Coming Home To Roost

Conditions: Sunny. Bitterly Cold.


Under Pressure

You gotta feel for the CIA, I guess. After missing out on stopping the whole 9/11 thing they followed up by rolling over and allowing Dick Cheney to brow beat them into bombing Afghanistan and invading Iraq. And if that wasn't enough, it seems clear now they were also enthusiastically involved in grabbing Arabs off of various streets and bundling them away somewhere for torture and rendition. Of course at the time no one cared because the republicans were in charge, and hey, we're at war. If you don't think torturing foreigners is the right thing to do, then you're one of them. The election of President Obama has now swung the needle back the other way, and that's always a bad thing for those who hang out at the end of the spectrum.

President Obama assured the CIA that no one in the agency would be held accountable for the years of torture, abductions and killings, along with the mass surveillance of Americans, conducted under dubious legal authorisations.

America's intelligence community breathed a sigh of relief at what it took to be a commitment that if anyone was to be brought to book it would be the politicians who the agency enthusiastically served as it slipped the leash of legal restraint, particularly the former vice-president who fronted the Bush administration's war on terror. Most doubted that anyone would be held accountable.

But in recent days the ground has shifted dramatically, as a slew of revelations about the CIA's activities has left the agency facing its most hostile scrutiny since the 1970s, when congressional hearings revealed that it was pursuing its own, often illegal, agenda including numerous failed attempts to kill Fidel Castro.

See, the thing about immunity is that it kinda doesn't work if it turns out you've been doing all this extra bad stuff as well.

The CIA's critics say that it is coming under belated scrutiny over its submission to a highly political and possibly illegal agenda that its officials embraced with enthusiasm in the febrile atmosphere after the 9/11 attacks, when the Bush administration thought it could throw out the rule book by declaring the Geneva conventions out of date and redefining long established parameters for torture.

Even where questionable practices were declared legal by the administration, they remained of dubious morality such as the practice of kidnapping suspected terrorists and flying them half way around the world to be tortured and interrogated, known as rendition.

Some former CIA officers, including the former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, say the agency involved itself in suspect practices as it rode roughshod over long established restraints.

"There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavoury things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA," he said. "There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it's going to handicap future activities."

Yes. God help you now if you want to throw a bag over some Arab's head and have him whisked off to a dungeon in Kazakhstan for a series of irregular beatings. You'll have to source your own thugs and transportation now, for a start. And it gets worse.

In recent days, the agency has admitted hiding from Congress - probably illegally - a covert anti-terrorism programme. Numerous leaks have revealed it to be an operation to kill al-Qaida operatives, sometimes in friendly countries. The leaks have not been denied by the CIA or members of Congress since informed about the programme.
[...]

The CIA's second, and perhaps greater mistake, was that all of the dark programmes appear to have been largely for nothing.

There is now ample evidence that interrogators learned most of what al-Qaida detainees had to tell before they were repeatedly water boarded.

Rendition, torture and Guantánamo are likely to have done more to have enhanced terrorism than curb it.

- guardian.co.uk/

Which ultimately is the whole point and the obvious conclusion, one that was reached way back in 2003 when Bush first made it clear he wanted to use his guns and bombs to remake the middle east into a peaceful democracy. Well, democracy doesn't come with a gun to your head, and everyone already knew that. So the real cause of the post 9/11 wars will have to remain undiscovered while we continue to watch the aftermath unfold and untangle.



What Does This Story Mean?

U.S defense officials are fairly sure that one of Osama Bin Laden's sons has been killed by a U.S missile strike back in 2008.

Correspondents say he is believed to have been active in al-Qaeda but never a senior lieutenant to his father.

Intelligence agents were "80 to 85%" sure Saad Bin Laden had been killed, an official told the US-based National Public Radio.

"We make a big deal out of him because of his last name," the official said.
[...]

US intelligence agencies believe Saad Bin Laden fled to Pakistan after spending several years under house arrest in Iran.

He was not targeted but was caught in a missile strike from an unmanned American drone flying over Pakistan "sometime this year", an official told NPR.

- news.bbc.co.uk/

So, the son of the guy we're actually after was possibly maybe killed accidentally in an attack by an American unmanned drone, like a year ago, and we're not sure if he was actually involved in anything or not. Have I interpreted that correctly? Is that the general gist?

Is this what the war on terror has come to? Occasional accidental picking-offs of people on the fringe of what has been defined as the enemy, all of which is not confirm able?

Let me ask you something: Are we making progress at all, or are we simply giving the industrial military complex billions of dollars in return for occasionally blowing random shit up? And: Where does that usually lead?


- Peace out

The Fog Of Wisdom

Conditions: Cold


Hopefully Not An Obituary

Robert McNamara, the brilliant, flawed genius who was best known as the architect of the Vietnam war, passed away this week, aged 93.

One of the last knights of Camelot, of the New Frontier, is gone. Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson, former president of Ford Motor Co. and the World Bank, husband, father and chief architect of America's catastrophic war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, passed away at home after years of declining health. He was 93.

"Mr. McNamara is best remembered and in some quarters still reviled for the seven years he spent at the Pentagon and the part he played in waging the Vietnam War," read McNamara's obituary in the Boston Globe. "In 1995, he published his memoir, 'In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam,' in which he wrote that he and other top officials were 'terribly wrong' to pursue the war. The controversy that erupted demonstrated the extent to which the nation's scars remained unhealed. Others can also be assigned responsibility for escalating the US role in the conflict during that time: Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk. To many, though, it was 'McNamara's war,' as US Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon once put it."
[...]

Vietnam was an exercise in hubris, deception and profiteering that McNamara spent the latter half of his life trying to justify, live down and explain away. The soldiers who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan would recognize Robert McNamara, for they were consigned to the grave by McNamara's modern replacements. Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rove, Libby and the other Bush administration officials who ginned up two wars and made abject debacles of both are the modern inheritors of McNamara's curse. As are the soldiers and civilians who have been chewed up and annihilated. As are we all.

Robert McNamara taught us all we needed to know about the folly of war, about aftermath and about regret. Nobody listened, nobody learned, except for the dead.

- truthout.org/

McNamara was many things, and one of the things he did late in his life is revisit the massive mistakes of American warfare (of which he was at the helm, or at least the control room) in his autobiographies, and documentaries. His participation in the thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the world literally stood on the brink on Nuclear annihilation, was instrumental in keeping us from going over. One of his greatest concerns was the danger represented by nuclear weapons proliferating throughout the world, due to their nature not allowing for mistakes to be learned from. It is a lesson that we, as a civilization, have so far listened to. But the sabers are still rattled, and countries still intimidate, threaten and even invade each other. So despite our technology, and our wisdom, we still haven't really progressed from the time when we aimed giant guns at each others heads and snarled. Will we ever learn?



- Peace out

I Got Your Unbalanced And Distorted Right Here, Buddy

Conditions: Oddly Sunny.


Amnesty International Points The Finger.

In a report that has been called "unbalanced" and "distorted" by the Israeli military, Amnesty International has accused Israeli forces of war crimes in the 22-day war Israel launched on Palestinian territory back in December. Hamas too came in for charges of war crimes, but found a distinction in how each side treated civilians.

In numerous cases, Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room of their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper position, "effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk," the group said.

"Intentionally using civilians to shield a military objective, often referred to as using 'human shields' is a war crime," Amnesty said.

One Palestinian quoted in the report said Israeli troops forced him on three occasions to go into a house to check whether gunmen holed up inside were still alive.

The report said it found no evidence Palestinian fighters directed civilians to shield military objectives from attacks, forced them to stay in buildings used by militants, or prevented them from leaving commandeered buildings.

But it said Palestinian armed groups fired hundreds of rockets into southern Israel. "Such unlawful attacks constitute war crimes and are unacceptable," said Donatella Rovera, who led an Amnesty mission to Gaza and southern Israel.

Amnesty also accused Hamas of endangering Palestinian civilians by firing rockets from residential areas and storing weapons and ammunition there.

More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died during the offensive Israel launched in response to rocket fire by militants in the impoverished and overcrowded territory.

Amnesty said 300 children were among those killed.

And the response from the Israel military?

"The slant of their report indicates that the organisation succumbed to the manipulations of the Hamas terror organisation," it said in a statement.

The military insisted its forces used "fighting methods and advanced technology to minimise harm to the civilian population while engaging terrorists who were operating from densely populated areas and using the local population as 'human shields'."

It also accused Amnesty of ignoring "the blatant violations of international law perpetrated by Hamas."

- alternet.org/

That's great. A total inability to reconsider one's actions and a simple statement of how anyone making a criticism has obviously been corrupted by the bad guys will see you through, every time. And so, nothing changes.



Film Review: Transformers 2

Films like this really make you wonder what modern films are today? I know what they used to be, but I can't help but feel the definition has changed to be more along the lines of a barrage rather than a story. Shaking someone by the shoulders rather than talking to them. Or, as someone else wrote, being forced to watch paint dry while being hit over the head with a frying pan. This film of course runs as a sequel to the first film, noteworthy to me as being a great juvenile disappointment. The sequel however benefits from it's predecessor because we now know what to expect, or more precisely, what not to expect, and that's exactly what we get, and nothing more. Robots fight, and shit gets blowed up real good. Again.

As a sequel, we don't have to waste any time introducing the characters, or the concept. Not a lot of time was spent on the plot either, as this film is essentially a replay of the first. There's a thing that points to the location of another thing, and both sides want it, and Sam's the key to finding where it is. The big focus here is on the fallen, a type of robot that lived on earth thousands of years earlier and built a device under one of the great Giza pyramids that would destroy the sun. Now they're back to set it off, and it's up to Sam, girlfriend Mikaela, the good robots and the U.S military to save the day.

Michael Bay has his usual frenetic style of direction cranked to the usual '11' here, but strangely, unlike the first film, I felt the robot fights were a bit easier to make out. Maybe I just didn't care anymore. The C.G was better as well, a sequence with an enormous robot tearing off the top of the pyramid a particular highlight. So, again we have a somewhat simplistic and childish film about giant robots fighting each other. It's an extremely good looking film, exhausting to follow, not very funny, has some moments of emotion, but ultimately it's pure shallow wall to wall spectacle. I guess that's what people want. One annoying comic relief out of Five.


- Peace out.