Archive for the American Gestapo category
April 7th, 2009
The NYker reports stirrings overseas, where the only hope of prosecuting Bush-Cheney war criminals resides.
A friend here made the point, outlining possibilities, last year.
It seems all the more important given Obama’s unwillingness to release Justice Dept investigations re same. He has been told (the old song) it would be bad for morale to prosecute the cops, and has punted. It’s a universal political problem, which he seems to have decided, as most pols do, to Look Away From.
The march of the US from something like a republic to something like a police state has been stepwise and rather clear. When opportunities present themselves to escort the monsters to the gallows, one must muster the will.
April 4th, 2009
An op-ed by an American law professor accuses Israel of war-crimes in Gaza.
And an editorial simple calls Obama for refusing to release Justice Dept documents on torture in the name of the war on terror. Including the much-rumored investigation of tidbit lawyer John Yoo, who was used to give the green light on unrestricted wiretapping and also involved with authorizing torture. Hang him high.
For a while I’ve been sensing a change in the Times coverage of Israel. Axing Judith Miller was a big step. But maybe something more basic is going on, as Israel veers toward a kind of suicide. Or maybe i’m imagining things …
March 17th, 2009
Security at the recent inauguration included a hypergagagigapixelled camera.
Investigate faces in the crowd with handy zoom.
And check out baby Bush.  Strangelove at his side.
March 12th, 2009
The hydra of the National Security Apparat, which sprouted another half dozen heads post 9/11, is a wonder to behold in motion.
President Obama appointed as the new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair, a Navy admiral and, judging by his words during his confirmation hearings, a good man and a well informed curious thinker about world affairs, who, on the flow chart, now sits atop all other agency heads notoriously defensive of their overlapping turf.
Director Blair then nominated Charles Freeman as Chairman of the National Intelligence Council, also a new post, and new organ, post 9/11. The AP reported soon after:
Freeman, who was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war, has harshly criticized the Israeli government, the Iraq war and the war on terrorism in general.
Blair said Freeman’s strong opinions are exactly why he wants him to be chairman of the council.
“I think I can do a better job if I am getting strong analytical viewpoints than if I am getting pre-cooked pablum,” Blair said.
This encourages one’s opinion of Director Blair, and it would seem Mr Freeman’s appointment would be a step toward actually changing Bush-Cheney foreign policy.
But Mr Freeman is indeed well known for criticizing Israeli policy in public. Two years ago he observed:
“Left to its own devices, the Israeli establishment will make decisions that harm Israelis, threaten all associated with them and enrage those who are not.â€Â
And so, this week Mr Freeman’s nomination was axed by various declared friends of Israel within the Beltway, led, sorry to say, by New York’s Senator Schumer.
The Times explains that:
critics who led the effort to derail Mr. Freeman argued that [his] views reflected a bias that could not be tolerated in someone who, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, would have overseen the production of what are supposed to be policy-neutral intelligence assessments destined for the president’s desk.
By this argument among candidates most qualified to sit atop the American so-called intelligence community are these chumps:
One recalls that eight years ago the reins of US foreign policy were handed to a clique of gargoyles whose gross Israeliocentric views had long been public. One may wonder.
One may not know what to think.
The Middle Ages knew that dismembered heads often mutter for ten seconds or so after receiving their severance, as Mr Freeman yesterday having taken back his name:
“Israel is driving itself toward a cliff, and it is irresponsible not to question Israeli policy and to decide what is best for the American people.â€Â
One shouldn’t be surprised at Obama’s withdrawal of support for Mr Blair, given that the father of the President’s chief of staff was an Irgun terrorist (sidekick to Menachem Begin). It’s surprising, and mildly encouraging, that Blair dared nominate Freeman at all.
But one supposes Rahm has now lit into his hide and no more such nonsense will be heard from the heights of National Intelligence.
March 10th, 2009
Came across this Times magazine piece by Tim Weiner while musing about Petraeus and Lansdale in Pakghanistan and Vietnam. It’s adapted from Weiner’s excellent CIA book of 1995, Legacy of Ashes, and touches on Lansdale among other interesting things.
And it takes one back to that fled world, post Soviet Union before 9/11, when dreams of Peace Dividends and calls for the dissolution of the CIA were in the air, the latter from the likes of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan: The CIA is impossibly inpenetrable and corrupted — ungovernable. Better to start over from scratch …
Fled is that music.
But even way back in 1995 all that was something of a cover story, or, rather, an effect of a cover story — an approach to policy distorted and frustrated by the privatization of America’s covert ops capacity, so to speak.
Journalist Joseph Trento (with whom on points I disagree) touches on this firmly in his book Prelude to Terror – The Rogue CIA and America’s Private Intelligence Network (2005).
The privatization of what had been since the CIA’s founding in’ 47 its bread and butter work (intelligence collection being merely its cover, its day job) was touched off by:
(i) the cashiering by Nixon in 1973 of CIA director Richard Helms, a career spook back to the OSS — the Man with dirty hands Who Kept the Secrets — and
(ii) attempts thereafter to clean the Augean stables, both by presidents — appointing a string of clean-hands DCIs: James Schlesinger, William Colby (who died soon enough in a boating accident) and Stansfield Turner — and by Congress — with the Rockefeller and Church hearings in the Senate, culminating with the House Select Committee on Assassinations.
But when one cleans the stables, what happens to the manure?
( Side Show: An illuminating unintended consequence of the attempted purgation:Â George HW Bush’s prez campaign in 1980 was staffed by a lot of retired guys in trenchcoats.
And his victory in 1988 was the first signal failure of US presidential exit polls. A problem that then slept until … 2000. And 2004. Dem Bush boys just don’t poll properly … )
Here’s a recent interview with Trento — worth reading and listening.
To return to Weiner:Â The ongoing privatization of the black bag work the CIA did for corporate and other chums in the good old days leaves somewhat moot, even in 1995, the isolated “What to do about the CIA” question. For the problem is now larger and more insinuated throughout the military-industrial complex (Eisenhower’s term now ringing somewhat quaint) than during the days of Gentleman Spy Allen Dulles.Â
Post 9/11, instead of following Moynihan’s lead by simplifying (in order to clarify) the National Security Apparat, a stampeded Congress slapped on several more layers of bureaucracy. And meanwhile the private sector in this growth industry expanded as never before, under Cheney’s guiding hand in particular.
Today’s rather cleansed CIA, then, is something of a front, more akin to the straight-shooting Pentagon than the dirty-tricks outfit of the golden age.
The dirtiest business — the most unpatriotic business — has been outsourced. To small and mid-sized firms owned and operated by ex-CIA, DIA, FBI, ATF and SS agents, ex-Army Rangers and ex-Navy Seals …
Prouty’s Secret Team in teeming blasted bloom.
M
February 17th, 2009
Ed Note: See comments below to follow the horrible story of escalating veteran suicides into 2011.
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From the Times:
“The American Army finds itself in a lot of different countries where cultural awareness is critical,” said Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley, the top recruitment officer for the Army.
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END QUOTE
General Freakley went on to unveil a new citizenship program that fast-tracks foreigners who speak particular languages. Green Card to Passport in six months.
Seem to recall some Caeser doing something like this.
Guess they must be running out of peeps — oh. Oh my.
Still, a bit odd. Army Recruitment handing out passports. Thought the State Department did that. And Immigration the whole naturalization thing …
And I seem to recall Secretary of State Clinton making a particular point, during her first address from Foggy Bottom, of reclaiming turf and powers lost across recent years to the Pentag–
Hey! You can’t –! Where are my Switzers?! Stop that! General Freakley, who’s in charge here?! You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!!!
Dr Strangelove, I presume?Â
Who’s the gadfly?
Further developments.
Who’s who …
February 7th, 2009
This story about how the Pentagon’s new — new — African Command horribly botched an attempt to make foreign policy in the Congo should but probably won’t temper the new president’s enthusiasm for the leaders of the Bush-Cheney Pentagon (both of whom have been kept on).
Also new since 9/11 is the Pentagon’s Northern Command. Governing North America.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the US security apparat has focused its attention upon Washington, where, 20 years on, it seems the only healthy power institution left. The Army that Ate its Government.  An old story …
Some hope perhaps: The new Secretary of State has loudly signalled an intention to take back from the Pentagon powers and responsibilities formerly seated in Foggy Bottom. More power to her.
February 6th, 2009
I have a lovely reprint of this article from 1975 in the flesh. Gallery Magazine — a girly book.
But here it is on the web. Very much worth reading.
November 13th, 2008
 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.
November 13th, 2008
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.”
( Who the heck put this bee in his bonnet?
See here. A film from Alex Jones. Worth watching. )
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.
Charisma perhaps comes at a price.
November 13th, 2008
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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November 11th, 2008
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.
November 9th, 2008
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.
November 9th, 2008
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.ÂÂ
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 …
November 2nd, 2008
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?
October 29th, 2008
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.
September 24th, 2008
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.
September 23rd, 2008
ED NOTE: See comments below to follow the question of Bin Laden’s existence into May 2011, when the americans announce that bin Laden has been killed. I for one do not yet believe them.
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), as he’s generally called, has appeared twice (if memory serves). He 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:Â 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:
“We are at war with Eurasia and have always been at war with Eurasia.”
But then, a month 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.
August 13th, 2008
Must read. Ron Suskind’s new book The Way of the World.
Hear him at Democracy Now this evening.
The facts seem well established.
And Suskind seems to think motions toward impeachment are imminent.
Yet the NY Times has so far ignored the story for almost a week.
But the Financial Times in London is not. It’s a tug of war, I guess.
