Twelfth Bough

i run my own damn think tank

Archive for November 9th, 2007

Big

Nov 9

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Corruption & Crime | 1 Comment

Over the past four or five years, I have read some pretty horrifying things. It started by getting on the internet and looking into 9/11. Horror. That poking around lead to Peak Oil. More horror. Since then I’ve come across various other plausible explanations for all manner of disturbing events, like this for example. The good thing about being serially horrified is that after awhile, I began to accept it as baseline. It just doesn’t shock me much anymore. I don’t believe it’s impossible that people do insanely greedy, selfish, evil things; in fact, I assume it’s happening. And here I must defer to the wisdom of one of my spiritual companions, Brother Lawrence.

When he was told of any great wickedness, he was not a whit surprised; rather, he would say, he marvelled not to hear of more, when he considered the baseness into which sin leads a man; that for his part he rose straightway to the throne of God, and forasmuch as He could remedy such, yet permitted evil for reasons very true and useful in the order of His Providence, he prayed and interceded for the sinner, and, having done so continued in His peace. - The Practice of The Presence of God with Spiritual Maxims, Spire 2003, p.93

Consolamini. Be ye comforted.

So if I had to pick a theme for everything I’ve learned the past few years, it would be Big.

For example, Sibel Edmonds has been trying to get her story out and uncensored, and you’d think that would be doable, but apparently the story is just Too Big. Because it’s not small. It’s not something about we can credibly say, “Oh, pshaw!”.

SE: Essentially, there is only one investigation – a very big one, an all-inclusive one. Completely by chance, I, a lowly translator, stumbled over one piece of it.
But I can tell you there are a lot of people involved, a lot of ranking officials, and a lot of illegal activities that include multi-billion-dollar drug-smuggling operations, black-market nuclear sales to terrorists and unsavory regimes, you name it. And of course a lot of people from abroad are involved. It’s massive. So to do this investigation, to really do it, they will have to look into everything.

CD: But you can start from anywhere –
SE: That’s the beauty of it. You can start from the AIPAC angle. You can start from the Plame case. You can start from my case. They all end up going to the same place, and they revolve around the same nucleus of people. There may be a lot of them, but it is one group. And they are very dangerous for all of us.

Sounds Big. Except she goes on to say that all investigations get shut down. Therefore, it must be Big.

That is, the guilty parties at the Pentagon and State Dept have the power to stomp on investigations into their own illegal activities. And as Sibel says, these people were involved in criminal activity, not just simple state-based espionage.

As reported in Vanity Fair:

“In fact, much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.”

Again, for corroboration about government sanctioned money laundering, follow the links and/or make your way though this. It’s not for nothing that we have a “War on Drugs”. And although it doesn’t get mentioned in Lukery’s piece, there’s the Scooter Libby connection to consider.

I’m afraid we’re living at a hinge of history. Big wheels are in motion, and we could very easily be ground up in the gears. I have profound respect and admiration for Sibel Edmonds, a deeply courageous woman. I pray that she will remain safe. I hope someone will match her bravery and tell her story in full.

I certainly don’t claim to understand everything that’s going on in the back rooms of power, but I can’t help but think of things I learned from my elders. 1) Don’t trust them as far as you can throw them; 2) They’re lower than whale shit, which is at the bottom of the ocean; and 3) You gotta know it, kid.

The Usual Suspects

Nov 9

Posted by Marlena in Economy, Media, Psychology, Stupidity, Unreality | No Comments

I know, I know. I probably sound like a broken record. But Somerby goes for the jugular today, and I support what he’s been doing all these years. People must understand why this country has so many intractable problems. At the root it’s because the world of ideas, the news, journalism, the process of understanding issues and picking our leaders has been completely corrupted. We don’t have good information, and therefore we make lousy decisions. It so happens that these lousy decisions benefit certain people, and those people have made a ton of money, so they want to help us make more lousy decisions. It’s good for business, baby.

Eventually the system will grind to a halt, collapsing under it’s own weight. I think we’re there now, or nearly there anyway. But it would be nice if, just before we take the spectacular dive, a bunch of people in this country figure out what the hell just happened here. Like at the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, when the detective figures out that the limping, simpering Kevin Spacey is really the ruthless killer Kaiser Sosi, and his mind goes through a rapid flash-back sequence? Remember that? He figures out about thirty seconds too late that he got played.

Q&A

Nov 9

Posted by Marlena in Bush/Cheney, Injustice, Iraq, Media, Unreality | No Comments

In a recent interview with Newsweek, Condi said she would like to know who said:

…that controlling Iraq would require winning over local, provincial and tribal authorities, Rice said, “I would like to go back and find out who gave that [advice] … Arab states can be very centralized. This is actually a fairly new model of local and provincial responsibility. I don’t think it was self-evident that this was the case.” Rice said that the U.S. occupation began to grapple with this reality in earnest in 2005, when the State Department began pushing to send so-called provincial reconstruction teams outside of Baghdad. She said the creation of a democratic central government and “the transition to administrative law, I think, is going to be judged very well” over time. But, she added, “I think we didn’t identify a lot of the kind of provincial and local leaders that might have been able to deliver services as well as politics on a more localized level early on.”

Liar or ignoramus? You decide. It took about five seconds to find an answer to her question on Google, since I recalled that the State Department had worked on some plans for Iraq.

The Bush administration kept the effort to overthrow Saddam and the effort to plan for his aftermath separate. The plan that became the Future of Iraq Project began as an effort to bring these groups together to plan for the aftermath. Initially, the aim was to keep the US government minimally involved. The Middle East Institute, a Washington think tank ran the initial meetings.

But the internal battling among the groups was too much for the Institute. Responsibility fell to the State Department. A small group of people had the lead.

It was contentious. Perhaps that’s a clue?

Here’s how the groups worked. Each had ten to twenty Iraqis and two to five international experts. We designed the groups to be heterogeneous. Each was moderated by State Department officials. There were observers there from other government agencies, including the Office of the Vice-President. Often these were senior experts. They took an advisory position. Contrary to some reporting, officials from the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense participated. However, they came less and less in early 2003 as the Defense Department began its own planning.

While State ran the groups, the goal was to give the Iraqis as much power as possible, in part by creating subgroups. In many cases the planning was very detailed, for instance, on the electricity system.

Planning began in October 2001 in State and at the National Security Council. The meetings began in spring 2002 at the Middle East Institute and quickly came to State.

Most of the groups met and produced plans. The groups focused on technical matters—water, agriculture, and the environment, oil and gas, public health, and even the legal group—had more success than those focused on more political matters. The Foreign Policy group never met due to politics. The Cultural Heritage group never met because of timing.

The Democratic Principles group only met once. It concluded that Iraq must be treated more like Japan or Germany than Afghanistan. That meant not a long military occupation, but a long-term commitment of US resources, and a truly democratic government.

The Defense Policy working group meet twice and reached broad-based consensus positions. It was agreed that retraining the military was essential. It was assumed by all that the military would not be disbanded. No one favored that. The consensus was that while it was essential to vet and dismiss some officers, the military was needed to preserve security. There was disagreement on how centralized the military should be, with the Kurds pushing for less centralization. Some younger former officers wanted retraining in human rights and the rule of law, while older former soldiers resisted this.

How can she claim ignorance of this with a straight face, in November of 2007? Yet she does, and she gets away with it. And people continue to die.

Style Over Substance

Nov 9

Posted by Marlena in Corruption & Crime, Media, Politics, Psychology | No Comments

Supposedly Rudy’s in big trouble now that Bernie Kerik faces indictment on federal tax fraud charges. I doubt it.

Democrats argue that Giuliani’s tough-on-crime image is at odds with his longtime relationship with Kerik.

“Voters are going to question Rudy Giuliani’s judgment given that he shepherded Kerik’s career while he knew there was an ethical cloud over his head,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Dag Vega.

Critics question Giuliani’s loyalty to Kerik and other friends; Giuliani has kept his childhood friend, former Monsignor Alan Placa, on the payroll of his consulting company; Placa was barred from the ministry after being accused of sexual abuse himself and of helping cover up abuse by other priests.

No, no, no. That’s not how it works as we all should know by now. Image is everything to conservative voters. Look at their favorite candidates, past and present: George Bush, Fred Thompson, Mitt Romney, Rudy Guliani. Do you see a theme? It’s not what they have done in the past that counts, it’s what they say they might do in the future that counts. It’s all based on style, on the threat of some bad-assedness. Since Guliani is ever a threatening menace, he has nothing to worry about.

Republican consultant Whit Ayres said the Kerik case might tarnish Giuliani’s armor rather than inflict any lasting damage.

“It’s an embarrassment,” Ayres said. “Isolated problems with individual supporters are never a major problem unless they become a pattern.”

He mentioned the resignation earlier this week of an adviser to Republican Fred Thompson, Philip Martin, after a report surfaced about Martin’s decades-old criminal record for drug dealing.

The episode was basically a one-day story for Thompson, Ayres said, although he acknowledged the Kerik case could stick around a little longer, considering Giuliani recommended Kerik for the Bush Cabinet.

Mainstream media personalities make millions fawning over Republicans.

Narrative conquers all: These people memorize their narratives, then maintain them till Hell freezes over. How else to explain the odd-ball judgment expressed on Tuesday evening’s Hardball? First, ponder this statement by the New York Post’s Charlie Hurt. The boys were discussing Saint Rudy:

HURT (11/6/07): You know, because [Giuliani] is such a gun-slinger, and because he is such a straight-talker, people believe him, I think, a lot of people believe him when he says—

MATTHEWS: Because he is a quick-draw.

HURT: Yes, when he says, “I’m going to pick judges like Justice Alito and Roberts,” who will—who are the main—that is the main issue for those guys.

Giuliani’s endless, howling misstatements are becoming the stuff of legend—but to Hurt, he’s still a “straight-talker.” But then, Time’s Mike Allen had stated this view roughly one minute before:

MATTHEWS: [Giuliani] is like the guy that used to—the guys who used to play the Globetrotters…Ron Paul keeps setting up Rudy for that basket. He just puts it in every time.

ALLEN: He does. And that response by Giuliani shows you why he has defied conventional wisdom at every turn. We thought, because of his views, he is going to be a non-starter with social conservatives and the South. It turns out they like his gun-slinging, straight-shooting swagger, that he comes across—he will answer a question, he will say, “No way, no how.” People like that.

To Allen, he’s a “straight-shooter.”

Within the past week, Giuliani had been caught up in his latest misstatements, this time about British health care. But so what? The press corps’ narratives were set in stone long ago—and to these people, the world is narrative. All week, Clinton’s “evasiveness” and “double-talk” have been trashed on Hardball—like Gore’s lies and Kerry’s flip-flops before her. But Giuliani is still a “straight-talker!” There is absolutely nothing on earth that will keep these lads from their Group Tales.

They will allow a little bit of criticism to get through. A few people will ask some questions and raise their eyebrows over Kerik. But this will not get very far. These minor jabs will simply inoculate Giuliani. The talking heads will tee up a problem, barely press it, and Giuliani will swat it down easily. No matter what problem he has, they can find some way to counterbalance it. Poor judgment? No. He was loyal. Finally they will interpret his undamaged reputation as proof that he defies conventional wisdom and is somehow “above it all”. The Anointed One.

Meanwhile, the conservative voters will stick with him for their own twisted reasons. They love his style, his authoritarian, belt-snapping, threatening ways. Digby has had them figured out for years and explains Giuliani’s enduring appeal despite his many “wrong” positions. It’s all about power.

You put those things together, and a little problem like Kerik doesn’t tarnish Rudy’s armor, it becomes a burnished patina instead.