud was given control of most of the historic Kuwaiti kingdom, all but cutting off Iraq from…access to the Persian Gulf.

The consequences are all too apparent today. Rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iraq remains. Three times Iraq has laid claim to Kuwait and been thrown back, most recently precipitating the First Gulf War. The total lack of interest in laying down sensible borders for the country resulted in what was at the time predicted – never-ending rivalry between the Shiites and the Sunni. This was complicated by the uncomfortable and unwanted presence of the Kurds, and the imposition of someone who was considered an outsider as king; and the lack of interest on behalf of the British in imposing anything other than a sphere of influence or proper governmental systems to replace the Ottomans. This resulted in the internal catastrophe and the endless successions of coups that led to the coming to power of Saddam Hussein.

More fence-sitting by the nobles

I don't know about you, but the neighborhood that I live in is full of blue-collar folks, with a sprinkling of white collar types, a few entrepreneurs, and even a guy who makes his living selling stocks and bonds. Average folk, in other words. We talk about all kinds of things; the latest zinger from Lakers' coach Phil Jackson, the recent 70 mph winds of the Santa Anas from off the high desert, the recent elections, and the war in Iraq.

Once upon a time, the boys from the El Segundo electronic warfare shops would be in complete agreement with the guys from body shops that we needed to pound those A-rabs with everything we had and show them towelheads a thing or two. No messin' with America, nosiree. Us more “educated” types would argue that we had no business being there in the first place, to no avail against the hotter heads. Thus we were pretty well split into two camps: for and against the war in Iraq. Well, after four years and 3,000 war dead, not to mention the guy in the corner, back from Iraq - with a funny way of sitting over his boilermaker, staring off into space at nothing at all for hours on end - the mood has changed, down at the corner bar.

We have hashed it out, consulted with one another, singly and in groups, and after literally hundreds of hours, lots of spilled beer, and even a few harsh words (and thrown punches), arrived at own consensus on Iraq: “Let's just get the hell out of there, right now.”

So what's up with this “bipartisan” Iraq Study Group, said to be composed of “this noble group of 10”? Are they going to offer us a solution, a light at the end of the tunnel, or is it going to be “stay the course”? Here's what group member Alan K Simpson (R-WY) had to say:

“People are looking at us for a solution. Not that we're not doing a good job – but if they think that this noble group of 10 are going to solve this issue, I think people are doing a lot of heavy breathing...I think expectations of this group are seriously overrated.”

“Heavy breathing”? Hoo hoo! Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, then what the fuck were you guys put together for?

What a waste of time. No “solution,” no “stay,” and no “go.” Just let our troops sit there and get shot at.

There used to be a word for “noble” idiots like these: mugwumps.