Apparently the NSA has been blurring a few lines about their charter. Hmm.
Category: The Regime
Missing a heart
Very strange story:
Family sues U.S. over serviceman’s missing heart (via NewsWorks)
The family of a Chester County Marine who committed suicide is suing the U.S. in Philadelphia court, claiming military authorities returned his remains without the heart and then lied to his parents about it. Sgt. Brian LaLoup, 21, at the time of his…
Whose sarin was it?
I have no idea who’s telling the truth in this story. Is Seymour Hersh being manipulated by sources in the intelligence establishment? Is Obama? Or, as Hersh says, did Obama deliberately try to force us into another war?
In his nationally televised speech about Syria on 10 September, Obama laid the blame for the nerve gas attack on the rebel-held suburb of Eastern Ghouta firmly on Assad’s government, and made it clear he was prepared to back up his earlier public warnings that any use of chemical weapons would cross a ‘red line’: ‘Assad’s government gassed to death over a thousand people,’ he said. ‘We know the Assad regime was responsible … And that is why, after careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike.’ Obama was going to war to back up a public threat, but he was doing so without knowing for sure who did what in the early morning of 21 August.
He cited a list of what appeared to be hard-won evidence of Assad’s culpability: ‘In the days leading up to August 21st, we know that Assad’s chemical weapons personnel prepared for an attack near an area where they mix sarin gas. They distributed gas masks to their troops. Then they fired rockets from a regime-controlled area into 11 neighbourhoods that the regime has been trying to wipe clear of opposition forces.’ Obama’s certainty was echoed at the time by Denis McDonough, his chief of staff, who told the New York Times: ‘No one with whom I’ve spoken doubts the intelligence’ directly linking Assad and his regime to the sarin attacks.
Continue reading “Whose sarin was it?”
The White House vs. Eric Holder
This doesn’t exactly bode well for protecting us from the excesses of the surveillance state:
In September, President Obama nominated John Carlin, a career federal prosecutor, to run the Justice Department’s National Security Division, a senior post whose occupant plays a key role in authorizing secret surveillance operations and managing national security investigations. It was a controversial pick. Not only did some of Carlin’s peers think he wasn’t the most qualified candidate. Attorney General Eric Holder — the man who was supposed to be Carlin’s boss — hadn’t supported him. Several former officials told Foreign Policy that the attorney general “strenuously” objected to nominating Carlin.
But Carlin had the backing of two senior officials in the White House, who had made it known that he was their preferred choice. In the end, their candidate won out, prompting several former law enforcement and national security officials to decry the nomination as an act of undue political influence over law enforcement decisions.
“I think it is extraordinary and unusual to have someone forced upon an attorney general over his objections,” said one former law enforcement official. “The independence of the Justice Department from the White House is institutionally important.” Decisions on which cases to prosecute and how to manage criminal investigations are supposed to be made free of political considerations.
Holder had his own list of candidates, which included another career prosecutor who had been his adviser on national security issues and had years more experience than Carlin working on terrorism and espionage cases, officials said. Holder didn’t know Carlin well and hadn’t worked closely with him.
Ultimately, the decision on whom to nominate for the position is the president’s alone. And Holder has since embraced Carlin — at least in public. But the rocky path to Carlin’s nomination, described in interviews with a dozen current and former Justice Department and administration officials, reveals a tense personal and political struggle over one of the most important national security positions in the government.
Carlin’s biggest advocates in the White House were Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, and Lisa Monaco, the president’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser, according to current and former officials. Ruemmler and Monaco had worked with Carlin at the Justice Department and in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, where all three served at the same time as prosecutors.
Former officials said they are concerned that Carlin, who has been acting in the position since March, doesn’t speak as an independent voice for the department, but rather is aligning his positions first with the White House, and particularly with Monaco, thus undermining Holder’s authority. Two individuals drew comparisons to John Yoo, the controversial Justice Department attorney in the George W. Bush administration, who was known to have his own relationships with White House officials and was seen as operating outside channels meant to guard against political influence.
“It shouldn’t be that way,” said a former government official who doesn’t support Carlin’s nomination. “There should be some walls between the Justice Department and the White House. The White House should not have a direct feed.”
Military Santa
Can’t militarize the young ones too early!
As Santa streaks through the sky this Christmas Eve, Rudolph merrily guiding the way, he will be flanked by some new and unusual companions: a jet-fighter escort, bristling with missiles.
That is the twist that — to the dismay of at least some child advocates — the US military has chosen to put on this year’s version of its traditional animated tracking of the yuletide journey.
(snip)
But as the word gets out, the plan is taking flak. Some say the Pentagon appears to have lost its way by introducing destructive weaponry to the otherwise jolly image of Santa setting out from the North Pole. Up to now, the most threatening aspect of Santa’s flight had been lumps of coal.
“Children associate Santa with gifts and fun and everything else that is positive about Christmas,” said Allen Kanner, a California child and family psychologist and cofounder of the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood. “They are associating this with the military in children’s minds. It is completely out of line.”
Isn’t this special
I wonder if the Hebrew words for “find” and “fabricate” are similar:
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has ordered both the Mossad and Military Intelligence to search for evidence that Iran is continuing nuclear activities forbidden under the Geneva accord signed with world powers last week, The Sunday Times quoted Israeli defense sources as saying.
Proof that Iran was violating the terms of the six-month interim deal would complicate US President Barack Obama’s push to delay the passage of new congressional sanctions against Iran while a long-term deal with Iran is being negotiated.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has repeatedly said, both before and after the signing of the deal in Geneva, that the agreement does not sufficiently curb Iran’s ability to obtain nuclear weapons and prematurely offers the Islamic Republic sanctions relief.
“Everyone has his own view regarding the Geneva agreement,” the Times quoted an Israeli intelligence source as saying. “But it is clear that if a smoking gun is produced, it will tumble like a house of cards.”
It’s as if Israel had a giant nuclear bomb growing out of its forehead and other countries politely ignore it, as if they didn’t want to hurt its feelings.
Double standard
Now, imagine the response if this guy was Palestinian or Iranian:
JERUSALEM (AP) — Stories about Hollywood producer Arnon Milchan’s alleged double life have been circulating for years.
Now, the Israeli-born businessman behind hits like Pretty Woman, Fight Club and L.A. Confidential has finally come forth with a stunning admission — for years he served as an Israeli spy, buying arms on its behalf and boosting its alleged nuclear program.
In a far-reaching interview aired Monday with Israel’s Channel 2 TV’s flagship investigative program Uvda, Milchan detailed a series of clandestine affairs in which he was involved and particularly how he helped purchase technologies Israel allegedly needed to operate nuclear bombs.
“Allegedly.” Because we don’t talk about Israel’s illegal nukes and the reason why Iran feels threatened.
“I did it for my country and I’m proud of it,” said Milchan, who ran a successful fertilizer company in Israel before making it big in Hollywood.
Even there, he says he continued with his clandestine work while maintaining close ties with Israel’s leadership.
Continue reading “Double standard”
November 22, 1963
November 22, 1963 from The New York Times – Video on Vimeo.
Will we ever know the truth about the Kennedy assassination? In a film by Errol Morris, Josiah “Tink” Thompson returns to what has haunted him for 50 years: Frame #313 of the Zapruder film.
Historic nuclear agreement reached with Iran
President Obama describes the agreement in an address to the nation tonight.
GENEVA — Iran and six major powers agreed early Sunday on an historic deal that freezes key parts of Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for temporary relief on some economic sanctions, diplomats confirmed.
The deal was reached after four days of marathon bargaining and an 11th-hour intervention by U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry and other foreign ministers from Europe, Russia and China. the sources said.
The agreement, sealed at 3 a.m. signing ceremony in Geneva’s Palace of Nations, requires Iran to halt or scale back parts of its nuclear infrastructure, the first such pause in more than a decade.
“We have reached an agreement,” Michael Mann, spokesman for European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a Twitter posting.
“We have reached an agreement,” echoed Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in a separate posting.
More details from the NY Times:
According to the accord, Iran would agree to stop enriching uranium beyond 5 percent. To make good on that pledge, Iran would dismantle the links between networks of centrifuges.
All of Iran’s stockpile of uranium that has been enriched to 20 percent, a short hop to weapons-grade fuel, would be diluted or converted into oxide so that it could not be readily used for military purposes.
No new centrifuges, neither old models nor newer more efficient ones, could be installed. Centrifuges that have been installed but which are not currently operating — Iran has more than 8,000 such centrifuges — could not be started up. No new enrichment facilities could be established.
The agreement, however, would not require Iran to stop enriching uranium to a level of 3.5 percent or dismantle any of its existing centrifuges.
Iran’s stockpile of such low-enriched uranium would be allowed to temporarily increase to about eight tons from seven tons currently. But Tehran would be required to shrink this stockpile by the end of the six-month agreement back to seven tons. This would be done by installing equipment to covert some of that stockpile to oxide.
To guard against cheating, international monitors would be allowed to visit the Natanz enrichment facility and the underground nuclear enrichment plant at Fordo on a daily basis to check the film from cameras installed there.
In return for the initial agreement, the United States has agreed to provide $6 billion to $7 billion in sanctions relief, American officials said. This limited sanctions relief can be accomplished by executive order, allowing the Obama administration to make the deal without having to appeal to Congress, where there is strong criticism of any agreement that does not fully dismantle Iran’s nuclear program.
The Kennedy assassination and American fragility
The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime. I do not accept the notion that the Warren Commission, created to allay public panic and not to investigate, and composed of wise men from Washington who had made careers out of knowing more than they ever would tell, somehow still managed to stumble onto the correct interpretation of all of the events of that surreal weekend. (Hell, Allen Dulles was on that Commission and Kennedy had fired his lying ass less than a year earlier.) I stopped believing in the Warren Commission even before it was put together. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I sat on my living room floor and watched the accused murderer of the president get gunned down on live TV in a roomful of Dallas cops. I stopped believing in the Warren Commission when I watched a lynching with my parents while the dead president was lying in state in the White House and as the country went numb around me.
The Warren Commission was a natural outgrowth of a mentality that had infected the government from the moment that the government decided that it would build, in secret, a weapon that would not only win World War II, but also have the potential to end civilization if it — or the men who allegedly were in control of it — ever ran amok. What historian Garry Wills calls the “Bomb Power” was based from its beginnings in the notion that there were things about their government that the American people need not know. From this came an irresistible impulse to treat the American people — for whom the Founders intended all of what John Adams called “the awful knowledge” about their leaders — like fragile children who must be protected at all costs from what their government found necessary to do on their behalf. From this has come a hundred commissions and boards and gatherings of the shamans of the security state — the slow bureaucratic response to the Watergate crimes, the Tower Commission on Iran-Contra, even the Simpson-Bowles budget commission — all of which sprang from the notion that the nation’s elite should conduct the nation’s business in as quiet a manner as possible, so as not to disturb the horses or wake the children. The Warren Commission was the first of these, and it did its job very well. What unruly bloggers call The Village can be said to have been founded in the premise that the American people needed to be shielded, for their own good, from the full knowledge of the facts surrounding the murder of their president in broad daylight in the streets of an American city.
…
I don’t know if we’ll ever settle who shot from where. But I do know that, almost from the start, the government has known more about this event than it has been willing to share with the people who, allegedly, govern themselves through it. It is long past time for that to end. It has been 50 years. So many people connected, in one way or another, and by one person or another, to the events in Dallas are dead. The Soviet Union is dead. Do not protect yourselves by claiming to protect us. We have been protected for too long and from too much of what the government has done in our name. We are not children, huddled at the classroom door, wondering why the nuns are weeping, and why the world has suddenly gone so silent all around us.”