What’s Sex Got to Do With It?
August 11, 2008
Chris Hedges on how salacious sex scandals tend to trump real news on the MSM.
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| AP photo / Steven Senne |
If I had to choose between George W. Bush, naked and neighing on all fours while being ridden around the Oval Office by a spurred cowgirl Condoleezza Rice, or enduring his shredding of domestic and international law to wage an illegal war and bilking of the country on behalf of his corporate backers, I could learn to stomach a wide array of sexual escapades.
Let our elected leaders and candidates have quick homosexual encounters in airport bathrooms, bring as many hookers as they want to their hotel rooms, and screw around with their campaign staff as long as they exhaust their libidos on lusts other than war, torture and economic mismanagement. Adolf Hitler, after all, was an abstemious and monogamous vegetarian who loved his German shepherd.
Suskind Revisited 2.0
August 10, 2008
Ron Suskind has now published the transcript of his interview with the source, Rob Richer. It confirms his original story that the White House tasked George Tenet with getting the CIA to produce a fake document suggesting a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qa’ida. However, it also doesn’t negate my view that the neoconservatives were behind the initiative as the orders from the White House came not from Bush but Cheney and the neoconservative coterie around him, particularly Scooter Libby. Con Coughlin, the hack who published the fake story on the front page of Conrad Black’s Sunday Telegraph has now revealed the source as Iyad Allawi. And Joe Conason at Salon shows that Allawi’s engagements prior to the publication of the story seem to confirm that he was the conduit for the story (thanks and happy birthday Tom).
On Dec. 11, 2003 — three days before the Telegraph launched its “exclusive” on the Habbush memo — the Washington Post published an article by Dana Priest and Robin Wright headlined “Iraq Spy Service Planned by U.S. to Stem Attacks.” Buried inside on Page A41, their story outlined the CIA’s efforts to create a new Iraqi intelligence agency:
“The new service will be trained, financed and equipped largely by the CIA with help from Jordan. Initially the agency will be headed by Iraqi Interior Minister Nouri Badran, a secular Shiite and activist in the Jordan-based Iraqi National Accord, a former exile group that includes former Baath Party military and intelligence officials.
McCommunism
August 10, 2008
Naomi Klein on China and the Olympics
“Security, central planning, surveillance state is an ideal cocoon for global capitalism”
Naomi Klein: Billions of dollars spent on Olympic security, China buys tools of war on terror (2 of 4)
Despotism & Democracy
August 10, 2008
Two short educational videos by Encyclopaedia Britannica Films from 1946/1945 respectively. UK/USA despotism or democracy? The videos would suggest the former rather than the latter.
The Politics of Free Speech
August 9, 2008
No, I am not talking about China. That is easy, and meaningless. I am not moved when some designer anarchist from California privileged enough to afford the ticket to Beijing makes a statement about — Tibet. As if things were hunky dory back home; as if being a Brit or an American grants one the moral authority to dispense such admonition. And there is ignorance. I have never heard any of these peaceniks speak about the Uighurs. Or about the sweatshop labourers. Tibet is sexy, it comes with a patina of Hollywood legitimacy. Uighurs – who are they again?
Does any citizen of the US or UK have business telling the Chinese how to run their affairs when their own countries are busy inflicting genocide abroad (Iraq, Afghanistan) and curtailing rights and liberties at home? Guantanamo, Bagram, Falluja, Abu Ghraib, rendition, shock-and-awe, 42 days without charge — and we have the chutzpah to lecture China, Zimbabwe etc? How many are aware that both UK and US have a higher incarceration rate than China, Saudi Arabia or even Burma?
And all the talk of ‘freedom of speech’ rings a little hollow when neither US nor UK has done much to ensure it at home. Remember those whistleblowers who were last year put in jail by the British state? Can any country which has laws like the Official Secrets Act claim it upholds freedom of speech?
So here comes the latest revelation. Tom Feeley, who runs the excellent news resource Information Clearinghouse is being threatened by armed goons to shut down his operation. Here is a mail Mike Whitney recently sent (thanks Liz):
My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info <http://informationclearinghouse.info/> which updates “news you won’t find in the corporate media” every day. The site is strongly anti-war.
Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious.
Iraq’s Lepers
August 9, 2008
This is why Al Jazeera is a head and shoulder above all competitors in the mainstream. You will never see something like this on CNN or BBC. As far as they are concerned, the ‘surge’ is working and all’s hunky dory.
Untreated, it leaves sufferers with skin sores and weak muscles and can leave patients unable to walk. Leprosy, is a curable disease that’s been wiped out in most countries. But in Iraq – leprosy sufferers in the south are kept in appalling conditions, and receive little treatment.
Nicole Johnston has this report.
Suskind Revisited
August 9, 2008
An extremely reliable and well placed source in the intelligence community has informed me that Ron Suskind’s revelation that the White House ordered the preparation of a forged letter linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and also to attempts made to obtain yellowcake uranium is correct but that a number of details are wrong.
The Suskind account states that two senior CIA officers Robert Richer and John Maguire supervised the preparation of the document under direct orders coming from Director George Tenet. Not so, says my source. Tenet is for once telling the truth when he states that he would not have undermined himself by preparing such a document while at the same time insisting publicly that there was no connection between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Richer and Maguire have both denied that they were involved with the forgery and it should also be noted that preparation of such a document to mislead the media is illegal and they could have wound up in jail.
My source also notes that Dick Cheney, who was behind the forgery, hated and mistrusted the Agency and would not have used it for such a sensitive assignment. Instead, he went to Doug Feith’s Office of Special Plans and asked them to do the job. The Pentagon has its own false documents center, primarily used to produce fake papers for Delta Force and other special ops officers traveling under cover as businessmen. It was Feith’s office that produced the letter and then surfaced it to the media in Iraq. Unlike the Agency, the Pentagon had no restrictions on it regarding the production of false information to mislead the public. Indeed, one might argue that Doug Feith’s office specialized in such activity.
The Olympics: Unveiling Police State 2.0
August 8, 2008
Naomi Klein on China, the Olympics and the police state. For more on this see Klein’s earlier piece China’s all seeing eye.
So far, the Olympics have been an open invitation to China-bash, a bottomless excuse for Western journalists to go after the Commies on everything from internet censorship to Darfur. Through all the nasty news stories, however, the Chinese government has seemed amazingly unperturbed. That’s because it is betting on this: when the opening ceremonies begin friday, you will instantly forget all that unpleasantness as your brain is zapped by the cultural/athletic/political extravaganza that is the Beijing Olympics.
All Options on the Table?
August 8, 2008
It is likely resolution H. Con. Res. 362, to blockade Iran, was not just ‘supported’ by the Israel Lobby but was written and driven through congress by them too. I’m not convinced it was anti-war pressure that stopped this effort either. Otherwise a good article by Chomsky, although vague as to why the US wants a war on Iran, which only the Israel lobby is driving for.
NUCLEAR threats and counter-threats are a subtext of our times, steadily, it seems, becoming more insistent. The July meeting in Geneva between Iran and six major world powers on Iran’s nuclear programme ended with no progress.
The Bush administration was widely praised for having shifted to a more conciliatory stand — namely, by allowing a US diplomat to attend without participating — while Iran was castigated for failing to negotiate seriously. And the powers warned Iran that it would soon face more severe sanctions unless it terminated its uranium enrichment programs.
Meanwhile India was applauded for agreeing to a nuclear pact with the United States that would effectively authorise its development of nuclear weapons outside the bounds of the Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), with US assistance in nuclear programmes along with other rewards — in particular, to US firms eager to enter the Indian market for nuclear and weapons development, and ample payoffs to parliamentarians who signed on, a tribute to India’s flourishing democracy.
The War Party
August 7, 2008
This is from when BBC hadn’t yet been emasculated by Blair and was still producing half-decent documentaries. It is an excellent look at the neocons and also has interviews with Jim Lobe, the preeminent authority on the subject.
