brainiac conspiracy

In Ecuador, Even Expats Get Free Health Care

Argh:

President Barack Obama has signed a secret order authorizing U.S. support for rebels seeking to depose Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his government, sources familiar with the matter said.

Obama's order, approved earlier this year and known as an intelligence "finding," broadly permits the CIA and other U.S. agencies to provide support that could help the rebels oust Assad.

I've got another idea: How about we sign an intelligence finding authorizing U.S. support for some fucking jobs in my city? I know this doesn't funnel any money into the hands of weapons manufacturers, but it might be a good idea to try alleviating a little human misery at home instead of spreading more misery on the taxpayer's dime across the Middle East. Jesus, when do they ever stop with this military shit.

---Vitelius

Why We Can Never Have Nice Things

Because persons who are smarter and a lot more serious than Professional Left Bloggers™ thought it would be an awesome idea to spread the blessings of democratic governance around the world while reminding us at home that we can no longer afford our massively bloated entitlement system because it would bury our children and grandchildren under a crushing burden of debt.

Meanwhile, people who will never get to see their children and grandchildren:

In human terms, 224,000 to 258,000 people have died directly from warfare, including 125,000 civilians in Iraq. Many more have died indirectly, from the loss of clean drinking water, healthcare, and nutrition. An additional 365,000 have been wounded and 7.8 million people---equal to the combined population of Connecticut and Kentucky---have been displaced.

---Vitelius

Bipartisan Consensus

If you've ever tried fighting insomnia by watching those one of those interminably dull, think-tank-sponsored, national-security panel discussions that show up on C-SPAN late at night and wondered, "Who the hell are the people in the audience who sit through this stuff?", here's your answer:

[T]he audience is filled with dark suits and military uniforms — Beltway Bandits (consultants, contractors, and anyone else grabbing for their private piece of the defense pie) and full-time soldiers, Marines, airmen, and sailors. In other words, people whose livelihoods depend on the war machine constantly turning in a forward direction. They aren’t there to determine whether drones are bad or COIN is dead or why veterans are committing suicide.They just want to know where the political winds are blowing, what the talking points are, and how to navigate the budget gauntlet; then they exchange a few business cards in hopes of gaining the access they all crave, all while feeling they are part of “the hive.”

That’s why the biggest stirring of excitement in the crowd didn’t come when World Bank President Robert Zoellick took the stage for a 45 minutes excursion that resembled nothing of the stated topic, “economics and security,” but when CNAS co-founder (and former senior Pentagon official) Michele Flournoy and other insiders were wheeled in to talk defense budget. Now the Beltway Bandits in the crowd suddenly awoke: to cut or not to cut, this was the question, and it affected them greatly [...]

There are only two schools of thought tolerated for debate in the CNAS vacuum---liberal interventionism and neoconservativism. It is not a matter of whether force will be used, but where to use it and under what guise. Even that debate seems largely taken for granted at these events. With the exception of tiny skirmishes between the centrists and neocons on Wednesday, all agreed that despite all the military and diplomatic blunders over the last decade, we should move full speed ahead on “readiness” and confronting China as the next great threat.

But only dirty stinking hippies would denigrate our military by shouting "War is good business!" and other vile obscenities.

Snark aside, one wonders what's more troubling here: The fact that our defense and foreign-policy establishments now seem to be fixed in permanent orbit around a global outreach strategy based on warmongering, or the fact that the people in charge of planning and deploying the warmongering outreach strategy are the same people who have been wrong about every fucking thing since the end of the Cold War. And to think some people worry that another 9/11 might happen.

---Vitelius

Transparency in Government

It's only truly important when it makes you look good:

Outsourcing the investigation to the Department of Justice instead is a cowardly ducking of responsibility---with tremendously dangerous potential. This is especially the case because under Obama and Holder, the DOJ---presumably to build up good will with the intelligence community---has taken to charging such leaks as violations of the draconian Espionage Act, a 1917 law intended for the prosecution of people who are aiding the enemy. Furthermore, the official DOJ position now seems to be that there is no reporter's privilege at all in such maters, and therefore no need to even consider the nature of the leak, how much if any damage it actually caused, what the intentions of the leaker were, and how much it served the public interest.

Strolling down memory lane, I seem to recall the Independent Counsel law that was passed in the wake of Watergate was intended to avoid the unavoidable conflict of interest that would ensue when an Attorney General was being asked to investigate his boss, particularly is the boss was the same guy who appointed him Attorney General. Now, it's an imperfect law, and it can be abused (see: Starr, Kenneth), but by and large, it's about the only way to maintain some semblance of judicial impartiality in such matters. I'm not so much worried that Eric Holder will go out of his way to cover up for his boss because he's corrupt as much as I fear he'll end up covering up inadvertently for his boss because he's, well, an incompetent who takes the advice of his worst lawyers to formulate administration policy, and who summons his worst lawyers to defend administration policy. But then, I'm just another cranky member of the Professional Left.

---Vitelius

First as Tragedy

Thinking back on the days of my youth, I can remember watching the "body counts" from Vietnam being posted on the TV every Thursday night. There were typically four columns: one for Americans, one for ARVN (South Vietnam) troops, one for the NLF (North Vietnam) and one for "Vietcong", which was basically anyone we killed over there who wasn't wearing a uniform. The last column was always wildly inflated over the first three, and the implication either way was that, besides the fact that we were perpetually winning the war, that no innocent civilians were being killed in all this. Of course, eventually news leaked out over American atrocities such as My Lai, where dozens of innocent civilians were being killed, and the public's mood soured on the war, and rather quickly. So what's different now? We've had ample evidence of atrocities for many years in our current wars, and outside a few lefty/libertarian bloggers and scolds, no one seems to give a shit anymore. Why is this? Is this kind of outrage a discontent of affluence that people can't afford to vent in hard times, or has our collective conscience grown coarse to these things? Or have we simply bought into our own bullshit that American is the Greatest Nation Ever that can Do No Wrong because entertaining the alternative would pose the kind of moral challenge our leaders would rather avoid? Don't know the answer here, but it sure seems like people don't seem to be terribly bothered anymore that our leaders are killing people all over the world with only the foggiest idea of who they're killing, and why, other than insisting that they're all "militants." Seems to me if our prevailing national ethos was prevalent back in the '70s, we'd still be fighting in Vietnam today.

---Vitelius

You Mean Liberals Don't Do it Too?

The tradition of respect for civil authority is so firmly embedded in the collective American consciousness, it rarely ever dawns on anyone to ponder the possibility of a military coup---mostly because, obviously, we've never had to endure one. However:

We are fighting a subset of a subset, Dominionist Christianity. It grew mostly at the end of the Vietnam War; it grew and grew and exploded in 1994 with the so-called Gingrich revolution, when we really saw the politics of polarization rear its ugly head. That Congress said that to be the right kind of American, you need to have these attributes, and if you don't, then you didn't deserve to be an American. And then after 9/11, it went on steroids. It went crazy [...]

What we are fighting at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation is nothing less than fundamentalist Christian para-church military corporate proselytizing complex.

It's a fanatical religiosity, in this case fundamentalist or Dominionist Christianity, mixed with actual weapons of mass destruction, mixed with a tortuous version of faux patriotism and unfettered access to weapon systems and further mixed with a dearth of restraint, oversight and supervision.

It leads to a national security threat that is metastasizing within our military. It's so huge, it's almost impossible to believe this could be happening.

I think this is a risk we've taken, but failed to acknowledge as a Republic, that relying on an all-voluntary fighting force to fight the nation's battles can have some dire and serious consequences. In universal conscription, after all, most draftees go off to do their duty but generally are counting down the days until they can return to civilian life. People who enlist because they actively want to fight may not have the same civic priorities. Throw in a dominant culture that fetishizes gun ownership and preaches a violent End of Days, and you've got the potential for . . . well, I think you can guess where I'm going here.

Put another way: I've heard more than one commentator in recent days---from both sides of the ideological divide---wondering out loud if the citizenry can ever reclaim genuine ownership of its government absent some form of armed rebellion. Don't know if that's true or not, but if it is, do you want the people who have the most guns in this country to be the ones leading the rebellion? It's scary shit, if you really think about it.

---Vitelius

Preemptive War We Can Believe In

Regardless how it's waged, it's still a violation of the UN charter and the Geneva Conventions:

The United States government only recently acknowledged developing cyberweapons, and it has never admitted using them. There have been reports of one-time attacks against personal computers used by members of Al Qaeda, and of contemplated attacks against the computers that run air defense systems, including during the NATO-led air attack on Libya last year. But Olympic Games was of an entirely different type and sophistication.

It appears to be the first time the United States has repeatedly used cyberweapons to cripple another country’s infrastructure, achieving, with computer code, what until then could be accomplished only by bombing a country or sending in agents to plant explosives.

Amazing, isn't it? Just imagine the reaction that would be elicited from our leaders if some other country engineered a similar attack on our infrastructure. At the very least there would be threats of retaliation, calls for sanctions, and shoe-pounding speeches in front of the Security Council. There might even be a drone strike or two thrown in for good measure. And to think we're not even doing this for our own national security, but for the sake of another country, which continues to show its gratitude in the oddest ways:

“We think there was a modification done by the Israelis,” one of the briefers told the president, “and we don’t know if we were part of that activity.”

Mr. Obama, according to officials in the room, asked a series of questions, fearful that the code could do damage outside the plant. The answers came back in hedged terms. Mr. Biden fumed. “It’s got to be the Israelis,” he said. “They went too far.”

Heaven forbid that anyone in our government should ever have informed the government of Israel that a preemptive military strike on Iran would automatically trigger a suspension of foreign aid and a call for UN sanctions. This would have cost zero taxpayer dollars, and as a special added bonus, it would be have been in accord with international law. But I guess those legal formalities only apply to the little countries, not to a global hegemon and its problem child in the Middle East.

On the other hand, it's good to know the Republic is otherwise in good health, with a thriving economy and ample jobs for all who want them. Otherwise, how could our leaders justify devoting precious resources to such a tangential endeavor? Oh, wait.

---Vitelius

The Banality of Drone Strikes

Feeling a lot safer these days knowing that our leaders are only targeting real militants, militants-in-training, militant-wannabes, or people engaging in militant-related program activities:

Probably the most disturbing of which is that one of the reasons why the Obama administration runs around claiming that the casualties of civilians are so low from their drone attacks, which everyone knows is false, is because they have redefined what a militant is. A militant in the eyes of the Obama administration formally means any male of fighting age, presumably 18 to 40, who is in a strike zone of a missile. So, if the U.S. shoots a missile or detonates a bomb by drone or aircraft and kills eight or a dozen or two dozen people without even knowing whom they have killed or anything about them, they will immediately label any male of a certain age a militant by virtue of their proximity to that scene.

What the New York Times article said, was that the rationale for this is that they believe that anybody who is even near a terrorist or any terrorist activity is "Probably up to no good." Ironically, that is, as Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News pointed out, the exact phrase that George Zimmerman used when describing Trayvon Martin to the 9-1-1 call, that he must be up to no good. The sort of suspicion, that even though we don’t know anything about somebody, the mere happenstance of where they are or what they’re doing entitles us not just to harbor a suspicion about them, but to kill them. And it is amazing that American media outlets continue to use the word "militant" to describe people [who] are killed by American drones without knowing their identity, even though we now know that the Obama administration uses that word in a incredibly deceitful and propagandistic way.

Well, it's not really all that amazing because, frankly, they just don't give a shit about who those people are on the wrong end of a Predator strike. And neither, outside of a few Unserious Persons like Glenn Greenwald and Ron Paul, do very many Americans. This is one reason of many why I wonder if we can no longer be considered a functioning liberal democracy anymore.

---Vitelius

Colonialism We Can Believe In

Riffing off the previous post, yet another reason why, in the realm of foreign/military policy, our leaders must be either neoliberal or neoconservative interventionists dedicated to upholding the primacy of Empire: Because, frankly, there's a lot of money riding on it:

The New Alliance was announced in conjunction with the G8 meeting last Friday. Under the scheme, some 45 corporations, including Monsanto, Syngenta, Yara International, Cargill, DuPont, and PepsiCo, have pledged a total of $3.5 billion in investment in Africa. The full list of corporations and commitments has just been released, and one of the most notable is Yara International's promise to build a $2 billion fertilizer plant in Africa. Syngenta pledged to build a $1 billion business in Africa over the next decade. These promises are not charity; they are business.

---Vitelius

Honoring Our War Dead

It's something to be mindful of in the midst of all the holiday barbecue and beer:

Biden, like Obama, said U.S. combat troops have returned home from Iraq, the conflict in Afghanistan is winding down and American commandos killed al-Qaida terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in May 2011.

"Those warriors sent a message to the world that if you harm America, we will follow you to the end of the earth," Biden said.

Meanwhile, why we fight:

A suspected NATO airstrike killed eight civilians---including six children---in eastern Afghanistan, a provincial spokesman said.

The airstrike took place Saturday night in Paktia province, said Rohullah Samoon, spokesman for the governor of Paktia. He said an entire family was killed in the strike.

Now I know what the standard rejoinder is, that The Enemy® uses these poor and unfortunate wretches as Human Shields™, and while collateral damage is always unfortunate, incidents like these are further proof that the Islamonazis hold no value for human life and we must redouble our efforts, etc., but I think it underscores the reason why so many people of my generation can't get too amped up over this particular holiday. Not because we don't care about honoring those who have fallen in battle on our behalf, but because too many of those who have fallen in our lifetime---in Iraq, in Afghanistan, and before them in Vietnam---died for no fucking reason whatsoever; because the leaders who lied to the nation and sent them off to their deaths have evaded all accountability for their actions; and because hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, from Haiphong to Fallujah to Kandahar, have been slaughtered over decades so one President or another could emerge victorious in some geopolitical dick-swinging contest. This sure is not the kind of change I voted for four years ago, but I guess in the realm of foreign policy, it scarcely matters who's President anymore. The hegemony of the Empire must be ever upheld, and never questioned. Only deeply unserious persons would deign to think otherwise.

---Vitelius

Not Rocket Science

As a rule, most people do not appreciate it when you bomb their villages and kill their civilian population, no matter how noble your stated objectives may be. Why is this concept so difficult for our leaders to grasp?

[U]ltimately, it was in the US interest to have a stable, democratic and prosperous Pakistan, Obama said, adding it was in the interest of Pakistan to work with the US to ensure it is not consumed by extremists.

Not that we'd ever have to worry about that here. Oh, wait.

---Vitelius

Conventional Wisdoms

There are many of them, of course, and one of the the most prized among the Village media is the Eternal Truth of Party Polarization. If conservatives favor tax cuts and de-regulation, the argument goes, liberals must favor tax hikes and increased regulation. If conservatives favor hawkish national-security policies, liberals must be more dovish on the subject. Conservatives oppose abortion under any circumstances, liberals favor abortion in all circumstances. You get the picture. It's been the gold standard for charting the ideological shifts along the political landscape for as long as I've been alive, perhaps longer.

Of course, people who live in the real world outside the Beltway understand that politics, like life itself, is rarely as simple as black-and-white arguments such as these, and that much of what happens in the political sphere is neither policy nor process but simply posturing. It's the inability to discern the differences between actual policy and mere posturing that has degraded our discourse and made much of our journalistic establishment irrelevant. Unfortunately, old habits die hard, and we're bound to be subjected for many years to come to more examples of simpleminded policy analysis, where conservatives who eagerly intend to return the country to a 19th-Century economy, and liberals who fret about income inequality in a 19th-Century economy without proposing anything substantive to remedy it, are portrayed as warring factions in a "clash of visions" instead of what they really are: Joint defenders of the failed and undemocratic economic model known informally as corporate capitalism.

---Vitelius

They Hate Us For Our Freedoms

Also too, for our criminal justice system that's the fairest in all the world:

The court heard how:

• Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
• Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall.
• Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
• Jameelah [Hameedi] was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.

The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.

Moazzam Begg, now working as a director for the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners said he was delighted with the verdict, but added: “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember those tried were all prosecuted after the war.

“Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”

In response to questions about the difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations, he added: “If President Bush was the President of extra-judicial torture then US President Barak Obama is the President of extra-judicial killing through drone strikes. Our work has only just begun.”

Good to know that we'll be able to marry whomever we want in the future. It's how we Americans set an example to the world as a champion of human rights.

---Vitelius

Amazing How They Do That

The best way to ensure a steady stream of terrorists to justify our Perpetual War on Terror is to, well, invent them:

The would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Yemen branch of Al Qaeda last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission, American and foreign officials said Tuesday.

In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the double agent left Yemen, traveling by way of the United Arab Emirates, and delivered both the innovative bomb designed for his air attack and critical information on the group’s leaders to the C.I.A., Saudi and other foreign intelligence agencies.

After spending weeks at the center of the terrorist network’s most dangerous affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the agent provided critical information that permitted the C.I.A. to direct the drone strike on Sunday that killed Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso, the group’s external operations director and a suspect in the bombing of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000.

Niiiiiiiiice.

You wonder if the geniuses in our intelligence community had ever considered the possibility of a double-cross. Not that our Friends in Freedom™ would ever contemplate this.

Also too, one wonders what the colleagues, friends and family members of Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso are doing tonight: Singing the praises of American Exceptionalism, or something rather less charitable?

Honestly. There is one simple thing our government could do, right now, that would cost no money and add no dollars to the deficit, that would virtually eliminate the threat of Islamic terrorist attacks on our shores forever. In fact, it would likely save us billions of dollars in money we wouldn't need to spend on our ever-growing security-industrial complex. So why in hell don't we do it?

---Vitelius

Golf Balls We Can Believe In

In the future, everyone will be famous surveilled for 15 minutes.

Naturally, the best way to pay for this is to start means-testing seniors for Medicare.

---Vitelius

Did Someone Give a Speech Last Night?

I remember a time when I actually got excited over them, and planned my dinners and evening-related program activities around them. Now, they come and go without much notice anymore. Why is this? Is it because I've become an irrational leftist malcontent, or is it simply because I'm weary of listening to eloquent defenses of policy initiatives that have sucked, like, forever?

Snark aside, I was never genuinely sold on Afghanistan as the "good war" since, to my definition, such a conflict needs to be waged for loftier reasons than simply the desire to kick Islamic ass---which, let's face it, was our leaders' prime motivator for many months, in fact years, after 9/11---and also, because such a war also needs to be winnable, i.e., against an identifiable enemy in uniform that can be vanquished. But there no uniforms in Afghanistan, and you can't dispatch an army to fight an idea (like global jihad), and because of this, the first reason---even if justifiable---did not absolve our policy professionals from pondering the second. And they never did ponder it, not even for a minute, even though anyone with the slightest knowledge of the Soviet experience there in the 1980s might have counseled an alternative approach to a full-scale invasion.

So now we will be sending them billions in money and munitions---and who knows, maybe "advisers"---through 2023 at least, while an army of permanently unemployed people at home go begging for jobs and mortgage relief. Someone tell me again why I shouldn't write in Rocky Anderson on my ballot next November.

---Vitelius

President Kravis

Lot of bandwidth devoted to this lately, much of it twaddle, but I think what's really important about it has been overlooked:

It's not worth moving heaven and Earth, spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person.

Mitt may be many things, but he's not a stupid man, so I don't quite buy Daniel Larison's argument that his conflating Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda betrays a reckless ignorance of Middle east politics; personally, I think he was just barking out all the usual neo-con dog whistles as a means of promoting his warmonger cred.

What I think we really get a glimpse of in the exchange cited above is not the decision-making processes of Romney the Foreign Policy Hawk, but the decision-making processes of Romney the Bain Capital guy---the executive money manager who measures nearly every social transaction in terms of efficiencies, costs-versus-benefits, and returns on investment: which is to say, applying the rationality of capital markets to formulating public policy. This is dangerous shit, for obvious reasons, but it doesn't mean Mitt is out of his league on foreign policy: it only means he's a man without a moral compass, and that should scare the bejeezus out of everyone.

---Vitelius

Same Old Shit, Basically

In the same old Steadfast & Resolute™ packaging:

Obama had a message to those, mostly Republicans, who question his timetable for withdrawal, arguing that it risks emboldening the Taliban and their al-Qaida and other extremist allies while demoralizing America's Afghan friends.

"Our goal is to destroy al Qaeda, and we are on a path to do exactly that. Afghans want to fully assert their sovereignty and build a lasting peace. That requires a clear timeline to wind down the war," he said.

But he also took aim at those, mostly Democrats but a growing number of conservatives, who no longer see a clear purpose to America's longest war and "will ask why we don't leave immediately."

"That answer is also clear: we must give Afghanistan the opportunity to stabilize. Otherwise, our gains could be lost, and al Qaeda could establish itself once more. And as Commander-in-Chief, I refuse to let that happen," the president said from behind a podium emblazoned with his official seal, several armored vehicles parked behind him.

If only he had substituted the words "people without jobs" for "Afghanistan", and "our corrupt financial system" for "Al Qaeda", then I'd say we'd have some change we can believe in. But since it didn't happen, it's just the same old shit, basically.

---Vitelius

Reaping The Peace Dividend

Only Marxists, anarchists and a few antisocial grumblers would express any alarm at the encroaching militarization of our leading public institutions because, well, nothing could be further from the truth:

The role of the Pentagon in funding drone technology on U.S. campuses is visible everywhere. The U.S. Army Research Laboratory funds micro-drone research at Georgia Tech. The Army has pledged to give three drones to Middle Tennessee State. The Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research and the Air Force Research Labs in Dayton Ohio fund the work of four professors at the University of Michigan, according to Dan Inman, chairman of the school’s Aerospace Engineering Department.

Many of the leaders in the field of domestic drones are military men. Mississippi State University is co-sponsoring a UAV conference later this month to discuss how unmanned systems can “provide solutions in agriculture, coastal environments, and disaster response to name but a few.” The keynote speaker will be U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.

Among the sponsors of the conference are major defense contractors, including Northrop Grumman, Aurora Flight Sciences and Stark Aerospace, a Mississippi-based subsidiary of Israeli Aerospace Industries, one of the world’s leading drone manufacturers, which touts its products as useful for “urban warfare.”

I've known young people who enrolled in college with the dream of becoming a surgeon, a minister, an attorney, a marine biologist or a professional athlete, but I've never known one who aspired to be a drone operator. But I guess an empire requires a civilian army as well as one that wears a uniform.

Snark aside, as mentioned earlier, always remember that somebody, somewhere, is making a boatload of money off this. Otherwise it wouldn't be happening.

At least we know we're free.

---Vitelius

Admitting The Obvious

Good to see that our leaders are discarding the fiction that the Global War on Terror is a conflict that can ever, or will ever, be concluded:

Last weekend, a U.S. drone strike killed four suspected militants in Pakistan's North Waziristan tribal region, despite the recent demand by a Pakistani parliamentary committee that such operations end.

"I'm here today because President Obama has instructed us to be more open with the American people about these efforts," Brennan said in a speech at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a Washington think tank.

"These targeted strikes are legal," he said, citing legal opinions from the administration, the U.S. Constitution and the Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

"As a matter of international law, the United States is in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces, in response to the 9/11 attacks, and we may also use force consistent with our inherent right of national self-defense," Brennan said.

So, even after we have incinerated Al Qaeda and decimated the Taliban, there will still be those pesky "associated forces" to wipe out, and their extermination will enjoy the full legal backing of our government. Meanwhile, the potholes continue to multiply on Wilshire Boulevard as the empire slithers into irreversible decay. Good times!

---Vitelius