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Topsail Island. March, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Topsail Island. March, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Topsail Island. March, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Topsail Island. March, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
Bouncing Souls - Letter From Iraq
News and Opinion
Col. Ann Wright:
10 Years Later and I’m Still Protesting War
A decade after I stepped down as the deputy ambassador in the U.S. Embassy in Mongolia, the war in Iraq is over for Americans, but continues for Iraqis. The whirlwind of sectarian violence brought on by the U.S. invasion and occupation continues to blow there.
The war on Afghanistan is now in its 13th year and as the anniversary of my resignation day approaches, I find myself outside the gates of Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, protesting war and, in particular, President Obama’s killer drone programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia.
Although Obama’s kill list, the CIA drone attacks in the undeclared war on Pakistan and the assassination of three American citizens by drone in Yemen receive most of the media and congressional attention, the incredibly large number of drone strikes in Afghanistan has gotten scant coverage—and that is why I am at Creech.
In 2012 alone, the U.S. Air Force has acknowledged 492 drone strikes/weapons releases in Afghanistan. A United Nations report states that only 16 people were killed in those strikes.
Check this out. How many different answers did Lindsey Graham give? I lost count. Holy crap. What a mixed up, muddled up, shook up answer. Finally he just resorts to something like 'we're not the SS. Trust us!'
Senator Lindsey Graham "We Are Not The SS"
What's Missing from the Iraq Debate
Iraqis.
The outpouring of commentary surrounding the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war can feel like déjà vu all over again. The political battle lines have changed very little over the past decade: Mostly, those who opposed the war decry the invasion, and its supporters defend it. There have been plenty of (often very good) diagnoses of what went wrong, but the parallel push for intervention in Syria and war with Iran suggests that few lessons will actually be learned from the war.
But here's one surprising detail about the flood of retrospectives: They have almost exclusively been written by Americans, talking about Americans, for Americans. Indeed, many Iraqis fail to see the point of commemorating the disastrous war for the benefit of the American media.
[...]
How American-centric has the outpouring of commentary been? Very. The New Republic got eight writers to comment on the anniversary, none Iraqi. Foreign Affairs put out a very good retrospective of its coverage of Iraq with 11 articles and 25 contributors, none Iraqi. The New York Times managed to find one, out of six roundtable contributors. And to show that there's no house bias here, the otherwise fascinating roundtable overseen by my Foreign Policy boss invited 20 significant participants in the war to talk about its lessons -- and didn't include a single Iraqi.
[...]
The real story of the American departure is how little it mattered. That's in part because the United States was never as necessary or wanted as Americans liked to believe. There's no question that U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker, for one, made himself indispensible to Iraqi politics through his tireless and effective diplomatic efforts. But as Charles De Gaulle famously (if apocryphally) said, the graveyards are full of indispensible men. Outside players can marginally affect faraway countries for a short time and through tremendous exertion, but their efforts are always refracted through local politics and rarely last.
[...]
Want to understand what went wrong in Iraq in all its complexity and chaos? The Internet is full of Iraqi academics, journalists, NGO leaders, and political activists with interesting perspectives on the invasion. It might also be useful to hear from the refugees, the displaced, and the families who lost everything. They will disagree with each other, have little patience for the pieties of American political debate, and refuse to fit comfortably into analytical boxes. On the 10th anniversary of the invasion, we should be hearing a lot more from them -- and a lot less from the former American officials and pundits who got it wrong the first time.
[Emphasis added]
This grassroots group pays a bounty to anyone who attempts a citizen's arrest on Tony Blair. The only requirement is that the attempt must be non-violent and reported by at least one mainstream media outlet. Since the antiwar movement in the US is all but nonexistent, maybe we should try to team up with the healthy antiwar movement in Britain, which seems alive and well.
Citizens' campaign to arrest Blair continues
Citizens band together to arrest former British prime minister over involvement in Iraq's invasion a decade ago.
More than a fifth - 22 percent - of Britons polled by YouGov this month said they believed Blair should be tried as a war criminal for his role in the conflict, which was preceded by massive anti-war demonstrations in London and other cities.
Fifty-three percent said the invasion was wrong, while half said Blair, a key international ally of US President George W Bush, had deliberately misled the British people over the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction. When it comes to waging war, our countries seem to be always joined at the hip anyway.
[...]
Cronin, meanwhile, is one of four people to have claimed a reward from an online campaign, Arrest Blair, which offers a share of a bounty pot for each attempted arrest.
[...]
Margo MacDonald, an independent member of the Scottish parliament, told Al Jazeera that she planned to table a motion on Wednesday calling for Scottish law to be amended to make illegal "the waging of aggressive war with the intention of regime change", specifically so that Blair could be brought to trial.
"Theoretically, we believe he could face a court in Scotland," MacDonald told Al Jazeera. "We are simply adding to the pressure."
[...]
But Chris Nineham, a founder of the UK's Stop the War coalition, sees a hardening of attitudes against Blair and growing recognition of the weight of war crimes allegations against him in political and media circles.
Even the Sun, a cheerleader for the invasion, felt obliged to run a piece alongside Blair's in which the father of a British soldier killed in Iraq accused him of being a war criminal and said he should be in prison.
I agree with this assessment. And an even stronger confirmation of this journalist's objections is that even as the MSM does a mini mea culpa (some of them anyway), the drumbeat for war with Syria and Iran just gets louder and louder. If they really had learned any lesson or had any intent to do things differently this time around, that drumbeat would not be as loud and it would be challenged much more often. What is more likely is that some, maybe most, mainstream media and cable news hacks are sell outs who will go along to keep their jobs and for the cable news hacks especially to keep their ridiculously overpaid positions. They will help to sell us right into another war without blinking an eye rather than buck the system or lose access. And this time around there is no excuse about the shock of 9/11, the staunchly patriotic atmosphere in the country, etc. Hell, even progressive A-list bloggers have shown that they will sell out for access, or whatever it is that they get.
The crocodile tears of the complicit: Iraq and the cries against humanity
Ten years on, the enablers of the Iraq war are still trying to justify their complicity.
It is very well and good that Mr Fineman wants to admit he should not have been so gullible when wisdom was most desperately needed. But his admission is rendered worthless by the explanation he provides for his ignorance. "American ignorance of the Arab and Muslim worlds 10 years ago was alarmingly vast. More than ignorance, there was fear, prejudice and propaganda," he explains.
Fineman's justification for his ignorance - that it was merely part of a broader American ignorance of the Arab and Muslim worlds - is a lie. All the evidence was there for anyone who wanted to see it. To begin with, some journalists even in the mainstream press where consistenly challenging the official line. The then Knight Ridder (now McClatchy) news service, for example, was consistenly pushing back against the Bush Administration's narrative, with a stream of articles by its Washington reporters whom colleagues like Fineman had to know were on to a good story (if he didn't, then he really had no business working as a journalist). At the same time, leading progressive publications such as The Nation, Mother Jones, Tikkun and newer web-based media like Alternet were all filled with articles by the experts Fineman says were in such short supply, sharing their knowledge with anyone who cared to read. Democracy Now! And other progressive radio stations featured innumerable scholars in, from and with long experience studying the region.
As important, American universities were and remain filled with people who knew all about the Muslim world, and who were in fact desperately reaching out to anyone in the media or government who'd listen to explain the realities on the ground, from the bogus nature of the WMD argument to the surety of disaster if the US invaded. Fineman could have taken one day and driven, taken the metro or train, or flown to any East Coast university, from Washington to Boston, and met with the supposedly missing experts. Pretty much every legitimate scholar of the Middle East opposed the war, and yet no one not named Bernard Lewis, Fouad Ajami or Samuel Huntington was given the time of day by people like him. And progressive think tanks were putting out analyses on a weekly basis challenging every major claim of the warmongers.
re: the article above, Fineman was a journalist at the time, so I agree that he should not get a pass and that he downplays the number of dissenting voices that were out there. But the American people in general do get a pass, imho. I say this because I was almost duped myself. Anybody here who knows me knows what a skeptic I am. But I had no idea what DailyKos or DemocracyNow was in 2003. I had one friend who was as skeptical as I was and that's it. We were both NRP type liberals. I was a mainstream Democrat with an Independent bent, not a yellow dog. I knew of the Nation and Mother Jones but never read them. I had three little kids and no time to pore through various news sources or the internet trying to find which ones were and weren't propaganda. I, and people like me, though we hated Bush and did not trust him a bit, did trust Colin Powell and did not believe he would lie the country in such a grave situation. So in that sense, I was duped too. It boiled down to a "who do you trust?" situation as it does for the vast majority of Americans, I think, how have neither the time nor the ability to do analysis of their own. And without having developed a set of people I trusted in a solid liberal/progressive alternative media, Colin Powell was the person I trusted the most. I'll never forgive him for that. Within a couple of weeks I could see the writing on the wall. But for awhile there, after that UN speech, I agreed that it was better to go in and quickly fix the situation with the nukes that might have been turned over to terrorist groups, which was the one thing that convinced me it might all be worth it. Mind you, I had no idea, not even an inkling of an idea, about the long term remaking of the Middle East plans by these criminals. I, like probably almost every other American, was thinking about a very rapid and relatively low cost war, like the first Gulf War and was thinking about a true cost benefit analysis, which is exactly why Rumsfeld is even more evil than the run of the mill evil imperialist. He told the country this would be a low cost and not a long war, when in reality, they were planning permanent bases. He and Cheney need to be held accountable and tried for treason, war crimes.
Journalists, on the other hand, had access to a lot of analysis. Their reasons for being duped are entirely different than the average American citizen. The journalists are guilty of cowardice, basically, and self interest. The cheerleaders for the war should not be out there today doing the same job because like complicit members of Congress, they have a motive to cover things up, again, a motive of self interest. Members of Congress can be blackmailed about what they knew and when they knew it. If they really loved their country they would step down, starting with Nancy Pelosi.
re: the article below, Even among the people treated worst by the Saddam regime, they are nostalgic for those days. They don't even have reliable electricity or sanitation despite the tens of billions of our taxpayer money spent on reconstruction (most of which was wasted or stolen). They now deal with Al Qaeda in Iraq, a group of terrorists that did not exist until after we decided to wreck their country (or more accurately, finish their country off, as we had been wrecking it for a decade prior to the 2003 invasion). And all of it for oil and neocon ideology. And after all of that, we really didn't even get the oil.
Iraq: 'You didn't fall… we pushed you'
The Iraq invasion cannot be reasonably described as a case of "humanitarian intervention", argues Brahimi.
Every Basrawi I spoke to judged that the US invasion had made an emphatically negative impact on their lives. They spoke of daily killings, the brutalisation of society, the decimation of infrastructure, a sharp rise in birth defects and domestic violence, soaring unemployment, particularly among young men, rampant rape and crime, and corruption levels unmatched by Saddam and his henchmen. The dominant motif was nostalgia for the Saddam era, even here, among communities which had fared worst under the Baathist regime.
What's wrong? The kick the can Gangnam style astroturf flopped? The Hugh Jidette astroturf flopped? The only meme that hasn't flopped is the catfood meme. But here they are again with a very noble sounding astroturf campaign this time.
Kleptocracy watch, Philip Howard edition
I picked up a copy of Politico at the local Starbucks, and out fell and slick 9 color insert, touting CommonGood.org. It seems CommonGood was founded by Philip Howard an anti-regulation freak.
Common Good is a collection of the usual kleptocrats, including Pete "Catfood" Peterson.
Our representatives are constantly bombarded with this stuff, and really they should know better, they should know that this is astroturf that represents the views of a small collection of billionaire bullies and their hired hands. But flunkies like Dick Durbin fall for it.
Obama, Netanyahu Stress Shared Stance on Iran
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: "If Iran decides to go for a nuclear weapon — that is, to actually manufacture the weapon — then it probably — then it will take them about a year."
President Obama: "We prefer to resolve this diplomatically. And there’s still time to do so. Iran’s leaders must understand, however, that they have to meet their international obligations. And meanwhile, the international community will continue to increase the pressure on the Iranian government. The United States will continue to consult closely with Israel on next steps. And I will repeat: All options are on the table."
Published at Corrente last week, based on an event in late January. I believe that I posted some videos from the Oxford Union event in an earlier What's Happenin' diary. Anyway, I'm putting this in here, and h/t to naked capitalism for republishing it. I haven't sorted through to see what else we've got here. I know there is a lot of related good stuff in addition to this that should be sorted through and organized to make it convenient for people to review. Maybe one day I'll get to that. For now there is this, and I will have a lot more to say on this particular subject of movies, Assange, propaganda because this is not the only one out there and the producers of Zero Dark Thirty have another project on their plate which looks to be more propaganda with Assange as the subject this time around. The CIA's Hollywood machine is really cranking these days. Brennan loves spinning things for the media so he probably loves working with Hollywood too, so I don't think this will slow down any time soon. After all, if it's black budget, intel or war, we have unlimited budgets, right?
Sunshine Week transcript! Julian Assange at Sam Adams Awards
Dreamworks' upcoming movie The Fifth Estate about WikiLeaks is "a lie upon a lie," says Julian Assange. "It fans the flames to start a war with Iran... So that’s the reality of where we’re at. Not merely a war of intelligence agencies, but a war of corrupt media, corrupt culture."
A little complicated, I'm going to explain a rash of transcripts I hope to post. Thanks to Lambert for giving me the opportunity.
The Oxford Union in January hosted the Sam Adams Awards for Integrity in Intelligence, where this year American Tom Fingar won the award for overseeing the 2007 NIE Estimate on Iran. "A consummate intelligence professional, Fingar would not allow the NIE to be 'fixed around the policy,' the damning phrase used in the famous 'Downing St. Memo' of July 23, 2002 to describe the unconscionable process that served up fraudulent intelligence to 'justify' war with Iraq," said the press release. Past award winners and associates also spoke, including 2010 winner Julian Assange by video link, the YouTube of which Oxford Union posted right away. Controversy ensued when the Guardian's Amelia Hill wrote a column saying Assange found "no allies and tough queries" at the Union. Craig Murray, who also spoke that evening, was furious at Hill's portrayal and posted a rebuttal with video embedded, Amelia Hill is a Dirty Liar. Who you gonna believe, the Guardian or your lying eyes? (Disclosure: I ♥ Murray.)
Murray's latest blog post now has a YouTube of him and some of the other speakers that night, finally posted by Oxford Union two months after the fact, so guess what the next transcript I post will be. (Sorry, Oxford Union posted Fingar's YouTube in February, but I haven't transcribed it.)
As always, help with proofing and filling in blanks much appreciated.
This was in the Guardian liveblog. Not that I know that much about the EU, but
this is what I
speculated about on the first day -- that this was deliberate, and an attempt to bring down the EU in a controlled way, or to change it radically, choosing the first domino, sort of. A controlled demolition of sorts.
The author makes a lot of important points about the bigotry toward some southern European peoples. But tucked inside this article are other things that go along with the same propaganda line that we see all over the place with the focus on the money laundering, etc. See what you think when reading this article. Does it raise any red flags for you? For instance, the mention of Slobodan Milošević. Do we have some smearing in the guise of defending going on here?
THE PIRATES AROUND CYPRUS
The other day, near Athens, I met a cheerful Greek-American economist who is in his mid-seventies. He sported a white Vandyke beard. He was shuffling around his veranda in a mischievous mood. He was planning a party for that night, which would run from ten o’clock until about five in the morning. All of his guests would wear pirate costumes. He had invited an Icelander he had barely met, he told me, because Icelanders were familiar with plundering and being plundered, and also, he noted facetiously, “They don’t drink much.”
I asked where the idea for the party theme had originated. “European Union pirates,” he explained.
[...]
In its foolishness, the proposal exposed in plain light a strain of ugly discrimination—is it too much to call it racism?—that continues to run through German, Finnish, and other northern-European attitudes toward the Union’s southern debtors.
[...]
Yet even if the Russian deposits in Cyprus reflect criminality, they arrived, again, under E.U. regulation. And most of the savers who would be hit are not Russians but, rather, ordinary Cypriots who practiced exactly the habits that too many Germans seem to disdainfully regard as un-Greek: they worked, they set money aside, and they saved to finance property purchases or retirement. There is no policy or moral case to tax Cypriot savers who hold accounts under the E.U.’s insured ceiling.
Krugman and others are going bonkers about the size and nature of the Cyprus economy and banking system but what about Luxembourg, for example?
Does size matter? Cypriot bank sector problem went overlooked
* Huge Cypriot banking sector drew no attention until 2011
* Sector is 7.5 times the size of island state's economy
* Not only euro zone state with outsized financial sector
[...]
When Cyprus was examined as to whether it met the criteria to join the European Union in 2003, a European Commission report on its readiness mentioned no problems with the banking sector - it was not a criterion for membership.
Neither did the European Central Bank mention that anything was wrong with Cypriot banks or their business model - based on funding from deposits, almost half of which are from non-residents - when it evaluated whether Cyprus was fit to joint the euro zone in a 2007 report.
[...]
Neither is the size of the Cypriot banking sector unique.
In a report published almost a year ago, the first public mention of the threat that Cypriot banks might pose to the financial stability of the island, the European Commission said Cyprus ranked only fourth in the euro area.
Luxembourg has a banking sector 24 times the size of its economy, Ireland eight times and tiny Malta 7.8 times bigger than its GDP.
Meanwhile... from Felix Salmon.
Counterparties: Jumbo shrimp
Resurrecting asset classes that fell out of favor after the financial crisis is all the rage this week. First, there was the news that the synthetic CDO market has risen from the dead (kind of). Now, we learn that JP Morgan is selling a small new batch of mortgage-backed securities, the first such transaction from any of the biggest banks since the financial crisis.
It's still hard to believe that there is so much shock. What did they expect? Seriously. It is reminiscent of our Wall Street Masters of the Universe.
Exclusive - Euro zone call notes reveal extent of alarm over Cyprus
In detailed notes of the call seen by Reuters, one official described emotions as running "very high", making it difficult to come up with rational solutions, and referred to "open talk in regards of (Cyprus) leaving the euro zone".
[...]
One issue repeatedly raised on the call was the risk of large outflows of capital once Cypriot banks reopen, probably on Tuesday. The ECB representative said the situation was being closely monitored and "technical preparations" were being made to try to limit the amount of any outflow.
"Some additional laws need to be passed. Overall we are in a very difficult situation," the official said, according to the notes. "(We're) trying to do everything within the powers to limit any unauthorised outflows."
And then there is this big move, basically an attempt to make the Eurozone like one country, requring EU approval before any fiscal decisions made by Eurozone member countries:
The evidence is everywhere that this is not a center right nation. So why is the Democratic party moving continuously to the right again? People can be brainwashed on specific things after months, years of media obsession and propaganda. Iran is a bad country, we have too much debt, scary terrorists on every corner, etc. But on some very fundamental things, the country consistently shows that it has left-oriented, populist ideas, such as wanting out of long wars and not wanting into new long wars, despising the too big to fail criminal banks, not wanting to cut Social Security, and in general favoring cuts to defense spending rather than cuts to earned benefits social programs. And now we know that the country wants to invest in things that will create jobs too. Stimulus. Even if the media has soured the word "stimulus" that is still what people want. We want a New Deal. And what is our government doing? Undermining the last New Deal and getting us into new wars. If the media was not complicit in deceiving the public and/or ignoring certain issues altogether, we would have a lot more people doing something about this mess. This government depends heavily on secrecy and control of the media. When I was growing up, I was led to believe that the USSR did that kind of thing, not the USA. Then again, I was also led to believe that North Vietnam and China were the ones who used torture.
The Morning Plum: A nation of Keynesians
As many have pointed out, the House progressive budget — which calls for substantial new spending to create jobs and defers deficit reduction until later — has been almost entirely marginalized from the Washington conversation. Instead, the outer ideological poles of the debate have been defined by the budget from Senate Dems, which contains as much in spending cuts as it does in new revenues — and a tiny fraction of stimulus spending as an afterthought — and the Paul Ryan budget, which purports to rapidly slash the deficit only through huge spending cuts and contains nothing in new revenues or spending.
In this context, it’s interesting that a new Gallup poll finds that public support for new federal spending to create jobs is simply overwhelming. Large majorities — and even majorities of Republicans — back the jobs creation policies Obama proposed in 2011 and renewed in this year’s State of the Union Speech:
* 72 percent support a “federal government program that would spend government money to put people to work on urgent infrastructure repairs.” This is also backed by 71 percent of independents and 53 percent of Republicans.
* 72 percent support a “federal jobs creation law that would spend government money for a program designed to create more than 1 million new jobs.” This is backed by 69 percent of independents and 52 percent of Republicans.
[Emphasis added]
Did you see that? 71%, 69% of Independents. 53%, 52% of Republicans. Repeat, Republicans want the government to spend money for a jobs program. Direct government spending to create jobs. That is a Roosevelt WPA program. What we are seeing with the insane austerity policy of the Obama administration is political malpractice. This is a blatant ignoring of the wants and needs of the people. Our government representatives do not represent us. You can't blame all of this on crazy House Republicans either. The American people are shouting, loudly and clearly about what they want. The president can knock down the Paul Ryans with polls like this, if he would get off of his austerity train and abandon his buddies, Pete Peterson and his phony grassroots group of CEOs and his Wall Street owners. It's time that he remembered what he was elected to do.
The National Security Advisor Exception Under the Espionage Act
When the FBI found sensitive — though it turned out, unclassified — documents in Thomas Drake’s basement, he was charged under the Espionage Act. When the Army found hundreds of thousands of classified — but not Top Secret — cables on Bradley Manning’s computer, they charged him with Espionage and Aiding the Enemy.
But when the FBI found Top Secret documents on Sudan — our actual enemy, if sanctions count — in Reagan National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane’s basement, it decided to investigate him for illegal lobbying.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
Wolfowitz's Cabal - The Real Story
They Weren't Wrong; They Lied
Righter than Right Republican Rep determines who is a woman
An Anniversary--and a Prelude to a New War
Hey y'all, let's have a war with Iran!
You See Where This is Headed, Right?
Bad Religion - Let Them Eat War