Ten years later after the start of the Iraq war, the neocons still don’t see the error of their ways. Mother Jones’ David Corn and author Ron Suskind join Hardball to discuss.
Highlights: Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Perle skewered in detail, airing their past words and their present insouciance. Cheney is called sadistic, all of them are called shameless. Hard-hitting. Bottom line: the 935 now-documented lies were deliberate, with the invasion of Iraq as the primary US military objective in the first Bush -Cheney Administration.
Phi Beta Iota: This is the single best 15 minute overview of the treason against the Republic by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle, among others. Ron Susskind, perhaps the single best author on insider politics in the US Executive, is now lighting a fire in the public mind.
[note: a shorter version of this essay also appeared in Counterpunch here]
In the summer of 2002, during the lead up to the Iraq War, a White House official expressed displeasure about with article written by journalist Ron Suskind in Esquire. He asserted people like Suskind were trapped “in what we call the reality-based community,” which the official defined as people who ”believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.”
President Bush announces the invasion of Iraq from the Oval Office, Mar. 19, 2003.
Suskind murmured something about enlightenment principles grounded in scientific empiricism, but the official cut him off, saying,
“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
This is a revealing statement about the mentality in the Bush White House prior to the Iraq War.
Think about it: in effect, the official is claiming the mind of a decider, who is tasked with making decisions to cope with the constraints of the real world, has the power to create a new reality over and over again. Therefore the decider need not be worried about matching his actions against those constraints, or even observing those constraints, before making his decisions.
Arrogant? To be sure.
Unusual inside the Beltway? Not really, based on my experience in the Pentagon.
But this outlook also reflects an incredibly stupid and dangerous way to orient one’s decision cycle to events in the real world.
Military Times, Wednesday Mar 20, 2013 16:47:54 EDT
The Air Force has relieved a full colonel with an impeccable resume for failing his physical fitness test [Phi Beta Iota: he passed the physical test, it was his waist measurement that was found to be beyond USAF “standards,” such as they are.]
Effective immediately, Col. Tim Bush is no longer in command of the 319th Air Base Wing at Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., said Maj. Mike Andrews, spokesman for Air Mobility Command, in a statement Wednesday afternoon. The wing’s vice commander, Col. Christopher Mann, will serve as interim commander until a replacement is found.
“Bush was not relieved for alleged misconduct or wrongdoing,” said a news release from Air Mobility Command.
If, as Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote, “the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” then we are a nation of barbarians. Our vast network of federal and state prisons, with some 2.3 million inmates, rivals the gulags of totalitarian states. Once you disappear behind prison walls you become prey. Rape. Torture. Beatings. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. Racial profiling. Chain gangs. Forced labor. Rancid food. Children imprisoned as adults. Prisoners forced to take medications to induce lethargy. Inadequate heating and ventilation. Poor health care. Draconian sentences for nonviolent crimes. Endemic violence.
North Korea: NightWatch's review of events since 1 January indicates that the North Koreans have been preparing this breakout since 2 February when Kim Jong Un began a series of meetings, starting with the Military Central Commission.
NightWatch judges the actions are deliberately planned because of their breadth, coherence and consistency. The North's depiction of itself as a victim reacting defensively is part of its deception strategy.
North Korean Actions on 7 March before the UN Vote: North Korea's Foreign Ministry joined the official chorus with an official statement that stressed three points, according to the Korean Central News Agency.
“First, now that the U.S. is set to light a fuse for a nuclear war, the revolutionary armed forces of the DPRK will exercise the right to a preemptive nuclear attack to destroy the strongholds of the aggressors and to defend the supreme interests of the country.”
Drawing from State Department and academic sources, Navanti presents the periodic table of terrorist groups, which details the size, scope, and level of activity of each group:
(Newser) – The Pentagon directly oversaw the creation of a Shiite militia force that set up secret detention sites and tortured opponents during the US occupation of Iraq, as part of American attempts to put down the budding Sunni insurgency, according to a new report by the Guardian that is being called “staggering.” Colonel James Steele, a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran of “dirty wars” campaigns in Central America, was chosen by Donald Rumsfeld to organize the paramilitary forces. A second adviser, retired Colonel James H. Coffman, worked closely with Steele and reported directly to David Petraeus.
“They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture,” says General Muntadher al-Samari, who spent a year working with Steele and Coffman while the Shiite militias were being organized. The allegations are backed up by several others, including journalists who say they were with Steele when torture was being performed nearby. Steele and Coffman had no comment on the charges, while a spokesman for Petraeus said the general always reported incidents of torture he discovered. Full investigation here.
