Journalist Gary Webb speaks
Tell YourObama to purge the CIA

  It’s almost four years since journalist Gary Webb was suicided.

Here he speaks.

Webb in the mid 90s had re-broken in a big way the big story of the CIA’s involvement in the international drug trade — updating old tales from Vietnam by documenting CIA-NSC responsibility for the Crack explosion in American cities during the Reagan years.

Webb’s serial newspaper reportage in 1996 bore the name Dark Alliance, and was republished in a book of the same name.

Those were the Clinton years; the stories not only got published, but drew widespread attention from the major media.

But Webb himself was soon and suddenly fired by his San Jose newspaper — which also destroyed its web archive of the Dark Alliance story.  Soon it was clear that the author had been blacklisted out of the business.

A month after Bush-Cheney were re-installed in 2004, Webb was shot twice in the head and died.  Suicide, the coroner reported.  Neither Little Jimmy Grimaldi nor Webb’s friends believe that.

Read his book.

And think about Daniel Moynihan in 1991 …

“The time has come to ask, with the Cold War over, can we purge the vestiges of this struggle from our laws, our bureaucracy, and most importantly from our way of thinking,” Moynihan said. “Can we muster the will to redefine ourselves?”

And then tell YourObama to purge and reform the National Security Apparat.

Little Jimmy Grimaldi:
What the heck now?
Obama’s proposed Civilian National Security Force

Here’s someone worrying about the political consequences, perhaps unintended, of Obama’s three-million-person internet social network.

And, geez.  Webster Tarpley is not pleased.  Sees Obama as a “post modern” Mussolini, and his loyal legions as fascists (using the term as narrowly as possible, to indicate the bunches — “fascisti” — of zealous bumpkins that Musso rode to power).

As wild as Tarpley’s theses may seem, here’s another worry that lends them some support: Obama’s campaign pledge to create a massive Civilian Security Force:

“We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve gotta have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well funded.”

A big national plainclothes police force, you mean?

Err … Wouldn’t that be the FBI?

So, err … you mean another FBI?  You mean two heads might be better than one?

Err … I thought that’s what went wrong on 9/11?

One might hope that the One has in mind a kind of public works project — an army of unarmed retired folk rolling through their local streets late at night in fuel-efficient “Community Observation Patrol” cars.

Recouping recent losses in their retirement accounts …

But that picture doesn’t fit the caption: a “national security force” as “powerful” as what the Pentagon presides over.  Some have glossed the notion by reference to Britain’s MI5.

Will cooler and more “conservative” heads in the Congress be stampeded into backing this wild notion by the shouts of MyObamists stomping thru the streets?

Charisma perhaps comes at a price.

Little Jimmy Grimaldi:
Palin & co. re “Real” America
is prep for martial law

Ed Note:  This was first posted on Halloween.  I bump it up because the Terror-watch drumbeat is getting so very loud.  (See comments below.)

—————
Little Jimmy Grimaldi is out with his Halloween Message.

Tonight’s topic:  Creeping Fascism.

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Gitmo Gitmo Got to Go!
Prosecutions pending?

There is talk in the air (at least on MSNBC) of shutting down the Guantanamo prison ASAP.

But the NY Times came out against the idea with a page-one story the day before the election.  (And I note that, since, the Times has softened the story on its website.  The lead was much stronger — suggesting closing would be ill advised — on November 3.)

Obama of course is a lawyer and taught some constitutional law.  He may be concerned not only to set things aright, but to prevent his own administration from being tainted by the prison.

I’ve wondered elsewhere if Robert Gates may not be kept on at Defense — so goes the rumor  — to oversee the (glorious) dirty work of shutting the prison down and purging the Pentagon of those responsible for it.

I can’t think of anything Obama might do on Day One that would more effectively set the new tone and set the country back on its course.

Gitmo Gitmo Got to Go!

And then perhaps some sort of prosecution, preferably here but if not then abroad.

Re the latter:  It would signal a techtonic power shift — akin to the shift already underway in global finance in the wake of the still shocking demise of the big five Wall Street brokers –  were Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith or … whatsisname, Curious George, to be arrested, say, in Germany, to be tried for crimes against German citizens.

Will be curious to see if they dare travel abroad once out from behind the White House fence.

NYROB High Five:
Cheney, Soros, Olmert

Recent MUST READS in the NY Review of Books:

On Cheney.

On the financial crisis — by George Soros.

And the full interview that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave before resigning — in which he renounces militarism as a possible basis of Israeli security.

Britain pressing Police State
measures like nobody’s business

Ed Note:  This was first posted October 19.  I’m bumping it up because twice since — see comments below — news has leaked of OTHER major police-state measures that somebody in Whitehall is apparently trying to ram through. 

What the heck is going on?

———

October 19. Times of London calling.

Britain will require passports to buy cell phones — to allow their version of the NSA to identify all callers instantly.

The plan’s champions are explicit about the aim: to improve surveillance of the general populace.

Washington will not be far behind.

Or … Piece says the plan has been tabled until next year in London due to some resistance within Whitehall.

I had come to think of jolly old Britain as the last refuge of the old English liberties.  Perhaps the more deceived …

PBS: Torturing Democracy

Airing this weekend and/or in the coming days nationwide.

Website includes an archive documenting Bush-Cheney torture policies.

The stuff of criminal prosecution, once the naked man is no longer emperor?

Hersh says Beltway background boys are waiting for January 20 to unload dirt on Bush-Cheney

The airy author of this Guardian piece misleads with the notion that Seymour Hersh is the greatest American investigative reporter.

He is, rather, the trusted mouthpiece of hundreds and hundreds in the National Security Apparat.

Nevertheless, it’s good news that he’s expecting rain once the new president has been installed.  Perhaps enough to float criminal prosecution of Rumsfeld, Cheney, Libby, Wolfowitz, Feith, Bush et al.

US Army dedicates brigade to domestic front / Port-a-Prisons

The Pentagon seems to be preparing for chronic domestic trouble:

“[T]his new mission marks the first time an active unit has been given a dedicated assignment to NorthCom, a joint command established in 2002 to provide command and control for federal homeland defense efforts and coordinate defense support of civil authorities.”

Kinda makes you feel warm all over.

And have you heard about the Port-a-Prisons?

Troublemakers from a NY peace demo may wind up in a Utah meadow.

Tell Team Obama
Osama is dead

The sudden heat in Pakistan has McCain and Obama stomping and swearing to get Osama next year.

But it seems most likely that Osama died around the time of the Tora Bora bombings in late 2001, when this video was released:

Around the same time, the CIA said it found on a Jalalabad computer another video of Osama.

But the blubbery fellow therein was probably somebody else.

True, this Fatty Osama (left above, right below) has appeared twice, if memory serves, since.  He’s just doesn’t seem to be bin Laden.  His nose, to begin.  His jocular manner. His jewelry.  Supposedly he’s writing with the wrong hand …

Moreover, he neither sounds like nor uses language like Osama, who, acccording to arabist Bruce Lawrence, speaks in an elevated, pious and poetic style most distinct. Neither Fatty Osama’s vulgar gloating over the attacks in his first video, nor the voice on recent tapes discussing world affairs like Wolf Blitzer, come close.

Lawrence has published a book of Osama’s messages and is one of Uncle Sam’s experts on his language, diction, and their meanings.  During 2006 he came to think something was fishy.  Then went on radio in 2007 to spread the news:

Lawrence, citing informants in the US intelligence apparatus’s Bin Laden units, told [radio host] Kevin Barrett that everyone knows the tape is fake, adding that the hoax has been kept alive because it is politically useful to those who wish to bolster the official 9/11 conspiracy that 19 hijackers directed by Bin Laden from a cave carried out the attacks.

Here’s another arabist, once employed in the 90s to translate and analyze a real Osama tape. He agrees with Lawrence, and is good to recall that shortly after the attacks in 2001 Osama told a Pakistan paper that he had nothing to do with them.

And here’s an overview of the question, including what purports to be a facsimile of an Egyptian newspaper that on December 26, 2001 reported bin Laden’s death.  The next day what seems like the last genuine video (first photo above) was released.

If indeed he’s long gone, then who’s pulling our leg?

Both sides have reason to keep the hero alive.

If Al Qaeda’s behind the curtain, then …

It’s El Cid.  Charlton Heston, as the legendary spanish hero in the wars with the Moors.

He dies one night, recall, in a besieged fortress, the battle far from won.  So his people prop the corpse on his horse. Tie a cross to his arms and back Jesus style. Then as dawn breaks they open the gates, slap the horse’s ass … and El Cid rides again.

But if it’s Uncle Sam behind the scam, then  …

It’s Goldstein, from 1984:  the phantom jewish bolshevik terrorist on every telescreen noon and night, whose (non) existence grounds the propaganda of the police state and its perpetual war:

Edward R. Cronkite: We are at war with Eurasia and have always been at war with Eurasia.  But then, a week later: We are at war with East Asia and have always been at war with East Asia.

El Cid.  Goldstein.  But not bin Laden. He probly dead.

So one wishes Obama would stop talking about Osama. Talk about what is and will be.