Waziri leaks

In all the hue and cry over Wikileaks, I haven't seen much to get too bent out of shape over. Most of it was, duh, obvious. A lot of it had already been reported.

While governments need to be able to keep their conversations confidential, even some that are merely embarrassingly frank, the main damage has been the need to blush a little.

Still, imagine this: You're a foreign service officer talking with your opposite number in another country's diplomatic corps. You know how certain you would be that he will keep your confidences, small and large! C'mon, no one is that naive.

Instead of laughing off the embarrassment, governments have pursued Julian Assange, arrested him, and locked him up on unrelated charges that look trumped up (h/t Digby). These governments have certainly responded with much greater focus than they would have had he been, say, Brett Favre or Kobe Bryant.

The biggest take-away from the whole affair so far has been how thoroughly inculcated the media is in the culture of secrecy that they are supposed to expose to light. Sure, they've reported on the leaks, but I'm starting to wonder how thoroughly.

When I heard that the Pentagon was directing its service people and contractors that they were not allowed to read classified documents even after they were published on the Internet, I thought they were typically, bureaucratically overreaching. Just like the world's most command-oriented bureaucracy to pretend that the genie right there in the room was still safely in the bottle. Even a genie not nearly as revealing as Barbara Eden.

Then, today, the New York Times carried the story of the U.S. CIA station chief in Islamabad had fled Pakistan after his name got out into the open in local media. What is his name? The Times pointedly wouldn't say:

The legal complaint that named the station chief, who was working undercover and whose name is classified, was filed on Monday over attacks that killed at least two Pakistanis. The complaint sought police help in keeping the station chief in the country until a lawsuit could be filed.
The agent’s name had already been revealed in a news conference last month by Mirza Shahzad Akbar, the lawyer who filed the complaint this week, and the name had been reported in local media.

The rest of the world can know, but Americans can't! The big media is in on the suppression of information.

Of course, Google is still up, so it's easy to find out. No, not the character actor by the same name.

I'm showing fear here, too, by not simply typing the name. I don't want to be charged with espionage for "revealing" something that's widely known the world just because there's a Top Secret stamp marking a piece of paper locked in a vault that I've never seen. Think about what that fear means to an open society, without which democracy is a sham.

The name I'm omitting is probably itself a cover identity. Really, would the CIA send someone to Pakistan for covert action under his own name? Of course not. Yet the Times and I won't simply type the name, and it's itself a fiction. Am I still allowed to name Winston Smith?

Funny, I don't recall the American big media being so solicitous of the classification status of non-official cover identity when the exposed agent was Valerie Plame.

The question: How long before the U.S., like China, decides it needs to block sites that expose its own citizens to this slightly uncomfortable sort of truth?

Update (1/7/2011): Related comment on Salon.

When is a mosque not a mosque?

Factcheck.org has "debunked" the presence of a mosque in the Pentagon. Muslims pray there, all right, they just do so in a non-denominational "chapel." Well, that does make it sound like something that's comfortably little-c christian, doesn't it? Of course, the ground zero mosque (which is not at ground zero) has also claimed not to be a mosque, rather to be a community center.

The key fact that Factcheck.org raises but fails to compare to rightwing hysteria over Cordoba/Park51 is that Muslims are praying in the exact portion of the Pentagon that had to be reconstructed after the 9/11 attack there. All of them must be triumphalists who are praying for the caliphate to wash infidel America off the face of the earth. Obviously.

Hey, I bet Maj. Nidal Hasan prayed there for the strength to achieve murder in his jihad at Ft. Hood! Call Fox. Let's crank this up. Oh, you mean the Bush administration set this up? Ssssh!

See also Mosqued bawl.

Minor combat operations have ended

It's great and all that the last combat brigade is out of Iraq a couple of weeks early, but:

Scatterings of combat troops still await departure, and some 50,000 will stay another year in what is designated as a noncombat role.

Even better than careful gradations of Pentagon bureaucratese, American casualties are waaay down in Iraq. It's still important to keep track of the fact that they were actual human beings with names and not just numbers. The most recent and surely not the last was Jamal Rhett, age 24, of Palmyra, NJ.

President Obama kept his promise, rather slowly, to finish up in Iraq. Good for him. But, like many of the better moments of his administration, it's a two cheers moment, not a three cheers moment.

In the end, the neocon Project for a New American Century got what it wanted - a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq. The rest of the rationale for going in was all marketing and bullshit. Now we have permanent bases there, more outposts in the empire the PNAC explicitly wanted to proclaim.

Mosqued bawl

Newt Gingrich (R-will to power) joins the amen chorus (amen to Jay-zus!) of teabaggers and wingnuts - that is, the majority of Republicans - in opposing the Cordoba House, a proposed Islamic mosque in Lower Manhattan. Once again, they prove that they have no idea of the meaning of freedom of religion. They narcissistically think that the Founders' great achievement was to codify the wingnuts' own special brand of Christianity as protected from who knows who - the great atheist-Islamist conspiracy, I guess. Just as many of them have missed the entire import of the gospels (Jesus was a liberal who ministered of love to the poor), they've missed the entire import of the First Amendment. And everything in between.

Gingrich can't help gilding the lily along with every other right-wing pundit. The mosque is "at Ground Zero." Or, as Newtie says, "overlooks Ground Zero." Most of the so-called straight news reporters give away their sycophant roles in pushing propaganda by adopting the wingy phrasing.

The truth is that the mosque is near Ground Zero - two city blocks away. (Click Google screen capture images for full-resolution aerial views.)


It just works so much better as propaganda to let your eager bullshit swallowers imagine that a mosque is going to rise in replacement of the twin towers. This is the sort of manipulation in plain sight that the Republicans know so well.

In any case, what distance toward the back of the bus would Republican opponents of religious freedom think appropriate? Maybe if the mosque were closer instead, they could think of its members as a human shield. The wingnuts' heads might explode from cognitive dissonance.

Wait til they find out how many other mosques there are in the area of Lower Manhattan!

Aaaieee! We're doomed. They're taking over! There's even an existing mosque four blocks from Ground Zero (though they appear to be having trouble keeping their lease).

Just leave out the context of how many churches there are in the same area:


I bet abortion clinics are feeling mighty nervous now! (Note: That's the wingnut logic of group accountability for the acts of a few other people who are superficially similar in some way.)

(Did I just commit journalism?)

Update (8/6): There's already a mosque inside the Pentagon! (h/t Jed Lewison on DailyKos)

Update (8/22): Updated in new item, When is a mosque not a mosque?

Update (8/22): I'm no New York Times, but I had the story of other nearby mosques almost three weeks before they did. In Manhattan, their own back yard. (h/t Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog)

Math phobia

This is the kind of number that scares even me: 180,000 to 360,000 traumatic brain injuries, mainly concussions, in Iraq and Afghanistan. The costs of caring for these troops is going to be immense, as my college classmate Linda Bilmes has documented and estimated at a time when I'm sure the projected cost was lower.

In the long run, we'll spend much, much more on these injuries than on Obama's stimulus plan, even if you measure it in present value as you should.

One thing concerns me: We have this vague 10% to 20% rate of injury released by the Pentagon. It appears to be the same rate "determined" by Rand Corp., updated to the now-greater cohort.

Why don't we have a more precise rate? We can't be happy with the implied error bar. Isn't anyone trying to get better data?

Or is this another fundamental refusal of the Bushists to even look at what they don't want to see? Now, that's a phobia.

Depends what definition 'meets' meets

The Pentagon says Guantánamo meets the requirements of the Geneva Conventions. This may well be true - now - but there's a short limit how far I'm willing to take on faith a self-assessment, particularly with the brass so heavily salted with holdover Bushists.

What I'd really like to see is a self-assessment that shows enough honesty to admit that for many years during Duhbya and Darth's rule (with Rummy raining snowflake memos down on the Pentagon), the way Guantánamo was run openly flouted Geneva.

That would be a start to recovering the traditional credibility of the military, which it had painstakingly rebuilt since Vietnam, only to fritter it all away on Iraq and torture.

Pentagon politics

It's bad civilian policy to give the vast Pentagon bureaucracy the scope of influence to hamstring decisions that the President makes. Absolutely, the military should have input, but if the brass drags their heels on Iraq, that's a good reason to retire them and bring up a corps less tainted by the bullshit of Bushism.

Sometimes, you just have to order the generals to get it done or get out.

Al Qaeda is just not a priority

Here's the stark admission:

"The chairman of the Joint Chiefs has said time and time again Iraq is a mission we must do. Afghanistan is a mission we do as we can," [Pentagon spokesman Geoff] Morrell said.

The people who had nothing to do with 9/11? Enemy! The people who attacked us on 9/11? No big deal.

How long until the White House backtracks on that?

Update: I mean, really, they're saying that they're willing to let the situation in Afghanistan totally go to hell. What a craven bunch of shitheads.

Office of military propaganda

Despite continually sniffing the air for bullshit, even I didn't have my bullshit detector turned up high enough. Sure, I was skeptical of uniformed military analysts, mostly just for their personal and institutional loyalties. I didn't expect to find bias consciously cultivated by the Pentagon through selection, access, and conflicts of interest.

By early 2002, detailed planning for a possible Iraq invasion was under way, yet an obstacle loomed. Many Americans, polls showed, were uneasy about invading a country with no clear connection to the Sept. 11 attacks. Pentagon and White House officials believed the military analysts could play a crucial role in helping overcome this resistance.

Torie Clarke, the former public relations executive who oversaw the Pentagon’s dealings with the analysts as assistant secretary of defense for public affairs, had come to her job with distinct ideas about achieving what she called “information dominance.” In a spin-saturated news culture, she argued, opinion is swayed most by voices perceived as authoritative and utterly independent.

So, they set out to create the perception, and goddamn the reality. They ran the government like a business, and that meant they needed referenceable accounts, no matter what sweeteners they needed to get those references.

At the Pentagon, members of Ms. [Torie] Clarke’s staff marveled at the way the analysts seamlessly incorporated material from talking points and briefings as if it was their own.

“You could see that they were messaging,” Mr. [Brent] Krueger said. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over.” Some days, he added, “We were able to click on every single station and every one of our folks were up there delivering our message. You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”

It seems as if the New York Times is finally asking how they got so snookered by the Bushist propaganda during the rush to war. It's a belated but good start.

Update: Fine phrasing at Whiskeyfire:

[I]f you want a war and know perfectly well you can't convince anyone that it's a good idea unless you're dishonest about it, you probably should rethink your belligerence.

Nine-hundred-page Family Circus

Not Me!

Why anyone would credit a single word from Douglas Feith, much less 900 pages of them, is a puzzle of belief trumping experience. Feith-based foreign policy!

Ministry of propaganda

ABC updates its Strait of Hormuz story. The Navy edited its video in a way that clearly suggested the "aggressive transmission" had come from the Iranian boats, even if the sound quality was suspicious. But now a spokesman says that oh sure it could have come from anywhere, sorry you all got the wrong impression. But "we still put it in the total aggregate of what happened Sunday morning," whatever weaselly bullshit that means.

The Pentagon is going to need a lot of retirements when a Democrat wins the Presidency. Anyone who engaged in this sort of political propaganda - gone.

One percent doctrine

Under Darth Cheney's one percent doctrine, America should invade any country that has a 1% chance of conveying nuclear weapons to terrorists. So why aren't we in Pakistan? Good question.

A sane one percent doctrine would prepare for 1% chances, war game them, create mitigation plans and scenarios, build infrastructure, keep some resources ready for rapid deployment, etc. The war gaming at least appears to be what the Pentagon is doing without any White House sponsorship (though it is possible the White House just couldn't acknowledge it), and I say good for the Pentagon.

One of the bonuses of being in Afghanistan is that we're right next door to the single most likely source of nuclear weapons for Islamic terrorists. I hope that we have a go team standing by at all times for possible interdiction or rescue. That would be a hell of a thing to try to put together on the fly. I'd rotate the duty, too. No team can stay sharp if it's sitting around the base yawning about alerts that always stand down.

Further, if we're not directing all the best of our satellite and electronic intel into Pakistan, we're idiots. Which is yet another reason to fear the results of having such incompetent morons in the White House.

The meaning of 'terrorism'

What is the meaning of terrorism - the word, not the sociology? (After all, this is a blog, not a dissertation in political science.)

The Bushists and their wingnut bloviators have used it to mean:

1. Violence directed at Americans


2. Any criticism that makes them sufficiently angry (which is to say, virtually all of it)

These self-centered definitions excuse them from having to subject their own behavior - and our own as Americans - to even the Golden Rule. We're Americans, we don't do terror, we're special.

It's typical of Republicans to build a rhetorical universe in which they win by definition and facts don't matter. Governments find this blurring of distinctions useful - witness the Greek government following the same path the Bushists have taken domestically. Forests or SUVs, fire can be a terror weapon, but I think a crime needs to meet specific and narrow factual criteria to be called terrorism.

The meanings of words do matter, as Republicans used to tell us when they were crawling into every orifice Bill Clinton had (ouch!) and bleeding out like a three-pepper Thai dinner. The word terrorism has a real, specific meaning: violence for political ends that targets innocent people. There's still lots of room for argument about what target and innocent mean in this context.

In WWII, the Nazi bombing of London was, we all agree, terror bombing. We've all seen movies of the plucky English and Winston Churchill still plying the streets between Luftwaffe raids. What then about the firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo? Or the nuclear holocausts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which possibly saved my grandfather's life)? We Americans often rationalize these horrific swords from the sky against infant and soldier and toothless elderly alike as attacks on the military infrastructure close to their incinerated homes. In truth, we know that we chose to kill all those people for minor direct military gain. And maybe Hiroshima was even the right choice at the time; war grays every boundary, and its terror did give tremendous indirect military gain by intimidating the Japanese into surrender.

Does the use of terror bombing against primarily civilian targets count as terrorism in a war that's already in full swing? We've been in the age of total war for well over a century. Southerners still hate Sherman for it. Moral or not, the norm of both "civilized" and "uncivilized" forces is to accept significant collateral killings. Most of us who are not pacifists agree that WWII was a just war, yet its collateral killing was worse than any previous conflict, and we and our allies always rationalized collateral killing and often (Curtis LeMay...) embraced it.

There is of course a very real difference on the subject between America and al Qaeda, just as there was between us and the Nazis. We have used technology to make our weapons ever finer and more discriminating, not in every instance (e.g. cluster bombs) but to a large degree (however, don't believe the missile videos from the First Gulf War were anything but cherry-picked). The real terrorists of al Qaeda, on the other hand, have used technology to be more and more indiscriminate.

We Americans are also likely to fall back on the Japanese perfidy at Pearl to ease our consciences, even though that was an attack on a legitimate military target, which means the perfidy was their use of diplomacy as a tool of war. They talked to cover a sneak attack that launched an aggressive war of choice. They, like Duhbya, felt they had no choice, or at least that was their rationalization. They, like Duhbya, pretended to seek peace long after the decision to make war had been made.

The attack on the WTC was obviously terrorism. While there's no doubt that a nation's economy is critical to any war effort, civilians engaged in their ordinary jobs are not a legitimate target. The same goes for Iraqis in Baghdad trying to earn a living.

The attack on the Pentagon on 9/11 was a little different. The Pentagon is the nerve center of our military and thus a legitimate - but still outraging - target. Only an infantile wingnut could claim that I don't want to defend it and the men and women who serve our country there and elsewhere.

My point is that understanding the world is important to achieving what we want to achieve. Blurring distinctions such as this only helps the political cause of American right-wingers and Bushists, who seem determined to efface any distinction other than us vs. them.

Of course, the attack on the Pentagon used a terrorist weapon, and I don't mean air attack. It intentionally murdered innocent civilians, typical of al Qaeda operations.

Logically, the attacks on the marine barracks in Lebanon, on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, on the Blackhawk in Somalia, and on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen were all attacks on military targets. Heinous and wrong, sure, but acts of war not of terrorism.

The import of all this is that the GWOT, as many others have proven over and over again, is a misnomer, and not just because Saddam was not a terrorist against us. The notion of a global war on terror is not even coherent, especially given the too-ironic use of fear in selling it.

What the PNAC neocons and the Bushists would like us to believe is that we're fighting at least a global war on jihadism (in the extreme sense of jihad). Of course, Iraq doesn't fit that formulation either - or didn't until we whacked the hornets' nest.

But, of course, if Duhbya could understand distinctions such as this, he could have understood the hostilities between Sunni and Shi'a in time not to provoke the hornets.