Author: wrongologist

What’s Erbil Got to do With It?

David Brooks:

We are now living in what we might as well admit is the Age of Iraq. The last four presidents have found themselves drawn into that nation because it epitomizes the core problem at the center of so many crises: the interaction between failing secular governance and radical Islam.

While Lawrence of Arabia said “on to Aqaba”, President Obama says, “on to Erbil”.

From the 2-time Pulitzer Prize-winning Steve Coll, writing in The New Yorker:

To the defense of Erbil: this was the main cause that drew President Obama back to combat in Iraq last week, two and a half years after he fulfilled a campaign pledge and pulled the last troops out.

More from Coll:

Erbil is the capital of the oil-endowed Kurdish Regional Government, in northern Iraq. There the US built political alliances and equipped Kurdish Peshmerga militias long before the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq, in 2003.

Erbil was the most stable place in Iraq until ISIS got near there. That caused Mr. Obama to draw a Red Line he has been thus far, unwilling to draw elsewhere in the Middle East, despite the urgings from politicians to his right. Mr. Obama, speaking with Tom Friedman in an interview last Friday:

The Kurdish region is functional in the way we would like to see…It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it is important to make sure that that space is protected.

Kurdistan’s economy has boomed, attracting investors from all over. But, Kurdistan has one notable deficit as the model Middle East US ally: it isn’t a state. Nor is it a happy partner in the Iraqi national unity government. So, given that, Mr. Obama’s explanation of his rationale for war seems incomplete.

Did we say there are American oil companies on the ground there? Or, that there are American oil workers on the ground there? ExxonMobil and Chevron are among the oil and gas firms drilling in Kurdistan under contracts that compensate the companies for their political risk-taking with unusually favorable terms. Along with them came the usual sub-contractors, the oilfield service companies, the accountants, the construction firms, and logistics firms.

More from Steve Coll: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

It’s not about oil. After you’ve written that on the blackboard five hundred times, watch Rachel Maddow’s documentary “Why We Did It” for a highly sophisticated yet pointed journalistic take on how the world oil economy has figured from the start as a silent partner in the Iraq fiasco.

Mr. Obama has a duty to defend American lives and interests in Erbil and elsewhere, oil or no. But, rather than evacuating US citizens, he has ordered a months-long aerial campaign to defend Kurdistan’s status quo. Why?

The DC Spin Doctors will say that it is essential to help a unified Iraq become capable of containing and defeating ISIS. But the status quo in Kurdistan also continues oil production by the international firms. We hear no mention of that, or how badly an evacuation would play for Democrats in the November elections. So, back in Iraq we are.

A little history: ExxonMobil cut its deal in Erbil in 2011. The GW Bush administration did not force Exxon’s predecessor American oil companies such as the Dallas-based Hunt Oil, to divest from Kurdistan. Bush’s team allowed the wildcatters on the ground to stay there, while insisting that Erbil’s politicians negotiate an oil-revenue sharing and political unity deal with Baghdad.

The Kurds in Erbil didn’t see the point in a final compromise with Baghdad’s Shiite politicians, so as each year passed, and the Kurds got richer, they attracted more credible and deep-pocketed oil companies as partners, and they looked more and more like a de-facto state. Steve Coll concludes:

And so, in Erbil in the weeks to come, American pilots will defend from the air a capital whose growing independence and wealth has loosened Iraq’s seams, even while, in Baghdad, American diplomats will persist in an effort to stitch that same country together to confront ISIS.

So we have another case of “Privatizing the Profits and Socializing the Losses”. The oil companies may or may not pay US taxes on the profits from their operations in Kurdistan, but Americans will surely pay the costs of Obama’s defense of Erbil.

We are defending an undeclared Kurdish oil state whose geopolitical appeal is as a long-term non-Russian supplier of oil and gas to Europe. We don’t hear that spoken about in polite or naïve company.

Or in our main stream media, which is neither polite or naĂŻve.

So, American forces are now using weapons (mostly air power) to destroy other American weapons captured by ISIS forces in Iraq, which the ISIS combatants have been using to capture even more US armaments, which Americans, in turn, will have to destroy at some point in the future.

Steve Coll reminds us that the historical Al Swearengen, Mayor of Deadwood, SD was a character in the HBO Series Deadwood. On the show, he once said that life is made up of:

“one vile task after another”

 

And so is American policy in Iraq.

 

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What Happened to Our Free Press?

We have a free press, right? That freedom implies the absence of interference from an overreaching state. With respect to government information, governments routinely distinguish between materials that are public or protected from disclosure to the public based on a classification process that protects some information from disclosure due to the information’s relevance to protecting the national interest.

Washington is making more and more information, including some that is decades-old, inaccessible except to journalists who are “trusted”. That is journalists who the Administration or an agency have invested time and effort to determine that they will put the best possible spin on whatever they are fed.

In the past, the term “access journalism” meant giving exclusive interviews (or leaks) to pet reporters who had established that they won’t bite the hand that feeds them good stories. From the perspective of the government, this is a virtuous circle: Not only can they reward reporters who play ball, but over time, these correspondents become influential, by virtue of having an inside information advantage.

But there are darker ways this game is played. Some agencies block information from journalists or historians who prefer to report rather than to take dictation. The American Historical Association has an article about government agencies using the courts to keep secrets secret:

In a two-to-one decision the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, in May 2014, agreed with the CIA that a volume of its…history of the 53-year-old Bay of Pigs Invasion could “confuse the public” and should thus be kept secret.

Huh? What are we supposed to be confused about? That the invasion failed? That the CIA set it up? Or maybe that the Agency was flat-assed wrong about the popular anti-Castro uprising that was supposed to be triggered by the invasion?

To win the legal argument, the CIA successfully convinced the two Judges that any document the agency deems “predecisional” (dealing with file information developed prior to a decision to act) can be withheld permanently. To do this, they rely on the CIA Information Act of 1984. This bill was a deal made to speed the CIA’s processing of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests while protecting information unlikely to be released because of national security concerns. But today, the CIA doesn’t abide by Congress’s intent, it routinely refuses to search its operational files – in particular, files which have been subject to an investigation. As an example, Admiral William McRaven, the Joint Special Operations (JSOC) Commander who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid, knew about this transparency black hole when he ordered the FOIA-complying Department of Defense to purge its computers of all files on the Navy SEALs raid on bin Laden and send them to the CIA, where the Operational Files Exemption would keep them “safe” from search and review for release.

If our society wants to maintain even a veneer of democracy, we have to change the CIA Information Act, which keeps important information from the public. It seems it is used to preserve the image of the CIA and shield it from criticism, as much as it is used to protect national security.

A second dark way in which the game is played is demonstrated by the Obama administration’s pursuit of more criminal leak investigations than all previous administrations combined. The Institute for Public Accuracy reported yesterday that 14 Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists have issued individual statements voicing support for New York Times reporter James Risen, who continues to refuse to name his source for information about a bungled CIA operation in Iran that appeared in his 2006 book State of War. The DOJ is considering whether to attempt to force Risen to testify against his sources.

Third, the White House occasionally threatens reporters about their methods of obtaining information. Press Secretary Josh Earnest publicly lectured the WaPo after they reported that Obama aides had early warning of a potential border crisis, and for citing an anonymous sources. At the same time, other reporters present at the lecture pointed out a familiar email that had just arrived in their inboxes: an invitation to a phone call with anonymous White House officials:

All of this is designed by the Administration’s spinners to produce cover stories. Because there’s always a cover story, even if it’s “nothing happened.” Cover stories are built like onions, one layer behind another, a fallback story behind every cover story.

Anti-transparency is tantamount to anti-accountability. Criticism is the only known antidote for error.

By contrast, in a competitive arena like business (or sports), ruthless postmortems, particularly of failures, often happen in public. They are believed to be necessary for improving performance.

But in Ultimate Politics, Washington can’t tolerate critiques, so they plan to be even less transparent. Forget the Constitution, folks.

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The Crook Who Took America off the Gold Standard

Forty years ago on August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace rather than face Impeachment. Millions of words have been written about his crimes and misdemeanors. Some efforts at rehabilitation of his image occurred over the last week.

One thing we shouldn’t forget is that Nixon took us off the gold standard.

When Nixon entered office in 1969, America had been part of the international monetary system known as Bretton Woods since the end of World War II. Bretton Woods committed the US to backing every dollar overseas with gold. Thus, foreign countries had the right to exchange their dollars at the rate of $35 per ounce. All other currencies were fixed to the dollar, and the dollar was pegged to gold.

Nixon appointed Arthur Burns as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1970, with instructions to ensure easy access to credit since Nixon was going to run for reelection in 1972, and wanted a growing economy to help his case. Bloomberg Business Week says he gave Burns some blunt instructions: “You see to it, no recession”.

Despite Nixon’s instructions to Burns, the US went into recession in 1970, triggering a rise in unemployment to 6% (imagine that!), which was the highest level since the Korean War. The recession should have curbed inflation, but it didn’t. Burns was stumped. Business Week quotes Burns’ diary:

What the boys around the White House fail to see…is that the country now faces an entirely new problem—sizable inflation in the midst of recession…The rules of economics are not working the way they used to. Prices were going up even when factories stood idle—a seeming refutation of the economic rules.

Despite growing inflation, Nixon pressured Burns to further loosen monetary policy, driving even more inflation. Domestic inflation was mirrored overseas. Foreign governments bought dollars to continue their growing exports to the US, leaving their central banks filled with greenbacks. Meanwhile, America’s gold holdings dwindled to $10 billion, about half its 1960 level.

The gold standard now existed in name only, since foreign banks held far more dollars than the US held in gold at $35/ounce. This left the US dollar vulnerable to a run.

In 1971, Nixon appointed John Connally as Treasury Secretary. Connally asked the White House financial team for options to control inflation and solve the possible run on the dollar, while keeping the domestic economy growing. Burns wanted price controls; he also thought the US should devalue the dollar against gold (that is, raise the gold price above $35). Undersecretary for Monetary Affairs Paul Volcker believed this would be ineffectual, as other countries would simply devalue their currencies by the same percentage. Volcker thought the US should temporarily halt gold-dollar convertibility.

On August 12, 1971 Britain demanded that the US guarantee $750 million. The next day, Nixon summoned his advisers to Camp David to agree on a plan. The plan had two essential points. First, America would stop converting dollars to gold. Second, to combat inflation, US wages and prices would be frozen for 90 days.

On August 15, 1971 Nixon announced the plan that unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar to gold, effectively bringing the 25-year Bretton Woods system to an end. This was called the “Nixon Shock”. The gold standard was abandoned, and the previously fixed exchange rates of the world’s major currencies began to float.

Many conservatives argue that we should return to a gold standard. Would that help or hinder the world economy?

A terrific economic history of the Great Depression is the 2010 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World” by Liaquat Ahamed. Ahamed says that the gold standard was the principal cause of the depression. His thesis is that tying the amount of currency a country has in circulation to the amount of gold it holds becomes a strait jacket. The problem is that if you have a gold standard, your money supply is fixed by the amount of gold available. When economic activity exceeds the value of a country’s gold holdings, trade and economic growth are stifled, or you devalue your gold, causing inflation.

Of course, because of Bretton Woods, you couldn’t devalue your gold. So Nixon, an economic conservative, took two unthinkable steps in order to get re-elected. He implemented wage and price controls, and ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold.

Taking the world off the gold standard has facilitated the unprecedented economic growth of the past 40 years, since trade has grown much faster than the growth in world’s physical stock of gold.

Nixon’s price controls didn’t do much. The Consumer Price Index rose 4.4% percent in 1971, and 3.1% in 1972. When the controls were phased out in 1973, inflation rose to 6.2%. It was a shocking 11% in 1974.

So, as in all things Nixonian, there was a little good along with a lottta bad.

When Nixon said the words “I will therefore resign”, it felt to the Wrongologist that years of anti-war protesting had come to fruition. Ford, our first appointed President, then promptly pardons Nixon, and the merriment was stopped dead in its tracks.

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 10, 2014

On Sunday, we reach for humor and less seriousness, but lately, the cartoons aren’t funny, they tend toward the ironic, or are downright scary. Maybe that is understandable, since we are back in Iraq. ISIS is now as bad as or worse, than Al-Qadea, which might be good news for the Wrongologist’s defense stocks!

Why is the Iraqi government outgunned by a rogue group of thugs?

Anyone?…Bueller?

Expanding “Arabia” to the wider Islamic world, we Americans have been on very sandy ground, from Kabul to Baghdad to Benghazi. And, like quicksand, we can’t escape:
• We’re working with Iran in Iraq, but against them in Israel and in Syria
• Iran is working with Palestinians in Israel, but against them in Syria
• Turkey a member of NATO, supports Hamas against Israel, but is against Assad

Nations in the Middle East are frequently allies on one front and enemies on the other. Somewhere in that paradox is the solution. Now that we are out of Afghanistan, will we have to fight the new terror group of the month, or the new terror group of the year? Can we be the police department to the world, yet keep our social contract and our domestic freedoms intact?

Military recruiters are about the same the world over:

COW alqaeda
T.E. Lawrence – Britain’s “Lawrence of Arabia”, warned that Arabia is not a hospitable place:

COW Lawrence

Iraq didn’t stop being a cesspool when we left;

COW Intermission

Reingagement is a tough equation to solve:

COW Reingagement

In other news, the leaders of Africa came to DC to hear our new pitch:

COW Africa
Finally, Jim Brady died this week. The Wrongologist’s company was a vendor to the Brady Center, and played a very small part in building public support for the Brady Bill:

COW Brady

 

 

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Friday Music Break – August 8, 2014

Today we feature three songs inspired by New Orleans and the August 29, 2005 Katrina disaster that killed 1833 souls.

We start with Steve Earle and the song he wrote for the HBO series Treme, “This City”. He explains the genesis of the song in the intro:

The recording is from BBC4 and he is accompanied by Diana Jones and Tom Morello, a person with great guitar chops and an even better social conscience.

Next, The subdudes. And yes, that’s a small “s”. Their sound is notable for the band’s substitution of a tambourine player for a drummer. The song is “Poor Man’s Paradise” from the 2007 album, Street Symphony, produced by George Massenberg, who produced with the Wrongologist’s favorite, Little Feat (that would be the Lowell George iteration of the band).

Finally, here is a Treme funeral scene that is followed by a traditional Second Line parade in honor of the dearly departed. Khandi Alexander’s performance in this scene is amazing. The idea of your loved ones dancing down the street after you go is very New Orleans and very comforting:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-iZUhHjXi8

Laissez les bon temps rouler mon amis!

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The CIA Needs an Intervention

This Part III of an unintentional three-part series on how the National Security State (NSS) has hurt our standing around the world. You can read parts I and II here and here. There is not a single aspect of American geopolitics that has not been infected by the NSS. In recent years, various foreign governments have occasionally expelled US agencies from their countries. We have assumed that this was a paranoid reaction by their undemocratic leaders to American goodwill.

Now, we can’t be so sure. It is increasingly obvious that the USAID is operating as a CIA front organization.

The AP reported last week that USAID funded a program in Cuba designed to spur anti-government activism among Cubans. It brought people from Costa Rica, Venezuela, and Peru to Cuba posing as tourists or health workers who were to lead HIV prevention workshops, but with the real goal of grooming opposition activists.

It’s not the first claim this year of political meddling in Cuba for USAID. In April, the AP uncovered a “Cuba Twitter” program also designed to undermine the Cuban government. It was a Twitter-like social media platform promoted by USAID that had about 40,000 Cuban users. And there’s more. In 2009, a USAID contractor was jailed in Cuba for alleged spying.

And we shouldn’t forget Pakistan, where the CIA used a hepatitis vaccination campaign as a cover to spy on Osama bin-Laden’s compound. One outcome from that effort was that our Seal team got Osama bin-Laden. But there were two bad outcomes: First, our agent, Dr. Shakeel Afridi went to jail, convicted as a spy for a foreign government. Second, Muslims all over the Middle East now reject the efforts at polio immunization as a Western ploy. Foreign Policy reports that the Centers for Disease Control says there were 416 reported cases of polio in the world last year and 99 of them were in Pakistan, a 60% increase from the prior year despite the availability of polio vaccine there since 1962. The problem is that the Taliban is shooting those administering the vaccine, and it has banned the vaccine outright. More than 60 polio vaccination health workers have been killed since the Pakistan ban was initiated in 2012.

Subsequently, the word has spread throughout the Middle East that those giving injections are CIA agents, and should be shot on sight.

Now we can add two cases this year where USAID has used subversion to try to overthrow the Cuban government. Cuba would open up far more quickly if the US ended its embargoes on Cuba, especially its ban on visits by Americans to Cuba. See the Wrongologist’s report on his trip to Cuba and our future relationship here.

USAID admitted the HIV workshop’s primary purpose was not HIV education: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[It]…enabled support for Cuban civil society while providing a secondary benefit of addressing the desire Cubans expressed for information and training about HIV prevention.

Do any of you find it hypocritical that America is currently sanctioning Russia for its interference in the internal affairs of Ukraine while our government engages in similar practices in Cuba?

The fact that USAID is used by the CIA is a tragedy for all concerned, since it taints any good work that they perform. The AP quoted Charles Kenny, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, who said that suspicions over US programs would deepen in countries already wary of the United States: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

The problem is that, especially [when] it comes to public health, even with countries we don’t particularly like, we probably want to be able to cooperate…Take the Ebola outbreak. It crosses borders very rapidly. Even if the places where it happens aren’t places we want to touch, in public health emergencies, we want to help stop [outbreaks] from becoming bigger.

And like clockwork, on Tuesday USAID and CDC announced Ebola assistance for West Africa. We shall see how our USAID people are treated when they get there.

So, is this Obama’s Bay of Piglets? Our CIA is more interested in stoking a silly, and dangerous Cold War militarist world view wherever it can. The actions of our CIA and the resultant poor image of America is one reason China is more competitive than the US in Latin America and Africa. They don’t meddle politically, they just want a fertile business environment.

When a family member can’t stop doing something that is bad for him/her, the rest of the family gets together with the bad actor and have an intervention: they work together to try to get the person to change their ways.

John Brennan and the CIA need that intervention right now.

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John Brennan: The Gift That Keeps on Giving

Following up on yesterday’s post about the corrosive impact of an out-of-control National Intelligence State, you may have missed that on July 7th, Bloomberg reported that Germany asked our CIA Head of Station to leave the country. From Bloomberg:

The expulsion, described as “an extraordinary event” by a German Foreign Ministry spokesman, reflects Chancellor Angela Merkel’s frustration about US spying on one of its most important allies and the political risk of growing mistrust of American intentions among the German public.

Bloomberg called Germany’s action the lowest point in relations with the US since Edward Snowden revealed extensive surveillance activities by the US, including the alleged hacking of Merkel’s mobile phone. Lawmakers and officials in Merkel’s governing coalition urged the Obama Administration to come clean on German surveillance and make a no-spying pledge. The US has made it clear that isn’t on the table.

Pressure on Merkel grew after an alleged American double agent was found in Germany’s foreign-intelligence service, known as BND. According to Spiegel Online: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

[The spy] had already been working for an American intelligence agency for two years. That relationship had…begun with an email, which he had sent to the US Embassy in Berlin, he explained. [He] talked about clandestine meetings in Austria, at which he had allegedly been paid a total of €25,000 ($34,000).

Bloomberg quoted Wolfgang Bosbach, a lawmaker in Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union party:

The US still hasn’t grasped what a burden this case is for the German-American relationship…Germany cannot tolerate espionage activity on its soil.

America came to this realization too late. Bloomberg reported that on July 9th, US Ambassador to Germany, John Emerson, went to the German Foreign Ministry with a Washington-authorized offer to provide Germany a US intelligence-sharing agreement resembling the “5 Eyes” relationship available only to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the UK. The goal was to assuage Merkel and prevent the expulsion of the Central Intelligence Agency’s station chief in Berlin.

But, that same morning, Merkel convened her top ministers and decided to ask the US intelligence chief to leave Germany. Merkel said:

We don’t live in the Cold War anymore, where everybody probably mistrusted everybody else… The notion that you always have to ask yourself…whether the one sitting across from you could be working for the others, that’s not a basis for trust…So we obviously have different perceptions and we have to discuss that intensively.

In addition to Ambassador Emerson’s efforts, Bloomberg reported that CIA Director John Brennan contacted Germany’s intelligence chief prior to the CIA official being asked to leave. He offered to visit Berlin to help resolve the dispute. But, Brennan’s offer was perceived in Berlin as too little, too late. The Germans had moved beyond a symbolic visit.

It wasn’t always this way. Before the current tensions, the US and Germany had a history of extensive intelligence cooperation. For many years, much of US electronic spying on Iran was conducted out of a CIA station in Frankfurt known as Tefran.

Now we have a big repair job on our hands, precisely when we need the German government to work closely with us on Ukraine and the Middle East.

Nicely played, US Security State! This conflict with Germany underscores the opinion that US intelligence agencies lack a good risk-assessment model, one that judges the benefits of operations directed at friendly powers against the potential risks that can come from those operations.

In the LA Times, Jacob Heilbrun said:

If Obama is unable to rein in spying of Germany, he may discover that he is helping to convert it from an ally into an adversary. For Obama to say Auf Wiedersehen to a longtime ally would deliver a blow to American national security that no amount of secret information could possibly justify.

And on the same date, Spiegel Online’s lead article was: “Germany’s Choice: Will It Be America or Russia?” Europeans in general, and Chancellor Merkel specifically, are examining how (or if) they can survive geopolitically without the US. And for Germany, and possibly others in Europe, this could push them into the logical alternative, a European tent that includes Russia.

Mr. Putin’s grand plan has been to separate Germany from the US. Yet, even in light of knowing Putin’s strategy, we still alienate Germany. This makes one ask: Who is in charge of our geopolitical strategy? Brennan, or Obama? Can anybody in DC play this game? Is it wrong to ask: How about firing Brennan over screwing up our relationship with Germany?

Mr. Brennan may be thinking of this exchange between Lady Clementine Churchill and French General Charles De Gaulle on December 9, 1967:

Clementine Churchill:

General, you must not hate your friends more than you hate your enemies

De Gaulle (in English):

France has no friends, only interests

Sadly, both De Gaulle and Brennan have been proven wrong. Germany will move us from the “friend” to the “interest” column.

Let’s hope we don’t need them to do something that only a friend would do.

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Our 4th Branch of Government

Everyone knows our government has 3 branches; the Executive, the Legislative, and the Judicial. That’s basic high school civics. But, it’s no longer true. The US government now seems to have a 4th branch: The national security apparatus, which has unfathomable power and reach.

From Tom Engelhard: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

New efforts at “reforms” will, at best, only modestly impede the powers of this [security] state within a state. Generally speaking, its powers and prerogatives remain beyond constraint by our judicial branch of government. It is deferred to with remarkable frequency by the executive branch and, with the rarest of exceptions, it has been supported handsomely with much obeisance and few doubts by Congress.

The national security apparatus is unelected. After last week’s mea culpa by Mr. Obama, apparently it has also moved beyond our Constitutional rules of checks and balances. You may recall that a report to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) on the CIA’s Rendition/Detention/Interrogation (RDI) program, was held up by the CIA. Along the way, we learned that the CIA was improperly spying on the SSCI.

In March, CIA Director John Brennan said spying on the Senate was outside the realm of possibility, claiming:

As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s — that’s just beyond the — you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.

Now we learn they did exactly that. The CIA Inspector General has found that:

CIA employees improperly accessed computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile a report on the agency’s now defunct detention and interrogation program,

On August 1st, the administration defended the CIA and Brennan’s actions. But Brennan DID obstruct the investigation, he leveled false charges at the Senate Intelligence Committee staff, filed those charges with Department of Justice, and then oversaw the process of redacting the damning CIA report.

From the Booman Tribune:

By any normal standard, John Brennan would be prosecuted for his actions. But he is being protected by the administration. I don’t think this is best explained by the idea that Brennan is doing a good job in other respects. He’s a major embarrassment to the administration and protecting him makes them look extremely bad. From the very beginning of his administration, I think President Obama has simply been afraid to take on the Intelligence Community.

And remember Mr. Obama’s rationale:

…we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened…there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And, you know, it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots…

He has clearly taken a side and it’s not that of transparency, or the Constitution. Or, do we live in a country where the President works at the direction of the head of the CIA?

Alternative Obama: If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a dozen times, look forward, because if you look backward you’re going to learn from history and then how are we ever going to continue weakening your Constitution?

Alternative Alternative Obama: John Brennan has a gun to my head. Keeps reminding me of how much my Presidency looks like that of JFK. Worries about my safety…

That might explain his lack of political courage, but, political courage is exactly what is required if we are to get off the self-destructive path this country is walking. Sadly, we aren’t seeing that. Too many are scared that they might lose their jobs if the boss saw their political action. Too many are flummoxed by how easily Congress can be co-opted by money. Too many in our media are giving right-wing politicians a pass because it’s clear that they won’t change.

There’s no excuse for the people who tortured or, who lied to Congress, even if they were under ‘enormous pressure’. They knew the difference between right and wrong. And the fact that John Kiriakou is in prison for revealing that the US tortured, while Cofer Black, David Addington, John Yoo, John Brennan and Jose Rodriquez, all of whom played a role in the torture program roam free, shows that our political elite’s ethics are upside-down.

Holding individuals, particularly direct actors (like torturers) and advisers who engineered the torture program accountable before the law would not destroy the effectiveness of the CIA or the security state. Those who violated the law should be prosecuted. But those who did not violate the law should be free to conduct operations on behalf of the US. They shouldn’t be made to feel that they are weakened or wronged.

In response to the related question that often arises: “What? Do you want the CIA to be looking over its shoulder or consulting a lawyer every time it needs to get something done? The answer is: “Of course”.

We should expect nothing less than that from every elected official from the President down to local mayors, police chiefs and commissioners. Particularly from those who have the statutory authority to harm others.

It is difficult to imagine today that what sounded like poetry at the first Obama inauguration is now mockery. Sadly, it’s not about unfulfilled expectations of more hopeful things; we understand the political dynamic at work in Washington. It is that among his “achievements” has been the further weakening of our constitutional rights through his compliant treatment of the emergent 4th branch of government.

 

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Remember the Gulf of Tonkin Incident?

August 4th is the 50th anniversary of the Gulf of Tonkin incident, an event that led to Congress giving President Johnson the legal authorization to begin the Vietnam War. On August 2, 1964, the destroyer USS Maddox exchanged fire with three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin. Two days later, the Maddox fired on radar targets, which it reported had launched torpedoes at the Maddox.

And on August 10th, Congress passed a joint resolution giving the president the use of “conventional” military force against North Vietnam.

Why should we remember the Gulf of Tonkin? Because the Iraq War wasn’t the first time we went to war where the intelligence and facts were fixed to conform to the policy. Jessica Desvarieux of the Real News Network interviews Daniel Ellsberg about his experience with the decision-making about the Gulf of Tonkin incident:

For those who don’t remember the Vietnam Era, Daniel Ellsberg was the Edward Snowden of his time. Ellsberg was physically present when the Gulf of Tonkin “facts” were “fixed” to conform to Vietnam policy. Daniel Ellsberg was a highly placed adviser in the Pentagon. He had been a Marine officer, assigned to a ship in the Suez Canal during the Suez Crisis in 1956. Starting in 1964, he worked in the Pentagon for McNamara, and starting in 1967, served 2 years in Vietnam as a civilian working for the State Department. Here is part of what Ellsberg says in the video: (brackets by the Wrongologist)

…my boss–the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John McNaughton–[was] with McNamara in his office on the morning of August 4, when I came into the office at 9 o’clock they were actually already planning the possible response to an attack…because of indications that the commodore on the spot…thought that he was being shadowed for a possible ambush…a courier rushed in…with a flash cable saying that Commodore Herrick on the patrol in the South China Sea…was under attack at that very moment, that there was a torpedo coming at him, he was taking evasive action…

More from Ellsberg: (brackets and emphasis by the Wrongologist)

…at about 1:30, while…McNamara…was over at the White House, and I think McNaughton was with him, conferring with the president on the exact nature of the retaliation, [in] comes a very dramatic table from Commodore Herrick saying, hold everything…All the torpedo reports except the first one are now suspect and, it turned out, he said, were reports of an overeager sonar man who was mistaking the beat of the ship’s propeller against the wake as they took evasive action, circled in the water. That was being mistaken for incoming torpedoes…

And Ellsberg tells us that the ship’s captain ultimately reported 21 torpedoes. He goes on to say that all but one were false reports, and that the captain said many years later that he was also wrong about the first torpedo: (emphasis by the Wrongologist)

Now, I took it for granted that anything I was seeing was, of course, also available to the president and to McNamara…So I assumed that they were quite well aware that there was a good deal of uncertainty about what had happened. The commodore at the time, Herrick, did say that there was one torpedo, but one had to take that with a good deal of salt, because he had been just as certain about the next 20 torpedoes, and it really took him many years before, looking at the evidence, he finally acknowledged that he had been mistaken about the first one as well. But even on that night, we knew that what the president proceeded to say and what McNamara proceeded to say to the press in television interviews, that the attack was unequivocal, we knew that that was false…

Just like years later, when it turned out that the assertions by Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush that they had unequivocal evidence of WMDs in Iraq, their evidence was at best, equivocal. Later, we learned it was false.

Just as there were no torpedoes in the Tonkin Gulf, there were no WMDs in Iraq.

Just like Johnson and McNamara got a blank check for war with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Rumsfeld and Bush got the Iraq Resolution, essentially a predated declaration of war given by the Congress to the president, in violation of the Constitution. We can go back further: the USA always has a pretext for war; remember the Maine! The patterns and degree of deception from Vietnam to Iraq appear to be eerily similar.

Add to that, whatever caused the downing of MH17 is not clear cut and unequivocal either. The US says it has evidence, but it has not provided that evidence to us. It is shrouded in mystery, doubt and propaganda, just as the supposed WMDs in Iraq, the Syrian government gas attacks, what started the latest Gaza/Israeli war, and many other incidents.

It is useful to add more skepticism into the current geopolitical climate. Today’s average Congressional staffer can remember GWB and WMDs, since they were 18-20 years old when that happened, while Vietnam is ancient history to them.

Both wars were started with a lie, but the equally big lie was that when the promoters got their wars, they were smart enough to know that neither war could actually be won.

So, who benefited?

And who will benefit if we engage again in Iraq? If we engage more deeply in Ukraine, or in Syria, or in Gaza?

Hint: It isn’t “freedom”.

 

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – August 3, 2014

For those on vacation, or without access to the Interwebs, here is a summation of this week’s wrong:
• The Senate couldn’t pass a bill to impose taxes on companies that move overseas
• The House didn’t vote on Mr. Boehner’s immigration bill because Sen. Ted Cruz blocked it
• We brokered a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas that lasted 90 minutes
• The Times of Israel took down a blog post that made a case for genocide
• Mr. Obama admitted that we torture

That’s not a lot of humor to work with, but here are the best. Congress hurries to not finish their work:

COW DoNothing

 

Ted Cruz driving baby Boehner:

COW Cruz

 

Genocide of Palestinians is contemplated in the Times of Israel:

Genocide

Yochanan Gordon framed his premise as “a question for all the humanitarians out there”:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu clearly stated at the outset of this incursion that his objective is to restore a sustainable quiet for the citizens of Israel. We have already established that it is the responsibility of every government to ensure the safety and security of its people. If political leaders and military experts determine that the only way to achieve its goal of sustaining quiet is through genocide is it then permissible to achieve those responsible goals?

Umm, wasn’t that the excuse Nazis gave the world about Jews, Gypsies, and Homosexuals?

And Mr. Netanyahu told the White House not to force a truce with Palestinian militants on Israel. He apparently advised the Obama administration “not to ever second guess me again” on the matter.

So, it looks increasingly like we need a 3-State solution:

COW Ceasefire

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In yesterday’s speech, President Obama said “We tortured some folks” and that “we shouldn’t be too sanctimonious”. The President:

It is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks had… A lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots…That needs to be understood and accepted. We have to as a country take responsibility for that so hopefully we don’t do it again in the future.

Apparently, some people didn’t agree:

What would cause Mr. Obama to make this “apology” for torture? Has he lost touch, or is he living in a bubble of intelligence advisers that he can’t or won’t fire?

This is reminiscent of the way that J. Edgar Hoover controlled (or intimidated) presidents in what we used to think was another age. Who, or what, is making this president say such crap, and not take what are to most of us, obvious actions?

 

 

 

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