Weekend Dystopia

Domestic drones are coming to an airspace near you. So, what a relief to find out that when it comes to spying on us from the skies, the police chiefs of our great nation fully intend to heed the constitutional niceties. At least that's what I think they're saying, given the mangled prose and dangling modifiers in the press release:

We also live in a culture that is extremely sensitive to the idea of preventing unnecessary government intrusion into any facet of their lives. Personal rights are cherished and legally protected by the Constitution. Despite their proven effectiveness, concerns about privacy threaten to overshadow the benefits this technology promises to bring to public safety.

Yeah, cultures is so picky about being violated. But I sure wish I had more proof that them-there privacy concerns are working like they should. 

Still, I suppose we should be grateful that we might even get treated to some advance warning from the police when an unmanned aerial device will be hovering in our neighborhoods. And that they will be painted a bright color so that we (and birds and any hang-gliders in the area) can see them. And that police agencies will be "strongly discouraged" from firing upon us from above. Even the ACLU is impressed, although it says it would be kind of nice if there were also some actual laws instead of mere suggestions. But we'll take whatever concessions we can get from our overlords. Compared to the terrorized Yemenis and Somalians on presidential kill lists, we should be so grateful for our exceptional freedoms.

It's usually not a great idea for politicians to openly consort with gangsters, especially when they're running for national office. But this is 2012, and ethics are so pre-Citizens United. If your name is Sheldon Adelson, you can be under pretend-investigation by the feds for illegal foreign practices related to your gambling empire, and still brag openly about buying the presidency. And while there may be some sharp intakes of breath from the few people who are paying attention, hardly anyone is batting an eye. 

Plus, since everyone has already decided whom they are going to support, it doesn't much matter how many baldfaced lies the politicians tell between now and election day. Paul Ryan begged for stimulus money and then lied about it. How else are he and Mitt sleazy? Gail Collins counts the ways. 

The Stung and the Feckless: The Washington Press Corps are miffed that President Obama talks to gossip rags and not to them. He hasn't given a press conference since June, when the corps seized upon his "private sector is doing just fine" gaffe and ran with it. He has instead appeared on shows like Entertainment Tonight, in the full realization that Election 2012 is just another ad campaign, and that he is TV Personality-in-Chief. What passes for a hard-hitting interview with him these days involves the reporter gushing that she just "flirted with POTUS!" Meanwhile, reporters are livid that the White House is demanding that even routine pool reports be submitted for censorship before release.

And yet, most of the populist outrage is being directed toward Putin's Russia, where the Pussy Riot punk band has been sentenced to two years for hooliganism in church and disrespecting their dear leader. State Department spokesperson (and former Cheney aide) Victoria Nuland issued a statement expressing "concern" and urging that Russia review the case. And when New Yorkers took to the streets Friday to express solidarity with the jailed rockers, the paramilitary forces of the NYPD arrested at least three of them, to express security state solidarity with Putin. The demonstrators' offense? They refused to take off their masks while converging in a public place, in gross pre-violation of the new corporate face-recognition technology planned for the Big Apple. The State Department has not even expressed its mildest concern about the civil rights crackdowns in our own country.

On a happier note, the diaries of George Orwell have just been published in book form.  They're still online, too. So the censorship is not quite complete. Yet.

A Morass of Orwellian Depravity

 Congressman Dennis Kucinich has now joined Nation writer Jeremy Scahill in referring to President Obama's targeted drone attacks as acts of murder. In an exclusive interview with the Britain-based Bureau for Investigative Journalism, the Ohio Democrat scathingly denounces this open secret of covert war, calling out the President, the Congress and a complicit press for their mutual descent into "a morass of Orwellian depravity." Said Kucinich:

You are looking here at an executive power that is unleashed. Our system of justice, according to the Constitution, is highly structured. There are broad areas of our constitution that have to do with people being investigated, arrested, charged, having a trial, and then if they are convicted being properly sentenced and incarcerated.

What we have done here with the drone programme is to radically alter our system of justice. Because, remember, if the whole idea is that we are exporting American values, those drones represent American values. And now we are telling the world that American values are summary executions, no rights to an accused, no arrest process, no reading of charges, no trial by jury, no judge, only an executioner.

If you have only an executioner that is not justice, that is something else. Not only the United States but the world community should be properly appraised about these so-called targeted killings. And because the emphasis in on killing, this is murder. If someone shot a grocer and his defense was ‘it was a targeted killing’ he would be put on trial for his life. But we are told that these targeted killings are somehow to be considered apart from any legal system.

Kucinich explains that the United States is"getting away" with bombing Pakistan and killing innocent civilians because it is engaged in good old fashioned double-dealing. Our government is able to ignore the Pakistani parliament's demand that the U.S. stop the drone strikes because it is dealing only with the real people in charge: the Pakistani military. We are in a defacto war against one Pakistan while being "friendly" with the other Pakistan. Doublespeaking, double-crossing and Orwellian to a degree than even Orwell might not have envisioned.


The congressman, who is serving his last term after being defeated in the primary, finds it hard to believe that so few are condemning, or even mildly questioning, the new American role of judge, jury and executioner of any person suspected of being a terrorist, suspected of canoodling with terrorists -- and worst and most recently, any male with the poor taste to live in a tribal area and to be of "military" age. He told The Bureau:

I hope it is not going to be too far into the future, somebody is going to look back at this and go ‘oh my God, why was this permitted?’ The US government just goes ‘we spent more money on arms than any other country in the world just because we have the most powerful military.’ We cannot assume for ourselves the right to impose a war anywhere we well please, and yet we have. And there is little accountability, so what I am trying to bring about in the Congress is to force accountability and transparency. Transparency in terms of ‘how are you able, you know, what about this extrajudicial summary or arbitrary executions? What is the legal authority for the government to conduct extrajudicial killings, where did this come from?’ Really, where did this come from? Says who?

As far as the stenographic role of the American media is concerned, Kucinich is equally harsh. It is not considered bad form, he says, for a president to kill people. But it is a huge faux pas to dare to talk about it!

Let me say that there has been a tradition of American journalists in modern times to serve as the spear carriers for the government. They may look like pens but these are the spears of supernumeraries who have reporters’ cards. It’s what happens when you have fewer and fewer newspapers, and newspapers that are tied to large corporate interests. And a lack of enough institutions in the major media who are willing to serve as an effective counter-balance.

Look at the New York Times. It bought in wholesale into the war in Iraq, and came back to apologise. But how do you apologise for all of the dead bodies and the dead soldiers? We feel the dead soldiers, but we should also feel the dead civilians… There is a disturbing tendency to ignore civilian casualties, in any conflicts that we’re involved in whether they’re declared or undeclared.

Yes, indeed, look at the New York Times. The paper of record recently used the usual anonymous government sources to smear the same Bureau of Investigative Journalism which today brings us the Kucinich interview as well as exposing the hundreds of civilian deaths and dismemberments resulting from Obama's robotic and open-ended War on Terror. Scott Shane, the same reporter who penned the hagiographic article on the president's secret "Kill List" and Terror Tuesdays, came close to accusing the BIJ of giving aid and comfort to the enemy by having had the chutzpah to talk about American bad behavior:

The bureau’s investigation, which began last year with a detailed study of civilian casualties, involved interviews with villagers who said they saw strikes, wounded people and family members of those killed.

The bureau counted 260 strikes by Predator and Reaper drones since President Obama took office, and it said that 282 to 535 civilians had been “credibly reported” killed in those attacks, including more than 60 children. American officials said that the number was much too high, though they acknowledged that at least several dozen civilians had been killed inadvertently in strikes aimed at militant suspects.

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

I am willing to bet that the anonymous official is none other that Obama's chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, former Bushie and Islamophobe extraordinaire and an obvious source for Shane's Kill List piece. (he even came out of the closet to be photographed for it.) He has been popping up all over the place lately, coyly bragging about the White House assassination squad even as the White House officially denies it existence and refuses to divulge the secret law it unilaterally enacted to give itself carte blanche for murder. Brennan was also outed by another Times reporter, David Sanger, as the discredited source behind the original botched narrative of the bin Laden assassination. Brennan even came to NYC this spring, just to applaud that city's spy program against Muslim Americans and, while he was at it, to blast the Pulitzer-winning Associated Press for exposing it.

"Freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose." From George Orwell's lips to the American Media-Industrial Complex's plugged-up ears.

Hillary Hearts WikiLeaks

When the WikiLeaks cables first burst upon the scene in November 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned and deplored their publication until she was blue in the face. But now that she's had a chance to think things over, she actually credits the cable dump for being the real catalyst for the Arab Spring. Without the Tunisians learning that American diplomats were just as disgusted with the excesses of their despot as they were,  they never would have had the courage to take on the regime. It was only a few weeks after the publication of "Tunileaks" that a desperate vegetable vendor self-immolated, lighting the spark of revolution.

Who knew that Hillary may actually, albeit grudgingly, admire the imprisoned Bradley Manning and asylum-seeker Julian Assange? This new nugget of information is buried deep within the pages of New York Times reporter David Sanger's "Confront and Conceal", a book which garnered attention mainly because of its scoop that the United States is conducting a secret cyberwar against Iran's nuclear program.

According to Sanger, a Tunisian blogger and activist named Sabi Ben Gharbia was gleeful that the cables sent from the American embassy contained scathing criticism of President Zine El Abedine:

"President Ben Ali was an American ally, sporadically cooperative in counterterrorism initiatives. But cooperation came at a high cost: Americans had to look the other way when it cameto Ben Ali’s habit of throwing challengers in jail and giving his family the first crack at his favorite sport, looting the national economy. Since Ben Ali had been in power for twenty-three years, Ben Gharbia figured the cables would be rich with anecdotes of excess. He was not disappointed. WikiLeaks yielded a gold mine—mostly about stolen gold.

"Ben Gharbia and his colleagues translated and posted seventeen of the cables describing Ben Ali’s most outrageous behavior. More would follow. TuniLeaks made it clear that behind the high walls of the American embassy, diplomats had long been disgusted by Ben Ali’s corrupt regime. In a June 2008 cable wonderfully entitled 'What’s Yours Is Mine' (Who said diplomats have no sense of humor?), the American ambassador at the time, Robert Godec, wrote, 'Whether it’s cash, services, land, property, or yes, even your yacht, President Ben Ali’s family is rumored to covet it and reportedly gets what it wants.' He wasn’t kidding about the yacht: Ben Ali’s nephews had, in fact, expropriated the beautiful pleasure craft of a French businessman. The cables showed that, years before the Arab uprisings, signs of discontent with Ben Ali were well known. 'It is the excesses of President Ben Ali’s family that inspire outrage among Tunisians,' Godec wrote. “With Tunisians facing rising inflation and high unemployment, the conspicuous displays of wealth and persistent rumors of corruption have added fuel to the fire.…"

Thanks to the sudden transparency previously lacking in American diplomacy, the Tunisians finally realized that the regime was vulnerable. Within a month, Ben Ali had fled the country. Like wildfire, revolutions erupted in Egypt and throughout the Middle Eastern region. Sanger writes:

“I’m not sure the vegetable vendor killing himself all by itself would have been enough,” Clinton told me later. “I think the openness of the social media, I think WikiLeaks, in great detail, describing the lavishness of the Ben Ali family and cronies was a big douse of gasoline on the smoldering fire.” Given how furious Clinton had been at the publication of the State Department cables—an understandable reaction, given the huge breach of secrecy, the embarrassing phone calls she had to make explaining the leak to world leaders, and the expulsion of a handful of her ambassadors—it was a surprising statement. When American diplomats had raised the issue of WikiLeaks to me, it was usually to chew out the Times for risking American national security. (Clinton expressed her displeasure to me too, as we prepared the publication in November 2010 of “State’s Secrets,” the Times’ series drawn from the WikiLeaks revelations.) But with the passage of time, she had finally found a leak she liked—an obscure set of her own department’s cables that, by revealing the excesses of a brutal and corrupt dictator, may have helped ignite the most massive democracy movement in the Middle East in anyone's memory.  

Meanwhile, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange remains holed up in the Equadorian embassy in London, seeking political asylum to avoid probable prosecution in the United States under the Espionage Act.  Private Bradley Manning, the original source of the cables, remains holed up in a military jail cell while his court martial proceeds at a snail's pace. You think maybe attorneys should subpoena Hillary as a witness for the defense? You think Assange and Manning should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, or at least a Pulitzer, instead of being reviled and ridiculed and imprisoned?

I think Hillary's admission is the biggest scoop in Sanger's book, but I have yet to find anyone writing about it as such. Here is one review outlining the top five "reveals."

Most of the book, incidentally, is a fawning synopsis of President Obama's foreign policy: a light footprint instead of nation-building invasions and occupations. Sanger is obviously a government insider, constantly referencing intimate conversations with Administration higher-ups, cozy dinners with generals and national security honchos, global press junkets, being summoned to the West Wing for emergency briefings. If Congress or Attorney General Holder are serious about investigating the "leaks" in his book, they won't have to try very hard. Sanger's main source appears to be Obama national security adviser (and former banking lobbyist) Thomas Donilon, and the rest of the book's material comes from a veritable Who's Who of government VIPs -- some named, some anonymous. Sanger also has obvious cachet with the president himself. I would rate the book as part pretty good investigative journalism, but mostly run-of-the-mill stenography. And that's being generous. The working title might have been "Conspire and Canoodle."

To give credit where it's due, though, Sanger does, in fact, characterize Obama's drone strikes as "assassinations" and likely war crimes, because they are in violation of an order signed by President Gerald Ford. If Obama rescinded the order, he did it behind closed doors. Maybe we'll find out in the next tell-all. Sanger described his tome as a narrative of Obama's first term, the implication being that he fully expects a second.

Leaky Ship of State

A White House that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined is itself going to be the subject of a leak investigation -- or so some Congressional chest-thumpers are threatening. Could Barry be joining Bradley Manning in Fort Leavenworth for spilling the beans to The New York Times over his cyberwar with Iran? Of course not. But it would make a great movie. 

We couldn't get a special prosecutor to investigate Wall Street and haul in a few banksters, but such senatorial heavy-hitters as Dianne Feinstein and John McCain are now demanding one for "Stuxnetgate" and also for recent revelations that the President is illegally killing  people with drones. This has nothing to do with human rights or anything, mind you. The congress critters are simply worried that some of those unstable countries might huffily turn around and get revenge on us! Feinstein and her ilk have always been just fine with the evisceration of the Constitution and shadow wars and general malfeasance. They are simply upset that the American public is finally finding out about their dirty little secrets, is all.

 Feinstein finds this recent avalanche of revelations "quite disconcerting and detrimental to our country." John Kerry of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee considers them "dangerous and damaging." Holy indignant alliteration! Now that news of drones and viruses are splashed all over American newspapers and cable channels, the Pakistanis and Yemenis are going to find out about them. They heretofore had no idea where all those bombs and dead bodies were coming from.

Dianne Feinstein Braces for Disconcerting Avalanche

Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who recently declared the whole world a battlefield in the War on Terror, remarked that while he sleeps better knowing we are killing people, he doesn't need to read a "blow-by-blow account of how it's being done." Such things are better left to fevered sadistic imaginations like his, I reckon.

As Glenn Greenwald has so aptly been noticing lately, the recent Times scoops have to be the direct results of cooperation from the Obama Administration. Otherwise, the Obama Administration would already be indicting people for leaks. That they are silent is proof positive that they want us to know about this stuff, because it prevents (they think) the Republicans from painting the president as soft on defense. It's the re-election, stupid! From The Hill:

The FBI opened its own probe Tuesday into who disclosed information on the Iranian attack, The Wall Street Journal reported. On Capitol Hill, the Senate Armed Service Committee promised hearings, while two Republican senators called for a special counsel investigation.

Several Democrats noted with alarm that the Iranian cyber leak is just the latest in a series of media reports that disclosed classified information about U.S. anti-terrorism activity.

(snip)

 The only conceivable motive for such damaging and compromising leaks of classified information is that it makes the president look good,” said McCain, the ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee. “They are merely gratuitous and utterly self-serving.”

McCain said Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) has agreed to hold congressional hearings on the leaks.

But there's no need to fear. Now that Iran has suddenly discovered in The New York Times that the Stuxnet virus was manufactured by the USA and Israel and is therefore plotting its own revenge attack, Barry and his Terror Tuesday Squad held a Situation Room drill yesterday to practice how to think and react to such a retaliatory affront. As the official White House statement hilariously puts it, "As President Obama said in his State of the Union address, we need Congress to pass legislation to secure the nation from the growing danger of cyber threats, while safeguarding the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens."