Revelations of secret bombing in Yemen bring President Obama closer to Lyndon Baines Johnson and Richard Nixon and their secret bombings of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War than is appropriate for any Nobel Peace Laureate. How many wars is this President going to start? As many as the American people will allow.
Der Spiegel reports that the Pentagon released the remaining papers of the Pentagon Papers while admitting that lies were told about the war. We know that. But here it is from them. The four volumes of the Gravel Papers can be accessed through Der Spiegel by clicking on the link below. How many more lies will the U.S. government tell the American people and the international community? As many as the American people will allow.
Are NATO's allies child soldiers? Isn't that against the law? So what else is new with this war? How long will war crimes and crimes against humanity be committed by NATO? As long as the American people allow these crimes to be committed.
This blaster is intended to bring two very important reports and a short third report to your attention. The three should be thought about together.
1 is an essay by Robert ParryConsortium News. It is an excellent summary of the last 10 years of perpetual war and the debacle wrought by the Neoconmen. It also explains why these wars are now un-winnable and how President Obama has walked merrily into the Aftrap and is being set up as the fall guy to the Neconmen's debacle. (My essay, which appeared in the Jan-Feb issue of Challenge, explaining the domestic politics underpinning the Pentagon's need for perpetual war can be found here.)
2 is a more narrowly focused but deeply disturbing essay in Counterpunch by Gareth Porter, who reports on a recent book by Saleem Shahzad, the distinguished Pakistani journalist whose body was found outside Islamabad last week. As Porter explains, Shahzad has laid out how Al Qaeda, especially Dr. Ayman Zawahiri (the brains of the outfit), laid out a strategy that played President Bush (and his fellow travellers) like like a violin. Porter describes how the name of the game has been to dupe the cowboys in America to overreact to generate blowback in the Muslim word. He explains why Zawahiri wants the US mucking around in Afghanistan. But Belogolova's report does raise a valid concern. If Shahzad is right in his assessment of Zawahiri, the good Dr must be laughing his rocks off … because from his perspective, Afghanistan may turn out to be the gift that keeps on giving.
3 is Olga Belogolova's report on a new Senate study in the 8 June issue of National Journal …. She tells the reader that the Senate report suggests we can not even leave Afghanistan without collapsing the economy. This is kind of thinking can be used as yet another pretext for signing up to Zawahiri's script of the U.S. staying in Afghanistan forever, enraging the Muslim world — and in the near term for scaring Obama into not withdrawing significant forces in July as he has promised to do. I am not so sure this concern over the economic effects of reducing aid is that important. If so much of the aid money goes into the swamp of corruption, a large part of the collapse may be related to corruption. Is eliminating the honey pot stoking corruption that bad for the Afghan people (or the Americans for that matter)? Will Afghanistan really collapse? Who knows? But I doubt it.
The real subject of these essays, however is the sorry state of the United States and its political elites who are either working for the benefit of other countries (i.e., see Parry's discussion of the Neoconmen and Israel) or are brain dead strategists in Versailles on the Potomac, who, as we used to say in the Pentagon, “went for the cape — right off the cliff.” An now the numbskulls who got the United States into these messes are suggesting we must stay the course. Which brings us back to the Colonel's lament in my last blaster.
Chuck Spinney
La Ciotat, France
Phi Beta Iota: Integrity might be lost at the top, but it is the failure of integrity among all ranks that enables the corruption at the top to persist. We swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the chain of command, but all of our officers, with few exceptions, appear at this time to be in violation of their oath to the Constitution.
Speaking at the 2011 Personal Democracy Forum, Doc talks about how power relationships work in markets vs how they should and could work. Markets are conversations, and they should be symmetrical conversations. Note his bit about how the language of marketing parallels the language of slavery….and the part where all their cookies end up giving them 50% completely wrong information.
As a trained neurologist working at a school of medicine, I thought I had a fairly good understanding of BSE and its human counterpart, nvCJD. But clinical knowledge is only one piece of the puzzle.
Drawing upon epidemiologic, forensic, political, medical, scientific, and historical sources, the author has provided a truly chilling account of the importation of prion disease samples from the small cannabalistic Fore tribe in New Guinea for U.S. animal experimentation in the 1950's and '60's, with credible links to the current epidemic of animal prion disease in North America (CWD or chronic wasting disease, TME or transmissible mink encephalopathy, and BSE), as well as the current epidemic of Alzheimer's disease in developed countries (i.e., those eating mass-produced livestock). The author also speculates that the cattle mutiliations in North America in the past few decades may have been programs designed for the surveillance of prions within the nation's food supply.
The Kenyan Government has been getting quite tech savvy in the recent past, becoming more pronounced as Kenyans join the civil service. This has resulted in subtle, but solid, movements towards a better connected Government as was showcased during the Connected Kenya Summit in Mombasa in April.
The following thoughts were inspired by one of Zeynep Tufekci’s recent posts entitled “Faster is Different” on her Technosociology blog. Zeynep argues “against the misconception that acceleration in the information cycle means would simply mean same things will happen as would have before, but merely at a more rapid pace. So, you can’t just say, hey, people communicated before, it was just slower. That is wrong. Faster is different.”
I think she’s spot on and the reason why goes to the heart of complex systems behavior and network science. “Combined with the reshaping of networks of connectivity from one/few-to-one/few (interpersonal) and one-to-many (broadcast) into many-to-many, we encounter qualitatively different dynamics,” writes Zeynep. In a very neat move, she draws upon “epidemiology and quarantine models to explain why resource-constrained actors, states, can deal with slower diffusion of protests using ‘whack-a-protest’ method whereas they can be overwhelmed by simultaneous and multi-channel uprisings which spread rapidly and ‘virally.’
Phi Beta Iota: Concentrations of power create preconditions for revolution. Precipitants (such as burning monks or fruit vendors) ignite masses. The public is a power no government can repress forever. Howard Zinn (RIP) knew the public is a power government cannot repress; Vaclav Havel spoke to this (power of the powerless); Jonathan Schell documented it most ably (unconquerable world). Bottom line: With a tiny handful of exceptions, all governments have lost legitimacy and capability at the same time that the public is increasingly aware of the shocking injustices by banks and predatory corporations that have been legalized by governments. Patrick Meier's discussion is a significant contribution to our understanding of why a global revolution is inevitable and panarchy will replace “sovereignty” as the primary operating principle for Earth.
It is now 1:10 in the afternoon and as the daily life in Tripoli unfolds that includes teachers, staff, and children at school, shopkeepers working in their businesses, streetsweepers sweeping the streets, people moving to and fro in the cars, on bicycles, and on foot, Tripoli has thus far since around 11:00 up to now, received at least 29 bombs.
Interestingly, the efforts of the Washington Post, New York Times, Associated Press, and others to portray Libya claims on the bombings as “absurd” are patently false and are merely efforts to defend in the court of public opinion, the indefensible bombing of civilians going about their lives in a heavily populated area. The Washington Post headlined “Libya government fails to prove claims of NATO casualties” and the Los Angeles Times headline blared, “Libya officials put a spin on a conflict.” These bombs and missiles are not falling in empty spaces: people are all over Tripoli going about their lives just as in any other major metropolitan city of about two million people.
Meanwhile, NATO has a spin machine of its own: NATO says it is making “significant progress” in protecting Libyan civilians. “What we did target was the military intelligence headquarters in downtown Tripoli,” the alliance said. I am currently with a delegation of former MP's and professors from France who are here in Tripoli on a fact-finding mission. The program for today was to visit the camps of internally displaced persons in this part of the country. However, we are not able to complete our program while Tripoli is under attack. I will do my best to visit some of the areas bombed today when/if this attack lets up.
What were you doing today between 1:00 and now? The people of Tripoli endure the trauma of repeated bombings in their immediate environment.
