Yemeni Dud Child Bomber = Gulf of Tonkin Opp & The Roves Roving Independently For a Good Reason

(If throwing a contribution Pottersville2's way won't break your budget in these difficult financial times, I really need it, and would wholeheartedly appreciate it. Anything you can afford will make a huge difference in this blog's lifetime.)


(EXTRA! EXTRA! Read all about it. And scream "Gangsters!")

The only reason I can fathom for the following announcement (and I would like to use a much milder expletive except for the fact that it's about Chase and Citibank (Bob Rubin) who are the biggest offenders) is that the next banking crisis is imminent - and the lies are coming home to roost. To be no longer desirous of participating in the FDIC Guarantee Program means that you want much laxer banking standards. And we know what that means.

Chase and Citibank announced via their websites that they are no longer participating in (Federal Deposit Insurance Company) FDIC Transaction Account Guarantee Program. Both banks are still insured under the general FDIC program, however.

I am rarely interested in "celebrity gossip" as I think it is either none of my business, a waste of time or indulgence in outright lying with a hidden agenda. But today's batch comes replete with insights including one on the Gulf of Tonkin episode, whose false flag operation led the US military to respond with full force in the War on Vietnam and was instrumental in enveloping the US in the fruitless (except for the military contractors) war against the Vietnamese, and how this Yemeni child may provide the same opportunity for the US to become completely immersed in the Mideast - don't forget all those Emerald City bases (built by Halliburton/KBR with reconstruction money) there for just such a possibility - is especially difficult to discount.

Legal Schnauser aroused my rethinking mechanism initially today when he ventured some very good reasons for the timing of the Rove divorce announcement (shades of Martha Mitchell's red herring usage) and how and why Rove had the wherewithal to have the public records concerning it closed. Is Turd Blossom's (Bush's Brain, the Architect of the New Rethuglican Majority) moment in the sun beginning to seem a little overcast? And isn't it nice to know that those out of government for years (since 2003 for him) still have their hands on the wheel?

Emptywheel makes clear the mythology (emanating from and surrounding the Cold Warriors) we've been fed and how long we've been lied to (the bucket of blood being poured over the globe is a nice touch). He names names* too, which is rather refreshing in a manner of correspondence after all these years to realize that your first thoughts were right about this mad crowd. Those in charge were criminals of the highest caliber. And it's definite that Emanuel (why, why do we have someone with that name at the top level of advisors? Is there no shame anymore?) is one of the biggest tools around.

The question of the new decade is: Will it make any difference to our political choices or will it just be cynically written off as something we can do nothing about? (As usual.)

It is good to know that Russ Feingold never endorsed Obama. Will he be the next "change" candidate? It's hard to trust again, isn't it? (And I really do like him. Hmmm.)

Compliments of my brilliant mentor Driftglass, the facts behind Team B (emphasis marks added - Ed.):

Thursday, December 31, 2009
What's the Real Story Behind Karl Rove's Divorce?

As we ring in the New Year, and temperatures dip in many parts of the country, progressives could use a delicious thought to warm their cockles.We have just the ticket. Imagine this: What if there is a connection between the announcement of Karl Rove's divorce and the recent discovery of 22 million missing e-mails from the Bush White House?

What if those missing e-mails provide a paper trail that prove Rove was behind efforts to use the U.S. Department of Justice as a political weapon? What if the Rove inner circle now knows that hard evidence exists to prove he was behind numerous criminal actions in the Bush administration?

News reports about the Rove divorce have been spotty. No one reported on the divorce until it had already been granted, which indicates the court file must have been sealed for some reason. I've seen no indication that anyone in the press has even seen the divorce complaint. It isn't even clear who filed for divorce - Rove or his wife, Darby?

Is this part of a pattern of special treatment for Karl "Turd Blossom" Rove? If you or I were involved in a divorce, the records would be public; not for King Karl. If you or I had abused the U.S. constitution and caused innocent people to be wrongly incarcerated, we would have been wearing orange jump suits a long time ago; not King Karl. If you or I were called to testify before Congress, it would be under oath and in public; not for King Karl.

But maybe Turd Blossom's luck is about to run out. We learn about discovery of the missing Bush e-mails on December 14. We learn about Rove's divorce on December 29.

Curious timing.

Darby Hickson Rove is an Alabama girl. And we don't grow no stupid girls down here in Alabama.

Could our gal Darby be thinking: "You know, it sounds like these new e-mails might be enough to send Tur . . . I mean my beloved husband . . . up the river to some pound-me-in-the-ass prison. (Tip of the hat to a film classic, Office Space.) I think it might be time to hit the exits, with a substantial sum of hush money in hand."

The Web already is aflutter with speculation that the divorce could mean Rove will finally hook up with GOP gay hunk Jeff Gannon.

A Rove-Gannon connection certainly is titillating, and it recalls this classic piece of reporting from Dotty Lynch of CBS News. But the thought that White House e-mails might provide a damning paper trail on King Karl . . . well, that has to be my favorite angle.

Is this all wishful thinking on my part? Probably. But hey, it's almost New Year's Day, and a guy is entitled to dream a little at this time of year.

Karl Rove in a pound-me-in-the-ass prison? Now there's a thought to warm the spirits.

Almost makes me feel like Homer Simpson, thinking about a donut. "Ummm . . . donut . . . "

Another interesting tidbit also hit blogtopia this holiday which explains in about 20 words the last 35 years. I'm interested. Are you?

Seems the Committee on the Present Danger (remember this pretentious group?) was one of the first PR efforts (CIA-inspired according to E. Howard Hunt's autobiography) to gin up interest in a continuing war on Communism and in many other supposed threats that would commit the US military-industrial complex (MIC) to wage war on some imaginary enemy and thus engage the efforts and put in motion the rightwing substructure which supported the rise of the NeoCons. It also depicts to vast advantage the secrecy surrounding Kissinger's company's tendrils extended into shady business all over the world (remember his nomination as the Chair of the 9/11 investigating committee which was derailed by his refusal to list all his activities?) - reminiscent of the later press mewlings about Greenspan's miming testimony.

Wouldn't I like to see this played and replayed for days on end on FOX Noise? If only.

Obama’s Royal Scam and The Iron Fist Of Rahm

Friday January 1, 2010 "Audacity To Hope Change We Can Believe In Rule of Law Accountability Freedom From Lobbyists and Special Interests Privacy Harm From Illegal Surveillance Constitutional Scholar Transparency Predatory Business Practices Closing Guantanamo Withdrawing From Iraq and Afghanistan"

These are but some of the major buzzwords, issues and concepts Barack Obama based his candidacy and campaign on to convince the American electorate to sweep him in to office. Mr. Obama, however, has gone significantly in the opposite direction on each and every one since taking office. As Frank Rich noted, there is a growing “suspicion that Obama’s brilliant presidential campaign was as hollow as Tiger’s public image — a marketing scam…”.

Is there support for this allegation other than anecdotal evidence? Yes, and Micah Sifry has an excellent piece out detailing the basis:

After all, the image of Barack Obama as the candidate of “change”, community organizer, and “hope-monger” (his word), was sold intensively during the campaign. Even after the fact, we were told that his victory represented the empowerment of a bottom-up movement, powered by millions of small donors, grassroots volunteers, local field organizers and the internet. . . . The truth is that Obama was never nearly as free of dependence on big money donors as the reporting suggested, nor was his movement as bottom-up or people-centric as his marketing implied.

And this is the big story of 2009, if you ask me, the meta-story of what did, and didn’t happen, in the first year of Obama’s administration. The people who voted for him weren’t organized in any kind of new or powerful way, and the special interests – banks, energy companies, health interests, care-takers, the military-industrial complex – sat first at the table and wrote the menu. Myth met reality, and came up wanting. . . . Should we really surprised that someone with so much early support from Wall Street and wealthy elites overall might not be inclined to throw the money-changers out of the temple? . . . .

When it came to planning for being in government, it turns out that Plouffe, along with David Axelrod, was a chief advocate for bringing in then Rep. Rahm Emanuel as Obama’s chief of staff. He writes, using a baseball analogy: “Rahm was a five-tool political player: a strategist with deep policy expertise, considerable experience in both the legislative and executive branches, and a demeanor best described as relentless.” (p. 372)

Note that nowhere in that vital skill-set is any sense of how to work with the largest volunteer base any presidential campaign has developed in history. Rahm Emanuel came up in politics the old-fashioned way: organizing and empowering ordinary people are the least of his skills.

It is an extremely interesting piece by Sifry, and I recommend a read of the entirety. For those that have not read David Plouffe’s book on the campaign, The Audacity To Win, or one of the other long-form reports of the Obama 2008 campaign, Sifry lays open the hollowness of Obama’s “grass roots”. Use 'em and lose 'em appears to have been the Obama modus operandi. The American people were desperate for something to latch onto, and Obama and Plouffe gave them a slickly tailored package.

As Digby notes, this line by Sifry really sums it up:

Now, there is a new enthusiasm gap, but it’s no longer in Obama’s favor. That’s because you can’t order volunteers to do anything – you have to motivate them, and Obama’s compromises to almost every powers-that-be are tremendously demotivating.

I think that is exactly right, and the needle in much of the activist base is moving from “demotivated” to downright demoralized and antagonistic. Yet Obama and his administration, notably Rahm Emanuel, indignantly continue to poke sticks in the eyes of the activist base and boast about it; and it is not from necessity, it is from design and pleasure.

Quite frankly, the seeds of this should have been seen coming. I have never forgotten the shudders I felt when I read two interrelated articles by Matt Stoller and David Dayen discussing how, heading into the 2008 general election, Obama was not just benefitting from, but devouring and commandeering broad swaths of Democratic base activist groups and their power, and actively working to marginalize and cripple those that didn’t assimilate into his Borg.

. . . DDay: . . . Shutting down Democratic and progressive structures that do not toe his line is exactly what Obama and his right hand man, Rahm Emanuel, have done since the election. As Stoller and DDay noted, they actually started even before the election and accelerated after it. The deal was sealed when, immediately after the election, Obama chose the iron fist of DLC strongman Rahm Emanuel to lead his administration, immediately dumped Howard Dean and began shuttering Dean’s wildly successful fifty state apparatus.

There was only one reason to do that, and it was not to germinate a new grass roots policy force; it was to consolidate power and kill off any other voices and/or authority within the party. As Micah Sifry demonstrated, consolidation and exclusion were always a part of the Obama plan. Almost more disconcerting than Obama’s singular cornering of all the power and movement is his refusal to use it to propel new policies. Not even on healthcare did Obama even attempt to truly energize and mobilize the vaunted Obama network, preferring instead to leave it up to the lobbyists, in the bag Congressmen like Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman and corporate interests.

This is exactly what has made the progressive campaign and voice of Jane Hamsher, Cenk Uygur, Firedoglake and other awakening progressive movements so critical. It is crystal clear the Obama Presidency is less than it was advertised to be; the only route to correction is through power and action; assertion of independent power is the only thing they will respect and acknowledge. The change will not come through old school Washington politicians beholden to corrupt financial institutions, the insurance lobby and corporate interests. Politicians like Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

Rick Rozoff adds some figures you might be interested in (emphasis marks added).

With a census of slightly over 300 million in a world of almost seven billion people, the U.S. accounts for over 40 percent of officially acknowledged worldwide government military spending with a population that is only 4 percent of that of the earth’s. A 10-1 disparity.

In addition to its 1,445,000 active duty service members, the Pentagon can and does call upon 1.2 million National Guard and other reserve components. As many as 30% of troops that have served in Afghanistan and Iraq are mobilized reservists. The Army National Guard has activated over 400,000 soldiers since the war in Afghanistan began and in March of 2009 approximately 125,000 National Guard and other reserve personnel were on active duty.The Defense Department also has over 800,000 civilian employees at home and deployed worldwide. The Pentagon, then, has more than 3.5 million people at its immediate disposal excluding private military contractors.

After allotting over a trillion dollars for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq alone and packing off more than two million of its citizens to the two nations, the U.S. military establishment and Peace Prize President have already laid the groundwork for yet more wars. Boeing, Raytheon and General Electric won’t be kept waiting.

Glenn Greenwald in Cause and Effect in the Terror War gives even better insight as to exactly what the Obamaboysmania is up to (emphasis marks added - Ed.).

Actually, if you count our occupation of Iraq, our twice-escalated war in Afghanistan, our rapidly escalating bombing campaigns in Pakistan and Yemen, and various forms of covert war involvement in Somalia, one could reasonably say that we're fighting five different wars in Muslim countries - or, to use the NYT's jargon, "five fronts" in the "Terror War" (Obama yesterday specifically mentioned Somalia and Yemen as places where, euphemistically, "we will continue to use every element of our national power").

Add to those five fronts the "crippling" sanctions on Iran many Democratic Party luminaries are now advocating, combined with the chest-besting threats from our Middle East client state that the next wars they fight against Muslims will be even "harsher" than the prior ones, and it's almost easier to count the Muslim countries we're not attacking or threatening than to count the ones we are.

Yet this still isn't enough for America's right-wing super-warriors, who accuse the five-front-war-President of "an allergy to the concept of war." In the wake of the latest failed terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines, one can smell the excitement in the air - that all-too-familiar, giddy, bipartisan climate that emerges in American media discourse whenever there's a new country we get to learn about so that we can explain why we're morally and strategically justified in bombing it some more.

"Yemen" is suddenly on every Serious Person's lips. We spent the last month centrally involved to some secret degree in waging air attacks on that country - including some that resulted in numerous civilian deaths - but everyone now knows that this isn't enough and it's time to Get Really Serious and Do More.

For all the endless, exciting talk about the latest Terrorist attack, one issue is, as usual, conspicuously absent: motive. Why would a young Nigerian from a wealthy, well-connected family want to blow himself on one of our airplanes along with 300 innocent people, and why would Saudi and Yemeni extremists want to enable him to do so? When it comes to Terrorism, discussions of motive have been declared more or less taboo from the start because of the dishonest equation of motive discussions with justification - as though understanding the reasons why X happens is to posit that X is legitimate and justifiable.

Causation simply is; it has nothing to do with issues of morality, blame, or justification. Yet all that is generally permitted to be said in such situations is that Terrorists try to harm us because they're Evil, and we (of course) are not, and that's generally the end of the discussion.

Despite that taboo, evidence always ends up emerging on this question. As numerous reports have indicated , the Al Qaeda group in the Arabian Peninsula has said that this attempted attack is in "retaliation" for the multiple, recent missile attacks on Yemen in which numerous innocent Muslim civilians were killed, as well as for the U.S.'s multi-faceted support for the not-exactly-democratic Yemeni government. That is similar to reports that Nidal Hasan was motivated to attack Fort Hood because "he was upset at the killing of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan."

And one finds this quote from an anonymous Yemeni official tacked on to the end of this week's NYT article announcing the "widening terror war" in Yemen - as though it's just an afterthought: "The problem is that the involvement of the United States creates sympathy for Al Qaeda. The cooperation is necessary - but there is no doubt that it has an effect for the common man. He sympathizes with Al Qaeda."

As always, the most confounding aspect of the reaction to the latest attempted terrorist episode is the professed confusion and self-righteous innocence that is universally expressed. Whether justified or not, we are constantly delivering death to the Muslim world. We do not see it very much, but they certainly do. Again, independent of justification, what do we think is going to happen if we continuously invade, occupy and bomb Muslim countries and arm and enable others to do so? Isn't it obvious that our five-front actions are going to cause at least some Muslims - subjected to constant images of American troops in their world and dead Muslim civilians at our hands, even if unintended - to want to return the violence? Just look at the bloodthirsty sentiments unleashed among Americans even from a failed Terrorist attempt. What sentiments do we think we're unleashing from a decade-long (and counting and increasing) multi-front "war" in the Muslim war?

There very well may be some small number of individuals who are so blinded by religious extremism that they will be devoted to random violence against civilians no matter what we do, but we are constantly maximizing the pool of recruits and sympathy among the population on which they depend. In other words, what we do constantly bolsters their efforts, and when we do, we always seem to move more in the direction of helping them even further. Ultimately, we should ask ourselves: if we drop more bombs on more Muslim countries, will there be fewer or more Muslims who want to blow up our airplanes and are willing to end their lives to do so? That question really answers itself.

And speaking of "the leading buyers of American military hardware in 2008," according to Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky (Irving Wallace's son), most of them "had two characteristics in common: they speak Arabic and their governments are opposed to democracy and basic freedoms."

Just our kind of clients.

Is the case rested yet?

How purposely dense will we continue to be?

My friend GreenDayMan at SalmonAlley puts everything into its proper perspective:

Terrorism Still Less Deadly in US Than Lack of Health Insurance, Salmonella

I knew this. How come no-one else does except a handful of people who actually pay attention? Why does the talk of terrorism take all the air (and resources) in the room? How about because it means money for contractors. Period. Seems like it is all about the money. Oh, and Ideology, but that is not even a close second as far as I can see.

Here is a great article by Blue Texan via Firedoglake.

Since we still seem to be having a national freakout over some loser who got on a plane with a bomb in his underwear, which was apparently worthy of a presidential address, it might be a good idea to put the actual danger posed by terrorist attacks in some numerical perspective.

Read it and weep. And then stop crying/whining/ignoring the unpleasant truth and ORGANIZE your troops.

* Operation Northwoods was a plan by the highest US military authorities to create a series of incidents involving loss of American and Cuban exile lives through the actions of phony Cubans in order to persuade the US public to go to war against Cuba. The document detailing this plan were obtained from Defense Secretary McNamara's file and were first published in Australia by Jon Elliston (Psy War on Cuba: The Declassified History of US Anti-Castro Propaganda, Ocean Press, 1999) with no reaction at all from the US. They were used again by ABC News journalist James Bamford in his history of the NSA (Body of Secrets, Doubleday, 2001), causing some minor notice among historians. Bamford was tipped off as to their existence by a friend on the Assassination Records Review Board, which was formed after Oliver Stone's film JFK raised the profile of records from that era. We present here this document (pdf, 778kb) as well as a body of supporting documents. We also trace the careers of some of the participants in the development of this plan, for they had interesting prior and subsequent histories.