If Scott Shane’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times is accurate, the United States could very well be in for the biggest political scandal since Iran-Contra…

“The Central Intelligence Agency withheld information about a secret counterterrorism program from Congress for eight years on direct orders from former Vice President Dick Cheney, the agency’s director, Leon E. Panetta, has told the Senate and House intelligence committees, two people with direct knowledge of the matter said Saturday.

The report that Mr. Cheney was behind the decision to conceal the still-unidentified program from Congress deepened the mystery surrounding it, suggesting that the Bush administration had put a high priority on the program and its secrecy.

Mr. Panetta, who ended the program when he first learned of its existence from subordinates on June 23, briefed the two intelligence committees about it in separate closed sessions the next day.

Efforts to reach Mr. Cheney through relatives and associates were unsuccessful.”

post linesJuly 12, 2009

Gary Younge’s contribution last Sunday over at Comment Is Free was exemplary. I’ll provide an excerpt, but I urge everyone to read it in its entirety…

“Every government assumes deeds and misdeeds of the past,” writes Hannah Arendt in Eichmann and the Holocaust. “It means hardly more, generally speaking, than that every generation, by virtue of being born into a historical continuum, is burdened by the sins of the fathers as it is blessed with the deeds of the ancestors.”

For Barack Obama this cuts both ways. Talented as he is, he looks much more so when compared with the man who preceded him. Just by showing up and stringing a few coherent sentences together, he embodies an improvement. To earn acclaim in these early months, he hasn’t had to do anything good. He merely had to announce that he would stop doing things that were bad.

On the other hand, he has inherited the scarred landscape of his predecessor’s tenure. Bush’s wars, banks, car companies, secret prisons and untried prisoners are now his. As the candidate he may have promised change, but as the president he must also simulate some sense of continuity. Soaring ­rhetoric, however hopeful about the future, cannot erase the past, which has a habit of remaining with us.”

post linesMay 26, 2009 Leave a Comment

The typical image of a dangerous man is often that of a serial killer, an assassin, and so forth – perhaps one that is historically notorious. Were I to say to you that one was recently interviewed on CNN you might think such an assertion a little much given the afore mentioned company. But the truth of the matter is that former Vice President Dick Cheney is a dangerous man.

A patient, calculating, equivocal, imperialist – to him, and other likeminded ideologues, the attacks of September 11th represented more opportunity than tragedy. In fact, the occurrence of such an attack was outlined in PNAC literature as being one of the quintessential components required to significantly alter post Cold War US foreign policy (and please, I do not say that to, in any way, infer conspiracy). In short, September 11th paved the way for the implementation of an imperial American doctrine that would open the door to the exploitation of crucial natural resources in the Middle East and Central Asia.

All that was required was a central US military footprint in the region.

Iraq was chosen to play host.

One only need review Cheney’s position on executive powers to realize that he is an autocrat in sheep’s clothing. He is also a cunning revisionist, one that will admit mistake in passing only as a device with which to bolster some other agenda. We are, after all, talking about a man that, as Secretary of Defense, agreed with General Colin Powell at the end of the Gulf War that occupying an Arab country (that being Iraq) would be a disaster.

In the end, Cheney ran out of time and did not get the prize that he was ultimately after – Iran, centralized and resource rich. His belief that Iraq provided the best opportunity for US military permanence in the region was driven by the necessity of time versus political capital. After Bush’s win in 2004 perhaps Cheney knew that the war would ultimately demolish Bush’s Presidency. Thus, running the administration into the ground in favour of creating a situation in Iraq that the next administration would not be able to simply disengage from certainly isn’t a concept that should be dismissed. Accomplishing that would mean an extension of America’s presence in the country and perhaps even more room to maneuver with regards to provoking the Iranians through not only occupational proximity, but also using the Israelis to amplify threats regarding Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

In the afore mention interview with CNN, Cheney said the following…

“I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we’ve accomplished nearly everything we set out to do.”

In response to Cheney’s assertion, Professor Juan Cole wrote the following

“What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney’s war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney’s war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da’wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity.

$32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can’t even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government’s bureaucracy and infighting have made it difficult to attract investors.

The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.
Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy– given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran’s influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting “al-Qaeda” in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens’ lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.”

post linesMarch 17, 2009 11 Comments

Sy Hersh made some impromptu comments during the recent ‘Great Conversations’ event held at the University of Minnesota that have raised some eyebrows. To be honest, given the ghost programs instituted by Rumsfeld when he was at Defense, Hersh’s claim that Cheney’s office was running a ghost program doesn’t surprise me in the least. The only question is – will he, like Nixon, get nailed for it? Now that he’s out of office will the American people care? Or will action be taken if incriminating evidence comes to light?

From the Minneapolis Post

“At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

post linesMarch 12, 2009 6 Comments

It’s a good day for information, unless you’re spending it running around trying to take advantage of Boxing Day sales. To be honest, I’m not sure if the prices today are going to be all that different than they will be two months from now the way things are going.

Anyway, I want to start with an excellent piece penned by Scott Horton for Harper’s entitled Justice after Bush: Prosecuting an outlaw administration. Horton initial assertion is absolutely on the money…

“Americans may wish to avoid what is necessary. We may believe that concerns about presidential lawbreaking are naive. That all presidents commit crimes. We may pretend that George W. Bush and his senior officers could not have committed crimes significantly worse than those of their predecessors. We may fear what it would mean to acknowledge such crimes, much less to punish them. But avoiding this task, simply “moving on,” is not possible.”

I highly recommend reading the entire piece as I feel it an important one. Historian Andy Worthington further delves into the subject by examining The Ten Lies Of Dick Cheney.

Lastly, retired US Naval Commander Jeff Huber’s piece The Tailor Of Mumbai is also a vital read in my opinion. Huber begins…

“My December 10 article “Our Man in Bananastan” discussed how the hasty conclusion that Pakistani militants were behind the terror attack in India sounded like the bogus intelligence described in satiric espionage novels by Graham Greene and John le Carre. The New York Times, following the journalistic standard it established when it helped Dick Cheney sell the Iraq invasion, reported the “facts” of the Mumbai affair as deduced from double secret hearsay.

Recyclable Sources

The Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the Indian attack, according to an unnamed State Department official who was rephrasing what unnamed American and Pakistani authorities had told him; but, unnamed American Embassy officials wouldn’t verify the story for the unnamed State official, nor would unnamed Pakistani officials in Islamabad.

NYT’s unnamed source at State also said that his/her/its unnamed sources said that unnamed Pakistani authorities, under pressure from unnamed sources in India, had arrested Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, a member of Lashkar. (Don’t get the two confused now. “Lakhvi” is they guy; “Lashkar” is the thing.) NYT reported that Lakhvi (the guy) reportedly “masterminded the attacks,” but didn’t make clear which unnamed sources had leveled that allegation.

An anonymous senior Pakistani official apparently confirmed that Lakhvi had been arrested along with a bunch of other guys who belonged to Lashkar the thing, but the official “later backed away from the assertion.”

Another NYT article reported that unnamed American counterterrorism officials in Washington “wanted to see proof that Mr. Lakhvi was actually in custody,” but apparently zero officials, named or unnamed, American or Indian or Pakistani, gave a dog’s last lunch about seeing proof that Lakhvi the guy or Lashkar the thing actually had anything to do with the Mumbai attacks.

The Washington Post took the Mumbai tale to the next level of incredibility when it published a piece by former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that purported to be expert opinion but read like the beginning of Clarke’s next bad spy thriller. Clarke essentially tells us that in order to understand what’s really happening in South Asia right now, we have to imagine that the shake and bake scenario he’s about to present is true. By the end of the article, the Mumbai incident, like all terror acts, leads to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden is giving orders to a couple of Taliban characters and a guy from Lashkar the thing and a Pakistani intelligence dude on how they need to get cocked and loaded to defile with the new American president’s head.

It took the BBC to report that all of the allegations against Lashkar stemmed from interrogations by the Mumbai police of the surviving member of the terror group, who might not have been a whole lot less dead than his nine former buddies when they shot truth serum into him.”

Read the rest, it gets better.

post linesDecember 26, 2008 4 Comments