Bounties

Nobody is surprised that Our President doesn't read his intelligence briefings, placing more confidence in Fox News than in the CIA.  (Personally, I suspect his aversion to reading may be because he's dyslexic.)  Republicans say nobody told him because the evidence for Russia paying bounties on the deaths of US service members wasn't strong enough.  Democrats say nobody wanted to tell him because he doesn't like to hear bad things about his buddy, Putin.

Another possibility is that he was told, and got on the phone to Putin to "find out if it was true."  Putin, of course, denied it — and Tr*mp, of course, believed him, just as he believed Putin's denial of Russian interference in the 2016 election: "President Putin says it's not Russia," Tr*mp proclaimed in Helsinki.  "I don't see any reason why it would be!"

Tr*mp has spoken to Putin by phone five or six times since he "didn't find out."  What were they talking about?  Oh, yeah — we're not allowed to know.

Yemen

Is the enemy of my enemy, etc. etc... ?  Apparently not.

We have heard Yemen described as a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, and I suppose that's accurate enough a description.  We've also heard it described as an outgrowth of the classic Middle Eastern conflict between Sunni and Shi'a Islam.  That, I'm pretty sure, it is not.

The Houthi are adherents of the Zaydi sect, which is an offshoot of Shi'a Islam, but not nearly orthodox enough to satisfy the clerics who hold power in Iran.  Iranian Muslims supporting the Houthi because they're, sort of, Shiite, would be kind of like the Roman Catholic Church supporting Seventh Day Adventists because they're sort of...  well, you get it.

Move over to Iraq, and you find Sunni clients of the USofA fighting the Sunni zealots of Daesh, aka all those other names and acronyms tirelessly repeated in the American press.  Why are Sunni fighting Sunni?  Not because IS (aka etc. etc.) is especially naughty what with the beheadings and whatnot.  No, it's all about the usual, just as it was from the time of the Cheney invasions or even the CIA's 1953 overthrow of the democratically elected Mosaddegh government in Iran and installation of the Shah.

It's about the oil.

That's why Saleh could be fighting the Houthi one minute and supporting them the next.  That's why the Egyptian military, an equal opportunity oppressor of Islamists no matter what branch of Islam they spring from, is out there trying to restore Hadi to power.  That's why Americans, even some in government, are having such a hard time figuring out how and why anybody is putatively allied with anybody out there around the Persian Gulf.

Don't be confused.  Just follow the money.  Follow the oil.

The CIA: Where We Are Now

Forget the intricate spy novels of John LeCarre.  Even forget Jack Bauer, whose use of torture foiled a terrorist plot every week.  Under Obama, the CIA has evolved.  Information collection has taken second place to assassination.  The CIA no longer is an intelligence gathering organization, it is a paramilitary force.

It seems that capturing and interrogating individuals associated with terrorist organizations got a little dicey, especially after torture (admittedly useless, but so much fun) was discontinued.  It turned out to be so much easier to blow away "suspects" with drone strikes.  Presumably, there is more evidence against the "suspects" than a resentful brother-in-law, but even so, one has to wonder whether due process of law might reach different conclusions.

The second victim of a CIA drone strike was US citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, age 16.  One supposes it was reasonable to assume he would grow up to be antagonistic to the USofA since victim number one was his father, Anwar.  Just the same, as best we can tell, the kid hadn't actually done anything yet.

Then there's the "collateral damage" — wedding parties and whatnot blown to bits because some terror suspect was the bride's second cousin once removed.  Even if the suspect was killed, the rest of the casualties were just straight-out murders.

Responsibility for drone strikes was supposed to be transferred to the Pentagon, which, at least, is under some oversight — but the CIA was allowed to continue killing with only minor restraint.  Since CIA activities are classified, nobody has to take the blame for screw-ups.

Among those escaping blame is Our President, who allows the CIA to act independently without Executive oversight.  And the band plays on...

Torture report

Reading the "letters" sections in the newspapers, you will discover that many people believe that revealing CIA torture of prisoners will lead to "retribution" against Americans.  Their thinking, to me, at least, is pretty strange.

Back in 1969 and 1970, the USofA authorized the "secret bombing" of Cambodia.  Does anybody  actually think the Cambodians didn't notice?  Only Americans and our allies were kept in the dark.

Early in 2011, hundreds of Taliban prisoners escaped from a prison in Kandahar Province.  Then, in 2013, Al Qaeda freed hundreds more from Abu Ghrab, in Iraq.  Does anybody think none of those prisoners were tortured?  In Afghanistan and Iraq, torture is no big news.

The people who had to be slapped in the face with the news — not just waterboarding, but torture by goddamned enema, don't live in the Middle East, they live here, in the USofA.

And a bunch of them have been elected to Congress.

Polio and the CIA

Polio is back.  It almost was gone — almost extinct — but it's back.

The epicenter is Pakistan, where health workers vaccinating children are victims of Islamist attacks.  The problem, it seems, is that health workers vaccinating children against polio probably were working as CIA informants in the search for Osama bin Laden.

Neither the Obama Administration nor the CIA has refuted those accusations.  Most likely, the accusations are accurate.  Most likely, the USofA has sacrificed the health and the lives of who knows how many children for the sake of killing one man in hiding.

The informants could have been selling leather-bound Korans, or doing market research for some mass producer of chapatis, or anything else.  Why polio?  Who gave the okay?  It's dreadful.  It's horrible.

Me, I'd call it a war crime.

The Senator and the CIA

Dianne Feinstein is profoundly pissed.  As chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, she has loyally defended the interests and reputations of the CIA and NSA for years.  No more.

The Committee's investigation into the abuses of the Bush-Cheney years has produced a report that probably would never have been made public.  On the off chance that it might have been made public, CIA operatives hacked into the computers used by Senate staffers and removed some documents the CIA stupidly provided in the first place — most notably, an in-house report on rendition and torture asserting that nothing useful ever came out of such practices.

Now that Feinstein has gone public, however, there is a slight chance that the Senate report — or at least an executive summary — may be released.  Personally, I'd rather see the CIA's in-house report, but you take what you can get these days.  (Well, maybe somebody will send it to Wikileaks.)

Edward Snowden is a hero.  Chelsea (nee Bradley) Manning is a hero.  Certainly, some CIA staff and Bush-Cheney personnel (including, perhaps, Bush and Cheney) belong in jail.  Just don't expect too much of "Professor of Constitutional Law" Barack Obama.

We won! Right?

Whoopie doo! Bin Laden is dead! We finally got him!

Now, as I see it, is a perfect time to declare victory and get the hell out of Afghanistan — and, while we're at it, the rest of the way out of Iraq as well. Yes, the death of Osama bin Laden is more of a symbolic victory than a military victory, but what the hell... as long as we won.

Our president has to be feeling pretty chipper today, as he should. If you're president, symbolic victories go a long way. How it all happened remains more than a little vague, so I don't mind indulging myself in a little pure conjecture, just for fun, mind you. I have no direct evidence for anything that follows, but it sounds good.

From what we've been told to date, there was only one mansion with eighteen foot walls in the upper-middle class neighborhood of Abbottabad where bin Laden was staying — and given what we know about the pervasive penetration of Pakistan by its security agency, we should assume that ISI knew who was living there. CIA operatives, on the other hand, may have been in the dark — since ISI doesn't make them especially welcome in Pakistan. It follows that the US got the tip about bin Laden from ISI.

It also follows that ISI wanted something in return for giving such politically valuable information to the Obama administration. One hopes that what ISI wanted was an expedited withdrawal of the US from Afghanistan, so that Pakistan can reassert what it considers its "natural" influence over its neighbor. Add that to the US foreign policy/military shuffle discussed in my two previous posts, and it seems that the troops just might be home well before the announced date of 2014.

Rejoice, ye progressives! Perhaps you weren't totally screwed. ("Hope" springs eternal, especially in the run-up to an election.)

In the meanwhile, expect to hear demands for Osama bin Laden's long-form death certificate from the usual quarters.

Unsubstantiated conjecture

Raymond Davis, the CIA operative, claims he shot two Pakistanis on motorcycles because they were attempting to rob him. The Pakistanis say he shot both of them in their backs, through the windshield of his car, for no particular reason — although it has been suggested that the two were "assets" who had turned against him.

Washington maintains that Davis is entitled to diplomatic immunity. Islamabad says he's a murderer, pure and simple.

So here's my unsubstantiated conjecture: the two dead men were agents of ISI, the Pakistani intelligence agency, and the killings were the outcome of some kind of "spy vs. spy" conflict that neither government cares to discuss. What kind of conflict? How the hell would I know? Clearly, the CIA and the ISI have not always worked and played well together, and the last people to find out about it are citizens of the US and Pakistan.

Let's just wait and see what emerges.

Sunday, 2/27, 9:40 AM — Unsubstantiated conjecture substantiated

Well, we didn't have to wait long! Here's the latest update!

Hypocrite. Coward. President.

If I seem to be writing less frequently lately, it's because my anger and outrage are devolving into the usual depression. I never expected all that much of Obama, but I suppose all that financial industry money spent on his campaign affected even a habitual cynic like me, so I swallowed hard and hoped.

Hope. Bullshit.

Let's forget my usual economic complaints for the moment. This week, I heard promises about greater regulation of derivatives, more anti-trust suits, and action to limit predation by credit card. I'm not listening to promises anymore. I'll wait and see what, if anything, actually happens.

Onward and downward: where the hell is Dwight D. Eisenhower (or some reasonable facsimile) when you need him? It's looking more and more like Obama is being cowed by Pentagon bullies, with participation by CIA, NSA, and probably a dozen other agencies whose goddamned initials are top secret. Why has McChrystal replaced McKiernan? Beats me, unless it's that McCrystal is okay with an invasion of Pakistan from Afghanistan, and McKiernan isn't. And what will that consummate bully, Benjamin Netanyahu, bully our president into doing when they meet this week?

Take some action against the torturers? Um, no, 'fraid not. Come to think of it, we can't even release any more embarassing photos. Abolish the military tribunals? Uh, sorry, but that might force us to release some people whose "confessions" were extracted by the aforementioned torture. "Don't ask, don't tell?" Don't ask.

Last week, Dick Durbin observed that the financial industry, despite its setbacks, still had the strongest lobby in Washington -- but what Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex still has to be in the running. So, how many of the useless, overpriced "defense" contracts that now appear to be on the chopping block actually will be chopped? If experience is any guide, most of those turkeys will still be alive and well for next Thanksgiving, and for the one after that as well.