The Peacemaker and the Media

Today, in an exclusive interview with high-gloss newsreader Elizabeth Vargas, President Gas told her and America that he hopes history jugdes his Presidency as one of "peace."

Yup. Peace.

Vargas, in typical Ameican supine media fashion, didn't immediately ask him the obvious. Jesus H. Christ! It's comical.

But let me tell you...the Bushes are basically untouchable when it comes to the media. Yeah, I know there has been bad news. However, it is dwarfed by what doesn't get reported in the mainstream media. Volumes on shady dealings, Nazi fundings, CIA connections, Bay of Pigs evidence, cocaine use, drunk driving, money from Reverend Moon...and on and on.

I worked at the most respected hour of news in TV back when W got the nomination in 2000. I prepared a briefing book for an interview. The previous week Gore got hammered in his interview. I watched Mr Respectability toss one softball after another to W. Nothing on pollution in Texas. On the failure of his education reform. On his shady time in the National Guard. And on and on. Nothing. I watched the "newsman" orally copulate W via satellite while my briefing book was ignored.

I made some comments in the newsroom. I never got a recommendation when I left.

Consider this. Ron and Nancy Reagan are the royal family of Republicanism...the demigods of the GOP. But Kitty Kelley can write a book pointing out that they used a psychics to make decisions. Ouch! Kitty was all over Larry King, the talk shows, the morning news shows...everywhere. It was true, Nancy admitted.

Now...how many of you know about Kitty's book on the Bushes? "The Family" is an assiduously researched, legally combed over tome that shows the true darkness of the Bush clan. It's a troubling look at the most powerful family in America. And they have been since the end of World War II. Kitty shows it. And how awful a human being Barbara is...how cunning and up-to-his ears in covert fun and games Poppy is...how totally craven the family has been during their long ride on the oil-military money train.

Larry King cancelled her appearance and refused to bring her on. The night before going on the Today Show, they cancelled. No one would touch her. Nothing.

You can piss on the Reagans all you want...but don't touch the Bushes.

There is this great video out there....of W...before he became Prezzie...on a satellite feed waiting for an interview. I've seen the video a couple times. Not on the news, of course.

Why?

Because he does this:


Now, what would all those "President Bush has a good heart" Christians who march lockstep behind their Jesus-lovin' leader have thought had they seen it before the 2000 election? And what if there was video of Gore doing that? Or anyone else, for that matter?

Yup...non-stop replay. Like the Howard Dean scream. W gets a pass, though.

The truth is out there...but it's not "out there" in broad daylight.

Bush says his presidency is all about peace while Iraq is churning out the casualties...and Vargas was so well-vetted for that "interview" that she didn't even need Astroglide.

In Case You Missed It

You might have missed it. It's easy to do. We're moving rapidly into territory once reserved for totalitarian regimes. Spying, prison camps, aggressive wars and invasions.

That's our America. The new, improved America!

Not that everyone's cooperating. Congress heard about this funny little program called Total information Awareness. Run by former Iran-Contra badguy John Poindexter, the TIA quickly came into being after 9-11. It was designed to monitor all communications and gather copious information domestically to help the Pentagon do...something. Websites visited, purchases made, divorce records, driving records, parking tickets...everything. Collated and cross-referenced...your life at their disposal.

So, those backwards thinkers in Congress who were not quite comfortable with that sort of thing decided to pull the plug. Nixed the funding. Caused a minor, if widely unreported, uproar. But don't worry...the Executive branch is on the job.

The TIA lived on beyond Congressional reach. The program was renamed Basketball, moved around to other agencies...and the sub-programs also renamed. You see? TIA was ended. There is no TIA. Only Basketball. It's so bouncy, now. It's a game!

And that's what it is. A game. If the Congress outlaws it...start playing games. They had a black budget...secret and without scrutiny. So they kept it going. Funded and finding...out...about us all.

It's like Bush announcing in the State of the Union that he wants America to reduce use of foreign oil by 75%. Hooray! Well, two days later his chief economic advisor and Treasury Sec'y John Snow both said that W didn't mean that "literally." No, it was a metaphor. There were no plans or intentions to reduce our foreign oil consumption by 75%.

See? It's so clear.

The there is a troublesome little blogger who filed a Freedom of Information Act query and, viola!, he got notes from Rummy immediately after 9-11. And it was reported in Britain...not here, of course.

Now we have a paper trial that shows Rummy wanting to connect 9-11 to Saddam immediately. Whether or not it was warranted.

The handwritten scrawls say, among other things:

"Hard to get good case. Need to move swiftly."

"Near term target needs - go massive - sweep it all up, things related and not."

"Best info fast. Judge whether good enough [to] hit SH at same time - not only UBL [Pentagon shorthand for Usama/Osama bin Laden]."

"Tasks. Jim Haynes [Pentagon lawyer] to talk with PW [probably Paul Wolfowitz, then Mr Rumsfeld's deputy] for additional support ... connection with UBL."

But there was no link. We know that now and some of us knew that then. They knew that. Richard Clarke knew that. Wrote about it. And was eviscerated for saying so.

Perhaps Rummy was speaking metaphorically. Like last week when he assured the press that the Pentagon wasn't paying Lincoln Group to spread propaganda around Iraq, but then was contradicted by the facts the next day.

But wait...there's more. The new, improved America is taking that great prison camp idea...once known as a gulag or concentration camp and now known as Guantanimo and Abu Ghraib...and bringing home where it belongs.

Under something the administration calls "New Programs," the US is beginning to build holding camps. You know...in case we need to put up large numbers of citizens should there be an "emergency." A sorta HoJo for those who cannot be out there on their own.

It almost funny that Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root got the $385 million contract to build these detention centers at undisclosed locations around the US. Hey...they built Camp X-Ray at Gunatanimo. They know how to do this sort of thing.

Don't worry, though. This is all part of the new freedom we will enjoy more and more as the old freedoms go the way of the paper ballot.

This is the new, improved America, my friend. A place where the Presidency is all-powerful, what he says is exactly the opposite of what you get...and where a few of us can decry the morphing of our politics into something almost fascist...and we can rest assured that our minders at TIA and the NSA are fully aware of the arguments we're making in emails, hone calls and blogs like this.

Oh yeah...not the TIA...our friends who like to play Basketball.

Beware of the Hive Mind

Harboring Doubts

Blowback. When an action, policy or strategy causes unintended, unforeseen and unwelcomed consequences. Chalmers Johnson, historian and policy analyst extraordinaire, literally wrote the book on it. Titled "Blowback, Johnson writes convincingly about the consequences of our de facto, world-spanning empire, our history of covert fun and games and the hatred, resentment and complications those hijinx have caused. Well, also that it will cause...because he was ahead of the curve when he published "Blowback" in 2000.

Now the Bush Administration, the source of blowback abroad, is facing some blowback here at home. Their base of right wingers have been fed a steady diet of culture clash, fear of Islamics, terror tales and they've adopted the thoroughgoing belief in the need check for terror around every corner and under every turban. Now, they are venting their well-stoked rage at the Bush Administration for selling off our ports to crazy Arab Islamics. The talk shows, the righty papers and Fox News--the backbone of Rove's consent manufacturing base--can't stop hammering their beloved leader for compromising our security.

Welcome to the world of blowback, my friends.

Okay...they are not my friends, but it sounded good.

This is their Dr. Frankenstein moment. They've created a monster and now it's turned on it's master. These right-wing nuts can't get enough of the neo-fascist struggle of "US" against "Them," and it certainly has served the good doctor thus far. But the monster has ignored all of the evidence that they're being manipulated, that facts show their master is in bed with the most virulent of terror-mongers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, and let's not forget the mountain of evidence that Team Bush cut off all those investigations, refused to heed all warnings and erased any lines connecting those troublesome dots on their terrorism map before 9-11. They--"the right-wing monster"--doesn't care much about the undeniable war profiteering...the $6-8 billions per month being transferred from their paychecks to Bush cronies via Iraq.

But they do know fear and outrage. They "get" the fear and outrage subtext...that the Islamic world is out to get us because we are free, because we are good and because they are evil. Now there is no way for the doctor to strap this monster to the table.

The question is whether or not the monster will see that there is a bigger story. A story of crony capitalism. That people and companies enmeshed in this administration stand to gain from the dubious deal with Dubai Ports. There are billions being floated into and out of this port deal. Now, there is preliminary information that W's daddy and his financial octopus--The Carlyle Group--has made some big profits off of the chain of sales that led to the port deal.

Unfortunately, the story is focusing on security. Security of our ports is an important issue. But it's not as important as our porous borders. So far, reports about port security show that there is a fairly good paper trail and a fairly vigilant watch at our ports. The one silver lining in this cloud of blowback is that the monster is still fuming about Arabs, not about yet another instance of crony profiteering. I hold little hope that the torch-wielding villagers in this B-Movie we call America--the media--will take this chance to take the focus off of the fear and put it's torch to the tower of profiteering that grows daily on Pennsylvania Avenue.

If the villagers do their job, they might be able to show the monster that every time it votes for Team Bush and it's GOP sycophants that it's voting against it's own self-interest. That they are being drained, the country is being drained, to fill the off-shore bank accounts of the oligarchy that parades itself as democratic crusaders. The dots, the lines...all there. Critics of this B-Movie called America will sit back and wonder if the long-awaited plot turn will finally happen...if this is the climactic moment when realizations will set off a chain reaction leading to a resolution of this twisted plot.

Has the blowback finally hit Team Bush where it hurts...at it's base? Chances are that the fear of Arab evildoers will overcome the reality of crony capitalism gone wild. Honestly, I do feel a bit of sympathy for the monster. I just hope it kills the doctor before the villagers burn it all down.

Re-Secrets and Damn Lies

Can you keep a secret? It's an important part of relationships...between friends, between lovers, between military commanders, between political operatives and in the spooky world of covert operations.

Secret identities, secret plans, secret lovers, secret peccadilloes. We all have our secrets. Revealing personal secrets can get you fired, divorced and ostracized.

Revealing state secrets can get you killed, get someone else killed, put you in jail and put national security in jeopardy. You know, like revealing the identity of a covert CIA operative, or passing secrets from the Pentagon to AIPAC.

Okay, once you've let a secret out can you take it back...re-secret it? As we all know, it's not possible to put a cat back in the bag once it runs freely in the full light of day. But that's our world. It's also Valerie Plame's world. But, apparently, it's not the National Security State's world. They believe in "re-secreting" and they've been doing it for the last five-plus years.

Our government is re-classifying previously de-classified documents. Okay, let's try that again...they are taking files and documents, some nearly fifty-years old, and making them secret again. The National Security Agency's historian, Matthew Aid, is perplexed by this...but he shouldn't be. The NSA and the Administration blocked the disclosure of the truth behind the Gulf of Tonkin incident a couple months ago...and Aid had a front row seat for that "re-secreting." The rub is that secrets often go hand in hand with lies. And the "re-secreting" he's trying to expose threatens the damn lies that our government, our empire, is based on.

This is something we all know from our personal lives. Secrets are fed and sustained by a diet of lies. This is the problem with secrecy. When we see it in our partners, whether professionally or personally, we suspect the worst. When we uncover lies, secrets unravel. Then we look to our "democracy" and our representative leaders and find secrets...and have to suspect their lies are covering something they don't want us to know. Something analogous to an illicit affair, some sort of embezzling...some abrogation of the implicit or explicit arrangement we've entered into.

But the stakes are much greater at the governmental level. We are not talking divorce. We are talking about the Constitution, perhaps tens of thousands of lives...perhaps billions of dollars.

Lies lead us into Vietnam. That's what many historians have deduced and what came out of the declassification of key documents. Lies are suspected about the assassination of JFK...why else are there so many documents still classified all these years later? Lies swirl around the Reagan-Bush years. Whether it's the October Surprise, of which there is a great deal of evidence now available, the Iran-Contra Affair, the illegal arming of Iraq...we can assume quite fairly that there are still things some of our leaders don't want us to know. And Alberto Gonzales made a point of stopping the de-classification of documents from the Reagan-Bush and Bush-Qualye Administration as soon as he became White House Counsel back in 2001.

Although it seems to evade most of my media colleagues, the people involved in those two administrations...involved in the October Surprise, Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and more...just so happen to be in this current administration. Or their progeny. Or associates. Hell, they're all on the same team...a team that has been operating since Allen Dulles formed the CIA. A core of power players that keeps on keeping on. It's a shadow government that depends on, is predicated on...is fed and sustained by...secrecy. And they know how important it is to keep secrets. They know how important it is to cover their tracks.

Their problem is that history can be studied. Documents, no matter how old or seemingly innocuous, can be put into context. Eventually, a good historian will find patterns. That's why the Gulf of Tonkin was such a problem...why it needed to be "re-secreted." It's illustrative of a pattern. A pattern of deception that leads to war. Of manipulated intelligence. Of a war for the sake of war. Eventually...of war profiteering and huge casualties and a country left in shambles.

The need to re-classify is fueled by the need to sustain today's lies, to cover up the patterns of the past...patterns that show clearly what is happening now. This current drive to cover up tracks began in the final year of Clinton...but now that we've heard a Bushie say Bill is "like one of the family" will anyone argue with my claim that they are on the same team? But, according to today's report "it accelerated" after 9-11. Of course it did, because we've been living a damn big lie ever since. There is one document--Operation Northwoods--that shows a pattern, a precedent. It's far too late to re-secret that one. But the damn lies of our current situation cry out for more secrecy, plead for the obfuscation of the past.

Our personal worlds do not allow for the re-secreting of our sins. Their world, the one that bends reality and manipulates information in the service of their Machiavellian machinations, re-secrets potentially enlightening documents, shuts the door on the past and places possible patterns into the same vault that holds those still-secret documents about Lee Harvey Oswald, about Ronnie and Poppy...about how we got here.

Why the GWOT is so WoB...

DC, a.k.a. the Whore of Babylon(WoB), is a city of acronyms. POTUS, SCOTUS, CIA, FBI, DOJ...and the Pentagon is a sea of acronyms. GWOT is the acronym du jour. Global War on Terror. Not on "Terrorism." Although I find "Terror" to be too open ended, it does serve the POTUS (President of the United States) better than "terrorism." Terrorism is precise...a conflict against specific actions and actors that can be defined and applied.

Terror, on the other hand, implies evil and fear and a state of mind...not specific actions. A war on "terror"? Does that mean we'll be attacking video stores that carry Hitchcock films, the collected works of John Carpenter and the first two Friday the 13th films? The first day of school, a blind date, speaking in front of a huge crowd...all terrifying. And then there are all those phobias....

Anyway, I digress.

It's the imprecision of "terror" over "terrorism" that is so telling. The attack on Afghanistan was justifiable. The Taliban and Al-Qaeda were there. Osama was there. There was a direct connection. Iraq? It was an Al-Qaeda-free zone. Tapes released this week have Saddam--over a decade ago--talking to his underlings about the threat of terrorism on the US...of nuke-car bombs in DC, bio-terror...and how he's warned the US of this impending doom and, he said, it wouldn't be coming from Iraq. Yeah, he said that. You might recall that he was a key ally of the Reagan-Bush Admin and remained so until about a month before he invaded Kuwait. In fact, we have incontrovertible evidence that Bush the First was illegally arming Saddam right up to the invasion. He stamped out Islamic fundamentalism. He attacked our Iranian enemies upon our request. He got WMDs from us beginning in 1983.

Oh, digressions.

But we attacked Iraq and part of the case was he was a terrorism threat armed with WMDs. No evidence there. But perceptions will do when we are simply talking about terror, and not terrorism. The Administration did create Iraq into a terror threat. Like a Hitchcock movie...they wrote the script, told the story and convinced the American people to be terrified of Iraq. And they convinced the Congress to be terrified of voting against the invasion...for fear of losing in the next election.

So, Iraq was part of the war on terror...if not on terrorism.

You see, if the war was about terrorism we would've invaded Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. If it was about WMDs we certainly would've gone into Pakistan, where the ISI covered up A.Q. Khan's nuclear technology distribution network for years. You know...the guy who gave North Korea the means to build it's bomb. Precision would've dictated that Al-Qaeda, to be cut off at it's roots, needed to be severed from it's Saudi funders and Pakistani trainers. A quick look at history shows that Al-Qaeda was created by the Saudis, the Pakistani ISI and the CIA. Long after the CIA cut it's public ties, the other two kept on keeping on. The Taliban would not have been...had it not been for Saudi money, religious Wahhabism and Pakistani training and support through it's system of madrassas. The support was direct and significant. Hell, the Saudis even provided most of the actual hijackers.

So, now that some Senators are up in arms about the United Arab Emirates buying into the US seaport system and the Administration okaying it...well...remember that those are concerns about terrorism...not terror. There is no terror threat regarding the UAE. Even though they offered some financial support to Osama and even tossed in one 9-11 hijacker... the Administration has not identified the UAE as a terror threat. They may be a terrorism threat, but this is the GWOT...the Global War on TERROR.

Be terrified of terror. The Whore of Babylon loves fighting amorphous things like terror. Fear is good for business. Terror is good for politics. And, given human nature, there will always be something or someone to be terrified of. But if you take a close look at the history of the 20th century I think you'll find that those who want to protect you from some amorphous terror are likely to be those you should be most terrified of in the first place.

Axis of Feeble

One down, two to go.

That's how President W could've summed up the Axis of Evil strategy from that oh-so-long ago State of the Union speech in his most recent installment. The basic objectives for Iraq have been achieved: that it not have autonomy over it's own oil, the introduction of artificial scarcity in the oil market, the transfer of hundreds of billions of dollars from taxpayers to the military contractors his administration represents, and the transformation of Iraq from an Al-Qaeda-free zone to a hotbed of terrorism and imperial backlash.

First and foremost, Saddam is not in control of a newly certified WMD-free Iraq with the world second largest oil reserves at his disposal. He can not make good on his promise to switch all oil transactions from dollars to euros. He can drive down the price of oil by opening a no longer sanction-impaired spigot. I know, it was about WMDs. Whatever...if you believe that then there is nothing I can do for you.

Just look at another Axis country...North Korea. The Administration has done little on that problem. Kim Jung-Il is thought of as the craziest of dictators, his country is a shambles of starvation, poor infrastructure and a non-existent economy. They have no resources to speak of...in particular...no oil. And we know for a fact they have WMDs. So far...nothing. Not even an investigation of Rumsfeld's part in selling uranium to North Korea in the late 90s...perchance to dream.

But then there is Iran. A massive oil reserve. A young, vibrant population. Lots of expertise, lots of other resources. And they are flirting with WMDs, dancing around nuclear weapons. They are much further along than Iraq was. But not yet. Perhaps they look at Iraq--which had nothing, and North Korea--which has something significant, and they realize that having nukes is an insurance policy against invasion. Iraq was invaded because they DIDN'T have nukes. They had nothing to bargain with, no weapon that would inflict an immediate and costly price for invasion.

So Iran is in a race. But stepping back from the WMD question there is another key factor here. Just like Saddam threatened in the year before the invasion, Iran is less than a year from switching all of it's oil transactions from dollars to euros. This is huge. That's a ton of money. That's a ton of money not cycling through American interests...banks and companies and the US Treasury. That's a power shift toward Europe. That's a no-no.

Just think of Iraq...newly freed from sanctions and flooding the market with oil. They drive down the profit margins of US oil companies as they drive down the per barrel price. Conversely, invasion has "de-stabilized" the oil market and driven oil companies into record profits. And then add to that the power of Iraq to use their massive oil reserves to move value to the euro...adding instability to the dollar. IF you are looking for a reason beyond WMDs, look no further. Because Clinton forced out the UN Inspection team, just like W did, by attacking Iraq and claiming they were not cooperating just as they were entering the inspections endgame. Former Marine Scott Ritter...head of the US-led team...has tried to tell us that Iraq was close to certification. Iraq was probably two years from being stamped WMD-free...but Clinton forced the inspections to end in 1998. Oh yeah...notice how cozy Bill is with the Bush clan now?

Iraq was invaded because they didn't have WMDs...not because it was thought that they did. The evidence of intelligence failures is, as the story keeps on piling up, evidence that any contrary evidence about WMDs was ignored, brushed aside and buried. Why?

We know why...because Iraq had massive leverage on the oil market just sitting there, waiting to be used. And Saddam had leverage against the dollar by trading oil in euros.

Now we are replaying the Iraq scenario with Iran. Sure their President is making it easy for us by shooting off his mouth like a aging quail hunter. But the key factor is the shift to euros, coupled with the lack of nuclear capability. But don't look for an invasion. Seymour Hersh reported two years ago that we have been infiltrating Iran with CIA operatives. Look for strategic bombing and an internal coup...sorta Mossadeq reprise, with Ukrainian-like demostrations in the street. If it succeeds, the Shiites in Iraq will have a pro-American Shiite government in Iran to align with. The Sunnis in central Iraq will be surrounded on three sides by hostile neighbors. And a whole helluva lot of oil will be "destabilized" and certain to be traded in dollars for decades to come.

Can't you just smell the profits now?