A Year That Did Truly Suck

2014 sucked. That's pretty much the consensus. Here's an (incomplete) list why, in no particular order:

> Russia attempted to host the Winter Olympics in Sochi and dark comedy ensued... 

> ...Including Russia's re-drawing Europe's borders for the first time since World War II (HA! HA! Who's laughing now, decadent West!)

> Commercial airplanes were shot down (with no repercussions), or just disappeared without a trace. 

> Global warming is definitely happening and it's probably unrealistic to do anything about it now.

> Foreign tax inversions to avoid U.S taxes officially became a cool "thing" in the corporate world.

> Old wars became young and bloody again in Syria and Iraq.

> Ebola scared the shit out of us -- no deaths though -- and killed from 5 to 15 thousand of them, over there, where they tend to be scared less and die more.

> ISIS / ISIL / Islamic State / Daesh / Those Crazy Murderers In Two Countries Where Lots of People Get Murdered.

> It became news to us (but not to them, or the people they've been shooting) that U.S. police can shoot just about anybody and get away with it.

> Although the U.S. unemployment rate dropped to 5.8 percent of the labor force in November 2014, the lowest since July 2008, the labor force participation rate (i.e. excluding those too young, old, sick or beaten down by failure to work) is still below 63 percent; and wages were up only 2 percent for the year.

> Congress did not raise the minimum wage, again.

> Voter ID laws are still in effect (mainly in the South) and still doing what they're intended to do: suppress youth and minority votes.

> Red Lobster (a fav of ur's truly) became an economic bellwether instead of that place with the cheesy biscuits.

> We found out (but weren't really surprised) that up to 18 percent of NCAA revenue sports athletes read like children.

> We discovered that sandwich makers earning minimum wage are being asked to sign non-compete agreements.

> We found out the CIA is filled with sadistic, sicko torturers (and their defenders) who are nonetheless incompetent.

> The GOP held onto the House and took over the Senate.

> The GOP put taxpayers on the hook in the amount of $300 trillion in bailouts for Wall Street's derivatives bets.

> U.S. corporations are even more, uh, endowed with personhood than ever.

> Likewise, robots (AI) continued their exponential Moore's-rate progress toward enslaving humanity... or just taking all humanity's jobs.

> Still no federal prosecutions of Wall Street banks that committed securities fraud, wire fraud, perjury during Congressional testimony.... (Thanks, Obama and Eric Holder)

> Stephen Colbert put to rest The Colbert Report -- and worse -- his genius farcical Bill O'Reilly persona.

> Dick Cheney managed to stay alive -- and stay on FOX -- for another year.

Did I miss anything?

2014 sucked for conservatives as well. I hear their whining so I know. Yet few of these will sound like victories to liberals (and notice that most involve Obama):

> Obamacare remains the law of the land (because the federal government remains funded).

> 44 states have adopted Common Core standards.

> Obama escaped an impeachment vote on (take your pick).

> The Keystone XL pipeline is still not approved.

> Obama remains extremely popular abroad.

> Uppity blacks (no, they don't use that adjective anymore!) protested and rioted about police all over the country and didn't seem to be punished for it.

> The Tea Parties' power in the GOP diminished and the Establishment came back.

> The gay marriage steamroller is unstoppable.

> Obama's Ebola "czar" wasn't qualified to thwart an Ebola epidemic that wasn't coming anyway.

> Obama granted "amnesty" to approx. 11 million illegals.

> Unlike the last guy, this Pope is a flaming lib.

> Obama's Attorney General Eric Holder got to leave his job at the time and manner of his own choosing.

> Obama tightened rules for US coal power plants and made a deal with China on greenhouse gas emissions.

> And all of Obama's other "tyrannical" executive orders (yeah, you know the ones, don't get me started).

> White conservatives lost their best black spokesman for personal responsibility among African-American males when it was revealed he was a serial rapist. (On the other side, liberals lost a great stand-up comedian).

> The latest (the 10th?) GOP Congressional report on Benghazi! did not conclude that Hillary Clinton murdered those four Americans with her bare hands.

> And Hillary seems like an unbeatable juggernaut in 2016 when compared to (insert RINO or TP wacko's name here).

2014 sucked for me as well. Maybe the worst year ever. For instance, being unemployed for most of it. Of course there are always silver linings, silver linings...

Begone and good riddance, 2014!  2015, you'll have to try really hard to suck worse. Talk to you next year, folks!

Friedman's 2009 piece on U.S. torture still correct (Stratfor)

Here's the practical part of George Friedman's 2009 op-ed on U.S. torture for intelligence gathering, and it's still on-target:

The problem with torture — as with other exceptional measures — is that it is useful, at best, in extraordinary situations. The problem with all such techniques in the hands of bureaucracies is that the extraordinary in due course becomes the routine, and torture as a desperate stopgap measure becomes a routine part of the intelligence interrogator's tool kit.

At a certain point, the emergency was over. U.S. intelligence had focused itself and had developed an increasingly coherent picture of al Qaeda, with the aid of allied Muslim intelligence agencies, and was able to start taking a toll on al Qaeda. The war had become routinized, and extraordinary measures were no longer essential. But the routinization of the extraordinary is the built-in danger of bureaucracy, and what began as a response to unprecedented dangers became part of the process. Bush had an opportunity to move beyond the emergency. He didn't.

If you know that an individual is loaded with information, torture can be a useful tool. But if you have so much intelligence that you already know enough to identify the individual is loaded with information, then you have come pretty close to winning the intelligence war. That's not when you use torture. That's when you simply point out to the prisoner that, "for you the war is over." You lay out all you already know and how much you know about him. That is as demoralizing as freezing in a cell — and helps your interrogators keep their balance.

And here's the philosophical part:

And this raises the moral question. The United States is a moral project: its Declaration of Independence and Constitution state that. The president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. The Constitution does not speak to the question of torture of non-citizens, but it implies an abhorrence of rights violations (at least for citizens). But the Declaration of Independence contains the phrase, "a decent respect for the opinions of mankind." This indicates that world opinion matters.

At the same time, the president is sworn to protect the Constitution. In practical terms, this means protecting the physical security of the United States "against all enemies, foreign and domestic." Protecting the principles of the declaration and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation.

Let me repeat something: The U.S. is a moral project on display for the whole world.  It's not just another country defending its people and borders. U.S. conservatives and liberals alike believe in "the American way," whatever they take that to mean. So if we allow harm to that moral project, we allow harm to the essence of who we are. We become something else. That's why myself and others have argued since 9/11 that if we allow the terrorists to change who we are, then they've already won. They've convinced us to abandon our moral project.

Now to Friedman's qualifier on that: "Protecting the principles of the declaration [of Independence] and the Constitution are meaningless without regime preservation and defending the nation."

But the U.S. regime has never been threatened; and the defense of the nation was never in question -- perhaps only the defense of a few thousand potential citizens of that nation. No threat that we know about has risen to the level of a gun to the head of America, or an existential threat.

Furthermore, it's clearly not worth taking every possible precaution possible against any imaginable threat. Those threats have to be real and of sufficient magnitude and likelihood. And the costs mustn't exceed the benefits.

To put it in everyday terms, as my conservative friends like to do, think about the safety of your home. If you're honest, you would probably admit there are several measures you could take to make your home safer against intruders, accidental injury, fires and natural disasters. But there are costs and trade-offs to all these measures; and at a certain point each one of us says, "I've done enough," knowing full well we could be safer if we were willing to spend more, endure more inconvenience, etc. And these are only the material costs and trade-offs -- not moral costs and trade-offs involved in torturing people!

I say this to ward off oft-heard arguments, mostly from conservative politicians and pundits, that the U.S. Government exists primarily to protect us from every military or terrorist threat, both real and imaginable. No, it doesn't. Because the costs of doing that wouldn't be worth it. Indeed, trying to do "everything possible" could even make life in the U.S. not worth living, and make abandoning our "moral project" seem like a more appealing option. That's the danger. 

Torture and the U.S. Intelligence Failure

By George Friedman

April 20, 2009 | Stratfor

URL: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20090420_torture_and_u_s_intelligence_failure#axzz3LQKKLpE1

Ex-CIA chief: Russian action in Ukraine 'is a classic covert operation'

The Secret Players In The Russia-Ukraine Game  

By Lorena O'Neil

May 20, 2014 | NPR

Keeping up with the battle in Ukraine? Then you must know of a man named Ramzan Kadyrov. No? Well, that's because he's the Instagram dictator staying in the background, behind the curtain, asking people to pay no mind to the Chechen military fighters he might be ordering over to fight for Russia.

Ramzan Kadyrov is the president of Chechnya, a Russian republic situated in the North Caucasus region. Multiple reports from Russia, Chechnya and Ukraine suggest that there is Chechen military involvement in the eastern part of Ukraine, fighting on the pro-Russia side. While the number of Chechens in Ukraine is hard to gauge and their existence difficult to prove, even a small number could have a deep significance.

To understand why this is important, one must first understand how Russia (and many of its supporters) plays ball. In a word? Subversively.

"What's going on with Ukraine is a classic covert operation," says OZY contributor and former deputy director of the CIA John McLaughlin. "The Russians probably won't have to go in militarily with special forces because they are gradually stirring it up, co-opting it." Multiple Russian experts assume that what we see on television from Ukraine has been influenced by Vladimir Putin's intervention.

"Everyone assumes this is not spontaneously generated by someone who woke up and said, 'Hey, I'd like to be a part of Russia,' " says McLaughlin. "They are doing this very indirectly. Involving the Chechens in that would be also kind of classic, to the extent that you can confuse the adversary." He explains that confusion makes it harder for those who oppose Russia to know what to do next, which is ultimately the aim of covert actions.

There are a host of reasons why Chechens in Ukraine could add confusion. It would mean introducing fighters of a different nationality with motives that seem to clash with Russia's. Chechnya itself fought a separatist war against Russia in 1994-1996, briefly winning until it lost a second war in 1999-2000.

The wars turned into an Islamic insurgency in response to the Kremlin's actions, geographically and politically. Kadyrov and his father, both Muslim, fought against Russia in the first war, but changed sides in the second. Given this recent history, it seems like many Chechens would be sympathetic to those fighting against Russia in Ukraine, and not willing to take up arms on behalf of Russia.

So what would motivate Chechens to fight for Russia?

"Kadyrov is a man who has survived by taking positions that are more pro-Russia than Russia," says Paul Goble, a longtime specialist on ethnic and religious issues in the post-Soviet world. He says the Chechen Republic is vastly more Islamic today than it ever was before, and Putin looks the other way because Kadyrov constantly expresses his undying love for Russia.

Additionally, deploying fighters works to Chechnya's advantage because it gives them military experience in the field, something the Russian government denies them by hesitating to draft North Caucasians in big numbers, Chechens in particular. The government is worried that if it trains Chechens to use its weapons, they may turn around and use their training against Russia.

Chechen forces in the Ukraine can also serve as an implied threat to Russia itself, proving [to Putin - J] how many able-bodied men Kadyrov has at his beck and call. "I find it a fascinating play by Kadyrov, a very evil man who is not stupid," says Goble.

Goble points out that it may be hard for observers to distinguish Chechen forces in the eastern regions of Ukraine from the Crimean Tatars, since both groups are Muslim. "They look similar. They could do something, and the Crimean Tatars could be blamed," says Goble. "Then there'd be more support for tough measures against the Tatars because they [would be seen as] dangerous Muslims, like the Chechens."

The introduction of foreign fighters would eerily resemble the events leading to the escalation of the ongoing Syrian civil war.

The Tatars were deported from their homeland of Crimea by Stalin in 1944, but have returned en masse since 1989. They make up about 12.1 percent of the Crimean population and have been consistent allies of the Ukrainian government against Russia. Sunday marked the 70th anniversary of their mass expulsion, and thousands gathered in commemoration.

Adding Chechens to the mix could intensify instability yet have minimal consequences for Russia. Goble explains that Chechens have a reputation for being brutal fighters. Kadyrov himself has been suspected of horrific human rights abuses and runs an intensely thuggish regime. (He tries to counterbalance this reputation with pictures of fluffy kittens on Instagram.) However,Moscow could easily deny any responsibility for actions taken by Chechens, as nothing has been officially ordered by Putin.

In fact, Kadyrov himself is denying official Chechen military involvement. When acting Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said Chechens were fighting alongside pro-Russian rebels in Slovyansk, a town in east Ukraine, Kadyrov took to his Instagram to call this allegation "absurd." As Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Liz Fuller points out, Kadyrov was careful to say "Chechen battalions" are not currently deployed in Ukraine, which does not really touch on the issue of informal military units.

Right now there is no definitive proof that Chechens are in Ukraine, just hearsay and YouTube videos. Kavkazcenter, the official website of the North Caucasus Islamic insurgency, posted a letter from a man who claims he was sent to Crimea and then to Slovyansk as part of a Chechen security force. Reuters spoke with a soldier who says he went to Crimea ahead of its voter referendum.

Recruitment centers in Grozny were reportedly asking for volunteer soldiers to fight in Ukraine, but the offices suddenly closed after stories about them were published. A Chechen student in Grozny alleges, via Russian blogger Oleg Leusenko, that residents were reluctant to volunteer, and recruiters called those people cowards and violently beat a man who refused to sign up.

Of course, this is not the world according to Kadyrov. "There are tens of thousands of volunteers in Chechnya who are ready to help those who are being abused by fascistic thugs, whose blood is being shed by the unlawful government of Kiev," writes Kadyrov, who can't resist a not-at-all-veiled threat even in a denial. "And if the Chechens really go to Slavyansk and other cities, you will see how people like Avakov flee from there, and will not stop even at the Western border of Ukraine."

Translation: We're not there — but if we were, you would know because you would be fleeing in terror. How thoughtful of the totally trustworthy Kadyrov to provide such ... reassurance.

U.S. intel. director: Earth is (still) a scary place

We're all gonna dieeeeeeeeeeeeee!  Aaaaaaaah!

Aw Lawdy, please save us CIA and NSA, save us!  

Let me quote Michael Cohen at length [emphasis mine] in his critique of the annual world threat assessment that the National Intelligence Director is obliged to give the Senate:

There is the habitually frightening adjective war front, "an assertive Russia, a competitive China; a dangerous, unpredictable North Korea, a challenging Iran." The sober-minded might look at these countries and conclude that a more accurate set of descriptors would be "an enfeebled and corrupt Russia, an economically slowing and environmentally challenged China, a contained and sort of predictable North Korea and an isolated and diplomatically-engaged Iran". But that would be a pretty lame threat assessment, wouldn't it?

Then there are the really scary sounding threats that aren't actually threats to Americans. Things like, "lingering ethnic divisions in the Balkans, perpetual conflict and extremism in Africa; violent political struggles in … the Ukraine, Burma, Thailand and Bangladesh." [...]  [B]ut the idea that any of these are serious "crises" or "threats" to America and its citizens is ludicrous.

This is what makes Clapper's argument – and indeed the entire process of writing a "worldwide threat assessment" so fundamentally unserious and distorting. America doesn't face a single truly serious security threat. We are a remarkably safe and secure nation, protected by two oceans, an enormous and highly effective military and dozens upon dozens of like-minded allies and friends around the world. Truly we have nothing to fear – except perhaps global climate change, which oddly merits a one-paragraph mention (pdf) in this year's threat assessment.

To listen to Clapper and others in the intelligence community one might never know that inter-state war has largely disappeared and that wars in general are in the midst of a multi-decade decline. 

And let's not forget that Clapper is the same guy who lied to Congress about not spying on U.S. citizens!:

The irony of all this is that Clapper has been under fire for months now because he allegedly lied to Congress over the extent to which the National Security Agency was collecting phone and e-mail records of individual Americans.

Yet, the yarn he spun on Capitol Hill last week was far worse than that: deceiving Americans about the nature of the world today and the threats facing the country. But in a political environment in which threat mongering and exaggeration is the norm rather than the exception, Clapper not only gets a pass – hardly anyone even noticed.

I've had enough of these obvious lies from "serious" spies protecting their administrative turf and bloated billion-dollar budgets.  There is no way that the U.S. is in more danger now than during the Cold War.  We have no enemies who can attack us, save Russia with its ICBMs. Terrorism is a mosquito on the list of actual threats to American citizens.

The James Clappers of the U.S. military-intelligence community might bamboozle and intimidate our Congressmen and journalists with their doomsday speeches, but not me.  What about you?

James Clapper might as well be called director of US fearmongering

By Michael Cohen

February 6, 2014 | Guardian

URL: http://gu.com/p/3mgk3

FOX tries its best to spin Senate BENGHAZI! report

Check out the GOP Spin Zone over at Fox News: 

• 
  COMPREHENSIVE REPORT BY the Senate Intelligence Committee definitively declares that individuals tied to 
• Al Qaeda groups were involved in the Benghazi attack, and that the attack could have been prevented.

Yet further down in the article it says:

The Senate committee report stressed that the intelligence still suggests the attack was not “highly coordinated,” but rather “opportunistic” – possibly put in place in “short order” after protests over an anti-Islam film elsewhere in the region.

“It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attacks,” the report said. 

So those conclusions from the Senate committee's own biased, partisan report refutes two of the Republicans' four main accusations against the Obama Administration: that al Qaeda was behind the attacks (and not just al Qaeda-affiliate groups being "involved"); and that the anti-Islam film had nothing to do with the timing of the attack. 

The third main accusation by the GOP is that the State Department and the White House ignored security threats inside Libya. This I won't go into now. It suffices to say that Amb. Stevens alone made the decision to visit Benghazi that day, not Hillary Clinton or President Obama. He was quite aware of the risky post-conflict security situation in Libya. Rep. Grayson made this amply clear in a House hearing on Benghazi, see it here:

The fourth main accusation by the GOP is that Obama and his generals did not come to the rescue of Amb. Stevens and other U.S. personnel in time, for reasons unclear or speculative. I won't respond to this accusation now either, since I've written about it before, and no credible analysts have been able to dispute the actual events or timing.

So there you go.  BENGHAZI! has been reduced to plain old Benghazi, a political tempest in a teapot, where brave Americans' lives and memories have been used cynically as political ammunition by the GOP.  Moving on.

U.S. torture: Past, present & future

Aint much difference.

It looks like the more they deny it, the more likely they're doing it. Kind of like Anthony Weiner.

Seriously though, Bush & Cheney were bad but Obama seems just as determined to continue torturing, despite his lofty oratory to the contrary.

We Americans cannot rely on politicians, the military, or the CIA to do the right thing; we need a national conversation about our values and the law, then we must demand the truth about what evil, sadistic acts they are performing in our name, supposedly for our safety.

Like it or not, we are all accessories to illegal imprisonment and torture, including torture resulting in homicide. Are we OK with that?

Happy Independence Day... for some.

Is Torture In America's Future As Well As In Our Country's Past?

By Dan Froomkin

July 4, 2011 | Huffington Post

URL: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/04/is-torture-in-americas-future_n_889359.html

CIA's letter to McCain downplays torture's role in finding Bin Laden

A private letter sent from CIA head Leon Panetta to Senator John McCain destroys the claim that torture ("enhanced interrogation") provided key intelligence on Bin Laden's whereabouts in Pakistan. A copy of this letter was leaked to journalist Greg Sargent and its authenticity was later confirmed by CIA spokesperson Marie Harf.

Wrote Panetta to McCain:

"Nearly 10 years of intensive intelligence work led the CIA to conclude that Bin Ladin was likely hiding at the compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. There was no one "essential and indispensible" key piece of information that led us to this conclusion. Rather, the intelligence picture was developed via painstaking collection and analysis. Multiple streams of intelligence — including from detainees, but also from multiple other sources — led CIA analysts to conclude that Bin Ladin was at this compound. Some of the detainees who provided useful information about the facilitator/courier's role had been subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques. Whether those techniques were the "only timely and effective way" to obtain such information is a matter of debate and cannot be established definitively. What is definitive is that that information was only a part of multiple streams of intelligence that led us to Bin Ladin.

"Let me further point out that we first learned about the facilitator/courier's nom de guerre from a detainee not in CIA custody in 2002. It is also important to note that some detainees who were subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques attempted to provide false or misleading information about the facilitator/courier. These attempts to falsify the facilitator/courier's role were alerting.

"In the end, no detainee in CIA custody revealed the facilitator/courier's full true name or specific whereabouts. This information was discovered through other intelligence means."

On separate but related note, we as a country ought to decide if our safety requires and merits throwing hundreds of people in prison without charges, access to a lawyer or their families, and torturing them for years whether they were originally guilty of anything or not. (Most people involved admit that most detainees at G'itmo were rounded up because they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.)

Let's keep in mind that many Mideast countries like Egypt, Iran and Syria have followed similar practices to ensure their "safety" from "terrorists." The definition of terrorist depends on who is in power. Do those in power deserve extra-legal or illegal means to fight those whom they label terrorists? And do we trust them to use those means wisely? If we're discussing countries like Iran or Syria, the answer is certainly, "No, we don't trust them."

So why do we trust our military and intelligence services with such power? What gives them -- and ultimately, us -- the right? Because we're the "good guys"? Do good guys torture others? People like Sen. John McCain, who was a victim of torture, states clearly that good guys do not practice torture. This is a moral and ethical issue as much as it is a security issue. So I return to the original question: Is our personal security (or in most cases, our peace of mind, since we're not really at risk from terrorism) so precious that it requires imprisoning and torturing possibly innocent people for years if not decades?

Exclusive: Private letter from CIA chief undercuts claim torture was key to killing Bin Laden

By Greg Sargent

May 16, 2011 | The Plum Line - Washington Post

URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/post/exclusive-private-letter-from-cia-chief-undercuts-claim-torture-was-key-to-killing-bin-laden/2011/03/03/AFLFF04G_blog.html#pagebreak

Intel experts: Cheney's claims untrue

Intel experts: Dick Cheney was wrong about Bush Administration moves
By Jonathan S. Landay and Warren P. Strobel
May 24, 2009 | BostonHerald.com

Former Vice President Dick Cheney's high-profile speech Thursday defending the Bush administration's policies for interrogating suspected terrorists contained omissions, exaggerations and misstatements, according to intelligence officals and the historical record, including:

Cheney said waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques produced information that "prevented the violent death of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of innocent people." He also quoted Director of National Intelligence Adm. Dennis Blair as saying the information gave U.S. officials a "deeper understanding of the al-Qaeda organization."

In his statement April 21, however, Blair said "these techniques hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security." A 2004 CIA inspector general's investigation found no conclusive proof that the information helped thwart any "specific imminent attacks," according to one of four secret Bush-era memos released last month. And FBI Director Robert Muller said in December that he didn't think that the techniques disrupted any attacks.

Cheney said his administration "moved decisively against the terrorists in their hideouts and their sanctuaries, and committed to using every asset to take down their networks." In fact, the Bush administration began diverting U.S. forces, intelligence assets, time and money to planning an invasion of Iraq before it finished the war in Afghanistan, leaving Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahri, at large nearly eight years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

There are now 49,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan fighting to contain the bloodiest surge in Taliban violence since 2001, and extremists have launched a concerted attack on nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Cheney accused Obama of "the selective release" of documents on Bush administration detainee policies, charging Obama withheld records that Cheney claimed prove information gained from the harsh interrogation methods prevented terrorist attacks.

In fact, the decision to withhold the documents was announced by the CIA, which said it was obliged to do so by a 2003 executive order issued by former President George W. Bush prohibiting release of materials that are subject of lawsuits.

Cheney said only "ruthless enemies of this country" were detained by U.S. operatives overseas and taken to secret U.S. prisons.

A 2008 McClatchy investigation, however, found that the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees captured in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan and Pakistan were innocent citizens or low-level fighters of little intelligence value who were turned over to American officials for money or because of personal or political rivalries.

[But now many of these innocent detainees may indeed be ready for jihad, after being imprisoned with real terrorists for years, and mistreated by guards, and denied lawyers or habeus corpus. Might not you be pissed off and ready for revenge if another country imprisoned you for no good reason, taking away several years of your life? This is the no-win dilemma that Obama inherited from Dubya. And Guantanamo is not the only prison. Dubya set up a network of prisons with no clear plan what to do with these detainees, or how to screen and release the innocent ones. - J]

Cheney denied there was any link between the Bush administration's interrogation policies and the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib jail, which he blamed on "a few sadistic guards." But a bipartisan Senate Armed Services report in December traced the abuses at Abu Ghraib to approval of the techniques by senior Bush officials, including former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

Taliban, warlords resurgent in Afghanistan

The opportunity cost of the 'surge' in Iraq is a dire lack of troops to fight the resurgent Taliban, and now, tribal warlords in Afghanistan.


Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed By the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns on U.S. Troops
By Anna Mulrine
July 11, 2008 | U.S. News & World Report

[Excerpt:]

'U.S. forces are keenly aware that they are facing an increasingly complex enemy here—what U.S. military officials now call a syndicate—composed not only of Taliban fighters but also powerful warlords who were once on the payroll of the Central Intelligence Agency. "You could almost describe the insurgency as having two branches," says a senior U.S. military official here. "It's the Taliban in the south and a 'rainbow coalition' in the east."'

'But though the Hekmatyar and Haqqani networks have loose alliances and similar goals, each has its own turf. "They are swimming in the same stream, but they are not unified. There is no Ho Chi Minh," says the U.S. military official. "They have the same broad generic approaches, and it works. The bottom line is that if your only mission is to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, you don't have to be coordinated—and what they're doing is plenty good enough to stir up problems in this country."

'In the course of conducting these operations, insurgents have benefited greatly from the shortage of U.S. and allied troops here, say U.S. officials. Earlier this month, Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that he is "deeply troubled" by the increasing violence in Afghanistan but emphasized that troop levels in Iraq precluded a further increase in forces. "We need more troops there," he said in Washington. "But I don't have the troops I can reach for."'

Truth's out: 9/11 was preventable

The Real-Life '24' of Summer 2008
By Frank Rich
July 13, 2008 | New York Times

[Excerpt:]

'By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.'s inspector general, "50 or 60 individuals" in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, '"I don't want to hear about that anymore!"'

Muslims hate our foreign policies

While I don't agree with Scheuer on everything -- most important, I don't agree that Muslim extremists pose an existential threat to the United States -- he is correct that Muslim extremists hate America for its actions, not for its "freedom." Until we accept the truth that popular Muslim hatred is blowback from U.S. foreign policies, we will never be able to stem the tide of extremism.

And it only further enrages Muslims when Bush -- whose "freedom agenda" for the world's oppressed peoples figured so highly in his speeches, and was a major reason (proclaimed ex post facto) for his invasion of Iraq -- picks & chooses which democracies he (i.e. America) will recognize as legitimate. If democracy for the world is our goal, then we must accept the results of free & fair elections everywhere, no matter who gets elected.

Hypocrisy never makes for good foreign policy
By Bernd Debusmann
March 7, 2008 | Reuters

It would be hard to believe if it didn't come from the man who ran the unit charged with capturing Osama bin Laden.

Preparations at one point included lawyers from several branches of the U.S. intelligence community. Their task? "To examine rolls of masking, duct and medical-adhesive tape and determine which had the right amount of stickiness to ensure that bin Laden's face and beard would not be excessively irritated if his mouth had to be taped shut after capture."

This comes in a footnote in an angry book by an angry man, Michael Scheuer, a 20-year veteran of CIA covert-action operations who left the agency in 2004 and became a vocal critic of what he sees as the failure of successive U.S. administrations to take seriously the threat of Islamic terrorism.

The beard-and-tape episode dates back to 1998 when, he says, "CIA engineers were required to produce an ergonomically correct chair for bin Laden to be seated in after he was captured. Likewise, well-padded restraint devices were manufactured to avoid chafing his skin."

So much for the ruthless, brutal, cold-hearted officials of popular lore.

The operation was called off because the Clinton administration feared a huge backlash if bin Laden had been killed by accident in the attempt to snatch him.

Also at play, according to Scheuer, was "the first question always asked by the agency's senior-most managers, 'Will it pass the Washington Post giggle test?' " He added that no "operation could be considered if the Post and other media would ridicule it if it failed and became public knowledge."

The giggle test, Scheuer says, was applied throughout his service with the CIA, which included arming Afghan mujahedeen in their fight against Soviet occupation. He was one of the architects of the CIA's controversial rendition program under which Qaeda suspects are seized and taken to third countries.

Bin Laden is still on the run, more than six years after hijackers under his command rammed airliners into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,000 people.

In his recently published book, "Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam after Iraq," Scheuer argues that the United States faces more trouble because its leaders refuse to recognize what drives terrorism.

President George W. Bush argues that terrorists "hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote." But polls show that the bedrock of support for militancy among the world's 1.3 billion Muslims is the detestation of U.S. foreign policies.

Scheuer faults U.S. leaders for failing to acknowledge the grievances that bin Laden laid out in precise detail, which were adopted by the followers he inspired. They were: (1) the U.S. presence in the Arabian Peninsula; (2) unqualified support for Israel; (3) U.S. support for states oppressing Muslims, especially China, India and Russia; (4) U.S. exploitation of Muslim oil; and (5) U.S. support and financing of authoritarian Arab regimes.

There is no reason to believe that the United States is about to change the foreign policies that motivate Muslim extremists in a region where politics and religion are intertwined and where many believe that the "war on terror" is really a war on Islam.

Foreign policy has not been much of a subject in the U.S. presidential election campaign. The candidates differ over when and how to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but none of them has given any indication of policies that would take the air out of the arguments that Al Qaeda and like-minded groups have used to attract recruits.

John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, and the rivals for the Democratic nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, have all pledged commitment to Israel and none of them is likely to loosen Washington's embrace of Saudi Arabia or push President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt toward greater democracy.

Polls show that radicals - potential suicide bombers and hostage takers - and moderate Muslims are in favor of moving toward more democracy, a process stifled in many places by authoritarian rulers who enjoy the backing of the United States.

America cemented its reputation as the superpower of hypocrites after one of the very few democratic elections in Middle Eastern history, the 2006 vote in which Palestinians opted for the Islamist party Hamas over Fatah, the corrupt ruling bureaucracy built up by Yasser Arafat. The closely monitored election was deemed free and fair.

The United States responded by boycotting Hamas and backing Fatah.

New Iran NIE 'a piece of crap'

This flabbergasts me. But I know it shouldn't. The neocon right's response to the new NIE estimate on Iran has been swift and fierce.

Here is just one example of neocon spin control by Human Events' Jed Babbin.

Babbin says we can't believe the CIA or the State Dept's Bureau of Intel and Research because they're so hopelessly incompetent. And now they're "anti-Bush." So that leaves us... where? Neocons respond: Iran is an enemy, a danger, a threat, and America should treat them as such, despite what our intelligence community tells us.

Here's one particularly shocking excerpt:

"Let's face facts: six years after 9-11, four years after the invasion of Iraq, US intelligence community is still unable to tell the president most of the things he needs to know about Iran, North Korea and the other nations that pose a danger to American security. That lack of knowledge heightens the danger created by reports such as the new NIE."

Did you catch the logical fallacy? If U.S. intelligence is so awful, how can we "know" that Iran and North Korea pose such a danger in the first place? Are we supposed to take it on faith, like we did with Saddam? Neocons respond: In the absence of reliable information, you gotta go with your gut -- or their gut, rather. And their gastric rumblings tell them to gear up for WWIII, with or without a reason.

WAR ALERT! Cheney: 'We will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon'

As Iran shows no signs of backing down and halting its uranium-enrichment centrifuges, Cheney's warning couldn't be clearer: the Bush Administration intends to attack Iran.

Meanwhile, Bush said at a press conference last week: "We've got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that, if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon."

That statement is less clear, but it could still be interpreted by Iran as a threat from the United States.

Why all the hurry? Why all the urgency? It's not because Iran is close to making a nuclear bomb. It's the end of Bush's lame duck presidency that's speeding up the war planning. The Bushies know that the next Administration can't be counted on to attack Iran pre-emptively. Just like with Saddam after 9/11, they see a window of opportunity to "take out" another enemy who's been on their hit list since the 1980s.

Don't be fooled again!

All this urgency is being driven by the U.S. presidential election cycle. The Int'l. Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) says Iran is still 3-8 years away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon; the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that Iran is 3-5 years away if they could manage to make weapons-grade highly-enriched uranium (HEU), which is doubtful. More likely, the IISS says, Iran is 10-15 years away, depending on the number of its functioning centrifuges and its intentions.

But prediction is an extremely tricky business.

In 2006 the CIA estimated that Iran was 5-10 years away from being able to make a nuke. But in 1993 the CIA estimated that Iran was 8-10 years from acquiring nuclear weapons. It's been 15 years since that dire prediction, and according to the experts Iran is still... 3-15 years away. Bottom line: We should be veeery careful about whose estimate we choose before deciding to attack a sovereign nation that has not threatened us.

... And Bush has a lousy record of assessing the threat from WMD.

CIA officers: Tenet told Bush Saddam had no WMD

Wow! This expose on Bush's knowledge that Saddam had no WMD is definitely a bombshell – but not a chemical or biological one, har-har-har.

Seriously though, you have to ask yourself: If Bush and his cronies lied to make the case for invading Iraq, what would stop them from lying to keep us there?

Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction

Salon exclusive: Two former CIA officers say the president squelched top-secret intelligence, and a briefing by George Tenet, months before invading Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal
Salon.com | September 6, 2007

On Sept. 18, 2002, CIA director George Tenet briefed President Bush in the Oval Office on top-secret intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction, according to two former senior CIA officers. Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam's inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.

Nor was the intelligence included in the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which stated categorically that Iraq possessed WMD. No one in Congress was aware of the secret intelligence that Saddam had no WMD as the House of Representatives and the Senate voted, a week after the submission of the NIE, on the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq. The information, moreover, was not circulated within the CIA among those agents involved in operations to prove whether Saddam had WMD.

On April 23, 2006, CBS's "60 Minutes" interviewed Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA chief of clandestine operations for Europe, who disclosed that the agency had received documentary intelligence from Naji Sabri, Saddam's foreign minister, that Saddam did not have WMD. "We continued to validate him the whole way through," said Drumheller. "The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming, and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy, to justify the policy."

Now two former senior CIA officers have confirmed Drumheller's account to me and provided the background to the story of how the information that might have stopped the invasion of Iraq was twisted in order to justify it. They described what Tenet said to Bush about the lack of WMD, and how Bush responded, and noted that Tenet never shared Sabri's intelligence with then Secretary of State Colin Powell. According to the former officers, the intelligence was also never shared with the senior military planning the invasion, which required U.S. soldiers to receive medical shots against the ill effects of WMD and to wear protective uniforms in the desert.

Instead, said the former officials, the information was distorted in a report written to fit the preconception that Saddam did have WMD programs. That false and restructured report was passed to Richard Dearlove, chief of the British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), who briefed Prime Minister Tony Blair on it as validation of the cause for war.

Secretary of State Powell, in preparation for his presentation of evidence of Saddam's WMD to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, spent days at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., and had Tenet sit directly behind him as a sign of credibility. But Tenet, according to the sources, never told Powell about existing intelligence that there were no WMD, and Powell's speech was later revealed to be a series of falsehoods.

Both the French intelligence service and the CIA paid Sabri hundreds of thousands of dollars (at least $200,000 in the case of the CIA) to give them documents on Saddam's WMD programs. "The information detailed that Saddam may have wished to have a program, that his engineers had told him they could build a nuclear weapon within two years if they had fissible material, which they didn't, and that they had no chemical or biological weapons," one of the former CIA officers told me.

On the eve of Sabri's appearance at the United Nations in September 2002 to present Saddam's case, the officer in charge of this operation met in New York with a "cutout" who had debriefed Sabri for the CIA. Then the officer flew to Washington, where he met with CIA deputy director John McLaughlin, who was "excited" about the report. Nonetheless, McLaughlin expressed his reservations. He said that Sabri's information was at odds with "our best source." That source was code-named "Curveball," later exposed as a fabricator, con man and former Iraqi taxi driver posing as a chemical engineer.

[The White House leaked the discredited INC defector "Curveball" as a source to the New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who dutifully hyped Saddam's WMD and the case for war. "Curveball" ended up being the brother of Ahmad Chalabi's chief aide. Chalabi was a top member of the Iraqi National Congress in exile, who received $ millions from the U.S. Gov't. prior to the Iraq invasion. Chalabi was also Judith Miller's main source on Iraq's "existent" WMD program in a series of award-winning stories she wrote in 2001-2002. The Times was later forced to print an apology because of those stories, although its editors never disciplined Miller.

That's the lib'rul media for you, always criticizing George W. Bush! – J]

The next day, Sept. 18, Tenet briefed Bush on Sabri. "Tenet told me he briefed the president personally," said one of the former CIA officers. According to Tenet, Bush's response was to call the information "the same old thing." Bush insisted it was simply what Saddam wanted him to think. "The president had no interest in the intelligence," said the CIA officer. The other officer said, "Bush didn't give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up."

But the CIA officers working on the Sabri case kept collecting information. "We checked on everything he told us." French intelligence eavesdropped on his telephone conversations and shared them with the CIA. These taps "validated" Sabri's claims, according to one of the CIA officers. The officers brought this material to the attention of the newly formed Iraqi Operations Group within the CIA. But those in charge of the IOG were on a mission to prove that Saddam did have WMD and would not give credit to anything that came from the French. "They kept saying the French were trying to undermine the war," said one of the CIA officers.

The officers continued to insist on the significance of Sabri's information, but one of Tenet's deputies told them, "You haven't figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change."

The CIA officers on the case awaited the report they had submitted on Sabri to be circulated back to them, but they never received it. They learned later that a new report had been written. "It was written by someone in the agency, but unclear who or where, it was so tightly controlled. They knew what would please the White House. They knew what the king wanted," one of the officers told me.

That report contained a false preamble stating that Saddam was "aggressively and covertly developing" nuclear weapons and that he already possessed chemical and biological weapons. "Totally out of whack," said one of the CIA officers. "The first [para]graph of an intelligence report is the most important and most read and colors the rest of the report." He pointed out that the case officer who wrote the initial report had not written the preamble and the new memo. "That's not what the original memo said."

The report with the misleading introduction was given to Dearlove of MI6, who briefed the prime minister. "They were given a scaled-down version of the report," said one of the CIA officers. "It was a summary given for liaison, with the sourcing taken out. They showed the British the statement Saddam was pursuing an aggressive program, and rewrote the report to attempt to support that statement. It was insidious. Blair bought it." "Blair was duped," said the other CIA officer. "He was shown the altered report."

The information provided by Sabri was considered so sensitive that it was never shown to those who assembled the NIE on Iraqi WMD. Later revealed to be utterly wrong, the NIE read: "We judge that Iraq has continued its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs in defiance of UN resolutions and restrictions. Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons as well as missiles with ranges in excess of UN restrictions; if left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade."

In the congressional debate over the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, even those voting against it gave credence to the notion that Saddam possessed WMD. Even a leading opponent such as Sen. Bob Graham, then the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had instigated the production of the NIE, declared in his floor speech on Oct. 12, 2002, "Saddam Hussein's regime has chemical and biological weapons and is trying to get nuclear capacity." Not a single senator contested otherwise. None of them had an inkling of the Sabri intelligence.

The CIA officers assigned to Sabri still argued within the agency that his information must be taken seriously, but instead the administration preferred to rely on Curveball. Drumheller learned from the German intelligence service that held Curveball that it considered him and his claims about WMD to be highly unreliable. But the CIA's Weapons Intelligence, Nonproliferation, and Arms Control Center (WINPAC) insisted that Curveball was credible because what he said was supposedly congruent with available public information.

For two months, Drumheller fought against the use of Curveball, raising the red flag that he was likely a fraud, as he turned out to be. "Oh, my! I hope that's not true," said Deputy Director McLaughlin, according to Drumheller's book "On the Brink," published in 2006. When Curveball's information was put into Bush's Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address, McLaughlin and Tenet allowed it to pass into the speech. "From three Iraqi defectors," Bush declared, "we know that Iraq, in the late 1990s, had several mobile biological weapons labs ... Saddam Hussein has not disclosed these facilities. He's given no evidence that he has destroyed them." In fact, there was only one Iraqi source -- Curveball -- and there were no labs.

When the mobile weapons labs were inserted into the draft of Powell's United Nations speech, Drumheller strongly objected again and believed that the error had been removed. He was shocked watching Powell's speech. "We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell announced. Without the reference to the mobile weapons labs, there was no image of a threat.

Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Powell's chief of staff, and Powell himself later lamented that they had not been warned about Curveball. And McLaughlin told the Washington Post in 2006, "If someone had made these doubts clear to me, I would not have permitted the reporting to be used in Secretary Powell's speech." But, in fact, Drumheller's caution was ignored.

As war appeared imminent, the CIA officers on the Sabri case tried to arrange his defection in order to demonstrate that he stood by his information. But he would not leave without bringing out his entire family. "He dithered," said one former CIA officer. And the war came before his escape could be handled.

Tellingly, Sabri's picture was never put on the deck of playing cards of former Saddam officials to be hunted down, a tacit acknowledgment of his covert relationship with the CIA. Today, Sabri lives in Qatar.

In 2005, the Silberman-Robb commission investigating intelligence in the Iraq war failed to interview the case officer directly involved with Sabri; instead its report blamed the entire WMD fiasco on "groupthink" at the CIA. "They didn't want to trace this back to the White House," said the officer.

On Feb. 5, 2004, Tenet delivered a speech at Georgetown University that alluded to Sabri and defended his position on the existence of WMD, which, even then, he contended would still be found. "Several sensitive reports crossed my desk from two sources characterized by our foreign partners as established and reliable," he said. "The first from a source who had direct access to Saddam and his inner circle" -- Naji Sabri -- "said Iraq was not in the possession of a nuclear weapon. However, Iraq was aggressively and covertly developing such a weapon."

Then Tenet claimed with assurance, "The same source said that Iraq was stockpiling chemical weapons." He explained that this intelligence had been central to his belief in the reason for war. "As this information and other sensitive information came across my desk, it solidified and reinforced the judgments that we had reached in my own view of the danger posed by Saddam Hussein and I conveyed this view to our nation's leaders." (Tenet doesn't mention Sabri in his recently published memoir, "At the Center of the Storm.")

But where were the WMD? "Now, I'm sure you're all asking, 'Why haven't we found the weapons?' I've told you the search must continue and it will be difficult."

On Sept. 8, 2006, three Republican senators on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence -- Orrin Hatch, Saxby Chambliss and Pat Roberts -- signed a letter attempting to counter Drumheller's revelation about Sabri on "60 Minutes": "All of the information about this case so far indicates that the information from this source was that Iraq did have WMD programs." The Republicans also quoted Tenet, who had testified before the committee in July 2006 that Drumheller had "mischaracterized" the intelligence. Still, Drumheller stuck to his guns, telling Reuters, "We have differing interpretations, and I think mine's right."

One of the former senior CIA officers told me that despite the certitude of the three Republican senators, the Senate committee never had the original memo on Sabri. "The committee never got that report," he said. "The material was hidden or lost, and because it was a restricted case, a lot of it was done in hard copy. The whole thing was fogged up, like Curveball."

While one Iraqi source told the CIA that there were no WMD, information that was true but distorted to prove the opposite, another Iraqi source was a fabricator whose lies were eagerly embraced. "The real tragedy is that they had a good source that they misused," said one of the former CIA officers. "The fact is there was nothing there, no threat. But Bush wanted to hear what he wanted to hear."