Guy Rundle on the rise of Julia Gillard to the Prime Ministership in Australia:
Gillard-mania was nostalgia for a politics that has long since vanished from Labor. There’s still a faction called the Left in Labor, and it’s still in business. But North Korea calls itself a democratic republic, and McDonald’s calls itself a restaurant, so you don’t want to put too much investment in names.
This is perhaps the best idea I’ve heard in ages:
Welcome to Conflict Kitchen’s first iteration, Kubideh Kitchen. Conflict Kitchen is a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. The food is served out of a take-out style storefront, which will rotate identities every 4 months to highlight another country. Each Conflict Kitchen iteration will be augmented by events, performances, and discussion about the the culture, politics, and issues at stake with each county we focus on.
Kubideh Kitchen is an Iranian take-out restaurant that serves kubideh in freshly baked barbari bread with onion, mint, and basil. Developed in collaboration with members of the Pittsburgh Iranian community, the sandwich is packaged in a custom-designed wrapper that includes interviews with Iranians both in Pittsburgh and Iran on subjects ranging from Iranian food and poetry to the current political turmoil.
Don’t believe the hype; America may well have kidnapped a man with little or no intelligence value. Democracy at work:
Contrary to a news media narrative that Iranian scientist Shahram Amiri has provided intelligence on covert Iranian nuclear weapons work, CIA sources familiar with the Amiri case say he told his CIA handlers that there is no such Iranian nuclear weapons programme, according to a former CIA officer.
Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official, told IPS that his sources are CIA officials with direct knowledge of the entire Amiri operation.
The CIA contacts say that Amiri had been reporting to the CIA for some time before being brought to the U.S. during Hajj last year, Giraldi told IPS, initially using satellite-based communication. But the contacts also say Amiri was a radiation safety specialist who was “absolutely peripheral” to Iran’s nuclear programme, according to Giraldi.
Amiri provided “almost no information” about Iran’s nuclear programme, said Giraldi, but had picked up “scuttlebutt” from other nuclear scientists with whom he was acquainted that the Iranians have no active nuclear weapon programme.
Here’s a headline in the Jerusalem Post to bring warmth to the heart:
IDF commits to reducing civilian casualties
This week’s Washington Post story on the outsourcing of intelligence continues to reverberate. One of the co-writers of the series, Bill Arkin, is interviewed on Democracy Now! A shadowy world of massive privatised madness since 9/11. More than half a trillion dollars is being spent annually on services that even many elements within government don’t know about.
But key questions are emerging, not least the fact that alternative media outlets and reporters have been writing about these issues for years but received no credit or acknowledgment. Take Tim Shorrock, investigative journalist and author of Spies for Hire: The Secret World of Intelligence Outsourcing. His latest, exclusive report is here.
The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill is also skeptical. His headline perhaps gives away the game: “Corporate Media Discover Private Spies. In Other News, No WMD in Iraq”:
What is perhaps most telling about the Post series is how little detail is provided on the most sensitive operations performed by contractors: assassinations, torture, rendition and operational planning.
New neo-con group Emergency Committee for Israel recently produced a TV ad slamming the supposedly suspect politician Joe Sestak. Now, more liberal Zionist lobby J Street has released a counter attack that shows how much Sestak in fact loves Israel.
Seriously, if this is the way to move the debate forward in the US, we’re in deep trouble:
Murdoch’s News Limited is a multinational, bullying monster that routinely escapes serious scrutiny. Its size convinces too many to remain silent.
But there are brave exceptions:
The [Australian Rugby team] Storm’s former chairman, Rob Moodie, has launched a withering attack on the club’s owners, News Ltd, comparing their ”intimidating” tactics to those of multinational tobacco firms.
Dr Moodie, who has battled with tobacco companies in his position as one of Australia’s foremost preventive health experts, told the Herald: ”Coming up against News Ltd isn’t easy. From my experience in health I’d compare their tactics to those of a tobacco company – they are just so powerful, they have so many resources and they can be very intimidating.
”I have been shocked by their approach to ethics.”
US grocery store Olympia Food Co-op has become the first shop of its kind in America to institute a boycott of Israeli goods:
Co-op board member Rob Richards explained, “My hope is that by being the first in the US to adopt the boycott we act as a catalyst for other co-ops to join in. Each additional organizational entity that joins may have a very small effect on the big picture, but drop by drop fills the tub.”
A litany of voices are now pouring out to claim the Iraq war was a mistake and a disaster. Would these same establishment figures be so honest if Iraq hadn’t become such a basket-case?
British and U.S. intelligence had no credible evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States before the 2003 Iraq invasion, the ex-head of Britain’s domestic spy agency told the country’s inquiry into the war Tuesday.
Eliza Manningham-Buller, director of the MI5 between 2002 and 2007, said that nothing to connect the attacks to Baghdad was discovered ahead of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The ex-spy chief also said the war caused allies to lose focus on the al-Qaida threat in Afghanistan, emboldened Osama bin Laden and led to the radicalization of a generation of homegrown British extremists.
Manningham-Buller said those pushing the case for war in the United States gave undue prominence to scraps of inconclusive intelligence on possible links between Iraq and the 2001 attacks, singling out the then-U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
“There was no credible intelligence to suggest that connection and that was the judgment, I might say, of the CIA,” she told the inquiry. “It was not a judgment that found favor with some parts of the American machine.”
She suggested the dispute led Rumsfeld to disregard CIA intelligence in favor of work produced by his own department.
“It is why Donald Rumsfeld started an alternative intelligence unit in the Pentagon to seek an alternative judgment,” said Manningham-Buller, who was a frequent visitor to the U.S. as MI5 chief. “To my mind, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11 and I have never seen anything to make me change my mind.”
So let me get this straight. Years of futile fighting, tens of thousands dead and now a realisation that the “enemy” must be engaged?
The White House is revising its Afghanistan strategy to embrace the idea of negotiating with senior members of the Taliban through third parties – a policy to which it had previously been lukewarm.
Negotiating with the Taliban has long been advocated by Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, and the British and Pakistani governments, but resisted by Washington.
The Guardian has learned that while the American government is still officially resistant to the idea of talks with Taliban leaders, behind the scenes a shift is under way and Washington is encouraging Karzai to take a lead in such negotiations.
“There is a change of mindset in DC,” a senior official in Washington said. “There is no military solution. That means you have to find something else. There was something missing.”
That missing element was talks with the Taliban leadership, the official added.
The American rethink comes in the aftermath of the departure last month of General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan.
Barack Obama, apparently frustrated at the way the war is going, has reminded his national security advisers that while he was on the election campaign trail in 2008, he had advocated talking to America’s enemies.
America is reviewing its Afghanistan policy which is due for completion in December, but officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad with knowledge of internal discussions said feelers had been put out to the Taliban. Negotiations would be conducted largely in secret, through a web of contacts, possibly involving Pakistan and Saudi Arabia or organisations with back-channel links to the Taliban.
“It will be messy and could take years,” said a diplomatic source.
Just how extreme are the Republicans in the US?
If you’re against gay people, the UN, sex, taxes and one world government, you’ll fit right in.
One of the biggest stories in North America at the moment is today’s Washington Post investigation on the explosion of intelligence services since 9/11. The sheer scale and cost involved is massive. Creating fear has never been more profitable. The outsourcing of government services is taking place across the world, including Australia and yet most of the mainstream media ignores the developments.
Governments can’t continue to keep claiming they are “keeping us safe” but spend more of our money on companies with little transparency. Targeting “terrorists” sounds sexy and keeps the tabloid papers happy (and many in the Murdoch press) but doesn’t address the ways in which this “threat” has been managed and exaggerated.
Figuring out exactly who’s cashing in on the post-9/11 boom in secret programs just got a whole lot easier.
U.S. spy agencies, the State Department, and the White House had a collective panic attack on Friday over an upcoming Washington Post expose on the intelligence-industrial complex. Reporters Dana Priest and William Arkin let it drop this morning.
It includes a searchable database cataloging what an estimated 854,000 employees and legions of contractors are apparently up to. Users can now to see just how much money these government agencies are spending and where those top secret contractors are located. Check out this nine-page list of agencies and contractors involved in air and satellite observations, for instance. No wonder it scares the crap out of Official Washington: it’s bound to provoke all sorts of questions — both from taxpayers wondering where their money goes, and from U.S. adversaries looking to penetrate America’s spy complex.
But this piece is about much more than dollars. It’s about what used to be called the Garrison State — the impact on society of a Praetorian class of war-focused elites. Priest and Arkin call it “Top Secret America” and it’s so big, and grown so fast, that it’s replicated the problem of disconnection within the intelligence agencies that facilitated America’s vulnerability to a terrorist attack. With too many analysts and too many capabilities documenting too much, with too few filters in place to sort out the useful stuff or discover hidden connections, the information overload is its own information blackout. “We consequently can’t effectively assess whether it is making us more safe,” a retired Army three-star general who recently assessed the system tells the reporters.
The Post — whose editorial page has been notably receptive to the growth of the security state over the years — explains in an editorial comment that it ran its constellation of websites by security officials to ensure that it wasn’t jeopardizing national security. In one instance, the editors deleted certain unspecified specific “data points” the project initially disclosed. And they further explain that most of what the project documents, like the locations of contractor and agency facilities, is already public information, distributed on company and agency websites. So it’s not as if the paper has put anyone in harm’s way. (Some of those overlapping contracts issued by the “263 organizations [that] have been created or reorganized as a response to 9/11″ might now be in danger, however.)
Still, in compiling all this information, there’s a risk that the Post provides a hostile foreign power looking to infiltrate the U.S. security apparatus now has an online yellow pages for sending out his resume. Ironically, the very nature of the phenomenon Priest and Arkin document might be enough to foil an infiltrator. Security agencies and their companies produce more information than anyone can consume, adding uncertain value to the amount of information already public. And the spigot — contained in congressional budgets that are either politically sacrosanct or entirely secret — doesn’t seem to be able to close. One impressed observer notes to the paper about a useless intel program scheduled for closure, ”Like a zombie, it keeps on living.”
What’s missing from the story, however, is any assessment of the threat against which this vast and growing machinery is arrayed. The Post notes that 25 separate agencies have been set up to track terrorist financing, which admirably shows the overlapping and redundant nature of the post-9/11 ballooning of agencies and organizations targeting terrorism. But the article barely mentions that there are hardly any terrorists to track.The
Post points out that among the recent, nuisance-level attacks by Muslim extremists – the Fort Hood shooter, the underwear bomber, the Times Square incident – the intelligence machine failed to detect or stop them. True. That’s an indictment of the counterterrorism machinery that has become a staple for critics of the outsize budgets and wasteful bureaucracy that has been created since 9/11.The core problem, which the
Post doesn’t address, is that Al Qaeda and its affiliates, its sympathizers, and even self-starting terrorist actors who aren’t part of Al Qaeda itself, are a tiny and manageable problem. Yet the apparatus that has been created is designed to meet nothing less than an existential threat.
