Phi Beta Iota: The USA has already had one veteran burn himself to death, while 18 a day are committing suicide (and in Iraq, more die from suicide each month than from combat). The US Government is very, very sick of mind, lacking soul and heart, completely divorced from reality and integrity. A couple of soccer moms are next–are you ready?
WASHINGTON – David Petraeus, the former general who led the Afghanistan war and now heads the CIA, has ordered his intelligence analysts to give greater weight to the opinions of troops in the fight, U.S. officials said.
CIA analysts now will consult with battlefield commanders earlier in the process as they help create elements of a National Intelligence Estimate on the course of the war, to more fully include the military's take on the conflict, U.S. officials say.
Phi Beta Iota: On the surface, this is a good order. Understanding both sides, however, suggests that this is a repeat of the Sam Adams – Westmoreland dictated fraud. The US military and NATO are lying to the public and to their respective legislative and executive branches about the continuing failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and across Africa. We no longer post the recurring slams on the falsehoods being purveyed. It is so very sad when our senior officials are so blatantly lacking in integrity and depriving us all of the intelligence that we are paying for.
Because so much was done under the veil of secrecy, much remains unknown about the extent of the illegality. Mark Danner’s publication in these pages of the Red Cross’s report on the abusive interrogations of “high-value” detainees provides a glimpse at the horrors US agents inflicted.4 But we do not even know how many people US officials have abducted, rendered, disappeared, tortured, or killed. We do not know the extent of the injuries suffered, and still being suffered, by those we abused. We still know relatively little about the mistreatment of most of the Guantánamo detainees. We have not apologized to even a single victim—not even to those, like Canadian citizen Maher Arar and German citizen Khaled al-Masri, who were targeted for renditions and torture based on misinformation, and have been cleared of any wrongdoing themselves.
Meanwhile, our former president in his memoir has proudly proclaimed that he personally authorized waterboarding—a practice we prosecuted as torture in the past when it was used against our troops. The former vice-president recently replied affirmatively when asked whether waterboarding should “still be a tool” of interrogation. Failing to condemn such blatant wrongdoing in some official way leaves an open wound both for the victims and for the integrity of our system, and implies that the tactics were neither lawless nor immoral. The rule of law may be tenacious when it is supported, but violations of it that go unaccounted corrode its very foundation.
All of which only underscores the continuing need for an engaged civil society committed to the ideals of liberty and law. The past decade suggests that the rule of law may be stronger than cynics thought. It teaches that adherence to values of liberty, equality, and dignity is more likely to further than to obstruct our security interests. But it also illustrates our collective reluctance to confront our past, a reluctance that threatens to erode our most important values.
Call it, then, the state of exception: these years during which, in the name of security, some of our accustomed rights and freedoms are circumscribed or set aside, the years during which we live in a different time. This different time of ours has now extended ten years—the longest by far in American history—with little sense of an ending. Indeed, the very endlessness of this state of exception—a quality emphasized even as it was imposed—and the broad acceptance of that endlessness, the state of exception’s increasing normalization, are among its distinguishing marks.
. . . . .
Before the War on Terror, official torture was illegal and anathema; today it is a policy choice.
. . . . . .
Ten years later, what was the exceptional has become the normal. The improvisations of panic are the reality of our daily lives.
Read full article.
Phi Beta Iota: This is a very thoughtful article that cuts to the heart of the matter, i.e. the U.S. Government's divorce from both reality and principle–the immorality and insanity of all that the U.S. Government does “in our name” and at our expense.
September 2006. Violence levels are spiking in Iraq. Every day brings reports of more suicide bombings, more IEDs, more death and destruction. So bad has it gotten that the Washington Post reveals that a senior Marine intelligence officer has concluded “that the prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim and that there is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there.”
This was the situation when I was among a dozen conservative pundits escorted into the Oval Office for a chat with President George W. Bush. I asked him why he didn't change a strategy that was clearly failing. He replied that he had no intention of micromanaging the war like Lyndon Johnson, who was said to have personally picked bombing targets in Vietnam. This commander in chief vowed to respect the judgment of his chain of command.
Phi Beta Iota: Full text with added links below the line. This review and the book are largely crap. Viet-Nam was lost for two reasons: because all historical and indigenous influences were for the residents and against the occupiers; and because the US Government was corrupt and was in direct support of a Catholic mandarin and his sister who took corruption, torture, and exploitation of a Buddhist et all land to new heights. The review misses two of the most important books on the matter, one, Triumph Foresaken that supports the “we could have won” argument, the other, Who the Hell Are We Fighting? that makes it clear that the corruption of intelligence and the corruption of military and political planning were at the heart of America's failure in Viet-Nam. Westmoreland was not a bad man, but he represented–as most Army leaders do today–the orthodox, the West Point Protective Association, the Army above Republic, the “go along to get along,” and of course the toxic brew of “leadership” that is arrogant, inattentive, poorly educated, and not at all concerned about the welfare or their troops. In the US Army today, “education” is for show or ticket punching, not to actually learn anything useful to the future.
First I met with Alexa O'Brien, one of the brilliant minds behind U.S. Day of Rage and its focus on Electoral Reform and non-violence as an absolute. [My memo that Fox news still has not read is here.]
Although they are also focused on a Constitutional Convention, as Lawrence Lessig has been, I reiterated the point that Electoral Reform is the one thing that can be demanded today (no later than 6 November, one year prior to Election Day), with severe consequences for every elected person if Congress fails to pass Electoral Reform by President's Day (February 2012), to include recall or impeachment, and camp-outs at their offices and in public spaces near their homes through to Election Day 2012.
Below are the working papers that have been posted for discussion in New York City, first with the Day of Rage team (it is neither a Day nor a Rage and it is all about electoral reform), then with the General Assembly at OccupyWallStreet, beginning with a handful of self-selected facilitators.
I will be driving a 1964 MGB, red in color, license VA MGB 64. If we do the human megaphone, it should be around 1700 (5 pm) Thursday or 1100 Friday.
