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Painted-Tongue. Salpiglossis sinuata. 'Royale Purple'.
May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
Painted-Tongue. Salpiglossis sinuata. 'Royale Purple'.
May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
Painted-Tongue. Salpiglossis sinuata. 'Royale Purple'.
May, 2013. Photo by: joanneleon
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Martha & The Vandellas - Jimmy Mack
News & Opinion
This is the article that everyone is talking about, from the New York Times. I'll excerpt, but you'll need to read it to get the full story.
Leak Inquiries Show How Wide a Net U.S. Cast
Some officials are now declining to take calls from certain reporters, concerned that any contact may lead to investigation. Some complain of being taken from their offices to endure uncomfortable questioning. And the government officials typically must pay for lawyers themselves [...]
“For every reporter that is dealing with this, there are hundreds of national security officials who feel under siege — without benefit of a corporate legal department or a media megaphone for support,” said a former Obama administration official. “There are lots of people in the government spending lots of money on legal fees.”
[...]
Officials who have been questioned in the current investigations are reluctant to describe their experiences. But the account of William E. Binney, who spent more than 30 years at the National Security Agency, shows what can happen [...] a dozen agents appeared at his house in Severn, Md. One of them ran upstairs and entered the bathroom where Mr. Binney was toweling off after a shower, pointing a gun at him.
[...]
A 2010 affidavit seeking the warrant — necessary, an F.B.I. agent wrote, because the analyst had deleted e-mails in his own accounts — said Mr. Rosen qualified for that exception because he violated the Espionage Act by seeking secrets to report.
[...]
On Saturday, a Fox News executive said that the notice had gone to News Corp., its parent company, on Aug. 27, 2010, but that Fox News was not told until Friday. The executive said they were still trying to sort out how the notice fell through the cracks.
There was a big kerfuffle yesterday on Twitter between Ryan Lizza and Kevin Drum. It's hard to piece together a conversation that big, which involved a lot of people, many of them journalists, so the best thing to do is probably to read Lizza's Twitter stream and branch out from there. It starts at about 5pm eastern, Saturday night, with this tweet about Kevin Drum's post on
Mother Jones.
This WaPo article is about a real life spy book, written by the son of a CIA operative. I'm not sure if this "Wolf" is the same as the "The Wolf" in Zero Dark Thirty. If so, he was the chief of the Counterterrorism Center and would have been in a key role for paramilitary activities and drone assassination program. He is the character in the big office with the lights dimmed, finishing up a Muslim prayer ritual when he is first seen in the movie. When watching the movie, I thought it was supposed to be John Brennan (also a Muslim convert) or some fictional figure based on Brennan when he was at CIA, but apparently it wasn't. Anyway, I don't know if "The Wolf" is a made up name in this book, but it was a well known name in the CIA. If it is the same guy, presumably he's not under cover anymore. This Wikipedia entry for the Counterterrorism Center, says that he remains under cover and has led the CTC since 2006, so it implies that he is still in that position, so I tend to think that it's not the same person or that he's now left that position. This Forbes article has Michael Hayden ranking him as the fourth of the "most powerful defenders and offenders" in the world .
‘The Wolf and the Watchman: A Father, a Son, and the CIA’ by Scott C. Johnson
The fibs and evasions begin early. Johnson rethinks the long boyhood walks he took with his father in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, during the depths of the Cold War. “He often stopped by one of the park’s giant trees . . . and reached down to examine the ground at its base,” Johnson recalls. He said “he was looking for good chestnuts,” but he was almost certainly using his son as a prop to retrieve microfilmed documents buried by an agent.
But the mundane could potentially turn lethal. One day in New Delhi, when he was a child and his father was portraying himself as a diplomat, his amah prevented an Indian from entering the house and kidnapping him. His mother finally tired of the double life and walked out on the family.
This is an article from the
Washingtonian back in January about "The Wolf".
What are the Real Names of the Characters in Zero Dark Thirty?
Let’s peel back the aliases and look at who these folks really are.
The character known as "The Wolf," a top-level CIA officer (you can tell by his big office) and a practicing Muslim (he prays in said office) must be this man, the chief of the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, known publicly only as Roger. He "hunts" Al Qaeda. So he's The Wolf. Get it?
WaPo's Greg Miller back in March, 2012.
At CIA, a convert to Islam leads the terrorism hunt
Roger, which is the first name of his cover identity, may be the most consequential but least visible national security official in Washington — the principal architect of the CIA’s drone campaign and the leader of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In many ways, he has also been the driving force of the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killing as a centerpiece of its counterterrorism efforts.
Slate, January, 2013.
Who Are the People in Zero Dark Thirty?
That CIA Counterterrorism chief we see practicing a Muslim prayer in his office—The Wolf, as he is named in the movie—is likely based on a man known by his cover name “Roger.” Roger, as described in a Washington Post profile, is a “collection of contradictions”—among them his conversion to Islam despite overseeing the death of Islamist militants. (His marriage to a Muslim woman was the catalyst for this conversion.) Unloved by most of his colleagues, some deem Roger responsible for the December 2009 Khost incident depicted in the film, which left seven CIA employees dead at the hands of an improperly vetted suicide bomber. Jennifer Matthews, who was one of the employees killed, was his protégé, and an unnamed source has cited Roger’s hiring of her as an example of the problems with the functioning of the counterterrorism system.
Obama’s new drone policy leaves room for CIA role
Four years ago, as a new al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen was proving itself a potent adversary, the Obama administration made plans to attack it with airstrikes just as the United States had been doing to the terrorist network’s core in Pakistan.
But this time, the White House decided there would be a key difference: The strikes in Yemen would be carried out by the U.S. military, not the CIA.
Farea Al-muslimi is the young Yemeni man who testified at a recent drone hearing.
Tavis Smiley Marks 10th Year On PBS
Smiley contends that members of the Obama administration, whom he didn't identify, have pressured sponsors to drop their support of his projects, including his anti-poverty initiatives. The White House had no comment, said a spokesman, Kevin Lewis.
Smiley declined to identify the companies, saying he wasn't authorized to disclose their names.
While he said he understands the desire of blacks to stand protectively by the first African-American president, he's adamant about his right to take Obama to task on rising black unemployment, the use of military drones and other issues.
"This administration does not like to be criticized. And the irony of it is, there's nothing I have tried to hold the president accountable on that my white progressive colleagues have not," Smiley said. "They're labeled courageous critics, but if I say it, I'm an `Obama critic.' There's race at play in the very question."
Obama’s Artful Anguish
PRESIDENT OBAMA’S speech on national security last week was a dense thicket of self-justifying argument, but its central message was perfectly clear: Please don’t worry, liberals. I’m not George W. Bush.
[...]
Against this backdrop, the president’s rhetoric last week was calculated to reassure and soothe. The promises he made in 2008, when he campaigned as a critic of wartime overreach, were revived, reasserted, amplified. He would push anew to close Gitmo ... phase out indefinite detention ... put limits on drone strikes ... safeguard a free press ... even wind down the war on terror.
But of course the year is no longer 2008, and Obama has been “the decider” for more than four years now. Which meant that his address had an air of self-critique that’s rare in presidential rhetoric. In the words of Esquire’s Tom Junod, one of the most perceptive writers on Obama’s drone policy, the speech didn’t just “speak to Americans in the language of moral struggle.” It tried to make the president himself “representative of moral struggle,” by turning “personal, almost confessional, in its weighing of doubt and its admission of second thoughts.”
[...]
I am not particularly nostalgic for the Bush era either. But Obama’s Reinhold Niebuhr act comes with potential costs of its own. While the last president exuded a cowboyish certainty, this president is constantly examining his conscience in public — but if their policies are basically the same, the latter is no less of a performance. And there are ways in which it may be a more fundamentally dishonest one, because it perpetually promises harmonies that can’t be achieved and policy shifts that won’t actually be delivered.
Action
To Those Who Have Supported My Coverage of Bradley Manning’s Court Martial (So Far)
Every dollar donated to help fund coverage of Bradley Manning has helped transform me into a foremost journalist on one of the biggest cases in military justice history.
Every post of mine shared on Facebook or Twitter has helped amplify critical coverage that is keeping the world informed of how the government is prosecuting Manning as if he is a traitor that aided terrorists.
[...]
I hope you will keep sharing my reporting with family, friends or those in your social network, and, when possible, make donations so I can remain a fixture in the press pool at Meade and keep up my coverage of the Manning case.
With gratitude,
Kevin Gosztola
Firedoglake.com Journalist
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Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
More Tunes
Martha And The Vandellas - Nowhere to Run