brainiac conspiracy

Wouldn't It Be Nice

If we could get through a single news cycle without threatening war on some crappy little nation-state.

And no, this is not to minimize the "danger" posed by a government like North Korea's, which is really more of a cult than a government, as the term is conventionally understood. And cults can and do engage in erratic and, sometimes, suicidal behavior. On the other hand, it's hard to see what constructive good this kind of "we're-on-the-verge-of-war" talk does to public attitudes, even if true in a narrow sense, other than to antagonize the North Koreans and frighten our own people. Then again, the kind of national security state our leaders are continuing to create for us requires a frightened, submissive populace that's willing to sacrifice its liberties for the protection that only our wise leaders can provide, so there is an obvious utility to be had---by our leaders and their backers in the security industry---from invoking a steady stream of imminent existential threats. There's just no utility to be had for those of rest of us who foot the bill.

---Vitelius

Wouldn't Happen Today

Put it this way: When was the last time a political scandal involving Republicans in Washington elicited more than a disinterested shrug from the members of the Beltway media? Note I said "political", not "sex" scandals---as in, using the mechanism of government to harass your political opponents---so wide stances and Appalachian Trails don't count. I mean, the years 2001-2009 were years of epic, serial lawbreaking of a scale that would have toppled most other Western governments and landed half the cabinet ministers in prison. But how many hard-hiting exposes were commissioned by the Gregorys and Blitzers and Kellers and Hiatts? Yes, I know there was some good individual reporting from people like Dana Priest, Charlie Savage, the folks at ProPublica and the like. But for every one of them, there were at least a dozen Judi Millers, Sue Schmitts, Chris Cilizzas and Mark Halperins---not to mention the worst offenders of the Clinton era like Jeff Gerth and James Stewart---who stood at the ready to blast the GOP bullshit into millions of e-mail inboxes via the wire services, and no shortage of Broders and Brookses and Cohens in the commentariat to remind us that no matter how much the Bush administration resembled an organized crime family, Democrats were equally corrupt.

Then again, on a certain level, maybe they had some valid points after all.

---Vitelius

Lessons Learned

Looking back, one of the big reasons I preferred Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton was on the matter of foreign policy. Specifically, my fear was that Clinton, as our first female President, would feel the need to impress the DC old-boy policy establishment with her "toughness" on scary brown people who Hate Us For Our Freedoms by dispatching the military on all sorts of reckless adventures and ultimately embracing many of the previous administration's most regressive counter-terror policies. Obama, my reasoning went, by virtue of his cross-cultural identity would be a more likely individual to challenge the sclerotic culture of American Exceptionalism that has dominated our policy discussions since the end of the Cold War, and his experience as a professor of constitutional law would give him the cover he would need to start to unravel the ugliest extrajudicial elements of Bush counter-terror policy. In retrospect, I sure nailed that one.

---Vitelius

Good Times Are Forever

It's all been flushed down the memory hole now, but as we all prepare for our next Middle Eastern war, it's good to look back on the old days in 2003 when we only had Iraq to worry about because our leaders in Washington were doing such an awesome job at identifying threats from overseas and mastering the finer nuances of foreign affairs:

The cover letter described how the Swiss ambassador had come into possession of the document; who his Iranian interlocutor was---a senior foreign ministry official . . . And he lays out that the senior Iranian foreign ministry official told him that this had been seen and discussed in multiple meetings with all of the major power centers in Iran---including the Supreme Leader, including the president at the time, President [Mohammad] Khatami---and that it was a fully authorized document from the Iranian government.

The content of the document, essentially, [was] an agenda for a diplomatic process to resolve all of the outstanding bilateral differences between the United States and Iran. On the Iranian side, they acknowledged that they would need to be prepared to deal with our concerns about their WMD activities, their links to terrorist groups like Hezbollah and Hamas, and they said in there that they would be prepared to eliminate military support for these organizations and to work to turn Hezbollah, for example, into a purely political and social organization in Lebanon. They recognized that this would be something they would need to do as part of a rapprochement.

What was your reaction?

I thought it was an extraordinary proposal, basically on comparable scale to the kinds of representations from [Chinese Prime Minister] Zhou Enlai that were passed through Pakistan in 1971 that paved the way for [then-Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs Henry] Kissinger's secret trip to Beijing and then the Nixon trip to China. I thought they were proposing something on that scale of historic and strategic importance . . .

Was that the time to make a deal?

From an American perspective it was absolutely the time to try and make a deal. We were at the height of our apparent power in the region. Iran was not yet spinning centrifuges, not yet enriching uranium. The president of Iran was not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but Mohammad Khatami. Iraq had not yet fallen apart. And early cooperation with Iran, I think, might have been very helpful in forestalling the worst of what we've seen in Iraq over the past four years.

Why didn't the U.S.?

Because important power centers in the administration---the vice president, the secretary of defense, and I think even in the end the president himself---were opposed to this kind of diplomatic effort with Iran.

---Vitelius

War Crimes We Can Believe In

I guess it stand to reason, in our Orwellian day and age, that it is an unpardonable offense for ex-government officials to disclose that their former employers no longer feel compelled to obey their own laws:

The Justice Department on Monday charged a former CIA officer with repeatedly leaking classified information, including the identities of agency operatives involved in the capture and interrogation of alleged terrorists.

The case against John Kiriakou, who also served as a senior Senate aide, extends the Obama administration’s crackdown on disclosures of national security secrets. Kiriakou, 47, is the sixth target of a leaks-related prosecution since President Obama took office, exceeding the total number of comparable prosecutions under all previous administrations combined, legal experts said.

Kiriakou, who was among the first to go public with details about the CIA’s use of water-boarding and other harsh interrogation measures, was charged with disclosing classified information to reporters and lying to the agency about the origin of other sensitive material he published in a book. He faces up to 30 years in prison if convicted.

Liberal Democratic administration, my ass. Greenwald's next column just wrote itself.

---Vitelius

Gifts That Keep on Giving

Curios from the Contra wars:

Crime groups in cahoots with venal army officers are looting military arsenals in Central America, giving them powerful weapons that allow them to outgun police and challenge the region's regular armies.

The weapons run the gamut from assault rifles to anti-tank missiles, some of which the U.S. supplied during regional conflicts more than two decades ago. The slippage from military armories occurs regularly.

---Vitelius

Our Liberal Media

It's easy to forget now, but it's remarkable how many TV network newscasts during the period 2002-2006 were larded full of these ex-military guys who were tapped for "analysis" during the run-up to the Iraq war and many months thereafter. Nobody at any of the networks apparently thought there was anything peculiar about this arrangement, i.e., that relying on people who had spent their entire careers in service to a particular system of governance to provide impartial and unbiased commentary on the workings of that same system might not be the wisest approach when you could call on, say, a member of Congress who sat on one of the Armed Service committees, or a professor of military history, or a think tank guy from Brookings to provide the same analysis. But then again, this was back in the day when our network anchors were cheering for men in flight suits swaggering across the decks of aircraft carriers, and applauding the dramatic rescue of captured soldiers who, well, hadn't been captured at all, and celebrating the heroism of gallant men who gave their lives mounting fierce assaults on the Taliban when they'd been shot by their own men, so I guess you could say they got the exact kind of expert analysis they wanted, and our government was all too happy to make sure they got it in spades. Too bad that most of it was intended to mislead their audiences, and none of them seemed to care about it. Good times!

---Vitelius

Glad That We're Congratulating Ourselves

For promoting democratic institutions inside of Iraq:

[R]ania and two other girls visited a house in Baghdad’s Al-Jihad district, where girls as young as 16 were held to cater exclusively to the U.S. military. The brothel’s owner told Rania that an Iraqi interpreter employed by the Americans served as the go-between, transporting girls to and from the U.S. airport base.

Rania’s co-workers covertly took photos of the captive teenagers with their mobile phones, but were caught. "One girl went crazy," Rania recalls. "She accused us of spying. I don’t know how we escaped," she exclaims. "We had to run away---barefoot!"

Before the Gulf War in 1991, Iraq enjoyed the highest female literacy rate across the Middle East, and more Iraqi women were employed in skilled professions, like medicine and education, than in any other country in the region [...]

"Many factors combined to promote the rise of sex trafficking and prostitution in the area," a Norwegian Church Aid report said last year.

"The US-led war and the chaos it has generated; the growing insecurity and lawlessness; corruption of authorities; the upsurge in religious extremism; economic hardship; marriage pressures; gender based violence and recurrent discrimination suffered by women; kidnappings of girls and women; the impunity of perpetrators of crimes, especially those against women; and the development of new technologies associated with the globalisation of the sex industry."

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government has done little to combat the issue. "This is a phenomenon that wasn’t prevalent in 2003," says HRW researcher, Samer Muscati.

Needless to say, none of our leaders will be held accountable for this. They don't inhabit the same nation of laws the rest of us do.

---Vitelius

This Just In

Obama declares war on ancient pagan fertility symbols.

Strange how it isn't being reported that way, isn't it.

And as right on cue, our brave leaders respond by doing what they invariably do when the Legion of Butthurt makes shit up about them: Cave.

Also too, war criminals.

---Vitelius

Our New Friends in Freedom

They do the darnedest things.

Also too, George Aiken.

---Vitelius

Kids Shoot the Darnedest Things

This sure ought to energize the base:

President Barack Obama has decided to waive almost all the legally mandated penalties for countries that use child soldiers and provide those countries U.S. military assistance, just like he did last year.

The White House is expected to soon announce its decision to issue a series of waivers for the Child Soldiers Protection Act, a 2008 law that is meant to stop the United States from giving military aid to countries that recruit soldiers under the age of 15 and use them to fight wars. The administration has laid out a range of justifications for waiving penalties on Yemen, South Sudan, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all of which amount to a gutting of the law for the second year in a row.

Last year, the White House didn't even tell Congress or the NGO community when it decided to do away with the Child Soldiers Prevention Act penalties. Most had to read about it first on The Cable. Aid workers, human rights activists, and even congressional offices were shocked that the administration had gutted the law without consulting them.

The White House argued at the time that because the law was new, the offending countries didn't have time to comply. As part of their damage control effort, they put National Security Council Senior Director Samantha Power on a private conference call with NGO workers (that we eavesdropped on) to explain that these waivers would only be for one year---but that in the second year, the administration was going to enforce the law in full.

"Our judgment was to brand them, name them, shame them, and then try to leverage assistance in a fashion to make this work," Power said at the time. "Our judgment is we'll work from inside the tent."

Apparently that plan was scuttled, because the administration has decided to waive almost all the penalties again, despite the fact that little progress has been made in any of the offender countries.

Since we are already well on our way to resembling countries like Yemen, here's a suggestion: Lower the Army recruitment age to 12, and waive the high-school graduation requirement. Heck, if my kid can bring down squirrels with his pellet gun, he sure as hell can learn to smoke Arab ass with an AR-15. Plus, mom and dad would appreciate the extra income since we got laid off our jobs, had our house foreclosed, etc. Who says we can't have full employment in this country? So cut my taxes already, let's get 'er done.

---Vitelius

Last Thing I Heard

American citizens possessed certain rights of due process under the Constitution, which generally included stuff like a trial by jury, no detention without charge, no bills of attainder, the right of a jury trial, cross-examination, etc. But I guess we don't abide by those legal norms anymore. Good to know, America fuck yeah!

---Vitelius

Mainstreaming the Crazy

Can occur in many ways. One we see all the time involves our media watchdogs taking seriously the rantings of paranoids and using their unhinged talking points as the groundwork for initiating a policy discussion in the interest of Fairness & Balance ("Is Social Security Really a Ponzi Scheme?", etc.). Another, more insidious, way this happens is when intelligent and sensible people in government who are smart enough to know better decide for purely political reasons to co-opt the crazy people's most radical beliefs for purposes of advancing their short-term policy cred and winning the favor of Serious People Everywhere. In so doing, they end up applying a veneer of bipartisanship to actions that would have been deemed needlessly divisive and extremist---and, in fact, blatantly criminal---a generation ago. You'd like to think that our current leaders in Washington are thoughtful and conscientious enough to avoid that political and ethical trap, but sadly, you would be wrong.

---Vitelius

Nobody Could Have Possibly Predicted

That our prison-industrial complex would make an awesome proving grounds for torture:

They have beaten inmates for asking for medical treatment, for the nature of their alleged offenses, and for the color of their skin. They have beaten inmates in wheelchairs. They have beaten an inmate, paraded him naked down a jail module, and placed him in a cell to be sexually assaulted. Many attacks are unprovoked. Nearly all go unpunished: these acts of violence are covered up by a department that refuses to acknowledge the pervasiveness of deputy violence in the jail system. Deputies act with such impunity that in the past year even civilians have begun coming forward with eyewitness accounts of deputies beating non-resisting inmates in the jails [...]

Deputy violence against inmates is routine in the Los Angeles County jails. Deputies slam inmates' heads into walls and windows. They push inmates to the ground and then begin kicking them with boot-clad feet. They shoot unresisting inmates with Tasers. They use other inmates to carry out gruesome attacks on their behalf: In one case, inmates sexually assaulted another inmate with a broomstick. In another instance, other inmates simultaneously raped an inmate and held his head in a flushing toilet. All with the apparent cooperation of LASD employees. This year alone, inmates suffered a shocking litany of severe injuries at the hands of deputies, including a fractured jaw, a broken collarbone, eye wounds so severe that they required surgery, broken blood vessels, and long-lasting dizzy spells.

(Cue cheering members of GOP debate audience Death Penalty fuck yeah!)

Deputies slammed Mr. III's head into a cement wall, leaving him with a concussion and a gash that took 35 stitches to close. They punched his face and head, and kicked his ribs. They aimed pepper spray into his eyes before shooting Taser probes into his back. Four witnesses watched the whole assault.

The confrontation began because deputies thought Mr. III had called them "gay." When Mr. III repeatedly denied the accusation, a deputy yelled to the row of pro per inmates---who serve as their own legal representatives---"Y'all pro pers think you can get away with anything. We the 3000 boys,"---a reference to the gang-like group of deputies in Men's Central Jail. "That shit ends now!" the deputy continued, as Mr. III stood one foot away from a cement wall. Suddenly, the deputy grabbed Mr. III's head, slamming his face into the wall. Blood poured down, pooling on the ground. Mr. III passed out.

When Mr. III regained consciousness, one deputy was sitting on his back, punching his face and head. Another was kicking Mr. III's ribs. Although Mr. III was motionless, the deputies yelled, "Stop resisting." Mr. III pleaded with them to stop. A deputy shot him with pepper spray. Another sunk three Taser probes into his flesh.

Two of the deputies stood roughly 6 feet tall, and weighed about 200 pounds. The custody assistant was slightly shorter, and weighed about 180 pounds. Mr. III, meanwhile, was 5 feet 7 inches and weighed just 135 pounds. A sergeant accused him of assaulting the deputies, but, as the ambulance technician on the scene pointed out, the deputies showed no signs of injury.

Mr. III spent two days in the hospital and four days in the jail's medical unit. The deep cut in his forehead took 35 stitches to close. After returning to his row, another deputy threatened him, saying: "The ACLU ain't going to be watching me forever."

Well, kids, what should we do? Hold someone accountable besides the usual low-hanging fruit, or just keep looking forward, never back?

If you think there's absolutely no correlation between stuff like this and what went on at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, guess again. It's why torture---or, most accurately, the inflicting of state-sponsored terror---is something that can never be enabled or overlooked for any reason or at any time. That's not to say prisoner abuse has never occurred in jails before the last decade's war crimes occurred, and never would again had they been fully prosecuted. But when the most powerful and omnipotent members of our ruling elites give a thumbs-up to, or turn a blind eye away from, the premeditated brutalization of society's powerless, it sends a clear signal to every proconsul in every province of the empire that this sort of behavior at least passes some acceptable threshold of legality, and hence of public morality. And once that happens, before you know it, the moral cancer metastasizes and infects every organism in the body politic, and abuses that once were piecemeal and scattershot become institutionalized within the everyday conduct of our businesses and government. If we were to be truthful to ourselves, this process has been slowly unfolding, like the abuses in the L.A. County Jail, for many years. Think I'm overstating?

Okay, ask yourself this: Can you think of any existing social network---beyond prisons or detention centers---where routine celebrations of suffering and humiliation have created a culture that's driven and defined by a mass-psychological impulse to inflict pain and revenge upon unknown others? Have you listened to talk radio, or watched any debates lately?

Our leaders once understood the interconnectedness of these things: Why don't they anymore?

---Vitelius

Also Too, Deficit Reduction

In the future, everyone will be famous a terror suspect for 15 minutes. Or longer:

The database now has about 420,000 names, including about 8,000 Americans, according to the statistics released in connection with the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. About 16,000 people, including about 500 Americans, are barred from flying.

---Vitelius

Awesomeness Personified

We never seem to be able to figure out what eventually happens when you give guns and money to a gang of religious nuts, do we?

A quarter-century ago, the Haqqani fighters were not the targets of C.I.A. missiles. They were the ones shooting C.I.A.-supplied missiles, the shoulder-fired Stingers that would devastate Soviet air power over Afghanistan.

Jalaluddin Haqqani was in temporary alliance with the United States against its greater adversary, the Soviet Union, just as his network today is allied with a Pakistan that sees Afghanistan as a critical buffer against its greater adversary, India. His clan’s ruthlessness and fervent Islam were seen then as marks of courage and faith on the part of men Ronald Reagan called freedom fighters.

Representative Charlie Wilson, the late Texas Democrat who made the mujahedeen his cause, called the elder Mr. Haqqani “goodness personified” [...]

For Americans who worked with them in the 1980s, the fact that the Haqqanis are now fighting their former American allies is no shock. The Russians were the foreign occupiers before; now the Americans are.

“The Haqqanis have always been the warlords of that part of the country,” said Mr. Sageman, the former C.I.A. officer. “They always will be.”

And why not? Its their turf, not ours. If our President wants to pick up 10 easy points in the opinion polls, he'd announce we're bugging out of Afghanistan tomorrow.

---Vitelius

Pretty Simple to Figure Out

Next year's likeliest outcomes, given the last three election cycles: Republicans regain the Senate, Democrats the House, and all hail Perry-Romney, Perry-Christie, Perry-Bachmann et al. It's pretty axiomatic: in shitty economic times, incumbents lose, and in good economic times, they generally don't. Perhaps our current incumbents would consider doing something about this if they want to hold onto their jobs.

Alternatively, our incumbent chief executive might consider starting another war and getting measured for a flight suit. It worked pretty well for the last guy who tried it.

---Vitelius

The Legacy of 9/11

Part 5: "You're either with us or you're with the terrorists", which was originally intended for foreign consumption, was quickly adopted by GOP political operatives as a debating point to defend not only neoconservative foreign policy goals, but any fucking agenda item that Republicans wanted to push. "You're either with us or you're with the enemy" has been a constant refrain from the party and its media echo chamber since then, and it has largely been the rhetorical device that has driven right-wing hate speech and smear campaigns since 9/11. They employed it in the wake of the attacks, and they did it in 2004, and they did it in 2008, and and you know what? They're still doing it now.

People like Dana Milbank and Maureen Dowd may look at our political leaders in Washington and see nothing more profound than a junior high-school food fight---but the fact is, one political party deliberately took advantage of deaths of 3,000 people on the most tragic day in the history of the Republic to contrive a political wedge issue; to game elections by delegitimizing its political opponents. The other political party, whatever its shortcomings, didn't resort to these amoral tactics. It's really as simple as that. And the only thing more maddening that reading endless "Republicans and Democrats, they're really all alike" op-ed columns over the last ten years has been the sight of our current executive wasting his time since 2009 trying to reach consensus with these sociopathic creeps.

---Vitelius

The Legacy of 9/11

Part 4: Because we can never get enough of putting a boot in some poor people's ass.

One thing I do know: If 9/11 had happened in any other Western democracy, this wretched and insulting anniversary scene would never have taken place. Because the attacks of 9/11 would have spurred any other parliamentary body to demand immediate investigations, and when it became clear that the chief executive and his minions had been asleep at their posts and then lied about the attacks in much the same way the Bush people did, they would have been subjected to a no-confidence vote, forced to call new elections, and driven from office by outraged voters. Don't believe me? It's already happened.

Maybe this is bad form to express today---you tell me---but shame on Obama for allowing himself to be seen in the same area code as that murderous son of a bitch, let alone at the site of his single greatest policy fuckup. The man belongs in prison for war crimes, not on a podium where 3,000 people died needlessly so he and his neocon buddies could squander the nation's blood and treasure on a trillion-dollar experiment in global social engineering that cost 100,000 lives. Short of incarceration, the man deserves to be heckled and hounded for the rest of his days, and treated with the same flippant arrogance he treated the nation for the first six years of his Presidency. It will be decades, if ever, before we can wash the toxic stain of Bushism completely out of our political fabric, and making bipartisan gestures of recognition towards a man who elevated the scapegoating and demonization of his political opponents into an art form only delays the collective healing that needs to take place---and hasn't even really begun yet---before we can truly learn the lessons of the awful day and start to construct policy solutions that ensure it never happens again.

---Vitelius

The Legacy of 9/11

There have been many legacies, to be sure, but one has been our media establishment's single-minded ability to profess astonished ignorance as a means of excusing the incompetence of our leaders in the days that preceded the attacks:

The nation perceived itself to be at peace, unchallenged as the world’s only superpower. There were, to be sure, bad guys lurking here and there. There were random fanatics and Unabomber types. Pennsylvania Avenue had been closed in front of the White House to prevent truck bombs like the one that hit the federal building in Oklahoma City.

At the airport, travelers were asked: Did you pack your bags yourself? Has your bag been in your possession at all times?

X-ray machines at the security checkpoint were calibrated to detect a gun or large knife. A computer program flagged suspicious travelers, and their checked baggage would get extra screening. The bags wouldn’t be loaded onto the plane until the travelers had boarded the flight. The system assumed that no one would blow up a plane while flying on it.

There was a template for terror, a paradigm for how an attack would unfold. An airline hijacker would want to divert the plane to some unintended destination. Flight attendants were trained to discourage passengers from attempting heroic acts in a hijacking.

America was good at preparing for the imaginable [...]

Rumsfeld the reformer warned that new threats might be different from the old ones. They “arise from multiple sources, most of which are difficult to anticipate, and many of which are impossible even to know today.”

Jesus, where to fucking begin:

The failure was not one of imagination but rather of incentives. It turns out that many individuals, panels, and agencies had predicted an attack uncannily similar to what happened on Sept. 11, 2001. The problem was that nobody in a position of power felt compelled to do anything about it.

As early as 1995, Abdul Hakim Murad told Philippine authorities that he and Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, had planned to fly an airplane into CIA headquarters. This wasn't dismissed as a crazy idea. The year before, a group of Algerians actually had hijacked a plane in France with the intention of crashing it into the Eiffel Tower.

In September 1998, a U.S. consulate in East Asia was warned about an impending al-Qaida plot to fly an explosives-laden airplane into an American city.

Around the same time, Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief, conducted an exercise in which terrorists commandeered a Learjet, loaded it with bombs, and flew it into a target in Washington, D.C. Clarke asked Pentagon officials what they could do to stop such a threat. They answered they could scramble jet fighters, but they would need authority from the president to shoot the plane down. The exercise went no further.

On Dec. 4, 1998, the President's Daily Brief by the CIA warned that "bin Laden and his allies are preparing for an attack in the US, including an aircraft hijacking" to compel the freeing of those responsible and imprisoned for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

The North American Aerospace Defense command also conducted an exercise to counter a terrorist attack involving smashing an airplane into a building (though the scenario assumed the plane would be coming from overseas).

Quite independently, in August 1999, the Federal Aviation Administration's intelligence branch warned of a possible "suicide hijacking operation" by Osama Bin Laden.

One of these days, when the history of our era is definitively written, one of the most pathetic narratives that will emerge from the events we've witnessed in our time will be of the grossly negligent dereliction of duty evidenced by both our Washington policy elites and by the lazy and cynical media apparatus charged with reporting their activities, and fact-checking their pronouncements, in a society dependent on the uncensored flow of reliable information. We need another 9/11 Commission, and badly.

---Vitelius