Phi Beta Iota: The rest of the world is sick of US misbehavior, upset at the continued posture of the US Government in covering up rather than remediating such persistent abuses, and saddened by the idiocy and passivity of the US public in the face of such atrocities. The national shame is enduring — and an obstacle to any possible progress on any front as long as the current Administration remains in lock-step with the mis-steps of its predecessor's crimes against humanity.
Three Explicit Photos and Full Article Below the Line
This is one of the most important essays SR has ever published. Here, I believe you see the real reason for the creation of the security apparat. Terrorism is its second, but public, brief. Its real brief is to prepare for climate change. When you cut through what flows out of the Aegean Stable! s that is the Congress, you find that in the civil and military bureaucracies they are laying track for what they see coming.
John Sifton is an attorney at Human Rights Watch. He worked in Afghanistan and Pakistan from 2001 to 2004 and was senior researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism from 2005 to 2007. He is currently the Asia Advocacy Director.
The first thing I did after I heard about the highly classified NSA PRISM program two years ago was set up a proxy server in Peshawar to email me passages from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A literary flight of fancy. I started sending back excerpts from Gerard Manley Hopkins poems.
I have watched with a mixture of awe and sadness as the Chinese have so successfully kicked our President in the balls over cyber-war, and started an astonishingly active national conversation over whether or not the active measures taken by the US Government against its own citizens are lawful, necessary, or even affordable.
I have taken several oaths over the past 36 years of service — all to defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, domestic and foreign — and I have to confess that it was not until I spent 20 years wandering in the wilderness — the longest “walk-about” ever taken by any serving intelligence officer in US history that I know of — that I have really appreciated how few in government service reflect on or honor their oath on a day to day basis, and how few of our citizens are intelligently engaged with the non-transferable responsibility of being citizens.
The Constitution is “root.” Anyone that forgets that — or worse yet, demeans it as Henry Kissinger, Michael Bloomberg, Colin Powell, Mike Hayden, Jim Clapper, and Keith Alexander have all been so quick to demean it — is part of the problem. I balance my sense that we need a ruthless counterintelligence service with a recognition that at this juncture, “truth and reconciliation” is the only path that might allow us to move past the old paradigm of money as the controlling authority, never mind that it is illicit money rooted in crimes against the public legalized by a corrupt Congress.
Barack Obama is our President. Get over it, those of you that have so many reasons for questioning everything about his presidency. It is what it is. The question we have to ask ourselves is this: what now? What can we do to save Obama, save the US Government, and save the Republic from three more years of domestic poverty and foreign war?
Mr. President, if I were a professional con artist paid to give you the pros and cons on engaging in a war in Syria, here's what they would be:
As you know, former president Clinton, probably understood by many to also be speaking on behalf of his wife, has called you a wuss. Virtually nobody remembers or cares that you said “I want to end the mindset that got us into war in the first place.” The majority of Americans, exercising that mindset, want you to get us into a new war in the first place if the alternative is having a wuss in the White House. I don't have a poll on that, but trust me.
This is not contradicted by public opposition to U.S. engagement in the war in Syria (as seen in the polls). If U.S. casualties are minimized and if the financial cost can come out of the base DOD budget — at least at first — then the political cost is negligible while the political gain is enormous. Unless you drag this out. The military budget is being increased right now, and in violation of the sequester, and nobody gives a rat's ass. They think it means jobs and non-wussiness. Unless you drag it out.
Franklin Lamb has the best piece below that I have seen on the Jewish/Israeli Lobby panic at the disaster which their anticipated slowly roasting regime change for Syria has been. But Frank either skipped or ran out of room to credit what the real panic is about.
Israel’s nuclear bunker buster attack (with a mini-nuke warhead) has turned out to be a shot yourself in the head moment to the Radical Zios.
It opened the door wide open for the Russians to return to the Med and mover an air defense into Syria which will eliminate Israel’s long history of wiping their feet on their neighbor’s air space.
