There is a portion of GWB’s Veterans’ day speech with which I think we can all agree:
…the civilized world knows very well that other fanatics in history, from Hitler to Stalin to Pol Pot, consumed whole nations in war and genocide before leaving the stage of history. Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously — and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply.
If the shoe fits, Mr. “President”…
I’m astounded that JB hasn’t posted this yet. From Zogby International:
It’s not like it was hard to see this coming, but Seymour Hersh reported in this week’s New Yorker that the U.S. has been conducting recon missions inside Iran with the purpose of identifying military targets:
Hersh quotes one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon as saying, “The civilians in the Pentagon want to go into Iran and destroy as much of the military infrastructure as possible.”
One former high-level intelligence official told The New Yorker, “This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush administration is looking at this as a huge war zone. Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign.”
The administration is denying the conclusions of the article, and insists that they are pursuing diplomatic measures to address the threat perceived from Iran. Let’s hope these aren’t from the same diplomacy toolbox we had nearby in the prelude to the Iraq war.
Meanwhile, Hersh’s source has told a pretty detailed story:
The former intelligence official told Hersh that an American commando task force in South Asia is working closely with a group of Pakistani scientists who had dealt with their Iranian counterparts.
The New Yorker reports that this task force, aided by information from Pakistan, has been penetrating into eastern Iran in a hunt for underground nuclear-weapons installations.
In exchange for this cooperation, the official told Hersh, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has received assurances that his government will not have to turn over Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, to face questioning about his role in selling nuclear secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea.
Hersh reported that Bush has already “signed a series of top-secret findings and executive orders authorizing secret commando groups and other Special Forces units to conduct covert operations against suspected terrorist targets in as many as 10 nations in the Middle East and South Asia.”
Defining these as military rather than intelligence operations, Hersh reported, will enable the Bush administration to evade legal restrictions imposed on the CIA’s covert activities overseas.
Now this seems more like the sort of diplomacy this administration has demonstrated: quietly make a deal with the non-democratic leader of the country known to have helped two-thirds of the “axis of evil” develop WMD (this is, ironically, every “axis of evil” member we have not yet militarily occupied), where the terms of the deal protect the individual known to have been a critical link in the WMD proliferation. Fantastic.
I’m reminded of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, by Chalmers Johnson. It’s a good book, and the thread it follows – connecting the dirtier side of our foreign intelligence dealings with their eventual consequences – makes this sort of unprincipled dealing and duplicitousness all the more terrifying.
(Via truthout.)
Twelve distinguished retired Generals and Admirals have published an open letter [pdf] to the Senate Judiciary Committee, arguing against Gonzales’ nomination as Attorney General (well, coming as close to a stance as CYA-laden diplomacy does, at least).
Not too surprisingly, they express concerns over Gonzales’ position on the Geneva Convention, as well as the familiar “torture memo” issue. With regard to the Convention in general, they echo Colin Powell’s concern that:
…abandoning the Geneva Conventions would put our soldiers at greater risk, would “reverse over a century of U.S. policy and practice in supporting the Geneva Conventions,” and would “undermine the protections of the rule of law for our troops, both in this specific conflict [Afghanistan] and in general.” State Department adviser William H. Taft IV agreed that this decision “deprives our troops [in Afghanistan] of any claim to the protection of the Conventions in the event they are captured and weakens the protections afforded by the Conventions to our troops in future conflicts.” Mr. Gonzales’ recommendation also ran counter to the wisdom of former U.S. prisoners of war. As Senator John McCain has observed: “I am certain we all would have been a lot worse off if there had not been the Geneva Conventions around which an international consensus formed about some very basic standards of decency that should apply even amid the cruel excesses of war.”
It’s nice to see that tactics used to date have not completely quieted informed dissent.
(via truthout.)
It’s been a busy few days for CIA news. First, Michael Scheuer (the author, as “Anonymous”, of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror) resigned on Thursday.
On Friday, deputy director John McLaughlin resigned with a warning that “widespread resignations” were possible, inspired by agency management since the new CIA Director Porter Goss and team have started:
Several other senior clandestine service officers are threatening to leave, current and former agency officials said.
The disruption comes as the CIA is trying to stay abreast of a worldwide terrorist threat from al Qaeda, a growing insurgency in Iraq, the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan and congressional proposals to reorganize the intelligence agencies. The agency also has been criticized for not preventing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and not accurately assessing Saddam Hussein’s ability to produce weapons of mass destruction.
“It’s the worst roiling I’ve ever heard of,” said one former senior official with knowledge of the events. “There’s confusion throughout the ranks and an extraordinary loss of morale and incentive.”
Current and retired senior managers have criticized Goss, former chairman of the House intelligence committee, for not interacting with senior managers and for giving Murray too much authority over day-to-day operations. Murray was Goss’s chief of staff on the intelligence committee.
At the same time, the Deputy Director of Operations Stephen Kappes delivered his resignation, though was convinced by Goss and the White House to hold a final decision off until Monday morning.
Newsday (via DailyKos) connects the dots today: this is an intentional move ordered by the White House to purge the CIA of voices who have been critical of administration policies:
“The agency is being purged on instructions from the White House,” said a former senior CIA official who maintains close ties to both the agency and to the White House. “Goss was given instructions … to get rid of those soft leakers and liberal Democrats. The CIA is looked on by the White House as a hotbed of liberals and people who have been obstructing the president’s agenda.”
Politicizing intelligence in this manner can only enhance the echo chamber effect — that non-critical positive feedback loop that amounts to an institutional yes-man — which basically means it’s no longer adding value. That is not good — disturbing as the threats we face may be, we need now as much as (or more than) ever to perceive reality as clearly and accurately as possible, not to structurally guarantee that we only see pre-approved realities.
It seems to be getting hard to publicly point out that war is a horrible thing that kills people and generally sucks.
Today brought two terrifying data points. Note that neither is even about any of the particular wars in which we are currently involved, but rather the general idea of organized armed conflict.
First, 66 ABC affiliates decided not to show the film Saving Private Ryan, apparently due to concern that its graphic descriptions of WWII might incur large fines from the FCC in the post-we’ve-seen-Janet-Jackson’s-breast era. This despite the fact that it has been broadcast on ABC on two previous occasions. Is war only “decent” enough for TV when we’re not fighting any?
But wait — there’s more. ABC News via boingboing via backchannel relativepath (thanks!), the United States Secret Service investigated some Boulder, CO high school students simply for singing a forty year old folk song that questions if profit justifies war:
The students told ABC News affiliate KMGH-TV in Denver they are performing Bob Dylan’s song “Masters of War” during the Boulder High School Talent Exposé because they are Dylan fans. They said they want to express their views and show off their musical abilities.
This falls under the Secret Service’s bailiwick, we’re told, because apparently singing this song amounts to threatening the president’s life:
Threatening the president is a federal crime, so the Secret Service was called to the school to investigate.
Students in the band said they’re just singing the lyrics and not inciting anyone to do anything.
The 1963 song ends with the lyrics: “You might say that I’m young. You might say I’m unlearned, but there’s one thing I know, though I’m younger than you, even Jesus would never forgive what you do … And I hope that you die and your death’ll come soon. I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon. And I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your deathbed. And I’ll stand o’er your grave ’til I’m sure that you’re dead.”
The first stanza of this song identifies those to whom the closing sentiment is addressed:
Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
To confuse non-original song lyrics with the sort of threat that warrants Secret Service investigation is absurd and chilling. In fact, the Secret Service’s FAQ rather clearly and reasonably discusses the difference:
The Secret Service does not desire or solicit information pertaining to individuals or groups expressing legitimate criticism of, or political opposition to, the policies and decisions of the government of government officials. However, we are interested in legitimate information relating to threats, plans or attempts by individuals, groups or organizations to harm USSS protectees.
According to ABC News, the Secret Service got involved after a group of students and adults who heard a rehearsal called a radio talk show “saying the song the band sang ended with a call for President Bush to die”, and then someone called the Secret Service. I assume that the Secret Service takes all reported threats seriously, but then does do some degree of actual vetting before sending agents to investigate. The Secret Service actually spent time interviewing the students’ principal as well as a teacher involved in an unrelated student protest last weekend (whaa-?), so presumably someone decided that this was an actual threat. (Note that there is no hint anywhere that the evidence of “threat” goes in any respect beyond singing this song.)
We are so very far through the looking-glass. Even knowing that, what I find amazing is that the talk-show callers, whoever called the Secret Service, and apparently some decision maker all seem to have read the first stanza of this song to identify the sitting POTUS, but that doesn’t seem to bother any of them. One of the performers hits the nail on the head (again from ABC):
“It’s just Bob Dylan’s song. We were just singing Bob Dylan’s song … If you think it has to do with Bush that’s because you’re drawing your own conclusions. We never conveyed that Bush was the person we were talking about,” said Allysse Wojtanek-Watson, a singer for the band.
If you haven’t heard the song or read the lyrics lately, check it out. It’s one of those Dylan songs that send shivers down my spine, and on the “moral values” scale, it certainly surpasses fretting about love between people with similar genitalia.
It’s encouraging that these students are acting with such conscience and bravery, and it’s great that their principal supported them and the performance went off as planned. However, that small silver lining is dwarfed by the impact this sort of exercise of state power has on the broader discussion climate in our country. Boulder is, after all, a very progressive city, and this event sends a pretty strong signal to school administrators and others in less progressive places (like Richland County, WI, or 66 local ABC TV markets).
My hat is off to those fighting the good fight in Boulder, but I hold it over a heart that increasingly quivers for our country. We are not acting like a very good beacon of democracy and freedom at the moment.
The BBC summary of the first day of the Falluja offensive paints a pretty grim picture. The 11 US soldiers killed yesterday (3 confirmed for Tuesday so far for a total of 14) have been widely covered in the media. The 30,000 to 50,000 estimated civilians left in Fallujah are currently without water, power, or the ability to leave their houses (what with the curfew, bullets, and explosions) with a limited supply of food.
What struck me in the BBC article was the number of insurgents thought to be in Fallujah currently: 3000. Despite Donald “Mr. Reliable” Rumsfeld’s assurance that:
There aren’t going to be large numbers of civilians killed and certainly not by U.S. forces.
the peril in which we have put the poorest (read: least able to evacuate) citizens of Fallujah in order to capture or kill absolutely no more than 1/10th their number is troubling. I have not seen civilian casualty reports yet, and given our early (and accomplished) objective of capturing the hospital and preventing civilian emergency vehicles from accessing it [sorry- can’t find that link at the moment], we may not. Of course, war is a very ugly beast, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that ratio is within certain formal theoretical parameters of “acceptable loss”. However, given (the NYT and rumor control via) relative path’s revelation that the Fallujah to Ramadi insurgent escape chute is unsecured, it seems unlikely that the number of insurgents killed or captured will exceed the number intentionally sacrificed by the insurgency for this PR event.
I wonder if Rumsfeld is as sanguine about how 50,000 poor Iraqi civilians without water, power, food watching US bombs and tanks crush their city will play in the Arab press. The BBC’s translation service provides a preview, which is neither surprising nor encouraging.
My name is Josh Heling. I work in technology, and blog here with incredible inconsistency about miscellaneous items of interest to me.
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