On May 26, journalist John Pilger published a piece at the Guardian called “We’ve moved on from the Iraq War, but Iraqis don’t have that choice.” Indeed; they are reaping the results in hideous measure, and will continue to for many generations to come, if not … forever.

Wreckage of human lives and war machines along Iraq's "Highway of Death." The legacy of our destructive war will last for generations.

The title I chose for this was a considered one, in that it’s been my wont to say both ‘We’ when we speak of our nation’s global military and policy depradations, and that ‘they’ve done it in our names.’ I witnessed some strong pushback to both those themes at Ian Welsh’s website not long ago; at the crux was whether or not ‘we’ should accept responsibility for not stopping the War Machine, or reject owning their deeds. You decide, but I’m trying this framing for now. Karmically (as in: causes reap effects) speaking, we will all be the recipients when and if the vast array of heinous deeds committed by our ruling class boomerang back on us, those ‘chickens coming home to roost.  Perhaps the karma is already killing us; who’s to say? Karma is at its core, the law of cause and effect.

Pilger quoted Nick Carraway saying in the Great Gatsby, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…” 

How apt a quote it is generally, but in this case specifically, given his mockery of Bush and Blair’s current activities. We see a few headlines here and there about Iraq and burgeoning civil war, nothing much about Libya, really, except that something like 152 different militias are making life hell there. We exported democracy, ‘protected’ and left, or were kinda asked to leave in the case of Iraq. Pilger laments that one murdered soldier in Britain has gotten so much ink spent on the story, but in contrast, the 57 Iraqis killed in a week of increasing sectarian violence was a non-event in media circles.

Pilger brought a lot of horrid news:

Their “mess” is a crime of epic proportions, wrote Von Sponeck, referring to the Iraqi ministry of social affairs’ estimate of 4.5 million children who have lost one or both parents. “This means a horrific 14% of Iraq’s population are orphans,” he wrote. “An estimated one million families are headed by women, most of them widows”. Domestic violence and child abuse are rightly urgent issues in Britain; in Iraq the catastrophe ignited by Britain has brought violence and abuse into millions of homes.

He also brought further news on the massive damage that was done to humans by the use of depleted uranium coatings on the bombs and missiles that were used to ‘shock and awe’ Iraq during the Gulf Wars.  You can read some of the particulars about DU in this post of mine from a year ago here, including the history of why Fallujah was targeted in extra ways.

After writing of the devastating increases in cancer and genetic birth defects in newborns, he writes about the ongoing cover-ups and failures to investigate the results of these war crime effects. He quotes a British oncologist working at the World Health Organization as saying, “We were specifically told [by the WHO] not to talk about the whole Iraq business. The WHO is not an organisation that likes to get involved in politics.” Then this:

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(by Anthony Freda via wendydavis @flickr.com)

In the first independent evaluation of top-secret classified internal U.S. intelligence accounting of drone attacks since the Bush administration launched America’s secret aerial drone warfare on Oct. 7, 2001, Jonathan Landay of McClatchy News has brought news that belies the Obomba administration’s claims about the program.  That day during the Bush administration, a missile-carrying Predator took off for Afghanistan from an airfield in Pakistan on the first operational flight of an armed U.S. drone, assumedly targeting the Al Qaeda camps that were allegedly harboring and training those who’d been deemed to have operational plans past the Twin Towers attack. 

Many of us at this site, but certainly not all, have known from our reading independent and foreign sources that the claims Obomba, John Brennan, et.al. have made as to the rigorous investigations into evidence that their targets were indeed ‘a baseball card deck’ of ‘terrorists intent on harming the Homeland’ was hooey.  But now the first mainstream news outlet has proven it, and it’s now part of the public record.  Whether or not Americans will be able to reset their comforting  ‘We only efficiently assassinate the Worst of the Worst terrorist leaders who mean harm to us’ beliefs isn’t likely; a plurality of us still believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, no matter that it’s been disproven countless times.  Propaganda thrives because we want to believe the easy lie rather than the uncomfortable and unvarnished truth.  We are exceptional, and exceptionally gullible. 

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Or more accurately: non-news, for the most part.  There’s still been absolutely no transparency on the deal that just wrapped up its 16^th round in Singapore on March 13 with 600 credited corporate trade representatives in attendance.  Still Congress hasn’t been privy to the text despite demands by Ron Wyden, et.al..  Japan had apparently been offered a slot in the past, but only yesterday asked to be let in on the negotiations.  Business has some heavy issues with it, though not in aid of thee and me, except for Congress-critters representing states where the automobile industry is key.  That’s likely legitimate, or at least the UAW thinks so.  I can’t remember now what led me to this video from New Zealand this morning, but it’s an overview of why itsourfuture.org.nz is working so diligently against it.

On rumors that Japan might ask to join the talks, 4000+ Japanese farmers and fishers  hit the streets of Tokyo on March 13 demanding Prime Minister Shinzo Abe keep his promises to boycott the talks despite pressure from the US.  Sound familiar?  Obomba’s fast-tracking this deal brings new meaning to his campaign promise to ‘renegotiate NAFTA’).

There’s been recent news that over 400 civil society organizations representing more than 15 million Americans have written to Congress urging that Fast Track be replaced by a more democratic trade negotiating and approval process’.

Electronic Frontier Foundation lists the dangers from draconian copyright and intellectual property rules, online free speech and privacy, fair use exceptions, and much  more.  The leaked draft 2011 text is here (pdf).

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Bidder 70 himself:

“I’ve been hoping that someone would step up and someone would come out and be the leader, and someone would put themselves on the line and make the sacrifices necessary to get us on a path to a more livable future. And I guess I just couldn’t wait any longer for that someone to come out there and had to accept the fact that that someone might be me.”

Here is Tim describing his activism and the idiotic and vengeful charges in his own words on April 3, 2009:

Bloggers everywhere helped raise money to pay the fines and pay for his defense, including My.Fdl.

He was sentenced to two years in prison on July 27 by U.S. District Court Judge Dee Benson who said at the his hearing,  “Mr. DeChristopher had many other lawful ways to express his disapproval with the oil and gas leasing process.  “Civil disobedience can’t be the order of the day,” the judge said, adding that it would lead to “chaos”, according to Treehugger.com.

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From Democracy Now!:

“DemocracyNow.org – Speaking via videolink from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange addressed a side meeting of the U.N. General Assembly on Wednesday evening.

(The rush transcript will follow soon.  Ah.  Toolwielderhas it now.  Most coverage says he ‘mocked’ OBomba and Cameron.  And Glenn Greenwald’s up on ‘Communicating With the Enemy” under Article 104 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).  Lord love a duck.)

Thank you, Julian Assange and Bradley Manning.  All the best to both of you; we owe you a great debt, imo.  I don’t know what else to say, so I’ll let a Roman philosopher speak for me.  For all of us, maybe.

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Video: From Democracy Now on April 27, 2012

On May 2, the Hennepin County (Minnesota) District Attorney Mike Freeman announced that just as jury selection for Chrishaun (‘CeCe’) McDonald’s trial was about to be completed, a plea arrangement was reached in which she pleaded guilty to second degree manslaughter and is expected to be sentenced to 41 months in prison for fatally stabbing Dean Schmitz.  Had she been convicted of second degree murder, she was facing up to a term of 150 months.  Sentencing is scheduled for June 4.

Leaving aside the earlier claims in the video that McDonald was being charged with two counts of second degree murder (beats me), some history of the case is in order.  And if McDonald killed Schmitz in self-defense, why did she accept the plea deal, and assumedly allocute to her guilt?

Well, let’s see what she and her defense attorney were up against.

Fightbacknews.org reported that at pre-trial evidentiary hearings on April 27, 2012:

Judge Moreno sustained a motion from the prosecution to exclude the deceased’s criminal record, which includes three assault convictions. Schmitz was convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend, his ex-girlfriend’s 14-year old daughter and his ex-girlfriend’s father. Judge Moreno has yet to rule whether the swastika tattoo on the deceased’s chest will be admitted into the trial, either in photos or testimony. Judge Moreno refused to approve the defense’s request for expert witness to testify about climate of violence transgender people navigate in Minneapolis and nationally. He has yet to rule on whether an expert witness can educate the jury about what the word “transgender**” means.

I never did discover how the judge ruled on that last issue, but continuing:

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Be very afraid; only an idiot wouldn’t be.

~ Anonymous

As far as I know, the only remaining hardware the US lacks that the UK has already, is surveillance cameras on every corner in major cities.  My best guess is that unless we can stop this nightmare, cameras will be coming soon, enabling the ability to link the data from the host of existing security agencies to real-time cameras with facial recognition capabilities that are able to track a person from camera to camera.  Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide; and I think we should be very afraid, as did Senator Frank Church who chaired the committee to investigate agencies like the NSA and the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO, and prophetically predicted in 1975:

“Th[e National Security Agency's]  capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide.  [If a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A.] could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back.“

This video is a DemocracyNow interview with NSA whistleblower William Binney who resigned from a thirty year career at the agency in 2001 due to the extreme illegality of the post 9/11 decisions to disregard any Constitutional protections of American citizens.

Binney was the key source for James Bamford’s columns at Wired.com (more later on him after the video).

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When Harry Truman created the CIA in 1947 out of the Office of Strategic Services that had been formed during WW II to coordinate espionage activities against the Axis Powers, Truman wanted a civilian intelligence organization that would bring raw data to him as President, unadulterated by the bias that wouldn’t be “slanted to conform to established positions of a given department.”

It appears that the following year Congress expanded the role of the CIA to include “sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures…subversion [and] assistance to underground resistance movements, guerrillas and refugee liberation movements, and support of indigenous anti-communist elements in threatened countries of the free world” [snip]  including “an active Black operations mission has been launched deep under cover into Bolivia.  (Wikipedia asks for citation for the expansion claim.)

By 1963 Truman expressed public dismay at the directions the CIA had evolved:

“Since the responsibility for decision making was his—then he had to be sure that no information is kept from him for whatever reason at the discretion of any one department or agency, or that unpleasant facts be kept from him. There are always those who would want to shield a President from bad news or misjudgments to spare him from being “upset.”

For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government.  This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations. Some of the complications and embarrassment I think we have experienced are in part attributable to the fact that this quiet intelligence arm of the President has been so removed from its intended role that it is being interpreted as a symbol of sinister and mysterious foreign intrigue—and a subject for cold war enemy propaganda.  [snip]
But there are now some searching questions that need to be answered. I, therefore, would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President, and that whatever else it can properly perform in that special field—and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.

We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

(The full text of his WaPo op-ed is here.)

We now know that the Operations Department through JSOC and its contractor friends like Blackwater, et.al. is running covert ops in many nations, and that they are not subject to Congressional oversight as are military ops.  (Think of the most recent Raymond Davis debacle in Pakistan.)  This is scary business, and many critics have taken to calling this unholy alliance the Dark Army or Shadow Army. No one knows exactly to whom they answer, although we toss around acronyms like the Masters of the Universe – close enough without further identifications.

In the video below, long-time CIA analyst for many administrations Ray McGovern talks about some of the dangers of General Petraeus heading the CIA.  A couple ironies to note are that a) he reminds us that most Congressional Dems objected when General Michael Hayden was appointed to head the Agency under Bush, but now are apparently sanguine about their Democratic President appointing a Republican General as head.  WTF?  The other is that McGovern was recently arrested at a Clinton speech at Georgetown U on internet freedom for standing with his back toward her so that his T-shirt’s message could be read, “Veterans for Peace”.  (Video of his injuries and arrest here.)

Aside from the alarming fact that this appointment will finally erase any pretense of the separation of intelligence and military and/or covert ops, thus rendering Congressional accountability virtually impossible, it will be impossible for actual unbiased intel to get a fair hearing.

I would also submit that the State Department is becoming less about actual diplomacy, and has turned toward being another arm of the military and sales representative for the defense industry according to many of the cable leaked by Wikileaks.  Our brains can now imagine how much of the cocktail talk at Diplomatic Parties concerns…weapons sales. Someone should write a play or a film about it, IMO.

Now here’s one of the main reasons for this diary: I’d like to know what you think about McGovern’s (and many others) contentions that this appointment will speed Petraeus on the road toward the Presidency, and specifically if the neo-con constant war for profiteering and resource control would be aided more by his becoming President or remaining as head of the CIA?  Remember: if a Democratic Prez can appoint him, how likely is it that he’ll be replaced any time soon under another administration?  The media heart this man extraordinarily; that gives him an extra three aces in the hand he’s holding.

I will say up front that I dismiss the idea that it’s an Obama Chess Move to neutralize the General as a Veep candidate in 2012, but if it’s your argument, I’ll try to hear it again.

(cross-posted at dagblog.com)