Jews In America Are An Oppressed Minority -- OR ELSE!

Rick Sanchez

Brian Stelter of the New York Times reports on the firing of Rick Sanchez by CNN:

Rick Sanchez, a daytime anchor at CNN, was fired on Friday, a day after telling a radio interviewer that Jon Stewart was a bigot and that “everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart.”

The latter comment was made shortly after Mr. Stewart’s faith, Judaism, was invoked.
...
Mr. Sanchez’s comments came Thursday during a contentious conversation with the comedian Pete Dominick on satellite radio. By Friday afternoon, a recording of the conversation had circulated widely on the Internet.

In the conversation Mr. Sanchez, who is Cuban-American, repeatedly suggested that he had experienced subtle forms of discrimination in his television career.
...
One of the co-hosts of the radio show brought up the fact that Mr. Stewart was a Jew, saying to Mr. Sanchez that he was a minority “as much as you are.”

Mr. Sanchez answered sarcastically, “Yeah. Yeah. Very powerless people.” He let out a high-pitched laugh.

“Everybody that runs CNN is a lot like Stewart,” Mr. Sanchez said. “And a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart. And to imply that somehow they — the people in this country who are Jewish — are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”

Indeed. They are actually so oppressed that they can have anyone who suggests otherwise stipped of his employment within 24 hours, as CNN has so clearly demonstrated.

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Rhymes With 'Democracy', Starts With An 'H': NYT Laughs About One Hoax While Perpetrating Others

The New York Times has been having a good laugh over some other "news" outlets which were fooled by a fairly simple hoax. In the words of Richard Pérez-Peña:

A Senior Fellow at the Institute of Nonexistence

It was among the juicier post-election recriminations: Fox News Channel quoted an unnamed McCain campaign figure as saying that Sarah Palin did not know that Africa was a continent.

Who would say such a thing? On Monday the answer popped up on a blog and popped out of the mouth of David Shuster, an MSNBC anchor. “Turns out it was Martin Eisenstadt, a McCain policy adviser, who has come forward today to identify himself as the source of the leaks,” Mr. Shuster said.

Trouble is, Martin Eisenstadt doesn’t exist. His blog does, but it’s a put-on. The think tank where he is a senior fellow — the Harding Institute for Freedom and Democracy — is just a Web site. The TV clips of him on YouTube are fakes.

And the claim of credit for the Africa anecdote is just the latest ruse by Eisenstadt, who turns out to be a very elaborate [sic] hoax that has been going on for months. MSNBC, which quickly corrected the mistake, has plenty of company in being taken in by an Eisenstadt hoax, including The New Republic and The Los Angeles Times.
...

The pranksters behind Eisenstadt [Eitan Gorlin and Dan Mirvish] ... say the blame lies not with them but with shoddiness in the traditional news media and especially the blogosphere.

“With the 24-hour news cycle they rush into anything they can find,” said Mr. Mirvish, 40.

Mr. Gorlin, 39, argued that Eisenstadt was no more of a joke than half the bloggers or political commentators on the Internet or television.

Yeah, sure. But whether or not this hoax is "very elaborate" probably depends on the scale of the hoaxes you're used to dealing with. It's actually quite small compared to some of the hoaxes the New York Times has been perpetrating simultaneously.

Consider, if you will, Michael Cooper's treatment of Sarah Palin as serious:

A Surprise News Conference After a Campaign Without One

Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska did something [in Miami] on Thursday that she had not done in her entire campaign as the Republican Party’s vice-presidential nominee: she stood behind a lectern and held a news conference.

She was asked what had changed.

“The campaign is over,” she said.

Yep. Now that she can't possibly do the McCain campaign any more damage, she's allowed out in public. And we're not howling with laughter?

Granted, the question-and-answer session lasted only four minutes, and for only four questions.

Four minutes? Four questions? And that qualifies as a "news conference"?

But after it ended, Ms. Palin did allow herself a look back, as she addressed a session of the Republican Governors Association conference and told conferees that she had managed to keep busy since their last conference.

“I had a baby,” she said. “I did some traveling; I very briefly expanded my wardrobe; I made a few speeches; I met a few V.I.P.’s, including those who really impact society, like Tina Fey.”

"I very briefly expanded my wardrobe"? Is this woman for real?

And, yes, she spoke of Joe the Plumber, the Ohio man who briefly dominated the McCain-Palin campaign and its talk of taxes.

I would be laughing so hard I couldn't type.

The conference has been dominated by soul searching among Republicans worried about their future after last week’s poor Election Day showing.

Soul searching? Come ON!

To that end, Ms. Palin was again asked whether she would run for president in 2012.

And she ducked the question. But who's counting?

“The future is not that 2012 presidential race; it’s next year and our next budgets,” Ms. Palin said. It is in 2010, she said, that “we’ll have 36 governor’s positions open.”

Ms. Palin tried to play down her celebrity (even after a week in which she was featured in interviews on NBC, Fox News and CNN). In her speech, she tried to shift the focus from herself to the work that Republican governors must now do, including developing energy resources and overhauling health care.

“I am not going to assume that the answer is for the federal government to just take it over and try to run America’s health care system,” Ms. Palin said. “Heaven forbid.”

She implored her fellow Republican governors to “show the federal government the way,” while also reforming their own party.

“We are the minority party. Let us resolve not to be the negative party,” ...

Are we kidding? Did Michael Cooper not just watch the same campaign we did? Why is he not screaming with laughter? Why is he not holding his ribs? How can he possibly type this stuff?

Ms. Palin said. “Let us build our case with actions, not just with words.”

Too funny! It's just too funny.

Let's not just call Bay-rack O-Bamma a terrorist! Let's shoot us some moose! Let's bomb us some Ay-rabs! Let's connect with Middle America!

And if that doesn't get you going, scoot over to Washington, where Mark Mazetti has been transcribing the holy utterances of CIA Director Michael Hayden.

Hayden, as CIA directors must do in the bogus War on bogus Terror, treads as fine line as you're likely to see. On one hand, he has to claim credit for progress -- Americans like to think the hundreds of billions they spend every year on "security" might be buying them something. On the other hand, he has to claim that the situation is increasingly serious -- otherwise why would we keep increasing his budget?

So we get doubletalk like this, from Mark Mazzetti:

C.I.A. Chief Says Qaeda Is Extending Its Reach

Even as Al Qaeda strengthens its hub in the Pakistani mountains, its leaders are building closer ties to regional militant groups in order to launch attacks in Africa and Europe and on the Arabian Peninsula, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency said Thursday.

The director, Michael V. Hayden, identified North Africa and Somalia as places where Qaeda leaders were using partnerships to establish new bases. Elsewhere, Mr. Hayden said, Al Qaeda was “strengthening” in Yemen, and he added that veterans of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan had moved there, possibly to stage attacks against the government of Saudi Arabia.

He said the “bleed out” from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also extended to North Africa, raising concern that the countries there could be used to stage attacks into Europe. Mr. Hayden delivered his report in a speech to the Atlantic Council of the United States in Washington, and it offered a mixed assessment of Al Qaeda’s ability to wage a global jihad.

He drew a contrast between what he described as growing Islamic radicalism in places like Somalia and what he said had been the “strategic defeat” of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia — the network’s affiliate group in Iraq.

Fortunately, Hayden has two things going for him. First, by the nature of the bogus war, failure guarantees success, and success guarantees failure. If the CIA fails to eliminate the threat of terrorism, it guarantees success in the budget struggle. And if it succeeds in eliminating a few terrorists every now and then, the inevitable "collateral damage" -- innocent civilians horribly slaughtered or maimed -- guarantees an upswing in anti-American sentiment: nascent terrorism, and just what the bogus warriors need to keep their bogus war alive.

Second -- and far more importantly -- the width of the line he's trying to walk is made irrelevant by the fawning coverage he knows his words will receive. It doesn't matter if he doesn't make any sense, because he knows he's not going to be challenged on it. This wasn't a potentially adversarial situation, like Sarah Palin's four-minute "press conference". It was a speech before a committed body of like-minded war-mongers, the Atlantic Council of the United States.

So, for instance, nobody in the audience would have been prepared to corner Michael Hayden and ask him whether the "growing Islamic radicalism" in Somalia is occurring because of or in spite of the atrocities committed against the Somali people by Americans and their Ethiopian proxies.

Atrocities? Oh, yes! From rendition and torture to bombing convoys of fleeing refugees! Somalia has been brutalized in recent years, without any Congressional debate, without any acknowledgement from either of the presidential candiates, and without any pretext, viable or otherwise. If I were running the CIA, I wouldn't want to talk about Somalia at all -- except possibly at a place like the Atlantic Council of the United States.

Mr. Hayden pointedly refused to give details about the strikes by remotely piloted aircraft, or even to acknowledge that they occurred. He did say that the recent killing of senior Qaeda operatives had disrupted the group’s planning and isolated its leadership.

In mid-October, a missile fired from an American drone killed Khalid Habib, the latest senior Qaeda planner to be killed this year in Pakistan.

“To the extent that the United States and its allies deepen that isolation, disturb the safe haven, and target terrorist leaders gathered there, we keep Al Qaeda off balance,” Mr. Hayden said.

This is so meaningless, it's almost not worth discussing.

To the extent that my aunt has balls, she could be my uncle.

It's just worthless. But Mark Mazetti doesn't care. Keep the paychecks coming!

The radicalization of Pashtun tribes, and their strengthening ties to Qaeda operatives, date in part to the decision by the Pakistani president at the time, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, to raid the radical Red Mosque in Islamabad in July 2007, the C.I.A. director said.

Now there's some history for you! All the way back to the summer of last year!

In fact, the radicalization of Pashtun tribes, and their strengthening ties to Qaeda operatives, date in much more significant part to decisions made in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s by our bipartisan foreign policy "elite". But Michael Hayden is not about to say that. And Mark Mazzetti isn't about to say it either.

As for questions, forget it. Hayden didn't even answer the easy ones.

At the end of his remarks, Mr. Hayden deflected questions about whether he would consider remaining at the C.I.A. during the Obama administration and declined to say whether President-elect Barack Obama had asked him to extend his tenure.

“This is the business of the transition team,” Mr. Hayden said. “This is the business of the president-elect.”

If nothing else, it's nice to know there's something that the CIA director wants to leave in the hands of the president-elect! Not that it's likely to do anyone any good.

But closer to the point: The CIA created al Qaeda! The CIA's friends in Pakistan have been maintaining al Qaeda for all these years. And Pakistan's most feared "terrorist" leader is almost certainly a CIA asset. But you won't read anything about any of that from Mark Mazzetti, or from the New York Times, or from the "liberal media" in general.

But what the heck? They're putting out ridiculous manure, selling millions of copies, and making a living; we're telling the truth whenever we can find it, for free, and counting our readers in the hundreds.

Maybe that's why the NYT laughs at the blogosphere!

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The Torture State: Innocents Suffer; Villains Walk; Media: "Next!"

In an excellent piece posted Friday, Chris Floyd provides an overview of the week's revelations regarding the Bush administration's deliberate and illegal efforts to institutionalize torture.

It's the most despicable tale, yet I urge you to read as much of it as you can stand. We simply need to know what's being done -- to our country, to our world, to our future, and in our name -- if we are to have any hope of dealing with it properly (or at all).

Floyd provides copious links, to the recent McClatchy series on the subject and much else; as he says, it really has been a remarkable week -- yet another totally disgusting, nauseating week for those who care about truth, and justice, and what used to be called "the American way".

There's no longer any way to deny the plain fact that Bush, Cheney, and their circle of spinners deliberately concocted a false "justification" for the horrendous acts which they were determined to commit. And yet, as Floyd points out, no consequences appear to be forthcoming -- soon or ever.

Why not?

Floyd suggests the answer can be found between the lines of a piece from Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times.

Rutten has also compiled a damning account of the administration's embrace of torture, but he argues that there shouldn't be any criminal or legal responsibility attached to this gruesome record, because in America we solve problems like this through the electoral system.

In other words, according to Rutten, if you can get yourself elected, no matter what you do while in office, the worst that should happen to you is that you might lose your job.

Floyd quotes Rutten:

The Bush administration has been wretchedly mistaken in its conception of executive power, deceitful in its push for war with Iraq and appalling in its scheming to make torture an instrument of state power. But a healthy democracy punishes policy mistakes, however egregious, and seeks redress for its societal wounds, however deep, at the ballot box and not in the prisoner's dock.

And Floyd comments:

The cognitive dissonance of this conclusion was so painful and severe that I had to read it several times to fully take in that it meant exactly what it said: Rutten believes with all his heart that the official practice of deliberate, systematic torture – a clear and unambiguous war crime which he himself has just outlined in careful detail – is ultimately nothing more than a “wretched mistake,” a “policy difference” that should not be “criminalized.” And how can this be? The answer is obvious, if unspoken: because it was done by the United States government – and nothing the United States government ever does can possibly be criminal, or evil. It can only be, at most, a mistake, a conceptual error, an ill-considered policy, a botched attempt at carrying out a noble intention.

If any other country had a policy “to make torture an instrument of state power, " Rutten would undoubtedly condemn it as a vicious evil.
...

But it appears that Rutten's outrage at injustice has its limits. It does not extend to actually punishing those responsible for torture and murder – if those responsible are the leaders of the American government. They are to be allowed to finish their terms, then live out their lives in wealth, privilege, comfort and safety. To do otherwise, says Rutten – to insist that no one is above the law – "risks the stability of our own electoral politics."

There's a lot more from Chris Floyd and I suggest you read it all. But there's also more to the story.

Arun, musing, suggests the hidden subtext of Rutten's column may be somewhat different. In Arun's words,

it could simply be that the politicians consider themselves to be a special breed of human being to whom the laws that apply to the rest of the United States do not apply.

I don't see these observations as mutually exclusive. In my view, these are two poisonous forces working together: America can do no wrong, and elected officials are above the law.

I won't quibble with Chris Floyd regarding Tim Rutten's sincerity, or his status as a "respected" "liberal" "journalist". A less generous writer might suggest that Rutten's status, given his context, reveals something about the nature of propaganda.

Rutten's suggestion that America's troubles can be sorted out through the electoral process -- and that the most "justice" a politician can suffer is the loss of his job -- would be thoroughly worthless, as Floyd points out, even if we had a functional electoral process. But we don't.

The torturers and war criminals we're talking about here were never legitimately elected -- a fact that has magically vanished as far as the national media are concerned -- and every day that major newspapers carry on as if they were elected [twice!] constitutes nothing less than a crime against humanity.

They have no right to the offices in which they do their evil work. They longed for a crisis, then they precipitated one; they started "the long war", and then they used the war to "justify" the extraordinary powers claimed by the unelected president. Everything this administration has done has been illegitimate -- every single act of war, every single draconian bill passed, every single "extra-judicial" killing, every single act of rendition, every single act of torture.

All of it -- the stolen elections, the self-inflicted terror, the regime of torture, the wars of aggression, the secret laws -- all of it -- was quite evidently planned in advance and predicated on the notion that the national "news" media would go along with it. Which they have.

What we're looking at here is a situation in which no major newspaper will call for charges against men who are obviously -- and admittedly -- guilty of treason, war crimes, and horrendous crimes against humanity.

So let's get this straight: There is no possible punishment which could even begin to approach "justice" in this case. None.

The dogs of war -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gates, Rice, Powell, Wolfowitz, Feith, Perle, Grossman, Woolsey, and all the rest -- have done so much damage to the entire world that no punishment could possibly be sufficient. Nothing could even come close.

Imagine the most horrible sort of punishment being inflicted on one of these people. Picture him (or her) under the worst conditions of torture you can contemplate. See his home and belongings destroyed; listen to his children weeping. Imagine that all his descendants were doomed to inhabit a land in which every single thing was contaminated with radioactive waste. Think of all his friends and relatives scattered to foreign countries where they aren't welcome, or living among death and fear and foreign troops and foreign mercenaries and all the other debris of modern war.

Now multiply by a million.

This is what these people deserve. But no opinion columnist (liberal or otherwise) for any establishment newspaper (left coast or elsewhere) could ever get such an opinion published -- and if he wants to keep his job, he'd best not submit such a thing to an editor, either.

Justice is as justice does. Derrick Shareef is in prison, probably for the rest of his life. His crime? He fell under the influence of an FBI agent posing as a wannabe terrorist, who gave him a place to live, strung him along by the nose, and arranged an "arms deal" in which Shareef gave another undercover agent a pair of stereo speakers for four nonfunctional grenades.

Shareef's motives may have been despicable, but he never hurt anybody. He's in prison for what he agreed to do, for complying with the suggestions of an entrapment expert who was sent to get him. And he's one of many angry (or stupid) young Muslims who have been entrapped by "counter-terrorists" working for the federal or local governments.

At the other end of the spectrum we find George Bush and his criminal cronies, who openly conspired not only to break the law but to get it changed so that it would no longer constrain them, so that they could claim legal cover for acts and policies which no sane American could possibly countenance. And they're scot-free.

Meanwhile, nobody who writes for an establishment publication can call 'em like they see 'em. Not a one. Not anymore -- unless he sees 'em crooked.

Tim Rutten is playing a game we've discussed here more than once. He's connecting the dots with a false narrative. He's leaving out essential bits of context, and leaping to conclusions that are not warranted by any facts or any logical reasoning, although they may well be essential for the continued comfort of Tim Rutten and his family.

And it's one of the most important ways, in my observation, that the establishment "news" outlets protect the criminal regime they serve.

In previous situations where I've observed this game being played, I have suspected that the journalist in question was doing -- or thought he was doing -- the best he could under the circumstances. He was getting factual information into the public record, and even though it was wrapped in manure, his path to print may have seemed like a better option than the path followed by, let us say, William Glaberson.

Glaberson writes for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune (the Eastern liberal "elite" and their European connections) and recently he's thrown all his skill and craft into a spectacular hit piece against William Kuebler. Kuebler, as we've seen, represents Omar Khadr, the young Canadian held at Gitmo, whom the Americans want to try for war crimes for something he may or may not have done when he was fourteen years old.

Kuebler has been claiming that the evidence against his client has been fabricated; the prosecution doesn't deny it. Kuebler has been saying that his client has been tortured; the prosecution doesn't deny that either. Kuebler has been saying there's no way Omar Khadr should be on trial based on the so-called evidence, and that there's no way he could get a fair trial even if there were evidence against him, because the military tribunal process is inherently flawed.

Glaberson's take on it: Kuebler is a crank. He should shut up about the process already and get on with it -- start going through the motions of pretending to offer a defense while an illegitimate and thoroughly corrupt government gets on with the ruination of the young man's life -- and that of the whole world.

Khadr is accused of throwing a hand grenade that killed an American soldier in Afghanistan in 2002.

Think about that for a second.

If we can bomb, invade and occupy a country we've been destroying by proxy for more than twenty years, all based on one false pretext after another, and anyone who opposes the invading army can be captured and incarcerated for six years and branded a terrorist and tried for war crimes...

... in a "legal" setting where where torture is OK, where confessions extracted under torture -- and under conditions no one wants to read about -- are considered sufficient, where so-called "respected liberal journalists" discuss such practices without seeking to redress them, and where other "journalists" feed their faces by ridiculing the honest people ...

... then where are we?

Here. And now. And sinking fast.

~~~

Explore some links, if you will:

Seton Hall University: Guantanamo Reports

Tom Lasseter for McClatchy: America's prison for terrorists often held the wrong men

U.S. abuse of detainees was routine at Afghanistan bases

Militants found recruits among Guantanamo's wrongly detained

Easing of laws that led to detainee abuse hatched in secret

Taliban ambassador wielded power within Guantanamo

Documents undercut Pentagon's denial of routine abuse

Ex-detainees allege that U.S. troops abused Quran

U.S. hasn't apologized to or compensated ex-detainees

Deck stacked against detainees in legal proceedings

Warren P. Strobel for McClatchy: General who probed Abu Ghraib says Bush officials committed war crimes

Strobel quotes Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, US Army (retired), who "led the investigation into prisoner abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison":

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes [...] The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

More from Warren Strobel: Documents confirm U.S. hid detainees from Red Cross

Andy Worthington at AntiWar dot Com: John McCain, Torture Puppet

Juan Cole at Informed Comment: The Great Torture Scandal

Dana Milbank at the Washington Post: Abu Ghraib? Doesn't Ring a Bell.

Think Progress: Ex-State Dept. official: Hundreds of detainees died in U.S. custody, at least 25 murdered.

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times: Torture began at the top

William Glaberson: An unlikely antagonist in the detainees' corner

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque: Torturegate: Truth, But No Consequences

Arun (Musing): Now I understand

Political Fundraiser On Trial; Party Preference The Story

Less than 48 hours ago, we noted (once again) the reluctance (read: refusal) of the mainstream press to identify elephants as elephants, especially when they're doing elephantine things, such as getting arraigned for insurance fraud and money laundering.

But when donkeys act like donkeys, the press has no such problem, as illustrated by the allegedly liberal New York Times with a story headlined "Democratic Fund-Raiser’s Trial Starts in Illinois".

A prosecutor on Thursday described Antoin Rezko [photo], a businessman and political fund-raiser, as “the man behind the curtain, pulling the strings” in an influence-peddling scheme to extort millions of dollars from companies that wanted to do business with the State of Illinois.

In her opening statements at a much anticipated trial here, the prosecutor, Carrie E. Hamilton, told how Mr. Rezko and Stuart Levine, a lawyer who was on two state boards, tried to use Mr. Levine’s positions and Mr. Rezko’s influence to obtain kickbacks.
...

The trial has attracted national attention because of Mr. Rezko’s relationship with Senator Barack Obama, who has not been accused of wrongdoing.

The trial will revolve around the administration of Gov. Rod R. Blagojevich, a Democrat like Mr. Obama, who has promised to clean up corruption in the state. Mr. Blagojevich is not charged with wrongdoing in the case.

You see how it works, don't you?

If you don't -- or even just for fun -- it helps to imagine the shoe on the other foot. Or, in this case, the shoes on the other feet.

Suppose, just for grins, that two prominent political types were caught doing the sorts of corrupt things that prominent political types do.

Suppose one of them was an elephant-sympathizer and the other was an elected donkey.

Suppose a local TV station ran a story on the elected donkey's arraignment but didn't mention his party; suppose this sort of coverage was considered "mainstream".

Now suppose a national newspaper ran a story on the elephant-sympathizer's trial and in addition to using the word "Elephant" in the headline, also managed to cast sideways aspersions on two even more prominent elephants, neither of whom had been accused of any wrongdoing. Would this paper be called "conservative"?

You have to be able to answer "yes" to the previous question if you want to characterize the New York Times as "liberal media".

Or else you can do it, as I do, as a term of derision.

Ebb Tide: The Fine Art Of Political Analysis Is Slipping Away

Monday, January 28, 2008
Ebb Tide I: Political Analysis Reaches Astonishing New Lows

Thursday, January 31, 2008
Ebb Tide II: Watching The Tide Roll Away

Saturday, February 9, 2008
Ebb Tide III: Use The Force, Jim!

Friday, February 15, 2008
Ebb Tide IV: Is It Rock Bottom Yet?

Monday, March 24, 2008
Ebb Tide V: Robert Parry Looks At Barack Obama And Sees Michael Douglas

Haunted House Of Mirrors

This series was intended to be about the twisted wreckage that America has become, and the trouble it has recognizing itself in the funhouse mirrors thrown up by the entertainment / news / trivia distribution system.

The thrust of the series was diverted somewhat, with several posts looking at the most transparent lies about 9/11 which still -- amazingly -- hold currency.
 
Saturday, January 5, 2008
Funhouse Mirror: Looking At America With The New York Times
false flag terror, rigged elections, and complicit media

Thursday, January 17, 2008
Beyond The Mirror: The 9/11 Funhouse, Part I
the fallacy: "No Conspiracy That Big Could Be Kept Quiet"

Thursday, January 17, 2008
Beyond The Mirror: The 9/11 Funhouse, Part II
more fallacies: "9/11 Couldn't Have Been An Inside Job Because Bush Is Too Stupid", "I Can't Believe It / I Won't Believe It", "I Don't Want To Talk About It", and "The 9/11 Truth Movement Has No Coherent Narrative"

Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Beyond The Mirror: The 9/11 Funhouse, Part III
truth: the United States has been pounding on a foreign country for six going on seven years now with no end in sight, and none of it is justified, even if the official story of 9/11 were true

Thursday, January 24, 2008
Beyond The Mirror -- The 9/11 Funhouse, Part IV
more fallacies: "Conspiracy Theorists Need Something To Believe In", "Conspiracy Theorists Find Their Bizarre Theories Comforting", "Conspiracy Theorists Hate America", and "Conspiracy Theorists Blame Bush For 9/11 Because They Hate Him"

Wanna Get This Picture On The Cover! The Photo Rolling Stone Should Have Published With "The Fear Factory"

(UPDATED twice, below and belower)

Rolling Stone has just published a long and fairly good article called "The Fear Factory", which focuses on the FBI's so-called Joint Terrorism Task Forces and their apparent history of fomenting bogus terror -- creating false "terror cells" which they can then bust.

The author, Guy Lawson, shines a spotlight on the shady dealings of FBI entrapment specialist William "Jameel" Chrisman, whose story graced these pages some time ago.

Unfortunately, Rolling Stone didn't publish Chrisman's photo, even though it is readily available. Nor did Lawson link to any corroborating evidence, even though plenty of that is available, too.

I have been working on a review of Lawson's piece and I hope to have it ready shortly. But in the meantime, since Lawson has sparked some interest in the case, it makes sense to post a photo of the rat and links to more information.

For a closer (and annotated) look at William "Jameel" Chrisman, how he entrapped Derrick Shareef, and how he tried to entrap Hassan Abujihaad:

Burned! Meet William Chrisman, FBI Entrapment Specialist

And for another glimpse behind the scenes of bogus terror:

Inadequate Deception: The Impossible Plots Of The Terror War

I'll be back with more on Lawson's piece and some related matters as soon as possible. In the meantime, and especially if you're new to all this, please click some links and learn about the terrorist threat we face, where it comes from, and how serious it really is!

UPDATE 1:

The Register-Star, hometown paper of Rockford, Illinois, was none too thrilled with the coverage Rolling Stone provided their fair city, and had this to say about it:

Rolling Stone takes aim at Rockford: Says city not worthy of terrorist attack

Jan 30, 2008 @ 07:22 PM | RRSTAR.COM

ROCKFORD - Rolling Stone, the venerable anti-establishment pop-culture magazine, took notice of Rockford in its latest issue.

In "The Fear Factory," a piece that suggests the federal government is "manufacturing" terror threats, author Guy Lawson examines the strange case of would-be mall bomber Derrick Shareef.

In the process, he takes a few swipes at Rockford, "a Midwestern city of 150,000, with a minuscule Muslim population and the lone claim to fame of being the hometown of Cheap Trick."

Later, Lawson opines, "Finding a meaningful target to blow up in Rockford isn't easy. A hardscrabble town in the middle of America, the place is not much more than an intersection of interstates and railway lines, with little of note that might attract the attention of terrorists."

What are your thoughts on this? Send us an e-mail at local@rrstar.com.

So I sent them my thoughts:

In "Rolling Stone takes aim at Rockford", I see the following:

"The Fear Factory," ... suggests the federal government is "manufacturing" terror threats

I hate to break it to you, but you can go without the quotes.

The article describes some of the bogus terror threats that the federal government has been manufacturing! Period.

It is very clear and all the author's assertions are very well-documented elsewhere. But you won't report on that, will you?

Why not? Doesn't the truth matter to the newspapers anymore?

I think you're not only upset that Rolling Stone took a swipe at your thriving metropolis.

I think you're also ticked because they showed up your shitty little paper.

You should have been reporting on this more than a year ago.

I wrote to Mike Wiser -- the "Star" reporter who covered this story extensively at the time -- and pointed out that the evidence of entrapment was enormous.

Indeed, the scent of entrapment was all over this case from the beginning.

But apparently he wasn't interested. And apparently you still aren't.

Are your revenues declining, just like all the other shitty newspapers in this country?

Maybe you should start printing the truth for a change and see whether that makes a difference in your sales.

Because right now the bloggers have your ass beat from here to hell and back, chump.

UPDATE 2:

I've been looking and looking for a good piece on this story and I've finally found one.

William N. Grigg: Federal Provocateurs: The "One Percent Solution"

Draped across the throat of our nation like a lank noose about to be pulled taut is a system of 102 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs). These entities, which could properly be called homeland security soviets, combine state and local police with FBI Special Agents, covert operatives from the CIA, personnel from various directorates of the Department of Homeland Security, and investigators from the IRS.
...

FBI Special Agent Lundgren told Rolling Stone that the JTTFs are governed by “the Dick Cheney one percent solution”: If there is just a one percent chance that a terrorist incident can occur, “then we have to treat our response as if there were a 100 percent chance.”


Of course, where no evidence of a plot exists, the Feds stack the odds by employing provocateurs who supply the missing “one percent chance.”

Right on, William!

Ebb Tide I: Political Analysis Reaches Astonishing New Lows

As the 2008 presidential "election" process grinds on, we can expect the quality of the reporting to keep getting worse, especially if the "liberal media" have anything to do with it:

If you look at the reams of coverage in newspapers outside the United States or follow the hours of television news broadcasts, you might conclude that foreigners had a vote in selecting an American presidential candidate -- or, at least, deserved one, so great is America's influence on their lives.

To the questionable extent to which the 2008 presidential election will have anything to do with the future course of American policy, it is perhaps fair to say that this election will determine whose lives the United States will ruin next. You might conclude that the victims should have some say in it.

And why not? They're the ones paying for our "way of life".

From Berlin to London to Jakarta, the destinies of Democratic and Republican contenders in Iowa or New Hampshire, or Nevada or South Carolina, have become news in a way that most political commentators cannot recall. It is as if outsiders are pining for change in America as much as some American presidential candidates are promising it.

Outsiders couldn't really be pining for a change in American direction, could they? But for some mysterious reason, they act as if they did!

The personalities of the Democratic contest in particular -- the potential harbinger of America's first African-American or female president -- have fascinated outsiders as much as, if not more than, the candidates' policies on Iraq, immigration or global finances.

Of course, outsiders are fascinated on whatever the media focuses on -- just like the locals! only worse. And the coverage always focuses on anything but the issues, especially the personalities. So how is this news?

It isn't, of course. It's pure spin. And there's lots more where that came from.

We've been reading Alan Cowell from Davos, Switzerland, in the International Herald Tribune:

And there is a palpable sense that, while democratic systems seem clunky and uninspiring to voters in many parts of the Western world, America offers a potential model for reinvigoration.

Ha! America offers a case study of a murderous post-democratic industrial society going down the tubes fast, and taking the rest of humanity with it! But of course the IHT cannot say that.

"It is in many ways an uplifting sight to see a great democracy functioning at that most basic of levels," said Lord McNally, the leader of the small opposition Liberal Democrats in Britain's House of Lords. "Even with all the money, the publicity, the power of television, the person who wants to be the most powerful man or woman in the world still has to get down and talk in small town halls and stop people on the street and stand on soapboxes."

Doesn't it just warm your broken heart to see all the warmongering zillionaires standing on their soapboxes?

Here's my favorite bit:

There is skepticism in some places that an African-American can actually win the presidency. "Can he win?" an Afro-Cuban cabdriver asked an American visitor in Havana. "I mean, can he win?" he asked, wondering if a black man could be elected in a land that Cubans are taught to see as riven with racism.

You see? America is not actually riven with racism. That's just a myth that the Cubans believe, because that's what they are taught.

And it kind of makes you wonder: Do we believe anything that's false about any foreign countries, just because of what we're taught?

I have to give Alan Cowell some credit, though. He did get himself to Davos, whereas I am still here. And he also managed to sneak a few morsels of truth into his article:

There is deep interest in the campaign in the West African nation of Senegal, fueled in large part by a dislike of President George W. Bush and a hope that a new president will be more open to immigration and less hostile to Islam.

"I think President Bush is anti-Islamic," said Mouhamed Souleymane Seydi, 24, a hotel-management student at the University of Dakar. "It's become much harder for Muslims to immigrate to America or even to visit. If you show up at the airport with a beard and look Arab, you're going to come under intense scrutiny."

This, too:

In the Philippines some displayed less concern, even with the Obama-Clinton race. "In the past we always have two white men talking about strange policies," said Alex Magno, 53, a political science professor at the University of the Philippines. "But probably if they get elected it will be the same as the old white men who contested the elections before."

... which could knock Alan Cowell out of the running for The Stupidest or Most Deceitful Political Analysis of The Year Award ... if there are any other qualified candidates.

And -- so sorry, Alan -- there are some!

~~~

to be continued...

"Who Is The Real Terrorist?" Reports From Pakistan And Afghanistan Differ

A couple of days ago I lost the only draft of a piece that was half-finished and already so complicated it made my head hurt. In that piece I had quoted Chris Floyd quoting Scott Horton quoting Carlotta Gall and David Rohde and Barnett Rubin. Are you with me so far?

The subject was Pakistan and Afghanistan: The piece by Gall and Rohde talked about Pakistan having lost control of the extremists that had been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, before Pakistan joined the War on Terror. The Rubin piece linked this loss of control to the bombing of the Serena Hotel [photo], Kabul's luxury spot for foreign visitors.

I don't have the heart to reproduce the post as I originally intended it, especially since reading it might make your head hurt, too. So I will try to give you more or the less the same information in a very different way.

I once read that the best blog entries consist of links, quotes, and comments. Maybe that's the secret.

Carlotta Gall and David Rohde in the New York Times: Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.
...

One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan’s last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Mr. Musharraf had now ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of new meddling.
...

The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.
...

After 9/11, the Bush administration pressed Mr. Musharraf to choose a side in fighting Islamist extremism and to abandon Pakistan’s longtime support for the Taliban and other Islamist militants.

In the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to contest Indian-controlled Kashmir, the border territory that India and Pakistan both claim, and to gain a controlling influence in neighboring Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States supported militants, too, funneling billions of dollars to Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan through the ISI, vastly increasing the agency’s size and power.

Publicly, Mr. Musharraf agreed to reverse course in 2001, and he has received $10 billion in aid for Pakistan since then in return. In an interview in November, he vehemently defended the conduct of the ISI, an agency that, according to American officials, was under his firm control for the last eight years while he served as both president and army chief.

Mr. Musharraf dismissed criticism of the ISI’s relationship with the militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers in battles with the militants in recent years — as well as several assassination attempts against himself — as proof of the seriousness of Pakistan’s counterterrorism effort.
...

One militant leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, typifies how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency’s control, turned against the government and joined with other militants to create powerful new networks.

In 2000, Mr. Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Army of Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002. The ISI intermittently provided training and operational coordination to such groups, he said, but struggled to fully control them.

Mr. Musharraf banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and detained Mr. Azhar after militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in December 2001. Indian officials accused Jaish-e-Muhammad and another Pakistani militant group of masterminding the attack. After India massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Pakistan’s border, Mr. Musharraf vowed in a nationally televised speech that January to crack down on all militants in Pakistan.

“We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad,” he said. Two weeks later, a British-born member of Mr. Azhar’s group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded by his captors. Mr. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the kidnapping.

After Mr. Pearl’s killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Mr. Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed. “I never believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably cut,” said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm.

At the same time, Pakistan seemingly went “through the motions” when it came to hunting Taliban leaders who fled into Pakistan after the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, he said.

Encouraged by the United States, the Pakistanis focused their resources on arresting senior Qaeda members, he said, which they successfully did from 2002 to 2005. Since then, arrests have slowed as Al Qaeda and other militant groups have become more entrenched in the tribal areas.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani government did not move against the leading Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin, who are based in the tribal areas and have long had links with Al Qaeda, one senior ISI official said it was because Pakistan needed to retain some assets of its own.
...

“Pakistan would certainly be better off if the ISI were never used for domestic political purposes,” said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A. Islamabad station chief. “That goes without saying.”

Barnett R. Rubin at Informed Comment: Global Affairs: New York Times on ISI; Serena Hotel Attack

David Rohde and Carlotta Gall deserve huge credit for an outstanding investigative article today on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. This article makes sense out of all the contradictory indications about the ISI's links to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as well as other armed militant groups. It also covers the ISI's role in domestic politics, including election rigging. It is clear from the article that a military regime cannot (and some will not) control the militants it created and that the military will also not permit civilians to take control of the state.
...

The attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul is a shock for all of us foreigners who have gone there for tea. conferences, or brunch, even if we never stayed there. Like most people who go in and out of the Kabul expatriate community, I imagine, I knew a couple of people who were there -- in my case including some Norwegian diplomats.

News reports mention that this was Afghanistan's only "five-star" hotel. They don't mention that nearly all Afghans live in "zero-star" conditions, including the thousands of people who pass that traffic circle every day and see inaccessible luxury behind thick walls. The rioters attacked the Serena in May 2006, apparently believing that alcohol is served there, though it is not.

I am sure that the people of Kabul don't want more violence in their city. They were badly frightened by the riots in 2006. But there is huge resentment and anger building up at the overbearing foreign presence. The May 2006 riots were sparked by an accident where US military vehicles killed a pedestrian. Afghans see and often do not distinguish among the "Chinese restaurant" brothels and the glittering restaurants (by Afghan standards, not ours) serving luxuries, including alcohol, to foreigners, some of whom are being highly paid to destroy Afghanistan's opium livelihood, which Afghan Islamic figures say is no worse than the alcohol they drink at night after destroying farmers' poppy crops.

Many Afghans think that money that is supposed to be used to help them is instead being used to pay for the good life for foreigners in the Serena hotel. Alas, it is true. When aid donors boast of how much technical assistance they are giving Afghanistan, they provide data on the size of the contracts they have given to consultants. I have spent some of the grant and contract money that pay for my salary and travel expenses on meals and tea at the Serena Hotel. These expenses are counted as someone's assistance to Afghanistan.

This is a new kind of target for the Taliban. Foreigners going to restaurants in Kabul (including some where, unlike the Serena, alcohol is in fact served), sometimes joke that they feel like targets. Up to now, however, they have not been. The Taliban have mostly attacked the international forces and Afghan army, police, and officials, as well as other "collaborators," such as employees on reconstruction projects or public figures who support the government. Sometimes they kill civilians indiscriminately when they attack government buildings (including cases when they killed students in schools). But as far as I know, this is the first attack targeted at the foreign assistance community and the "corrupt" lifestyle it has brought to Afghanistan. I imagine it will not be the last.

Scott Horton at Harper's: Pakistan Loses Control

A recent poll suggests that half of Pakistan’s population believes that Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, or military leaders very close to him, had something to do with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan may be the world’s center of wacky conspiracy theories, but this public perception should not be lightly dismissed. In fact the Pakistani military and its intelligence arm have deep ties in to the Islamic militants who considered Bhutto their greatest threat on the Pakistani political stage.

For those trying to make sense out of the tremendously complex, and tremendously important threads in Pakistan and Afghanistan that tie together Musharraf, the Pakistani senior military establishment, Pakistan’s Interservice Intelligence (ISI), the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, tribal chiefs and groups, and various terrorist groups which float in the shadows between all of these players, Carlotta Gall and her colleague David Rohde offer an important contribution in today’s New York Times.

I first met Gall more than ten years ago when she was working for the BBC covering Central Asia. Even then she was a very rare figure, a Westerner who tenaciously dug in to learn what was going on. Gall never thought the answers were to be found in the lobbies of the Sheratons and Intercontinentals, which is where the bulk of the press corps seem to hang out to pick up their scoops. She went to the villages and small towns to form a solid picture of the situation and she probed insistently into the shadowy world of the Pakistani intelligence service and its various cat’s paws.

Her article today gives one of the best accounts of the relationship between ISI and their radical agents, and the ambiguity of much of this relationship. It’s mandatory reading.
...

The ISI is the critical prop to Musharraf’s reign. It was responsible for his rigged election successes in the past and certainly will play the same role in the coming election. The Times piece goes on to offer specific detail on an internal review of the agency and its relationship with radicals, which leaves many asking who is guarding whom?

Barney Rubin goes on to link this report with the alarming bombing attack on Kabul’s luxury Serena Hotel.
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Westerners are now being targeted, and the Taliban’s reach is right into their ultimate luxury sanctuary in Kabul. This development opens the year in Kabul on an appropriate note of alarm. Afghanistan is not Iraq, and the prospects for success of the Western effort there are considerably higher than in Iraq. The stakes are also higher, I believe. This is the challenge at center stage of the current conflict: the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ultimate growth matrix of the terrorist threat that manifested itself on 9/11, and which is, six years later, stronger than ever.

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque: Risky Business: A Reporter in the Eye of the Storm

... a perfect description of Gall at work when I knew her in Moscow. That was how she covered the first Chechen war, a brutal affair on every side, and one swathed with many layers of lies. She went to Chechnya, to the front lines and "to the villages and small towns to form a solid picture of the situation." She would call in her stories on a satellite phone, dictating them to someone at the desk -- often me -- racing to meet the midnight deadline, sometimes with shellfire sounding in the background.

The New York Times has made many egregious hires (Judith Miller, that little Kristol guy, etc.) and many foolish, even sinister moves over the years. But in hiring Gall, who has been covering Afghanistan from the beginning of the American invasion there, they have provided us with at least one figure of great journalistic integrity, tenacity and courage among the upper echelons of the corporate media.
...

Horton links to Gall's latest story, written with David Rohde, exploring the shadowlands nexus between Pakistan's security forces (army and intelligence), and the terrorist factions they created, nurtured, armed, trained and now, occasionally, fight against. The story even manages to make an early mention of the American role in using Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, to arm, fund and train a global jihad network -- the one-time "freedom fighters" now reviled by their own creators as "Islamofascists." It also notes that it was this American intervention -- begun under the saintly Jimmy Carter (even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan) and greatly expanded under the Reagan-Bush regime -- that "vastly increased" the size of the ISI and extended its dark influence throughout Pakistani society.

This angle is not the thrust of the piece, but it is extremely rare to see even this much context in a story about the troubles in Central Asia, where ham-handed, dim-witted interventions by the bipartisan loot-and-power crowd in Washington have for decades been fomenting vast storms of blowback, which we will be dealing with for many decades hence -- with the worst storms yet to come.

Chris Floyd is right: it's great to have such a brave reporter on the scene. But it's a shame she's shackled to the corporate media, where even a short mention of the CIA's role in Pakistan and Afghanistan is a rarity.

And in this rarity the truth must be hidden in as many misleading ways as possible, by such devices as acknowledging the American influence in the 1980s but no later, hinting but never making the dubious claim that the CIA had cut all its connections with the group it had founded.

Similarly, in the hands of the New York Times, this is a story of militants who have "turned against their handlers" despite the obvious fact that it was the handlers who turned against the militants.

Obvious? If Musharraf had to purge the ISI three times, what does that tell you? It was Pervez Musharraf (at the "request" of George W. Bush) who tried to change the course of mighty rivers.

The "militants" and "terrorists" have been under attack ever since 9/11 was blamed on Osama bin Laden. And those who recall the sequence of events will remember that "blame" is the correct word. The USA asked the Taliban to turn him over, the Taliban offered to send him to any duly constituted international court if the Americans provided evidence against him, and the Americans responded with wave after wave of bombers.

This was the only response available to the United States, after all, since it had no evidence connecting Osama bin Laden with the attacks of 9/11, as even the FBI admits. Bin Laden was the scapegoat; no more, no less. 9/11 was an inside job, a multi-faceted coup d'etat for which he was blamed but which he never could have accomplished.

And you don't see the NYT talking about Pakistan's change of policy toward the militants in this light, nor do you see anything in the so-called "paper of record" about how USA has used and betrayed "freedom-fighters" all over the world.

In short, I'd rather see Carlotta Gall writing for the NYT than not, but we're still obliged to read her reports through the standard filter. In other words, the individual dots may be laid out correctly, but not always; meanwhile there are always some dots missing, and the narrative connecting the others is bound to be twisted.

And I can't deny that I'd be a lot more comfortable with the official story of 9/11 -- as well as the official story of how Pakistan lost control of the militants who attacked us on 9/11 -- if the story about the loss of control had come along before the attack, rather than six years after. But such is the nature of covert ops, I suppose. You can't always fabricate the history your cover story requires, but that's never considered a reason to cancel an operation.

Speaking of 9/11, attentive readers will have noticed that the NYT quotes Robert Grenier, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad on 9/11 and is currently a managing director at Kroll -- a company which ranks very high on the list of corporate 9/11 suspects. If there is any reason to believe this man, I have no idea what it is. So much for the "liberal media".

I disagree with Scott Horton on Western chances in Afghanistan. As I read it, Afghanistan is "lost" and always has been. The invasion was based on lies and will never amount to anything but a crime against humanity. But that won't stop the imperial adventure. Nor will most of the "dissident" media ever acknowledge it. But the "militants" will never stop trying to eject the foreign military presence -- and as long as that presence remains, the "militants" will never have to go recruiting.

Will Scott Horton write about this one day? Or will he continue to present propaganda disguised as journalism, where the "center stage of the current conflict" is "the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ultimate growth matrix of the terrorist threat that manifested itself on 9/11 ..."

It's beautiful English, of course. But as History it stinks.

The evil force that manifested itself on 9/11 was a lot closer to home than the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I would have thought Scott Horton was smart enough to see that. But then again, perhaps he's shackled by Harper's. Or perhaps he never would have got the gig at Harper's... but I digress.

Listen: whoever bombed the Serena Hotel seems to understand that the foreign troops are little pawns in a big game and will be replaced as necessary, for as long as the foreigners continue to sip tea in the hotel. In other words, their "tactical shift" seems to indicate a realization that there's no point attacking the troops and leaving the foreign dignitaries alone. They don't seem to realize that the foreign dignitaries are as replaceable as the troops.

But the replaceable foreigners are hiding now, according to Eleanor Mayne in Kabul for the Telegraph: Party's over in Kabul after hotel bomb

It could have been a scene from the trendier parts of Paris, New York or London - a smart restaurant-bar packed with chic 20-somethings, debating which club to head on to as midnight approaches.

Yet L'Atmosphere, a funky French bistro with open fire, is not a hang-out on the Left Bank, Soho or Greenwich Village but in the Afghan capital, Kabul, the city that once hosted the world's most hardline Islamic regime. Its customers have been the foreign aid workers rebuilding the country.

But last week's suicide bombing of the upmarket Serena hotel, where the swimming pool and coffee bar were popular gathering points for Westerners, and the Taliban's threats have alarmed Kabul's aid workers, who have until now regarded the city as a place to let their hair down after arduous postings in remote Afghan provinces.

Many aid organisations are now in temporary "lock down" - barred from going out for anything other than essential business. On Friday night, a tour by The Sunday Telegraph of the city's nightspots, which are discreetly located in private ­villas, found most closed or nearly empty.

During the six years since the fall of the Taliban, the city has slowly acquired an unlikely status as a party town among the tens of thousands of charity workers, diplomats and security staff now based here.
...

The prospect of further attacks -part of a deterioration of security in Kabul in the past year - have raised the question of whether the city may end up building a version of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, where aid and construction workers live in spartan compounds.

Such a move would not be welcomed by the capital's aid workers, many of whom club together to rent spacious Kabul mansion houses. While their colleagues in Baghdad cannot venture out without an armed escort, they can come ago largely as they please. On Fridays and weekends throughout the summer, sun-bathers crowd the grass at the swimming pool at one United Nations compound, enjoying the pool-side bar. And there are beauty salons offering relaxing Thai massages, as well as therapists, counsellors and yoga classes.

Late-night dancing, meanwhile, is guaranteed at Bayou Blues or Crazy Eight, a security contractors' hang-out where weapons must be handed in at reception.

So lively is the social scene that Kabul has its own version of Hello! magazine in the form of the monthly Afghan Scene, which features a "Be Scene" section with pictures of various expats attending photo gallery launches, dinners and occasional black tie parties.

That tells you more than you ever needed to know, doesn't it? They hate us for our freedoms?

And finally, some remarkable journalism: a point of view you will never see from the New York Times, Carlotta Gall or no.

Nawab Khair Buksh Marri interviewed by Rashed Rahman, editor of Pakistani daily The Post: "We fear extinction"

I want to ask who defines international standards. Who creates the world order? Who forms international public opinion? America and her satellites decide the price of petrol and the fate of nations. And whosoever dares disagree is a terrorist. Human beings need to think as to who is the real terrorist: the one who kills or the one who defends his right to life, the one who cons or the one who resists being conned? It is not predetermined that a superpower is civilized and peace loving by definition. Who invented and dropped the atom bomb before any other nation had an atom bomb? That is quite akin to the parable of the lion distributing the bounty. The phrase “lion’s share” does not refer to a fair and just distribution of resources. America is the lion of the international community and then she has quite a coterie of hired servants, stooges and cronies. America has colonies all over the world apart from vast interests in technology, science and research. Whoever resists America, is being labelled as a terrorist. When Osama asks America to leave his lands, he is called a terrorist, even if Osama and those of his ilk have been working for the American interests in the past. When Mullah Omar asks America to leave Afghanistan, he is given the title of a terrorist.
...

Those who wield power are also the arbiters of justice. Processions are taken out at Trafalgar Square every day and the British are not bothered. The rule of law is a nice accessory of the civilized world. Protests are not the sole method of defending rights. These methods can be a pressure tactic. However, they are ineffective when the powerful decide to have their way. Protests could not stop the American aggression against Iraq. The Americans said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as if America did not have any weapons of mass destruction. Well, America was the referee and it failed to find any such weapons in Iraq. Civilized protests are ineffective in addressing deep-rooted grievances.
...

If you give up hope, you are dead. One needs to keep hope alive to live on. As you know the elections are round the corner. On the one hand we have the clamour of the weak. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the noise and the power of the regime. The weak are neither resourceful nor united at the moment. They do not trust each other either. It is not necessary that the equation remains the same forever.

If you haven't had enough yet, please read all of "We fear extinction".

I think you should also read all of "Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say", but don't forget to remember the parts that aren't mentioned.

Barnett Rubin's piece, "New York Times on ISI; Serena Hotel Attack", contains a lot of detail on the terrorists who have been blamed for the attack on the Serena. Blame is not the same as guilt, as Rubin himself points out when he writes "In case this hypothesis proves true, here is some background." Regardless of who was behind the bombing, this is a very informative post.

I've said this before but just in case: bookmark Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque and read him every day. That's an order. You can thank me later.

And as for Scott Horton, I've been a bit rough on him, but he does fine work on a number of fronts. So here's another bookmark for your collection of hard-working patriots, not all of whom agree on all issues.

Funhouse Mirror: Looking At America With The New York Times

Ages ago -- Monday -- in a bizarre year-end editorial called "Looking At America", the New York Times listed some of the most egregious wrongs of the past seven years.

President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

In the years since 9/11, we have seen American soldiers abuse, sexually humiliate, torment and murder prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few have been punished, but their leaders have never been called to account. We have seen mercenaries gun down Iraqi civilians with no fear of prosecution. We have seen the president, sworn to defend the Constitution, turn his powers on his own citizens, authorizing the intelligence agencies to spy on Americans, wiretapping phones and intercepting international e-mail messages without a warrant.

We have read accounts of how the government’s top lawyers huddled in secret after the attacks in New York and Washington and plotted ways to circumvent the Geneva Conventions — and both American and international law — to hold anyone the president chose indefinitely without charges or judicial review.

Those same lawyers then twisted other laws beyond recognition to allow Mr. Bush to turn intelligence agents into torturers, to force doctors to abdicate their professional oaths and responsibilities to prepare prisoners for abuse, and then to monitor the torment to make sure it didn’t go just a bit too far and actually kill them.

The White House used the fear of terrorism and the sense of national unity to ram laws through Congress that gave law-enforcement agencies far more power than they truly needed to respond to the threat — and at the same time fulfilled the imperial fantasies of Vice President Dick Cheney and others determined to use the tragedy of 9/11 to arrogate as much power as they could.

Indeed. And that's not all.

Hundreds of men, swept up on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq, were thrown into a prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, so that the White House could claim they were beyond the reach of American laws. Prisoners are held there with no hope of real justice, only the chance to face a kangaroo court where evidence and the names of their accusers are kept secret, and where they are not permitted to talk about the abuse they have suffered at the hands of American jailers.

In other foreign lands, the C.I.A. set up secret jails where “high-value detainees” were subjected to ever more barbaric acts, including simulated drowning. These crimes were videotaped, so that “experts” could watch them, and then the videotapes were destroyed, after consultation with the White House, in the hope that Americans would never know.

The C.I.A. contracted out its inhumanity to nations with no respect for life or law, sending prisoners — some of them innocents kidnapped on street corners and in airports — to be tortured into making false confessions, or until it was clear they had nothing to say and so were let go without any apology or hope of redress.

All this makes perfect sense, does it not?

It condemns the Bush administration -- Bush and Cheney particularly -- for egregious and obvious crimes: crimes against the Constitution, crimes against the people of America, crimes against the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, crimes against humanity itself..

So what's bizarre?

First, the "explanation" for all these crimes:

This sort of lawless behavior has become standard practice since Sept. 11, 2001.

The country and much of the world was rightly and profoundly frightened by the single-minded hatred and ingenuity displayed by this new enemy. But there is no excuse for how President Bush and his advisers panicked — how they forgot that it is their responsibility to protect American lives and American ideals, that there really is no safety for Americans or their country when those ideals are sacrificed.

Out of panic and ideology, President Bush squandered America’s position of moral and political leadership, swept aside international institutions and treaties, sullied America’s global image, and trampled on the constitutional pillars that have supported our democracy through the most terrifying and challenging times. These policies have fed the world’s anger and alienation and have not made any of us safer.

And second, the proposed solution:

These are not the only shocking abuses of President Bush’s two terms in office, made in the name of fighting terrorism. There is much more — so much that the next president will have a full agenda simply discovering all the wrongs that have been done and then righting them.

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably. Then when we look in the mirror as a nation, we will see, once again, the reflection of the United States of America.

What kind of a mirror is the New York Times using?

Against all indications, the NYT attributes the actions of the Bush administration to "panic and ideology".

It's clear that neither Bush nor Cheney have panicked -- on 9/11 or ever since. They've been sitting quietly, watching the universe unfold -- right into their laps!

And it's even clearer that their ideology plays a heavy role in what they have done. So why talk about panic?

For that matter, why talk about "this new enemy" without trying to identify it?

The Bush administration took less than a day to decide who was to be held responsible for 9/11, less than a month to start bombing Afghanistan, less than two months to pass the enormous and egregious PATRIOT Act, and more than a year to empower a whitewash disguised as an investigation. What does that tell you?

The administration was (and still is) heavily populated by members of an extremist group which called for a cataclysmic attack on America, in order to enable their radical agenda, just before the 2000 election.

They wanted the catastrophic events of 9/11 to happen, they were ready for them to happen, and they took full advantage of them when they did happen. What does that tell you?

They were in position to make it happen, and they have done everything in their power to deceive us about the how and why of almost everything ever since! ... And we're supposed to believe they're telling us the truth about 9/11!

Alas, the official story of 9/11 is a shaky one, and our nation's leading paper could knock it down with one good investigative series -- but they won't. They'd prefer to enumerate the abuses we suffer at the hands of our own government and hope that we can vote our way out of trouble.

But the Times' prescription for healing America bears absolutely no resemblance to reality!

It's not the voters' fault that Bush got into the White House in the first place, and it's not their fault that he got to stay there for a second term. Both presidential elections were not only stolen by the Republicans but also given away by the Democrats, and the major American media -- led by the purportedly liberal New York Times -- played a huge role in legitimizing the theft, if not the giveaway.

Even now -- even though the illegitimacy of both "elections" is obvious, and even though the ideology of the "winners" has caused us enormous damage, the nation's "leading" newspaper will still not investigate or even acknowledge election fraud, unless it happens in a foreign country.

Even now -- with the official story of 9/11 in tatters -- the NYT will not investigate the events of that day, or even acknowledge that the official story is a crock of manure.

It's only fitting, I suppose, in a fun-house mirror kind of way, for the New York Times to say:

We can only hope that this time, unlike 2004, American voters will have the wisdom to grant the awesome powers of the presidency to someone who has the integrity, principle and decency to use them honorably.

In point of awful fact, the only people who have "the integrity, principle and decency" to use "the awesome powers of the presidency" "honorably" are ignored, if not denigrated, by the nation's corporate press as a whole and by the New York Times in particular.

The hypocrisy required for the New York Times to pontificate about the "wisdom" of the American voters is absolutely beyond measure.

So much for the "liberal media".

If you don't have symptoms resembling stomach flu, you haven't been paying attention.