War Handwavium

Senator Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) husband is multimillionaire, Richard Blum. Mr. Feinstein owns about 25% of a company called URS. URS does a lot of contracts with the US Military. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars a pop.

Charles Lewis, executive of the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity watchdog group in Washington, asked “Why hasn’t she expressed outrage about some of the potential conflicts with people in or close to the Bush administration?” Dick Cheney’s connections with Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of Halliburton, was fodder for outrage over Cheney’s invasion of Iraq. Maybe Misses Feinstein didn’t object to Cheney’s conflict of interest because she had her own conflict of interest.

Glenn Greenwald highlights Feinstein’s voting record. She authorized the Iraq invasion, she funded the Iraq war without a timetable for withdrawal that her fellow Democrats wanted. She supported the Patriot Act. She helped General Hayden get confirmed as CIA director even though he presided over the illegal wiretapping program. The supported Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General even after he refused to answer basic questions about torture. And in October of 2009, she used her position as Chair of the Intelligence Committee to gut most proposed reforms to the Patriot Act.

And now Misses Feinstein is leading the charge to put public pressure on Obama to escalate the war in Afghanistan. A war that could profit her husband with millions of dollars.

If you are a Democrat and you live in California, I suggest you write your Little Orphan Annie of a Senator and tell her that she should stop working to get her Daddy Warbucks of a husband military contracts and start working to end Bush’s wars and Bush’s Patriot Act and Bush’s wiretapping programs.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/10/13/afghanistan/

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2003/04/27/BA284459.DTL

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2009/10/11/afghanistan___the_proxy_war/

A little while ago, Obama said that he wasn’t going to do a knee-jerk reaction to Afghanistan and simply send more troops without a good strategy to go with a surge. Within the next day, someone leaked a military report that said America will “fail” in Afghanistan if we don’t add more troops.

The gossip going around is that someone in the Pentagon leaked the report to put pressure on Obama to do the knee-jerk reaction and send more troops.

What has been leaked *since* is that the report says that Afghanistan will need a total of half a million American troops and will take at least 5 years

If true, I’m definitely in the “need a strategy” camp before sending more troops. Half a million troops and five years is just plain crazy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-andrews/classified-mcchrystal-rep_b_298528.html

http://news.aol.com/article/the-point-afghanistan-mcchrystal-report/681449

From the Huffington Post:

The congressional legislation intended to defund ACORN, passed with broad bipartisan support, is written so broadly that it applies to “any organization” that has been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws, campaign finance laws or filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. It also applies to any of the employees, contractors or other folks affiliated with a group charged with any of those things. In other words, the bill could plausibly defund the entire military-industrial complex. whoops.

Whoops indeed.

See, the right wing took ACORN and whipped it into a right wing feeding frenzy about all that is “wrong” about government. What mainly is “wrong” about ACORN is they helped register poor and underrepresented citizens in poor neighborhoods. That usually translates into Democratic voters, which angers the Republicans. So they found ACORN employees doing naughty things, convinced their base that it was systemic to ACORN as an organization, and quickly passed legislation to cut funding to ACORN.

OK. Fine. But you can’t legislate something specifically to cut funding from ACORN. Laws can’t punish specific individuals, they have to punish any individual who behaves in a certain way.

So, what they did was pass a law that defunds any organization who acts fraudulently.

OK. Fine. Except that sort of behaviour has occurred in giant military industrail companies. The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) went through the database and immediately found that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman both qualify for ACORN-style defunding due to the 20 cases of fraud between them. Blackwater is another group that committed fraud against the government.

Actuallly, I think defunding fraudulent companies is a good idea. As long as it’s implemented in a behavioural way, not specifically calling out ACORN, but calling out and defunding ANYONE who commits fraud. The problem is, this bill was rammed through by the Right, and the Right is probably going to have an issue with the defunding of the military industrial complex that they hold dear to their hearts.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/22/whoops-anti-acorn-bill-ro_n_294949.html

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/help-him-help-us-by-digby-couple-of.html

Seven CIA directors (3 served under Bush Jr., 2 served under Clinton, 1 served under Bush Sr., 1 served under Nixon) have written a letter to President Obama telling him that the Attorney General should not investige the CIA for any crimes, ever.

In other news, several mafia bosses have sent a letter to the president saying that organized crime should not be investigated.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/09/19/cia/index.html

The CIA has refused to release further documents related to its controversial terrorist rendition, detention and interrogation programs, saying doing so would threaten national security.

In other words, they lawyered up and pled the fifth on the grounds that it would incriminate them.

You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney present during questioning. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you. Do you understand these rights?

Oh, if only they had given the thousands of innocent prisoners they tortured these very same rights.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090902/pl_afp/usattacksciaintelligenceprobe

Representative Pete Olson (R-TX) held a Town Hall meeting and told the story of “Britney”, a pregnant woman who could not find a doctor to treat a heart condition of her unborn child, and then said “Britney” was convinced her child would not have been born if there was a public option.

People in the audience then started shouting that it was private insurance that had turned her down, not the government, therefore “Britney” was a poster child FOR a public option, not against it as Olson tried to portray.

Olson shut down the meeting 47 seconds later and went home.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677#32635078

Short version: yes, we did.

Longer version:

What we did included the deaths of at least a hundred prisoners, fake executions, threats to kill the family of prisoners, threats to rape the family of prisoners, buttstroking with rifles and knee kicks, dislocated shoulders, induced hypothermia, pressure points on carotid artery,

And waterboarding. That thing we convicted Japanese WW2 war criminals for doing.

Of the approximately one-thousand prisoners who went through Guantanamo, the US government has admitted that the vast majority of them were innocent. About 800 were eventually released without any charges, let alone a trial, or due process of any kind.

Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the most cowardly approach to investigating the obvious war crimes: a “preliminary review” that accepts the guidance from Bush’s DOJ as legal and Holder, that great example of courage that he is, is only going to investigate whether anyone exceeded that illegal guidance. Bush’s DOJ memos advocated torture that violates the Geneva Convention on multiple levels. But Holder doesn’t want to investigate that at all. Instead, Holder wants to use an Abu Ghraib model of investigation which will pursue only the low-level people in the trenches and ignore the obvious evidence that goes all the way up the chain of command directly to the President of the United States.

Cowards all.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/24/ig_report/index.html

http://luxmedia.vo.llnwd.net/o10/clients/aclu/IG_Report.pdf

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/08/25/king/index.html

According to CIA Director Leon Panetta, the CIA has been lying to congress about significant actions since 2001.

What those actions are has not yet been revealed.

But this news comes out the day before the House discusses a measure that would increase the number of people in Congress who must be notified of covert intelligence operations from the current 8 to more than 35.

The White House opposes the bill.

Given how poorly these 8 members have been doing currently, I’m inclined to support the idea of expanding the number of congresspeople who must be informed of CIA operations. Makes it harder to hide bad operations under a few members of congress.

I’m wonder what the “significant actions” have been. It would be purely speculation, but it might be that the amount of torture and rendition and so on has been far worse than reported even now.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20090709/pl_bloomberg/avp991mwyfpe

Glenn Greenwald writes about NPR’s Bush Apologist hack Alicia Shepard’s insistence on avoiding the term “torture” when refering to what America has done to prisoners in Abu Graihb and Guantanamo. You can read it here:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/06/22/npr/index.html

Shepard is using classic war handwavium logic, misdescribing the physical violence America has done to its prisoners in order to downplay and minimize the severity of those actions.

It’s not “enhanced interrogation techniques”; it’s torture.

They’re not “detainees”; they’re prisoners.

It’s not the Ministry of Love… well, hopefully you get the idea.

In fact, Shepard’s doublespeak on NPR wins her Orwell’s coveted “Ministry of Truth” Award.

Congratulations, Alicia!