Zarqawi Killed in Air Strike

About time. And no, we're not "winning" in Iraq, if such a thing could even happen. But no matter what you think of the war or the insurgency, most of which has nothing to do with Zarqawi, this is a good day.

AFTERTHOUGHT: And, well, yeah, it would've helped if we'd killed him in his terrorist training camp in the Kurdish no-fly zone which we controlled when we knew exactly where he was. But then we couldn't've dangled him like a shiny fishing lure in front of rabit Rightists as a manifestly absurd excuse to invade Iraq, now could we? That's okay; it was worth it. Because we're winning in Iraq!

You Could Be Preznit!

I've always wondered what Condi sees in him. (BTW, even if she's a mass-murderer, you just know somebody that pent-up is fantastic in bed. Way to go, George!)

How to Steal a US Presidential Election for the Second Time

Here.

Too bad Hillary and her spineless ilk don't yet get that this country is even less Republican-friendly than in 2000. People like this are in a shrinking minority in this country, let alone the world.

The loser of both the 2000 and 2004 elections, faux-president Bush, didn't get any "capital" from the last election, and yet he spent it, much like he spends the Chinese money that America doesn't have. Now he's flat broke and facing more than two years of pretending to govern. I shudder at the possibilities of what might happen before his term ends.

Evolution Exposed!

Damn it, the Bible was right all along! (PZ Myers via C&L.)

P.S. I'll be voting for the GOP from now on!

No-Shit News Item of the Day

Here. (Via Raw Story.) Still, it's nice to know....

Pat Robertson Takes on Jack La Lanne

Pat Robertson claims to leg-press 1000 lbs. (Thanks, Abbytaylor.)

He's supposedly leg-pressed 2000*.

P.S. 1000, maybe. But 2000? Come on. We're sure it has nothing to do with him pushing his "age-defying" protein shake....

BONUS: Jack La Lanne's site is here.

*Previously, this figure read "20000." That was a typo.

Pentagon "Releases" 9/11 Video

And it tells us nothing new. So no end to speculation that an airliner didn't hit the Pentagon, and even if the video had settled that, no end to the overwhelming reasons to believe that our intelligence-security services were deeply involved in the operation (cached).

God Speaks

His name is Murry Waas.

P.S.: Washington Press Corpse: this is the guy to emulate.

Iran, Plane Crashes

I've been procrastinating about this for a couple of months. Given our rapid movement toward war with Iran, it's hardly germane, but I want to post it before we "do something" about that country. Sad to say, but I'm the only one who (to my knowledge) noticed the following. I'm sure there were plenty who did, in various intelligence circles, but I'm the only one who's bothered to mention it in public [pats self on back].

Early this year, a year after Seymour Hersh reported that the US was messing around in Iran (again) and many months after the unacknowledged Joshua Kurlantzick reported that the US was supporting the now oft-reported crazy MEK in conducting covert operations in Iran, three planes "crashed" in Iran. No big deal. Except that the crashes were timed close together (again, no big deal) and two of them killed a number of the sort of people you'd want to kill if you were aiming to topple the government (okay, well, pretty convenient).

It's late and I have a job, so here's the homework:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/12/06/tehran.crash/index.html

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/01/09/iran.crash/
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/02/19/world/main541219.shtml

Two of the crashes were within a month of each other, early Jan. 2006 and Dec. 2005. The other one was in 2003. In the most recent two cases, the plane was transporting the "elite" Revolutionary Guard. Given that we're messing around inside Iran with Rummy having a near blank-check to take covert action, this is highly suspicious.

As the CBS piece notes, in the December 2005 crash, "All aboard — 18 crew and 284 passengers — were members of the Revolutionary Guards, an elite group under the direct control of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The guards protect Iran's borders and defend ruling hard-liners in this ultraconservative society." It also notes that several of the victims were "high-ranking officers of the Guard."

That's who we're trying to get rid of--the ruling hard-liners.

In the latest crash, in early February, 11 high-ranking Revolutionary Guard officials were killed. Iran's news service, IRNA, reported that "the guard's Commander of Ground Forces, Ahmad Kazemi, along with the commander of the 27th Rassoulollah Army Division and the chief of intelligence, died in the accident."

The chief of intelligence died. Pretty convenient. Now I don't know what's going on or who did this (it could be coincidence, but it stinks of something else), but I would be amazed if we weren't involved, either directly or through a third party, say, the Iranian crazies that are buddy-buddy with the neocon establishment (you know, the MEK):
http://www.wetdogdesign.net/realitique/iran-kurlantzick.htm.

Put this in the context of the recent reports of serious planning for attacks on Iran and the outed-agent Valerie Plame was working on Iran, and the Plame leak begins to look suspicious (I'm not saying it wasn't more than a political maneuver, which everyone outside of Power Line acknowledges, but there may be something else at work).

Rob

DISCLAIMER: Yes, I think the first, earliest crash was just an accident. It's the latter two that look suspicious. But hearing about the first one raised my suspicions about the ones that followed. As usual, for something this (ahem) important, I get no comments whatsoever.

Data Strip-Mining

Greg Palast, the BBC reporter who proved that the 2000 election was stolen and unearthed not one, but two US plans for Iraqi oil, has the skinny on the latest domestic warrantless wiretapping record-collecting move by the unrepentent monarchists in the White House. Think it's bad? Oh, yes, it's bad. But (as usual) it's much, much worse. Read. Weep.

Georgie McCarthy

Cheap shot or accurate description? You be the judge (via Crooks and Liars).

The (Last) Mayoral Debate

Last night's run-off mayoral debate between candidates Landrieu and Nagin was striking. All of them were, I suppose, since the moderaters routinely asked pointed questions and were clearly engaged in the answers given--unlike, say, Bill Schieffer. But last night, John Snell acted like a wife who'd been cheated on and was addressing her husband who'd just come home to pick up a few things for another night in a hotel. "Did you think about me when you were fucking her? huh?" he may as well have asked. He brought up the past--Nagin's Bring Back New Orleans Commission plan, which he called "pure fantasy," the undisclosed budget and the fiscal health of city hall. And yet, unlike the wife in my example, he was fair. He grilled Landrieu too (but Landrieu isn't running N.O. right now and doesn't have to answer for un-picked-up debris). It was beautiful. Because anyone running for an important office should be grilled. The rest of us are grilled in important job interviews, but politicians rarely are. Dare I hope that one day we could have presidential debates like that?

Lein Shory Irate Savant Leaves the Closet

My friend Lein Shory has been through more than his fair share recently, and unfortunately that means his blog Irate Savant is at an end. We salute it, we'll miss it and we hope to see it in some other form (such as an epistolary novel, say, with pen-and-ink drawings). But to hell with all that. What we care about is Lein's son, Logan, and his health. If you have any spare change, if or when Lein puts up a paypal button, please give the bastard some loot. God knows, he needs it.

P.S. Lein was the best writer in our class at LSU. His blog proves it. I know no publishers or agents read this rag, but in case one shows up, give him a chance, people.

P.P.S. Those readers who remember occasional commenter and blogger LNS should know that LNS was Lein--in his normal, non-fictive voice.

BONUS: Lein's new, non-fiction blog dealing with his current crisis with his son is Ad-Hoc Existence. Unlike friends and cousins, I didn't lose my house in Katrina, but given the state of things in New Orleans, I can't help but relate to Lein's situation. He's going through what New Orleans itself is going through.

SUPER BONUS: Okay, maybe not. But anyway. Lein was a big reason I started this blog. I'd wanted to start one in the winter of 2002 but opted instead for talking to myself about how we needed "regime change" in Washington. I kept reserving my rants for my beleaguered (but otherwise well-treated) girlfriends until Lein gave in and started Irate Savant. That was the kick in the ass I needed. So I started ranting in public. Next I plan to quit my job and start handing out tracts on Bourbon Street.

Hold the Corps Accountable

The Times-Picayune reports (again) that the Corpse of Engineers built New Orleans levees using obsolete data. Where's the prosecution? A few people in that organization need to be tried for negligent homicide, don'tcha think?

NOTE: Since the man who made the disastrous decision is dead, maybe not. But the article doesn't addresses neither the porous-soil issue that was central to the 17th St. breach nor the issues with most of the breaches, which weren't due to overtopping. Using outdated storm data was unconscionable but how that may have affected issues like sheet-pile too short for the soil is a big question. The half-assed guess that the Vicksburg office signed off on was made by someone for some reason. Who? What? I imagine the T-P will tell us eventually.

Why, Thank You

The god I don't believe in knows well how I feel about Red Blogistan, so this doesn't come casually. Captain Ed, of all people, in defending the 101st Fighting Keyboardists, wrote this, perhaps by accident but I assume because he's a nice, gracious dude:

Many on the left disagree, however, and often they provide challenging arguments and valuable perspectives on policy and the manner in which it gets implemented.

Given the severely divided state of the country, sharpened in the Red-Blue Blogistan divide, this is quite an admission. I wish others would admit as much. Kudos to the Kaptain for giving Blue Blogistan a teensy bit of credit. Maybe I'm an asshole, but I can't do the same (no offense to the Kaptain--this is a broader issue). That's not because I don't think most Red Blogistanis are sincere, it's because they're opinions are (mostly) based on falsehoods. If we were all working from the same base of information, this problem wouldn't exist and we could argue about solutions to problems instead of arguing about whether problems exist.

The broader issue is this. It would be wonderful if the country weren't divided. It would be wonderful if there were nothing but raucous debate from varying perspectives on all the issues of the day. But we have no such debate. On TV and even in the papers we have a restricted, narrow range of debate, usually limited to a couple of points of view reduced to a couple of sentences each. This is childish (and probably has a lot to do with the decline of the papers and the ascent of simplicity-prone, image-dependent TV--and I say that as a photographer and ad-agency employee).

To make matters worse, our country's being run by a Party who's wedding to bullshit marketing (read "outright lying") to push their agenda through, because few voters would approve of their agenda if they understood it. Not only that, but their followers have been eating this perfumed horseshit and not questioning it but instead declaring how good it smells and what an ingenious meal they've been served (Zagat rated!).

I used to suspect that the blogosphere was divided by perspective. But after extensive research into various issues (using, oh, I dunno, primary sources), it's pretty clear that one side, though biased in favor of certain policies and behaviors, is familiar with verifiable facts (or at least decent reporting) while the other is mired in bullshit.

It's not a matter of perspective, it's a matter of propaganda. And the propaganda is all on one side.

Snowed In

Jeebus. Next: Fox News announces it's changing its name to "White House Propaganda."

UPDATE: It's Uhfishul.

CIA Blogmining

Recently Schroeder noted that his blog had mysterious readers from Reston. The night I read his post, I noticed I had some too (I've been getting hits from Reston for ages). My "readers" were on an AOL server, so I figured that it was just a crawler, which it probably was. But as Schroeder pointed out, lots of spooky gov't agencies hang out in Reston. So it was with some interest that I read this Washington Times article sent in by a flesh-and-blood reader.

Pulitzers for Journalism

So many reporters do their jobs and get little, if any, recognition. Most, it seems, get lots of complaints about minor errors and no kudos for getting most of their facts straight. Hats off, then, to the New Orleans' Times-Picayune and the Mississippi Gulf Coast's Sun-Herald for kicking proverbial ass during and after that Stalin-inspired storm Katrina ravaged our corner of the coast. Hats off as well to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau for breaking the story of domestic spying, to Dana Priest for his coverage of secret prisons, and to Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer for uncovering the Dukestir's malfeasance. While it's unfortunate that there wasn't stiffer competition (ahem), these guys deserve free dinners and drinks for eternity. We're some kinda grateful.

Get the skinny here.

Pesky "Leftists"

Joe Klein and Eric Alterman duked it out in the Huffinton Post recently over Klein's breakfast remarks about the "left wing" of the Democratic Party. Klein claims Alterman misrepresented what he said by conflating the terms "liberal" and "left wing" (though how "right wing" could accurately reflect "liberal" positions or how "liberal" isn't "left" he does not say). Klein can nitpick if he wants, but his remarks are still relevant. In his own defense he wrote in the HuffPo that

The default position of leftists like, say, Michael Moore and many writers at The Nation, is that America is essentially a malignant, imperialistic force in the world and the use of American military power is almost always wrong. Liberals have a more benign, and correct, view of America's role in the world and tend to favor the use of military force if it is exercised judiciously, as a last resort, and in a multilateral contect--with U.N. approval or through NATO. The first Gulf War, the overthrow of the Taliban and the Kosovo intervention met these criteria; Bush's Iraq invasion clearly did not.

(Emphasis mine.)

Here, Joe Klein unwittingly reveals his profound ignorance of both history and world journalism from the last few decades. Leaving aside the ethical question of whether intervention is "wrong," America's imperialist interventions are so well documented that it's pathetic that so many Americans (most self-styled "conservatives," say) are unaware of them. If they were aware of what the foreign policy apparatus of our government has done, they would be horrified. Knowing what the US government has done and reacting appropriately to it as humans capable of empathy and regret is distinct from supporting socialist or progressive policies. This is why "left" and "liberal" are non-descriptive, distracting adjectives here. There has always been a tradition in this country of non-intervention in foreign affairs. President George Washington advised against it, and even a pro-assassination president like Eisenhower warned against the corrupting influence of the military-industrial complex. Recently, conservatives like Pat Buchanan and Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com have argued against intervention (Raimondo is pretty hard-line about it).

Shelves of thoroughly researched books that Joe Klein apparently hasn't read have detailed the covert (and overt) actions of the US intelligence-security apparatus in world affairs, and "almost always" these actions weren't "exercised judiciously, as a last resort, [or] in a multilateral contect" (even spell-check would've caught that one, Joe). To note this is not to "hate" America, it is to recognize what's been done in our name and what's led to much of the world "hating" us. It is to insist that instead of following the usual protocols, we should actually do what Klein stupidly thinks we've done. Because if we really had used "military force if it [were] exercised judiciously, as a last resort, and in a multilateral contect," we'd have few problems.

This is not what we have done. As I told one of our mystery reporters last week (at the Mayfair Lounge, no less), Americans live in a bubble. Within the borders of our country, our laws sorta kinda apply (see influence-peddling, elections, etc. for exceptions), while without our borders our government acts like Tony Soprano. This is no exaggeration. It is the truth. But it is not without exception. And this is where it's critical to note that knowing our history and writing about it is not to "hate America" or to be "anti-American." Because Western governments have repeatedly and routinely acted just as the United States has. When the US wasn't preeminent, back in the days of the French and British and German empires, Western colonial powers did exactly what we've been doing since WWII. (Indeed, we did the same things before WWII, but to a smaller extent, because we weren't so powerful and rich. Remember Mexico? Remember the Maine?) I don't doubt most governments throughout history have acted similarly, depending on their ability to do so. The reason America stands out is that it's the lone superpower. Even during the Cold War, the US was stronger and richer than the USSR, and it acted accordingly, viz. for its "interests."

But what are "interests"? Why do governments do these things? Governments--and ours is no exception--always claim that their reasons are noble. They're going to bring freedom, defend the country against a dire threat, civilize the natives--you name the cause, they've made it, always straightfaced and rarely sincerely. The British were going to liberate Iraq. Later, of course, they fought a battle for Fallujah, faced an insurgency and bombed thousands of civilians. Yes, things certainly have changed. In the late 19th century, Western nations invaded Africa and raped it for its resources. What did they tell their people at the time? They were going to "civilize" Africa. Who knew that "civilizing" meant cutting down so many with recently invented Gatling guns? (Pesky darkies!) And does anybody remember the Opium Wars or how we pried open Japan's legs? Our current wars and the reasons for them are no different. Anyone who wants to know what the "war on terror" is about should peruse Zbigniew Brzezinski's book The Grand Chessboard. (Hint: it's not about "terror.") There is one word for why most governments do such dastardly things: power. And in many instances that amounts to trade.

In the case of our "war on terror," America's "interests" are power-based. They have to do with money and influence and with maintaining our preeminence in the world. If we acted "judiciously" in Bosnia because of the Kosovars, why did we make a deal with Al Qaeda there? According to Congressional terrorism expert Yosef Bodansky, American officials promised Al-Zawahiri's brother (or Al-Zawahiri himself) $50 million in exchange for Al Qaeda not attacking us there. We also trained KLA terrorists in the region, even after we supposedly had stopped because of international agreements. This is troubling, to say the least. If we bombed Afghanistan because of 9/11, why were we preparing to do so before 9/11 and why did American officials reportedly threaten the Taliban with a war in October, which is exactly what happened after the WTC and Pentagon were attacked? Oddly enough, an oil pipeline route was at stake; so was influence over Afghanistan and Central Asia (Condi Rice's expertise), the fulcrum of power in Eurasia. But enough of 9/11. There's a long list of covert US action to "hate."

Here's a short list: United Fruit, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Chile, Argentina, Cuba, Congo, Iran, Egypt, Italy, the Phillippines (Abu Sayyaff? We helped create them). For more, read Killing Hope, The Assassination Business, or the ugliest one of all, The War on Truth. The list is too long for a blog post of any detail. If you're curious, not really busy or not incredibly lazy, then read these books; they'll change your perception of what you're told on TV. Note: Why did Al-Zawahiri pick 9/11? That's when the US-supported Egyptian security forces picked him up and tortured him (he's since deserved it). Go figure.

Some Americans may have asked themselves why prisoners at Abu Ghraib and many other detention facilities, for example, were mistreated tortured. I don't know. But I and many others have repeatedly noted that the methods used were drawn up by the CIA and taught to police forces throughout Central and South America decades ago. The mystery of Abu Ghraib isn't why or how it happened, it's why and how we let it happen repeatedly in the past fifty years. The only difference between then and now is that in Iraq, we weren't using proxies.

Since the grand productive colonial days, Western governments have done no less than what they always have, limited only by an increasingly curious media (until recently) and evolving standards that mitigate against wholesale slaughter. (I don't doubt that non-Western governments do the same or would do so if they were rich and powerful, but I don't know much about them.) So are Brits or French who criticize their governments' foreign maneuvers labelled "anti-British" or "anti-French"? Do they "hate" their countries? I don't know. But presumably they do not. As with US citizens who criticize their government's inhumane foreign actions, I imagine they recognize the distinction between covert action and country. If a wife criticizes her husband, does she hate him? If he punches his friend and she scolds him, is she anathema? No. And those who criticize the abhorrent behavior of our government are no different.

BONUS: Nobody noticed, but in his Klein-critical HuffPo piece, Alterman wrote that he "went to a breakfast this morning sponsored by HBO and the Council on Foreign Relations where Tina Brown interviewed Julia Sweig, author of Friendly Fire: Losing Friends and Making Enemies in the Anti-American Century..." (emphasis mine). Time Warner's HBO and the CFR? How bizarre is that? Is there a precedent?

Negligent Homicide

No, I'm not dead, I just started a new job at a fancy ad agency and don't know what the future of this extremely low-readership blog will be. But anyway, one of the many stories barely reported in this news vacuum known as the Washington Press Corpse is that the Army Corpse of Engineers (no, not all of the engineers, but presumably a few decision makers) is guilty* of negligent homicide. In honor of the news vacuum, which continues to not show the consequences of either Iraq or, god forbid, Katrina, here are a couple of gruesome photos compliments of Robert Lindsay by way of Your Right Hand Thief. (By way of Schroeder.)

BONUS: On a tangential note, Mystery Reporter 1 (2?) and I recently dined at Cooter Brown's for the final Final Four game. Highlight was the Tom Benson sandwich, made of chicken. (For out-of-towners, that's an insult to the owner of the Saints.)

*Not in the court-of-law sense, since they haven't been prosecuted. But the prosecutorial evidence is abundant.