wikileaks – dowackado

“We’re the dark matter”

By timmukyPosted on September 5, 2011Posted in afghanistan, iraq, militarism, rule of law, terrorism, torture, war, war on terror, wikileaksNo Comments

Reading the news this week, there are at least three (not unrelated) subjects that call to mind that great line from Adventureland: “Hey, do you have an ice-pick I can jam into my ears? I can’t listen to this song again.”

Liberals crowing (um, prematurely?) about the mighty triumph in Libya. Not surprisingly, you can find the quintessential dumb, media hack version on the Times’ OpEd page. There is an even dumber wonk version in the works — which quite possibly will lead to a new! improved! foreign policy going forward based on “R2P” which involves, you guessed it, more “kinetic military actions”.

The lack of response, from government and serious media alike, to the Wikileaks revelations about the 2006 atrocity in Ishaqi, in which U.S. soldiers executed 11 civilians, including women and toddlers, by tying their hands behind their backs, and shooting them in the head. And then called in an air strike to destroy the evidence.

And, to arbitrarily limit the list to three things, the USA’s Qaddafi problem, as laid out in this typically very good piece from Amy Davidson of the New Yorker, who seems to be one of the few voices in the mainstream press paying attention:

Its dealings in Libya are not the C.I.A.’s only problem; nor is the C.I.A. the only problem. The Washington Post has two new pieces in its “Top Secret America” series that one should read. The first, by Julie Tate and Greg Miller, is on the C.I.A.’s shift away from learning things and toward killing people considered dangerous (and who makes that call?), with analysts becoming “targeters.” The other, by Dana Priest and William Arkin, is about the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, which has held some thousand prisoners “in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.” (“We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a SEAL told the Post.) The “C.I.A.” binder in Tripoli included “a list of 89 questions for the Libyans to ask a suspect,” the Times said. We should have at least that many—many more—for our own government.

Maybe minor, maybe not, but Davidson cites the “dark matter” quote, not what followed. The attribution itself is kind of revealing, no? It was not “a SEAL told the Post.” No, that creepy, grandiose claim came from “a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity.” Yes, strapping. Really?

To be sure, Priest and Arkin are not the only reporters in the land to have become aroused by contact with these hunky dudes.

The humble brag about being “dark matter,” the ever-expanding practice of extrajudicial assassination–something even Reagan condemned– on an unimaginable (and apparently unknowable) scale. The CIA quietly and without discussion transforming its mission from intelligence to becoming “one hell of a killing machine.” Working in close coordination with the very dictators we’re demonizing for the rubes at home…. That’s bad, I guess, but…. Hey, did you check out the six-packs on these dudes!

WikiLeaks: Extreme disclosure when the “last best hope” fails

By timmukyPosted on December 10, 2010Posted in iraq, militarism, rule of law, war on terror, wikileaksTagged jay rosen, judith miller, julian assange, michael massing, michael r gordon, new york times, parroting the government line, quaint notions, watchdog pressNo Comments

Jay Rosen’s From Judith Miller to Julian Assange pinpoints when the Paper of Record switched its mission statement–from reporting the news to parroting the government line, without skepticism, without verification.

For the American press that still looks to Watergate and the Pentagon Papers for inspiration, and that considers itself a check on state power, the hour of its greatest humiliation can, I think, be identified with some precision: it was on Sunday, September 8, 2002.

On that morning the New York Times published a now notorious story, reported by Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller, in which nameless Bush Administration officials claimed that Iraq was trying to buy the kind of aluminum tubes necessary to build a nuclear centrifuge.

Rosen weaves in material from “Now they tell us,” Michael Massing’s 2004 analysis of “the nadir” (Rosen’s phrase) in the New York Review of Books, to demonstrate just how momentous that Sunday morning was:

We know from retrospective accounts that the Bush White House had already decided to go to war. We know from the Downing Street Memo that “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” We know that the Bush forces had decided to rev up their sales campaign that week because ”from a marketing point of view you don’t introduce new products in August,” as chief of staff Andrew Card brazenly put it. We know that the appearance of the tubes story in the Times is what allowed Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld and Rice to run with it on the Sunday shows, because without that they would have been divulging classified information and flouting their own rules. We also know that the tubes story was wrong: they weren’t for centrifuges. And yet it was coming from the very top of the professional pyramid, the New York Times.

.. The government had closed circle on the press, laundering its own manipulated intelligence through the by-lines of two experienced reporters, smuggling the deed past layers of editors, and then marching it like a trained dog onto the Sunday talk shows to perform in a lurid doomsday act.
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In retrospect, it looks awfully bad, but it’s significant that the Times has put a lot of effort into examining its own behavior, and is only a little bit sorry.

Below, a 14-minute video in which Rosen expands on the print piece (nice title, btw):

As for the events of the past two weeks, it appears the Times fancies it’s doing something qualitatively different from what the government is going after Assange for. Not everyone agrees. The ubiquitous and odious Joe Lieberman has already floated the idea of prosecuting the Times:

“I’m not here to make a final judgment on that, but to me the New York Times has committed at least an act of bad citizenship,” he said. “Whether they’ve committed a crime, I think that bears a very intensive inquiry by the Justice Department.”

In contrast to the Times’ obliviousness, the Guardian’s Friday editorial recognizes the stakes. Although the focus here is on a free Internet, the bottom line for a nominally democratic society is the same.

In times when big business and governments attempt to monitor and control everything, there is a need as never before for an internet that remains a free and universal form of communication. WikiLeaks’ chief crime has been to speak truth to power. What is at stake is nothing less than the freedom of the internet. All the rest is a sideshow distracting attention from the real battle that is being fought. We should all keep focus on the true target.

Rosen makes the connection in his conclusion, quoting Guardian columnist Simon Jenkins, a Brit who evokes high (and apparently bygone) American standards of governance and transparency:

“Accountability can only default to disclosure. As Jefferson remarked, the press is the last best hope when democratic oversight fails.” But at the nadir the last best hope failed, too. When that happens accountability defaults to extreme disclosure, which is where we are today. The institutional press isn’t driving it; the wilds of the Internet are. To understand Julian Assange and the weird reactions to him in the American press we need to tell a story that starts with Judy Miller and ends with Wikileaks

Why the obsession over Assange’s hair?

By timmukyPosted on December 3, 2010Posted in wikileaksTagged haircut wars, jackshafer, julian assange, shave and a haircut two bitsNo Comments

haircuts — Jack and Julian, pot and kettle

Don’t get me wrong. I LOVED Jack Shafer’s Slate piece, “Why I Love WikiLeaks: For restoring distrust in our most important institutions”, and this may be a quibble … but there’s an obiter dictum that screams out for comment:

Oh, sure, he’s a pompous egomaniac sporting a series of bad haircuts and grandiose tendencies.

Juilan Assange has a lot on his plate, including a warrant for his arrest and calls for his assassination (actual crimes, by the way)–from that Canadian oaf (“feeling manly today”) and others, so let’s not make him all anxious about his hair.

It could be that this is an old picture of Mr. Shafer, and he now sports a new, more stylish coif. Or maybe Google Images has led me astray, and that isn’t even a picture of Jack Shafer. In either case, my apologies.

But otherwise … something something … glass houses … shouldn’t throw stones.

More on Iran’s parallel universe nuclear threat

By timmukyPosted on December 3, 2010Posted in iran, war, war on terror, wikileaksTagged 2007 nie, george bush, george bush having a hissy, iran nie, ray mcgovernNo Comments

I like to think that I’m up to speed on the subject of Iran’s purported nuclear program, but this RealNews Network interview with former CIA analyst Ray McGovern serves up some surprising news.

It was surprising to me, anyway, because I wouldn’t be caught dead reading the new Dubya bio, but McGovern did. Apparently even purchased the damn thing.

This entire interview is excellent. The avuncular McGovern stomps all over the Times’ ham-handed and just flat out wrong attempt to claim (over four pages in the print edition) the Iran/Saudi princes wikileak as support for their hysteria over the “sharp distress over a nuclear Iran.”

This in spite of the fact that the last word continues to be the 2007 NIE in which, as McGovern says, “sixteen intelligence agencies declared with great confidence that in 2003 Iran halted its nuclear weapons program.”

The part that surprised me was what McGovern pulled from the pages of Decision Points, Dubya’s bio (at 6:25 or so): that the young Bush threw an absolute hissy about the NIE when it came out, and promptly flew to Israel and Saudi Arabia to apologize!

Why apologize? (one might well ask). Isn’t this good news? Not for the Decider.

Ah, that explains all too well.

Oh, and as for an updated NIE, McGovern says Don’t hold your breath:

Also, an updated NIE on Iran’s nuclear program, completed earlier this year, is dead in its tracks, apparently because anti-Iran hawks inside the Obama administration are afraid it will leak. It is said to repeat pretty much the conclusions of the NIE from 2007.

On Iran, just a tiny disconnect between Arab opinion and that of the princes

By timmukyPosted on December 1, 2010Posted in iran, militarism, politics, war, wikileaksTagged arab public opinion, democracy now, iranian threat, jack shafer, noam chomsky, Shibley TelhamiNo Comments

threat_iran_us — Not exactly trembling about Iran, are they? (source: 2010 Arab public opinion poll)

I think I gave too much credit in the previous post to the dubious notion, advanced by the Times and others, that the cables vindicate U.S. and Israeli hawkishness vis à vis Iran.

I should have just cut to the chase, as Mr. Chomsky did on Democracy Now yesterday. The dictators think one thing, and their subjects think the opposite.

So Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. The results are rather striking. They show the Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel- that’s 80. The second major threat is the United States- that’s 77. Iran is listed as a threat by 10%.

With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority- in fact, 57–say that the region would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. 80, 77, say the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. 10 say Iran is the major threat. This may not be reported in the newspapers here- it is in England- but it’s certainly familiar to the Israeli and U.S. governments, and to the ambassadors. But there is not a word about it anywhere. What that reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership and the Israeli political leadership. These things aren’t even to be mentioned. This seeps its way all through the diplomatic service. The cables to not have any indication of that.

When they talk about Arabs, they mean the Arab dictators, not the population, which is overwhelmingly opposed to the conclusions that the analysts here- Clinton and the media- have drawn.

Here is the summary of the poll results.

The results (PDF).

And Chomsky’s larger point? That “what this reveals is the profound hatred for democracy on the part of our political leadership”? Can’t really disagree.

That should be paired with Jack Shafer’s sharp observation in Slate yesterday:

International scandals—such as the one precipitated by this week’s WikiLeaks cable dump—serve us by illustrating how our governments work. Better than any civics textbook, revisionist history, political speech, bumper sticker, or five-part investigative series, an international scandal unmasks presidents and kings, military commanders and buck privates, cabinet secretaries and diplomats, corporate leaders and bankers, and arms-makers and arms-merchants as the bunglers, liars, and double-dealers they are.