I was overseas during the most intense stage of the 2008 US Presidential Election; thankfully. However, I was not completely spared from this ludicrous ‘politics the American way’ even outside the country- think CNN international, think Wall Street international edition … basically think the inability to escape it all thanks to the globalization of the news, more like Americanization of the global news. The around the clock coverage of elections a la USA was booming in the background, more like foreground, of every single international (Western) hotel and resort, tourist hangout cafes and bars, and airport lounges. And I heard many comments from ‘outsiders’ on the ridiculously long, expensive, and show-like phony distraction called Presidential Election USA. Of course, deservedly, many of those comments were ‘snarly.’ Some were plain witty and truthfully hilarious-muckraking a la Brits.

I almost never disagreed with the outsiders’ assessment of and take on our painfully long, money-driven and for-show-scripted presidential election season. However, I slightly differed in one characterization:

Many referred to our uber costly and glitzy presidential race as ‘A Dog & Pony Show.’ I certainly saw, and still see, the appropriateness of this characterization of our presidential race: A Dog & Pony Show. But I had, and still have, my own characterization that applies equally well, and actually goes even deeper: A One-Man-Owned Cock Fight.

A Cock Fight is a contest in which gamecocks usually fitted with metal spurs are pitted against each other. Here is a bit more expanded description:

A cockfight is a blood sport between two roosters (cocks), held in a ring called a cockpit. Cockfighting is now illegal throughout all states in the United States, Brazil, Australia and most of Europe.

The combatants, referred to as gamecocks, are specially bred birds, conditioned for increased stamina and strength. The comb and wattle are cut off in order to meet show standards of the American Gamefowl Society and the Old English Game Club and to prevent freezing in colder climates. Cocks possess congenital aggression toward all males of the same species. Cocks are given the best of care until near the age of two years old. They are conditioned, much like professional athletes prior to events or shows. Wagers are often made on the outcome of the match. While not all fights are to the death, the cocks may endure significant physical trauma. In many other areas around the world, cockfighting is still practiced as a mainstream event; in some countries it is government controlled.

…

There are variations and regionally based differentiations in cockfighting shows and betting-gambling, but the two main ones are based on one owner-two cocks or two-owners-two cocks.

I happen to view our presidential race as a one-owner-two cocks show. Of course, initially, during the primaries it all starts with several cocks-one owner, and after that it gets narrowed down until we have two cocks-still-standing and one-owner. To understand this a bit better you must look at the major backers of our presidential candidates; take the last round in 2008: Obama-Clinton-McCain. Take a look at the fund-ers, owners. What do you see? Military Industrial Complex mega players, Financial Industry mega players, Oil industry mega players …All spreading their bets between three cocks, and later on two. They train and groom their multiple cocks, write the show scripts for the PR-Marketers (mainstream media), let the cocks put on the show, and no matter which cock wins, they get to win.

So yes, we Americans love everything big: big cars, big houses, big food portions, and big-glitzy and ludicrously long presidential election races with way too many bells and whistles, which  can appropriately be called ‘A Dog & Pony Show.’ When examined closer a better analogy seems to be a One-Man-Owned Cockfight.

*** A few readers have suggested that we cover the 2012 presidential election here @ Boiling Frogs Post. I personally would rather stay away from all that nonsense glitz. After all, the entire MSM is covering it 24 X 7, and almost all popular blogs-forums have committed their entire sites to it. However, I would like to hear from more of you.

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I was scheduled for an interview on the latest developments on the Turkish-Syria topic, however, they had a last minute change and suddenly I was facing questions regarding the latest exposé on Bahrain-Washington Times. If you look carefully you’ll see my eye-balls turning rapidly (mine are too tightly connected to the wheels spinning inside my head) …Anyhow, I needed at least an extra five minutes to explain the real macro points on this topic (Yap, I’m one of those who cannot sum up things in short bullet points. Why do you think I always prefer interviews of a minimum of 30-minutes?), but life (TV interviews) doesn’t work that way. That, and feeling uncomfortable using my intended (and well-deserved) words: Whores-Pimps-Johns… Well, here is the RT clip:

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Yesterday Justin Elliott at Salon reported on an international media-lobbying intrigue involving Bahrain, a Lockheed Martin executive and the Washington Times:

A top executive at Lockheed Martin recently worked with lobbyists for Bahrain to place an op-ed defending the nation’s embattled regime in the Washington Times — but the newspaper did not reveal the role of the regime’s lobbyists to its readers. Hence, they did not know that the pro-Bahrain opinion column they were reading was published at the behest of … Bahrain, an oil-rich kingdom of 1.2 million people that has been rocked by popular protests since early 2011.

The episode is a glimpse into the usually hidden world of how Washington’s op-ed pages, which are prized real estate for those with interests before the U.S. government, are shaped. It also shows how Lockheed gave an assist to a major client — Bahrain has bought hundreds of millions of dollars of weapons from the company over the years —as it faces widespread criticism for human rights abuses against pro-democracy protesters.

…

The story is worth reading. Just remember this is an itsy bitsy tiny little case; only one example of many more similar cases occurring regularly. Hello? Think about our Congress and over 400 lobby-able crooks in it. Think about our government providing perks and access to ‘select’ reporters for being good pet boys. Think about dime-a-dozen plentiful retired generals linking their MIC bosses to the mighty purchaser Pentagon…on a daily basis hundreds of prostitution transactions like the one with the Washington Times. Come to think of it, one major difference between the examples I’m providing and prostitution in the true sense of the term is that usually the American public is at the center of services and transactions provided. That is, the services and products offered are their hard-earned dollars, their liberties, their security, their gullibly misplaced trust…

Let’s take Salon’s exposé on the Washington Times. The paper and the reporter appear to be the prostitutes. Now, figuring out the pimp(s) and distinguishing it from the client is a bit more difficult. You see, at first glance it looks like Bahrain is the client, and the Lockheed Martin Executive is the pimp, right? But if you really look at it you’ll see Lockheed Martin as the ultimate beneficiary: too much publicity on our Bahraini puppet regime may bring a few sanctions, and those sanctions may include an arms embargo, and then Lockheed Martin may lose a few hundred million dollars (peanuts of course, but hey…). Let me show you one example of the stakes for LM:

SYRACUSE, NY, October 2nd, 2007 — Lockheed Martin [NYSE:LMT] has delivered an AN/TPS-59(V)3B ballistic missile defense radar system to the Kingdom of Bahrain. The radar proceeded smoothly through a site acceptance test in August and now is being used by the Bahrain Defence Force for air surveillance. In May 2004, the U.S. Marine Corps awarded Lockheed Martin a $43.6 million contract to provide the long-range radar system to Bahrain, along with associated supplies, equipment and services, as a foreign military sale (FMS).

So ordinarily, in more US Congress-like scenarios, we’d have the pimps aka the lobby firms; we’d have the client, let’s say a MIC firm or a pharma or a foreign country, and then, we’d have the prostitutes: our elected representatives…

In this particular case there seems to be an absence of a ‘pimp.’ Pretty cost effective, efficient, direct and smart: the client, Lockheed, goes to the prostitute directly and gets ‘his thing’ done, but the Arab Sheikh pays for ‘the thing.’ But wait a minute, the ultimate payment, the real dough, is going to ultimately be paid to Lockheed for all those ‘arms.’ So, in a way, we are looking at a sucker paying a client for going to and getting his ‘thing’ done with a media prostitute …

Okay it gets a bit confusing. We have these sucker puppet Arab regimes. We have MIC or Oil as ultimate clients, and then, we have the media as … what? It is the ‘John’ the client who is getting paid, so it is not exactly prostitution because that would be too noble for what these guys in the media are and do. It is more like a whore than a good ole fashioned prostitute. Then allow me to recap one more time:

In this latest US media exposé we’ve got a case of a ‘John’ and a ‘sucker’ and a ‘whore’; no?

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Thomas E. Woods, Jr.; Rollback:  Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse; Regnery Publishing, Inc. (2011)

In Rollback, Thomas Woods provides a thoughtful, clearly written wake-up call.  The breadth of the topic is a bit ambitious, particularly for such a portable read, but Woods provides numerous, wide-ranging examples that will lead readers to reconsider some of their assumptions and expectations.  At times, one might be left a bit confused whether Woods thinks government fiscal collapse is inevitable, or if we still have time to forestall that collapse by ‘repealing big government.’  Either way, however, he leaves no doubt he believes we have large-scale upheaval ahead of us, and that the architecture of much of our federal as well as state government faces a forced and forceful diet. 

Woods is a fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute.  The Mises Institute was founded in 1982 by Lew Rockwell, former chief of staff for Rep. Ron Paul of Texas.  The Institute has been a center for academic scholars dedicated to the principles of the “Austrian School” of economics as well as classical liberalism more generally.  The Austrian school is so named due to the influence and collaboration of founding members like Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Carl Menger.  In the United States, Murray Rothbard became one of the leading Austrian voices, which rejected much of the mathematical and statistical foundations of mainstream economics and their application in government economic programs.  The Austrian school stands out for its dedication to free markets and a sharply curtailed role for government in society, and Woods’s Rollback clearly reflects this perspective.

Woods opens Rollback with two neat quotes, including a long running truth from a Roman senator and historian named Tacitus – “The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.” This idea is fleshed out most explicitly in Rollback’s Chapter 6, “The Myth of Good Government,” where Woods looks carefully at the asserted justifications and politically practical sources of demand for a variety of government programs and extensive regulatory practices.  One common thread to those examples is the notion of regulatory capture, where regulation is sought out and developed by the industries being regulated, at the expense of consumers and the common good.

But the fiscal challenges we face arise from a broader set of political influences, including general public laziness and acquiescence in programs based, in Woods’ eyes, on fiscally unsustainable promises.  He takes a closer look at Medicare and Social Security, and depicts demographic icebergs likely to sink the ship. 

Some fun facts from Rollback’s opening chapter include:

A May 2010 poll found that an incredible 85% of graduating college students planned to move back in with their parents after graduation, facing an average of $23,000 in debt before they even start working.

Many states are ‘going bust;’ seven states likely to see their pension systems fail by 2020, and thirteen more by 2025.

Dozens of cities are contemplating bankruptcy.

Washington D.C. has seen demand for new homes rise faster than another other large American city, and it also has the highest median household income of any of the 25 largest metropolitan areas.

This last item is related to Wood’s opening quote about ‘the more corrupt the state, the more numerous its laws.’  Included along with the 50 states, Washington D.C. has by far the highest income per capita, and it also has by far the largest numbers of lawyers per capita.  When you want to get cynical, one way to think about DC is as a factory full of lawyers and lobbyists, who make laws and programs enriching their clients and themselves at the expense of the rest of us.

In Chapter 2, Woods turns to Barack Obama and the “Change We Can Believe In,” finding not much change nor little to believe in, particularly in the new Administration’s health care programs.  The chapter’s strongest and most interesting elements, however, deal with the stimulus programs for the weak economy, their pork-barrel origins, and their unseen costs that can actually retard recovery. 

From there, Woods broadens his perspective to a general review of the role of government in economic crisis, with particular reference to the origins and solutions developed for our Great Recession in recent years.  Woods provides a careful review of housing market finance and the consequences of government programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and their interplay with monetary policy of the Federal Reserve. 

Woods and others have strong words, in hindsight, for what they assert were artificially low interest rates arising from Fed monetary policy in 2002-2006 as seeding the recent housing crisis.  This perspective may be a little too easy, in hindsight, and it can also deflect attention from other worthy sources of investigation into regulator behavior, including the Fed’s outsourcing of capital and other financial regulations to the anointed set of credit rating agencies.  This proved a critical point of failure, Fed advertising that it promotes financial stability to the contrary.  But to his credit, Woods at least notes the credit rating interaction with capital regulation problem.  And those that think the effective repeal of the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investment banking in the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 was a central element of our latest meltdown would do well to look at Woods’ argument here.  It wasn’t the repeal of Glass-Steagall, for example, that allowed banks to invest so heavily in well-rated but disastrous mortgage-backed securities.  They were allowed to do so before the Glass-Steagall repeal, as well. 

Woods has harsh words for the financial regulators and their claims to expertise and foresight before our latest crisis.  In turn, more and better regulation, the argument goes, is not the solution for our financial system down the road.  Fewer public guarantees and government programs could be a better route.  Along these lines, Woods cites economist and historian Robert Higgs, who has said of the regulators:

“Had they been given even greater powers, budgets, and staffs, what enchantment would have transformed the regulators into smart, dogged champions of the public interest, rather than the time-serving drones and co-conspirators with the regulated firms that they have always been?”

Woods also includes one of my favorite economists, George Stigler, in his argument here.  Stigler was a Nobel prize winner and a central leader in the University of Chicago economic and business schools, and the ‘Chicago School’ of regulation.  Stigler has provided some of the most important foundations for the ‘capture theory’ of regulation, how regulators get co-opted by special interest groups.  

“If Stigler is correct, then we have here another reason to consider it simplistic, even childish, to foist major tasks of economic stabilization onto regulatory bodies in the superstitious hope that this race of supermen will identify and act upon problems before anyone else perceives them, and always with an eye to the public interest.”

If you thought Woods was too already too harsh on the Federal Reserve, well, the next chapter is dedicated to the Fed.  Woods and others of the Austrian school are sharply critical of central banking generally, and Chapter 5 provides a brief and accessible review of their reasoning.   The dollar has lost roughly 95% of its value since the Fed was created in 1913, depending on how you measure that, anyway, while Woods and others make a pretty good case that, from a longer-term perspective, our banking system has been more unstable with a central bank than it was without it.  Woods is pleased by a revival in critical interest in the Federal Reserve in recent years, and tries to make a case that the Fed hasn’t just been a failure in his eyes – it has been a failure on its own terms, as well.

If special interest groups capture government programs designed and/or advertised to promote financial stability, but these programs actually destabilize and threaten us, what if that is also operating in the case of government’s role in promoting national security?  This could be a little frightening, perhaps, but also a way of taking the blinders off and seeing the world realistically.  (For that matter, what if our law enforcement authorities are captured by the criminals?  A topic for another day).  In Chapter 5, Woods turns to the Pentagon, with the main thesis arising from his assertion that “beyond a certain limit, military spending constitutes the classic example of parasitic growth.”  Woods cites operations research professor Seymour Melman, from Columbia University, and Melman’s use of the term ‘overkill’ to capture how many resources we have dedicated to the military sectors that have been taken and diverted from other opportunities.   One fun fact in this discussion includes the fact that the U.S. strategic aircraft and missiles were capable of unleashing the equivalent of six tons of TNT for every person Earth even by the 1960s.  Woods provides a wide variety of other sobering statistics about the cost and consequences of our global military establishment.   Obama and Company took their share of criticism earlier in the book, but Woods, to his credit, certainly doesn’t leave the Republican party unscathed, particularly on this score. 

In Chapter 6, Woods pulls back for a more general perspective on the role of government, and concludes with a chapter reinforcing his early ideas that fiscal strains will inevitably force examination of policies restricting government down the road.  Some of Woods’ personal prescriptions include ‘opt-outs’ for Social Security and Medicare, across-the-board cuts in federal spending, currency competition as an alternative to our current central banking system (citing Ron Paul, who has introduced legislation along these lines), state nullification of unconstitutional federal measures, a ‘repeal amendment’ allowing states to annul specific federal laws if two-thirds of the states see fit, creative Internet-based mechanisms to ‘crack through the media monopoly’ (Go Boiling Frogs!), and a very interesting if narrower proposal called ‘jury nullification.’

All in all, Rollback is a good read — provocative, clear and educational.  You may not always agree with him, but you can learn from him.

Bill Bergman- Senior Financial Analyst, ‘Follow the Money with Bergman’ at Boiling Frogs Post
Bill Bergman has 10 years of experience as a stock market analyst sandwiched around 13 years as an economist and financial markets policy analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He earned an M.B.A. as well as an M.A. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago in 1990. His favorite course there was titled “The Economics of Regulation,” and the lessons learned in that course and elsewhere help illuminate his cautious if not cynical and concerned perspective when told that government is looking out for us. Mr. Bergman is currently working with Social Movement Sciences LLC, a new enterprise developing evaluation and funding services for not-for-profit organizations. He is married, with three kids, and lives in Chicago. His objective with this column is to provide insight into financial and economic conditions, public policy framing money and financial markets, the history underlying our financial infrastructure, and monetary aspects of investigations and scandals.

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On the other hand, by this very same definition, a criminal ‘hot case’ that has not gone through a proper investigation by real investigators remains a ‘hot case.’ Whether that hot case is shoved into a cold case file or not does not make it technically a ‘cold case.’ The never-investigated mass murder on September 11, 2001, a case never assigned to real and independent investigators, with many witnesses never-interviewed, with many suspects never-pursued, with many questions left unanswered, and with many leads never-followed, remains a ‘hot case.’ The self-serving classifications and redactions, the many cover ups, and the burial of the case and related files in government-created massive igloos, do not make 9/11 a cold case.

Let’s take a few minutes and by comparison examine a smaller scale murder investigation involving a murdered wealthy middle-aged man in an office building that was set on fire. While the forensic teams go over the body and through the charred building and debris to search for clues and evidence, the trained detectives begin interviewing witnesses, checking out the victim’s history, following any leads and forming their list of suspects.

In creating their list of suspects, the investigators look at all persons with direct or indirect motive(s): A young trophy wife with a multi-million dollar life insurance policy; a business adversary with much to gain from the elimination of the murder victim; former business partners and associates with grudges; a man who had actually threatened the murder victim; another who had shared his intense desire to see the victim dead; the owner of the handsomely insured burned down office building who had been unsuccessfully trying to sell the building and liquidate his assets …so on and so forth.

Whether through accounts of eye-witnesses or relatives, coworkers and friends, whether through documented evidence such as letters or e-mails, the investigators fill the list with possible suspects with motive(s) to see the victim dead, and maybe some with the established intent to kill him. Once the investigators create their list of suspects, and once the forensic and other evidence and witness statements have been gathered and analyzed, then they set about winnowing down the list. Using exhaustive interrogation techniques, investigative channels, and forensic evidence, the investigators begin eliminating unlikely suspects from the initial list one-by-one.

Sometimes the list is simultaneously narrowed down and expanded. While some initial suspects can be eliminated, others related to the initial suspects may be added as accessories to the crime. For example, the murder victim’s business adversary hired a professional hit organization that turned around and contracted the killing to three of its contract hit men. Or the victim’s wife’s lover plotted with her and engaged two hit men to execute the plot.

In the end, the investigators turn over their final suspect-accessory list and all the evidence that they believe will stand up in court to a prosecutor who then decides (on the evidence)  whether to bring charges against one or more suspects, and then argues the case in court. The suspect(s), motive, means and opportunity, all supported by evidence and witnesses, are presented in court for the jury to judge the case and decide guilt beyond reasonable doubt.

Of course we then have those cases that never make it to court. The lack of sufficient evidence, witnesses, or even a lack of possible suspects, moves the case from the investigation phase directly into the cold case file cabinet.

Then, we have cases that never make it even to the real investigation phase. Period. Without going through the usual investigative process- evidence-gathering, witness interviews, seeking motives and means, looking for intent, establishing a list of suspects …Without turning over any suspect with ‘all’ associated evidence and witnesses to any prosecutor…These case are evasively declared closed or a cold case.

The investigation of the 9/11 mass murder was first assigned to a highly-influenced and dependent Congress. We are not talking seasoned detectives and investigative agents here. Then, it was given to a group of sleazy pocketed politicians called a commission. Again, we are not talking about experienced detectives and savvy and independent prosecutors. No; just a handful of masterful and deceitful politicians and their puppet administrative staff.

There never was a thorough initial list of suspects. A few hours after the mass murder a bearded man in some dark cave in Afghanistan was announced as the mastermind and less than a couple dozen dead hit-men were declared the executioners of that mass murder. As for motive and intent, there was a round or two of circular discussions in the media, but absent any real investigation and thus any need for real prosecution, establishing motive and intent were deemed irrelevant and unnecessary. Same for any accessory suspects; a few hundred were rounded up around the globe and were taken into black holes, black sites, and black prisons. Some were later released, some were tortured and killed, and some still remain in those holes. We don’t know, and it looks like we’ll never know.

In a real-life mass murder investigation by real investigators a document like this, explicitly stating the desire for a mass murder like this would immediately make its way into the evidence bag, and signatories such as these people with a real motive and unlimited means would be automatically added to the top of the investigators’ initial list of suspects. They would remain there until further investigated, eliminated, or possibly prosecuted. Of course this was not a real investigation, and with no real investigators, and there never was a real list of suspects.

In a real-life investigation highly suspicious suspects like this would not easily disappear into thin air just like that.

In a real-life investigation any suspect accessory like this would be investigated, interrogated, and accordingly cleared or apprehended. And other highly suspicious persons or possible witnesses like this would be questioned and examined very thoroughly, rather than being directly assisted in fleeing the country.

In a real-life investigation key witnesses and investigative experts like these would be held with the highest regard, and their knowledge, first-hand information, and documented evidence would be considered of great value. They certainly wouldn’t be censored, classified and officially gagged.

In a real-life investigation if the highest-level criminal investigative body declares the capriciously designated perpetrator only a ‘suspect’ with no real hard evidence ever linking him to the crime in question, the case would be categorized as ‘never-solved & so very much open.’

And the list goes on and on. When we get down to it, I mean really get down to it, what do we really have in the investigation of the biggest mass murder in the history of our nation? I’ll tell you what we have. We have a still ‘Hot Case’ that has been shoved inside a massive establishment-built igloo; so far, successfully.

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 I am not going to get into the ‘some’ reasons for this post; although, I have plenty to say on the subject. Instead, for the purpose of this piece, and for those audiences, I am going to answer the ‘whys.’ Why ‘some’ still question and seek answer(s) and accountability on 9/11.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ claim that’s what gives them the right to override our Constitution and all other laws guaranteeing our liberties and privacy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ claim as justification for every one of our many wars.

Why 9/11? Because that’s what ‘they’ say is the reason for us having to be violated, humiliated, groped and fondled for the ‘privilege’ of travel.

Why 9/11? Because that’s when ‘they’ began the illegal eavesdropping of all our communications.

Why 9/11? Because that’s how ‘they’ legitimize excessive secrecy.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the excuse ‘they’ use to implement torture and severe human right violations and escape all liabilities.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the rationalization ‘they’ use to expand ‘their’ size and power.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ have successfully made it a means to justify many unjustifiable ends.

Why 9/11? Because that holds answers to many questions ‘they’ don’t want you to ask.

Why 9/11? Because that’s the question ‘they’ don’t want ever answered.

Why 9/11? Because maybe that is what ‘they’ really wanted.

Why 9/11? Because ‘they’ should not get away with it.

With all due respect to those who are still not satisfied with my answers to their ‘why’ question, we’ll be publishing articles, podcast interviews and investigative videos on 9/11 and related topics for the next few weeks…or maybe longer.  We hope to have those friends as an open-minded and critical thinking audience during our 9/11 coverage here at Boiling Frogs Post.

Sibel Edmonds

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BFP Nightly Quote

“If there is one principle more deeply rooted in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest.”- Thomas Jefferson

International Newsworthy

US Prepares for Worse-Case Scenario with Pakistan Nukes

‘NATO Planning Military Attack on Iran’

Libya: Benghazi Blues

Turkey’s Erdogan & Calculated Syrian Affront

US-Bahrain Defense Pack Renewed; for 10 Years

Uproar in Egypt as US Funnels Aid via NGOs 

New U.S. Envoy in Israel to Clear Obstacles for Obama’s Second Term

Georgia: Putin Tweaks Tbilisi on Ossetian Annexation

* * * *

National Newsworthy

Obama Campaign to Get Big-Screen Osama Bin Laden Boost

End of the Road for Hedge Funds?

US Prepares for Military Intervention in Somalia

The Air Force to Spend $23 Billion on the “Escalade” of Spy Drones

Colorful Maps: US Military’s Costly Weapon in the War in Afghanistan

Military Spending Threatens America’s Future Strength

Solar Politics

Law Professors Ask SEC to Write New Political Donation Disclosure Rules for Business

Funding Nicholas Schmidle

‘Only’ 20% of US House of Representatives will Visit Israel During Summer Recess!

* * * *

Noteworthy Editorials

Afghanistan’s Innocent Victims

Barack Obama: The Bizarro FDR

The Dubious Death of Osama Bin Laden

Where Have Libya’s Children Gone?

* * * *

BFP Nightly Funnies

“Why doesn’t Israel want to become the 51st state? Because then it would only have two senators.”

Hitler Learns About Tent Cities & Housing Protests in Tel Aviv

* * * *

BFP Nightly Video Potpourri 

Video 1: The Essence of the Banking Industry…

Video 2: ‘Ending War’- Obama Flashback

Video 3: John Pilger’s War by Other Means- Part IV

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

BFP Nightly Quote

“Yes, we love peace, but we are not willing to take wounds for it, as we are for war.” - John Andrew Holmes 

International Newsworthy

Balochistan: Kharotabad Killings & the Cover Up

Disposable Army: Private Security in Iraq

Iranian Terrorist Group (MEK) has Intimate US Ties

US Steps Up Pressure on Syria

Is Azerbaijan Lobbying for U.S. Weapons Sales?

Strippers, Georgia on Russian-US Minds

NATO Considers More Kosovo Reserves

Death Squads Threaten Journalists in El Salvador

* * * *

National Newsworthy

Cartoonist Targeted with Criminal Probe for Mocking Police

Government to Monitor Social Networks for “Extremist Propaganda”

Debt Crisis? Pentagon Purchases $23 Billion worth of Global Hawk Drones

Beneath Jobs Report Surface Lie Some Ugly Truths

Will 2012 Be the End of the Presidential Public Financing?

NY Times Journalist Cites Congressional Unanimity on Gaza Slaughter & Embraces ‘J Street’ to ‘Balance’ Lobby 

USCENTCOM Buys Software to Impersonate Social Networkers & Bloggers

* * * *

Noteworthy Editorials

No One is Safe under the Espionage Act of 1917

The Mysterious Death of Bin Laden: Creating Evidence Where There is None

US Considering Permanent Base in Iraq

Barack Obama & the Debt Crisis: A successful Con Game?

Onset of Imperial Decline: Osama Bin Laden & the Aftermath of 9/11

* * * *

BFP Nightly Funnies

“A man jumped the White House fence, but after a brief chase, the Secret Service was able to talk President Obama into coming back and finishing his term.” – Conan O’Brian

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” - Mark Twain  

* * * *

BFP Nightly Video Potpourri 

Video 1: Destabilization of Syria Based on Libya Model

Video 2: John Pilger Film Trailer- “The war you don’t see”

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For almost 10 years we have been engaged in a massive and many-fronted war advertised as a war on terror-war on Al Qaeda. Recent reports put the total cost to America of this war on terror at around $3 trillion. This is not counting un-countable covert operations with secret budgets, and it does not include the war in Libya or covert wars elsewhere.

For the last 10 years of the Cold War, the period of our heightened expenditures against a war marketed as a war against communism, we reportedly spent slightly under $3 trillion.

For a moment let’s forget about the exaggerated and sometimes dubious Soviet threats that were being sold to our nation during the Cold-War, and assume all of them legitimate and warranted. Okay?

We had the Soviet military with over 5 million men. We were dealing with Long-Range Ballistic Missile capabilities.  We had an empire with a declared arsenal of 39,967 tons of chemical weapons. We were faced with massive nuclear arsenals and warheads, sophisticated fighter aircraft, tanks… All that, and of course the added fear propaganda and jazzed up other threats to go with it. My point here is not how scary an adversary the USSR was to the United States. Here is what I want you to do:

Take into perspective and compare the size, budget, militaristic and technological capabilities, and the vast power of our former adversary, the USSR, to the current alleged terrorist adversary, Al Qaeda, whom we have supposedly been fighting for ten years.

Let’s first begin by engaging in a rational process of elimination, and take out the wars and targets that are not related to the 9/11 terrorists, the supposed Al-Qaeda. That will take out Iraq and Saddam Hussein, and also Libya and Gaddafi.

Next, we should take out Afghanistan as a terrorist nation state. Afghanistan has been under our occupation for almost ten years, and we have our puppet government installed there, and when it comes down to it, the Taliban does not equate to Al-Qaeda, it never did. The Taliban did not exercise terrorism in the United States or its Global territories.

We must also remove Pakistan as a terrorist country, thus a nation state target. If you remember, neither the quasi 9/11 Congressional Inquiry nor the quasi 9/11 Commission Report ever declared the Pakistani government/nation as terrorists or an Al-Qaeda member. Let us go with their official judgment. After all, haven’t we been giving Pakistan billions of dollars in US aid since 9/11 and continuing to date? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to on one hand categorize our drone war there as war against Pakistan as a member of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, and on the other hand support and finance them? Exactly; that eliminates Pakistan as an Al-Qaeda nation-government. Are you with me so far? What does this leave us with?

Our war on Al-Qaeda terror does not include a single nation state or organized state military. No military infrastructure or headquarters. No trained army-navy-air force. No tanks, warplanes, nuclear warheads, drones. No intelligence institutions or landmarks. No communication satellites. No technology. No borders. No GDP…

The supposed Al Qaeda’s top leadership was declared by our government to be Osama Bin Laden, aka Al Qaeda Commander in Chief; a sickly old man who was hooked to a dialysis machine; who supposedly lived and hid in caves, and later, in a mud house located in a remote third world village with chickens and goats. A man who sustained himself and his family by periodically selling his wives jewelry or bartering milk from his goats for occasional lamb chops. All this according to our own government; coming out in bits and pieces, and of course, sometimes in a totally contradictory fashion.

The supposed Al-Qaeda network’s communication and intelligence sharing infrastructure, according to our government, was kept very simple to evade our trillion-dollar intelligence institutions. The Al-Qaeda commander-in-Chief wrote down notes and instructions. He then waited for the courier to come and pick it up. The old man courier would hop on a donkey and travel from a bigger town to the Commander-in-Chief’s mud house in a third world village. This sometimes took several days. He’d take the note, then hop on his donkey, and go back to the town where he’d meet another intermediary courier. The intermediary courier would take the note to a nondescript little house, climb up to the roof where he kept trained courier pigeons and hawks, and based on the importance of the communication given to him, he’d either choose a hawk or pigeon to send the intelligence to the next courier. The next one used couriers who traveled to the remote deserts by camels, and so on and so forth.

How about the sophistication of weapons-methods used by our target terrorists, the ominous Al Qaeda? We are talking about a dozen or so pocket knives priced at approximately $4 a piece (probably made in China), and of course if bought in bulk, for a total under $40. That for the supposed execution of the massive terror plot over here, in the world’s super power nation. As for other worldwide terror incidents that have been placed under the  ‘Al Qaeda Track Record,’  we are talking about rudimentary bomb-making ability paired up with ultra simple bombs created by ingredients such as fertilizer; we are talking a few loads of cow dung here; literally, that is.

What about the size of the manpower these terrorists, Al-Qaeda, possess? Interestingly no one in our government has ever touched upon any scientific or even commonsensical estimate as to the number of active-combative Al-Qaeda terrorists. Instead, our government, through their stenographers in the media and their marketing arm in the Hollywood filmmaking industry, has succeeded in forming this public perception of a massive number of boogieman-Al Qaeda-terrorists out there who are actively and constantly planning and executing terror plots against the West.  Thus, to get a certain level of rational perception we must look at some factual indicators:

We have had this $3 trillion ‘War on Al Qaeda Terror’ for the last 10 years with nearly a quarter million military members, thousands and thousands of intelligence operatives and analysts, highly sophisticated and gigantic intelligence gathering tools (Think NSA, satellite technologies, wiretaps, spooks and snitches), mega rewards for turning in Al-Qaeda members …You’d think in ten years of these constant war and intelligence gathering operations we’d have tens of thousands of captured Al-Qaeda terrorists in our jails here and abroad. No?

Interestingly ‘No.’ Let’s take a look at the mother of all our captive top Al Qaeda terrorists detention center; Guantanamo Bay:

Since October 7, 2001, when began the war in Afghanistan, 775 detainees have been brought to Guantanamo. Of these, most have been released without charge or transferred to facilities in their home countries. The Department of Defense often referred to these prisoners as the “worst of the worst”, but a 2003 memo by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld says, “We need to stop populating Guantanamo Bay (GTMO) with low-level enemy combatants … GTMO needs to serve as an [redacted] not a prison for Afghanistan.”

Currently we have less than 200 detainees at Guantanamo most of whom have not been proven guilty of being ‘Al Qaeda terrorists.’ Let’s be even more generous and count in those detained in other US military prisons like Bagram. Again, we are looking at 500 or so prisoners none of whom having ever been charged; none of whom legally found to be an Al Qaeda terrorist.

Now please put all these facts in perspective: Ten long years of continuous wars, trillions of dollars, 250,000 military personnel, trillions of dollars worth of intelligence gathering institutions and capabilities, millions of dollars set in rewards for Al Qaeda terrorists, and a supposed network with supposed  Al Qaeda active terrorist members in very large numbers. Yet we have less than 1000 detained who have been accused of being Al Qaeda terrorists, and none ever proven to be an active Al Qaeda terrorist member.

Does this make sense to you? Does it make sense as far as the trillions of dollars you have been made to pay for this? What are we talking about here? A massive never-ending war against a fantastical network of technologically and militaristically dwarfed terrorists whose proven guilty members we haven’t been able to catch or kill.

Everyone is busy arguing whether we should cut or add a few billion dollars to the several trillion dollars war on Al Qaeda. People keep talking about which country we should be getting out of, or, how many more countries we should get into to fight against terrorist Al Qaeda. No one is asking what Al Qaeda is or who really these supposed Al Qaeda terrorists are. The question that never seems to come up is exactly how big is this Al Qaeda we are spending trillions of dollars and thousands of lives fighting against. I mean no one.

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International Newsworthy

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 International Newsworthy

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National Newsworthy

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The lesser Evil

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Can we just step back for a few minutes, put aside all the little meddling points showcased by the propaganda machine media and political showmen, take a look at the following facts, and try to see the forest despite the trees?

An ‘alleged’ Mastermind executes a terror attack on September 11, 2001, with a few men, to be exact 19.

Our government responds by sending over at least 150,000 men and women.

 That ‘alleged’ Mastermind implements the 9/11 terror plot with a few hundred thousand dollars; in the range of $400,000.

Our government spends more than $1,000,000,000,000 in response, on wars on terror abroad, at least that much here at home, and keeps on spending.

Our government has been using lots of this:

To bomb the hell out of this:

Because we have this:

And they have only this:

The 9/11 Terrorist Attack cost us 2977 innocent lives. 19 terrorists’ also died on that day; resulting in 2996 deaths.

 In Afghanistan alone our government’s response has resulted in the deaths of more than 2600 coalition forces, at least 10,000 civilians, and many more thousands lumped together as Taliban, Militants or  simply unknown; our estimated total around 20,000.

We suffered greatly as a result of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, with 2977 deaths, nearly 7000 treated for injuries, and tens of thousands suffering the losses of their loved ones.

As a nation we’ve been suffering continuously since then; for almost a decade: with thousands of our soldiers killed, many more thousands wounded, and many many more thousands of these men and women’s loved ones suffering the results. We have also been suffering the loss of trillions of our hard-earned tax dollars. For a decade; Continuously.

As a nation we’ve been causing lots of suffering too; for a decade; continuously. With tens of thousands of people we’ve killed and seriously injured, and with many more tens of thousands of orphans and loved ones left behind to suffer those losses.

Tens of thousands of lives. Trillions of dollars. Tens of thousands of disabled; orphans, and widows. Suffering there. Suffering here.

There must be ‘some ones’ out there immune to all this suffering. Obviously those ‘some ones’ have not been suffering. In fact ‘some ones’ must be gaining a lot from all this suffering.  And maybe, considering the tremendous level of ‘gains’ involved, ‘some ones’ actually want, thus, start and inflict the suffering. Otherwise what could ever explain this insanity?

Tens of thousands of lives lost there. Thousands of lives lost here. Tens of thousands more in pain; and many more mourning. Millions deprived of Trillions of hard-earned dollars. And there are those ‘some ones’ who have been earning billions of dollars from many millions’ sufferings; for almost a decade, and, continuously.

Who could these ‘some ones’ be? Any food for thought?

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During the last two years I have been engaging in a certain ritual each time I get together with friends or acquaintances. Usually this is how it goes: we chat about how much ‘worse’ things have gotten since Obama became president, on issues from expansion of our imperialistic wars to illegal domestic spying to fiasco-ridden bailouts to the continuation of torture and assassination programs… At some point during these intense discussions I lean over the table, look directly in my companion’s eyes and say the following: ‘Come on, admit it, and admit it loud and clear, with no ifs or buts. Say it; say I wasted my vote.’ The reaction is usually something like this: ‘I really had hopes for this guy,’ or ‘considering the other evil I didn’t have much of a choice,’ or something along these lines. But as you may know I don’t give up that easily, so I press harder: ‘whatever the reason, do you now see your vote as completely misplaced and wasted?! If so, just say it.’ To make a long story short, I usually succeed. I get them to admit, loud and clear, with each syllable emphasized: Yes! I wasted my vote.

Let me explain my intentions before you take me as someone who gets some sort of a perverse pleasure in being proved right, or, rubbing people’s noses in their mistakes. Because I don’t take any pleasure whatsoever from this particular ritual, neither do I consider myself some sort of winner in a competition. I engage in this ritual because I truly believe in ‘admitting to our fallacies’ as the first step in getting over them and or not repeating our past mistakes. It is one thing to be objective enough to criticize one’s chosen candidate, but it is a totally different ball game when we take responsibility and own up to our own role in creating or putting in place the wrong candidate. And I believe three major mistakes we as a nation repeatedly commit are the following:

1-     Buying into our Media’s Marketing Scam in Creating a ‘Viability’ Illusion

2-     Believing in & Repeating the Myth of Wasting One’s Vote

3-     The Lesser of Two Evils Mentality

Two years ago I wrote the following on the self-defeating lesser of two evils mentality, and I still stand by it:

On the issue of casting votes, one of the points I keep hearing, over and over, is that ‘I knew it even back then, but I had to choose and vote for the lesser of two evils.’

Don’t you consider this, at least to a degree, to be acceptance of ‘no hope for real change’ when it matters the most, during elections? First, to readily accept that we are limited to only choices that have been declared as ‘viable’ by the same MSM and establishment we seek to change.
Second, to helplessly adopt a mindset that says ‘evilness’ is an inevitable prerequisite for ‘viable’ candidates.

When it comes to ‘evilness,’ there is no reliable standard of measurement. Let’s say, for example, that the pre-selected options are: Senator Obama, Senator Clinton, and Senator McCain. How do you measure their degree of ‘evilness?’ For arguments sake, let’s say there is a standard of “evilness” measurement, and when applied to these candidates you get the following data: on a scale of ‘0 to 100’ on the evilness measurement index (‘100’ being absolute evil, ‘0’ being no evil qualities), McCain ranks 98, Clinton 96, and Obama 94. Based on this do people feel justified in voting for the lesser of the ‘given’ three, even though that candidate still ranks extremely high in ‘evilness’?

And in that same article I summed up the myth of wasting one’s vote:

The second issue I want to bring up has to do with the notion shared by many: I didn’t want to ‘Waste’
“I know there are other candidates who are ‘much less evil’ and have much better track records. However, as you see, they don’t have a chance. The MSM and the establishment have either marginalized them or never acknowledged them in the first place. They have no chance, thus, I won’t ‘waste my vote and will choose between the ‘viable’ candidates declared ‘electable.’”

We don’t give those ‘better’ candidates a chance even when we believe in them and their competence. What if every one of us who’ve been active and pushing for ‘real changes’ disregarded the ‘established’ etiquette of candidate viability, went out and actually voted for the candidate we trusted ? What if by doing this that ‘nonviable’ candidate ended up with, lets’ say 15% of total votes? Granted he or she has not become the ultimate winner, elected, but what do you think that 15% would mean in the next election? Would it encourage more people to do the same, cast their vote based on what they really believe? Would it motivate better people to rise up and take on leadership? Would it help the current landscape of the MSM – promoting coverage of a ‘people’s candidate’? And finally, what if two election seasons later we get to see a ‘people’s candidate’ with 50% or more of votes cast?

Now, let’s talk about our ‘dependent’ media’s viability criteria when it comes to political candidates, since this may very well be the major factor shaping the other two fallacies. After all, they, the media, package, market and sell the two candidates deemed and stamped as viable by their bosses. I am saying ‘let’s talk about,’ since I want this to be a discussion with you as participants. I want us to look at previous ‘viable candidates’ we put in high office guided by the media’s systematic vote-shaping marketing scams, and I would like us to take note of how they currently are setting the stage for their bosses’ choice of ultimate finalists this time around. We are going to list ingredients that go into the establishment’s chosen viable candidate, and dissect the anatomy of a viable candidate. I’ll start the discussion and let you continue and expand upon it.

Last February I came across a selectively picked and rather contained quasi debate posted at the Politico site on the viability of Republican candidates post CPAC. What caught my attention was not so much the quasi experts and agenda-driven analysts who are in on this marketing scam, but the terminology and adjectives long-used by our media to systematically shape the direction of election votes. I am talking about words and adjectives that become glued to candidates to create the myth or illusion of viability or non-viability which then, after being repeated thousands, no millions of times, become accepted reality by the unknowing majority. For this case, I am going to use Ron Paul as the perfect example. Here are a few phrases of ‘non-viable’ rhetoric with catch-words emphasized:

Paul’s occasional embrace of seemingly bizarre issues has created the impression among most voters that he is a fringe candidate… Dr. Paul would be hard pressed to be viewed as a viable candidate for president.

These voters see Dr. Paul as an outsider holding fringe views. Although the voters probably have more in common with Dr. Paul than not, they already have a soured view of him – a condition that isn’t likely to change.

…

He clearly has a niche among the electorate… I wouldn’t expect him to be the GOP nominee

…

Of course Ron Paul can never be elected president. He’s a quirky, schoolmarm-ish eccentric whose quixotic tangents – like a return to the gold standard – are too far removed from the average person’s day-to-day concerns. And he looks more like the clerk at a hardware store than a president.

…

No one can argue that Ron Paul had a real following in pockets of the country, but he has no chance in another presidential run…

…

He has a track record of wacky statements going back 30 years, and bizarre and racist associations… It’s tragic that the national hopes of libertarian conservatism are lodged in such an imperfect vessel as Ron Paul…

…

Ron Paul has some strong and populist views on issues that are unlikely to sweep him into office.

…

Ron Paul would make a great Republican presidential candidate…if he was running in 1924. Come to think of it, he does have that dry Calvin Coolidge routine down pat.

…

In the next year or so we’ll witness the following adjectives being attached to Ron Paul over and over, every day, and a hundred or more times a day: Not Viable, Fringe, Marginal, Eccentric, Nutty, Quack, Old, Ugly, Racist, Extremist, Radical, Sexist…

There are certain qualities that go completely against the opinion-shapers’ viability propaganda rules. Let’s list a few;

Consistency

Consistency is a major no-no when it comes to candidate viability as determined by the establishment and its media. A flip-flopping and contradictory statement-action record is viewed as a Must; it is considered a necessary characteristic of a good politician. Obama’s inconsistency is viewed and presented as a sign of him being a savvy politician. As a senator he supports NSA illegal wiretapping and protects the participating businesses, then he says he will stand against it and stop it as a president, and then, as president he continues and expands it. There you have it: a masterful politician. Now, Ron Paul has been exhibiting the opposite, and that is a problem; that makes him not politician-like and a fringe. How could he be so courageous (Radical) as to stand against the PATRIOT ACT and other similar police state practices when doing so was so politically unpopular! And, remain that way?! That is just craziness! Now apply that to the same consistent positions on NSA illegal wiretapping, FBI National Security Letters …How so boring, thus not viable!

War & The Military Industrial Complex

Let’s admit it: if you are not indebted to the Military Industrial Complex, thus, not committed to war, interventionism and imperialistic expansion, you are simply crazy, unrealistic, and simply not presidential material. Those drones, the bombs, the F-16s, tanks and armor cannot sit on shelves as un-liquidated inventory surplus, or even worse, unmade. That’s the position of the Military Industrial Complex and its tentacles and advocates in the US media. Now, you get a man who has consistently opposed wars, throughout his political career, who has been known as Anti War throughout his life, a man who calls war a racket, and you have a man considered not viable. To not make it sound what it is, anti-war, since that has some positive connotations, they’ll simply make him out to be a nutcase.

Powerful Foreign Lobby Influence-Israel

An absolute commitment to US interests and respect for all human life regardless of ethnicity or race is not tolerated if it gets in the way of certain powerful nation’s interests and lobby, and this applies mainly to Israel. No viable candidate in his or her right mind would criticize or speak against the interests of Israel that are in conflict with American’s interests. This is considered one of the most important 10 commandments of political viability, and those who dare to challenge it are stamped as Anti-Semitic Radicals. Ron Paul has dared, and dared this viability commandment consistently; in words and in actions, and that my friend is another sacred no-no no establishment candidate may cross.  

Constitutionality, Small Government & True Americanism

Today, our founding fathers, our first few presidents, would be considered absolutely Not Viable. Think about it, how could the men who said and did everything in their power to restrain government’s powers, advocated and fought for small government, and warned against the danger of big government and government becoming the domestic enemy of our Constitution, be considered viable by the military industrial complex, financial institution-federal reserve, powerful foreign lobbies, and of course, the government itself?! The same people, these same opinion shapers, who call Ron Paul a radical anarchist, would have used those same exact adjectives against the architects of our Constitution, and declared them all non-viable.

I am not going to try to make too many points, and I am not sitting here advocating and campaigning. You can switch the name to Kucinich or Nader, and see similar adjectives and labeling come pouring. Too short, too ugly, too strict, too naïve, way too radical, not politician enough, crazy, nutcase, eccentric, anal, ugly, old, uncharismatic…Instead, let’s flip this trend, and list what goes into a ‘viable’ candidate’s anatomy as far as the establishment, the same establishment that has gotten us into perpetual wars, illegal domestic spying practices, trillions in deficit and a tanking economy… is concerned.

I’ll start the list and have you add your items in the comments section:

Inconsistent & Convenient Flip Flopper

A Good Actor & a Great Pathological Liar (Think ‘Change, Change, Change’;-)

Indebted to the Military Industrial Complex

Committed to Perpetual Wars & Imperialistic Foreign Policy Practices

A Major Advocate of Big Government

Approved & Supported by the Israel Lobby

Polished & Groomed by the Political Marketing Industry

Disregard for the Constitution and or Savvy in Bypassing the Constitution

Trusted & Counted On by Financial Conglomerates & the Secret Federal Reserve 

There. You now have my initial list of US Political Market’s Viability Criteria. Please treat it as a starter, and add yours.

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Tom Woods joins us to discuss his latest article on the Phony Arguments for Presidential War Powers which has triggered intriguing reactions from the media on both sides of the isle. He provides us with historical background and a ‘real’ constitutional view of war making powers vested in US presidents, and tells us why the mainstream, left and right, usually proclaims the congressional power to declare war  “obsolete.” Dr. Woods defines ‘State Nullification,’ provides us with examples and an historical context for this power vested in the states, and counters uninformed arguments and generalizations spread by the mainstream on this topic. He talks about the Federal Reserve and the disastrous government bailout, the polarized and sound-bite oriented media, the labeling of critics of the status quo,  the case of the states and medical marijuana, the man most responsible for the beginning of the  imperial presidency in the US, and more!

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., is a senior fellow of the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He holds a bachelor’s degree in history from Harvard and his master’s, and Ph.D. from Columbia University. He is the author of eleven books, most recently Rollback: Repealing Big Government Before the Coming Fiscal Collapse and Nullification: How to Resist Federal Tyranny in the 21st Century. His other books include The New York Times bestsellers Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse and The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, as well as Who Killed the Constitution? The Fate of American Liberty from World War I to George W. Bush (with Kevin R.C. Gutzman). Dr. Woods’ writing has appeared in dozens of popular and scholarly periodicals, including the American Historical Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Investor’s Business Daily, Modern Age, American Studies, New Oxford Review, Catholic World Report, and Journal of Libertarian Studies. He is presently a contributing editor of The American Conservative magazine, and a contributor to six encyclopedias. He publishes regularly at his website http://tomwoods.com.

Here is our guest Tom Woods unplugged!

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According to our inside sources a new Bipartisan Congressional Caucus for Prozac will be launched before the end of the 112^th Congress. The primary purpose of the Prozac Caucus will be to raise awareness and advocate for this ‘miracle drug’ aka ‘happiness pill,’ on the grounds of combating homegrown terrorism and domestic violence, lowering the national divorce rate, and increasing the level of general job satisfaction among the restless American workforce. “Increasing the level of general satisfaction and happiness, while decreasing the effects of violence and despair inducing factors such as anxiety and depression, are the major keys to achieving long term national security, family unity, and work force stability. With Prozac we believe we can achieve all that and more,” said a congressional aide who wished to remain anonymous. The caucus will have an interactive website with easy-to-print promotional materials and a password protected section for physicians titled ‘Patriotic Physicians for a Secure America.’

Let’s start with what is a congressional caucus, or at least what it is supposed to be, in theory that is. A congressional caucus is a coalition of House and Senate members who meet to discuss specific legislative priorities and policy issues. Caucuses ‘supposedly’ allow members to discuss issues to determine their positions and make sure their votes are informed. They can also give ‘advocates’ a chance for a group of legislators to champion their cause on the Hill. You may go ahead and change ‘advocates’ to ‘lobby and you’ll be even more on target.

When we look at the long list of these caucuses, a list that initially had only a few but seems to lately  have taken off rapidly, we see some caucuses that seem rather ‘ordinary and expected;’ for example,  Children’s Environmental Health Caucus or Congressional Dairy Farmers Caucus. We also see some ‘amusing’ ones, such as Congressional Bike Caucus, Congressional Soccer Caucus, and Congressional Boating Caucus.

You follow me so far? Okay, then there are more than a few caucuses that are ‘confusing:’ Democratic Israel Working Group, Congressional Israel Allies Caucus, Congressional Friends of Jordan Caucus, and other ones for Turkey, Jordan, etc.  Why do I say ‘confusing’? Well, in the above paragraph we outlined the caucus definition, which includes ‘giving advocates, aka lobbies, a chance to influence, aka lobby, their cause through the members of their caucus. In this case, the advocates, aka lobbies, are foreign, and this means ‘direct foreign influence,’ and that in turn would make the representatives in these caucuses who then influence and lobby the rest of the Congress ‘foreign agents.’ Think of it as two-tiered foreign lobbies: First, the registered foreign lobby influencing the target caucus, then, the caucus acting as a lobby for that foreign lobby to influence and lobby the rest of the Congress.

Finally, there are some ‘just plain eyebrow-raising’ caucuses that have been popping up and gaining momentum recently. Probably you haven’t heard of them. Please don’t kick yourself for not knowing. Save that kick, or cancellation of subscription, for the news media you’ve been following. Okay, back to ‘eyebrow-raising’ caucuses. Here is one example:  The Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Caucus, which has recently changed its name to the Unmanned Systems Caucus. Thanks to Corey Pein’s WarisBusiness site I was made aware of this scandalous caucus:

The motivation for members to join the UAV Caucus (not to be confused with the A/V Club) may be national security or job creation, but the caucus is also where members of Congress directly show their allegiance to an industry that donated generously to their war chests.

How much? In the 2010 election cycle alone, UAV-related political-action committees donate more than $1.7 million to the Caucus’ 42 members.

In February 2009, Rep. Buck McKeon (R-CA), at the time the ranking Republican on House Armed Services, co-founded the UAV Caucus. He began to hold meetings on the future of the military systems and by the end of the year he had launched a website–on House servers–for the caucus, which was ostensibly designed to provide news on UAVs and connect members of Congress with the industry.

…

…caucus has served as the Congressional booster for the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. The UAVSI “Advocacy” page gives am overview of all the ways its members can maximize that relationship;In addition to whatever legislation and appropriations, caucus support has manifested in the opportunity to give committee testimony, visits from Congressmen, keynote speeches, meetings with legislators on “AUVSI DAY,” roundtables, facility tours, but perhaps most notably, a tech fair sponsored by McKeon’s office at the Rayburn House…

…

We filtered the 200 AUVSI corporate members to only the “Diamond” and “Platinum” members, then further narrowed the list to only those with corporate PACs. A stark picture emerged: Altogether, these PACs accounted for $1,788,800 in contributions in the 2010 to the members of the caucus. This figure doesn’t include members who weren’t reelected, such as AUV Caucus co-founder Rep. Allan Mollahan (D-WV), who was defeated in last year’s Democratic primary. Two of the newest members of the caucus—Rick Berg (R-ND) and Vicky Hartzler (R-MO)—received nothing from these PACs, probably because their incumbent opponents were the defense industry’s favorites.

…

You can read the rest of Pein’s revelatory piece here, but I think you all get the point on ‘eyebrow-raising’ caucuses. I guess it wasn’t a really long leap from the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Caucus to the Bipartisan Caucus for Prozac!

The expected chairman of the upcoming caucus who would neither deny nor confirm the formation of the Caucus for Prozac had the following to say (of course on the condition of anonymity):

“Listen, I’ve always taken pride in being a constitutionalist, and the formation of this caucus is further proof…Somewhere in the Constitution it says people should pursue happiness and their government should help them go get it. See? This is exactly what this caucus is about: help and encourage people to get happiness!”

The congressman may have been a bit under the ‘happiness pill’ influence. He must have meant the Declaration of Independence; not the ‘Constitution,’ and, the passage he must have been thinking of was probably this:  ‘All men are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men…’Oh well, at least they are taking the pill they are anxious to sell others.

The expected co-chairman from the opposite party also commented off the record:

“As a nation we are losing our edge, our competitiveness, in so many areas; manufacturing, R & D, services…even in the Global Happiness Index!! We are America. We must be number one. It is time to declare war on unhappiness! With this caucus we are doing just that: declaring war on unhappiness, and getting competitive on the happiness front. If unhappiness is the enemy, this pill is the weapon to kill it…to quash the damn thing. With this caucus we’ll get Americans to swallow this pill… swallow it big time, and in no time they will rank number one again…at least in the happiness department…”

The expected cochairman was talking about the annual World Happiness Index report on countries. Judging from his hawkish tone and aggressive language, he was either not taking the pill, or, exhibiting one of the known adverse reactions to it. The follow up call to check on this was not returned.

With the new trend taking hold in the formation of congressional caucuses, some refer to them as neo-caucuses, other members are frantically working to stake out new territories and mark their turf. There are many empty caucus spots to grab: The Caucus for McDonalds, The Caucus for the F-35, The Caucus for JP Morgan, The Caucus for Pepsi Cola …So many caucuses to form, so little time!

Click here for our previous satirical pieces under Boiling Frogs Beltway Buzz.

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It was a rainy April day in 2004, and I was in the office of one of my professors at the university’s Public Policy Graduate Department. I was having one of those defeated and disillusioned moments that kept recurring during that time period. I think you would have found it justifiable: I had been slapped with two separate gag orders via two separate invocations of state secrets privilege, I had just witnessed the Congress being hit with another gag order in my case via retroactive classification issued by the Justice Department, we were at war in Iraq based on lies, the PATRIOT ACT was in full swing, secret kidnapping and detention operations by our paramilitary were taking place all over the world, congressional corruption and revolving door scandals were popping up one after another…So, you see, all this and being almost at the end of my masters program specializing in US public policy, where what we were taught didn’t match reality on the ground (US politics and government) whatsoever, gave me a certain degree of justification for feeling  the way I felt that day.

Sitting across from my professor I threw out the questions: Why can’t I see a single instance of practices indicative of our so-called system of checks and balances? Isn’t it more like three illusionary branches but actually one system serving the interests of a very few? Isn’t our nation headed towards a police state; fast and furiously? How do all these in-theory-only fanciful policy concepts apply to real-politics on the ground? …

My professor smiled and nodded. After letting me vent, he calmly replied:

“You are young. You have to look at what’s been happening and place it in historical context. If you look at the US political climate over the last century you’ll see this Pendulum Trend. Things get really bad for civil liberties and good governance for a few years, sometimes even for a decade or more, then, things swing back the other way, and you see Renaissance-Like changes towards the other direction. We go through a hawkish period with wars, and then, we get into a more pacifist mode. We get a conservative administration and lose some of our welfare gains, but a few years later we get a liberal government and put in place new welfare programs…Things don’t stay the same. It’s been only three years or so since 9/11. Very soon people will get over the initial shock and fear, and they’ll push out the current national security state of government…This is the cyclical nature of US politics…”

I looked up at him, and asked:

“So you are saying this Pendulum will swing the other way? All by itself? So we just sit tight and wait for this pendulum to swing the other way?”

He shook his head, and replied:

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yes, time takes care of some of that. Other actors outside the state will play their role…you know, various NGOs, etc. Changes in the economy will be another ingredient…of course, the media…the Bush administration will be replaced, and most likely, it will be replaced by the other party, bringing in a liberal oriented administration… So, yes, give it some time and you’ll see the Pendulum swing the other way…”

Tell you what: I have heard this ‘Pendulum Swing’ story-theory many many times since; especially from academians, tunnel-vision analysts, crusty politicians, and to a certain extent, from the general public – those with a bit higher education who consider themselves politically involved and savvy. The more I study history, the further I delve into our real governance record, the more I look at the last half century’s graph on fluctuation of the real ingredients (here at BFP we call these the real diseases, the macro causes)…well, the more I get pi..ed with this utterly nonsensical and false yet widely-held notion of ‘just wait for the ‘Pendulum Swing.’

The only area where the ‘pendulum swing’ applies, and even that with a major caveat, is this yoyo illusionary cosmetic change of party every few years. That major caveat being: two parties as two sides of the same coin; the monopolistic power above made to look like a duopoly where naïve and ignorant citizens are led to believe they’ve been given two choices – Product A packaged in Red & Product B packaged in Blue. If you haven’t read my pieces on this, the ones that brought loads of attacks due to ‘me not giving enough time or chance to Obama,’ read the pieces here  and here. You don’t have to go far back in history to see this exact phenomenon. Just take a look at the ‘actual’ records for the Bush and Obama administrations, and you’ll see that on everything that actually counts (again we are talking macro level factors) the records match; Product A (Bush) in Red & Product A (Obama) in Blue, and of course, beneath the two, all the poor suckers who are still under the illusion of having a say, having a choice, when it comes to their votes.

Back to the damaging misguided illusionary ‘Pendulum Swing.’ If poor suckers count the same product in different packaging as governance choice, the two-party system as two opposite ends of governance, then they certainly can argue that this ‘pendulum swing’ notion applies. I’ll leave this group alone, and go to non-suckers, almost all my known readers who look for the master factors, the big bubbas of US politics-governance determinants: the ever expanding Military Industrial Complex, the  ever extending and expanding federal police and intelligence sector, the ever increasing campaign finance domination by the very few, the ever ongoing-increasing government-elected official corruption and revolving door practices, the ever expanding US wars (and their ever increasing costs), the ever failing-damaging hypocrisy-ridden foreign policy practices, the ever diminishing civil liberties and citizen privacy rights…We pretty much named all major trends-determinants-ingredients of US politics-governance, and one look at the record on these will tell you, with 100% certainty, that NO, there ain’t no swinging pendulum involved in those things that matter and really count. It is a myth. If there is a pendulum it is broken and totally malfunctioning; it is stuck, travelling only in one direction, and going fast, my friends.

I came across the following quotes in a well-written article published at New Internationalist Magazine:

Some people take comfort in the back-and-forth sway of the political pendulum. It is part of the greatness of our ‘two-party system’, they contend; it reflects the American aversion to extremism on ‘either side’. For the mainstream media, charting each degree of the pendulum’s swing is the essence of the 24-hour news cycle.

The problem is that focusing on the to-and-fro of electoral politics, like staring at the hypnotist’s medallion, can lull you into a trance. Once there, it is easy to miss those political trends that transcend episodic US elections. A graph of these trends would not show undulating curves that rise and fall based on shifts in Congress. It would be marked by arrows pointing steadily upwards.

…

In recent decades, raising the budget for US military spending has been a bipartisan passion. That budget now amounts to around $680 billion per year, more than seven times the military spending of the US’s nearest rival, China, and enough to sustain a network of more than 700 bases scattered globally across some 130 countries.

…

Economic inequality is another arrow, and perhaps the most distressing one. Since the 1970s, the once-garish sight of a CEO making more than 250 times the pay of an average worker has become the norm. This, combined with the steady growth of corporate power, has given the wealthy a firm hold on the levers of our democratic politics. A landmark Supreme Court decision in January, which eliminated restrictions on corporate spending in elections, only strengthened their grasp.

…

When I was living in other parts of the world I came across oppressed, repressed and abused people, the perpetrators being the government and or the monarchy’s extensions. Some of these people, not the majority but the irate minority, had the fire in their eyes and the will and the energy to fight for change. There were others, perhaps not far from being the majority, who took pride in their faith-religion, and refused to do anything about their conditions; they even smiled about it. They would be open and quickly tell you why they refused taking actions and just waited, and that with such conviction. You see, their religious leaders whose strings were in the hands of that same oppressive government told them, day in and day out, that their suffering was temporary since it was only worldly suffering, and that when they died, when they entered the land of eternity, they would be handsomely rewarded for all their suffering and live happily, and forever. They hung on to this notion administered to them like opiates by those in power; it was their version of ‘Pendulum Swing,’ it was what pacified and lulled them, and it was exactly what the powers above wanted.

Maybe my experiences rightfully or wrongfully helped shape my loath and disdain for this utter nonsense called ‘Pendulum Swing’ and the elite advocates I keep encountering here and there. It is here in my home country today that I often see those lulled and pacified, some even smiling, doing nothing and waiting for their pendulum to actually swing…magically. How about ‘You’? Are you waiting for the Pendulum to Swing?

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With all eyes and attention on Egypt, the unsavory ‘US Foreign Policy’ has become the topic of choice among the intelligentsia, journalists, and the overly populated US analyst colony. There are scores of analyses out there; thousands of articles, millions of blog threads and unending ‘update’ headlines on TV screens. Yet, at least in ‘popular’ outlets, reality appears to be the missing link. Don’t worry, I am not about to hit you with a long-winded article on Egypt. If you are masochistic enough to actually want my take (pages and pages of  history/analyses) you can revisit a few of our pieces on the topic of nefarious US foreign policy practices here, here and here; timeless and equally applicable to what we are witnessing with Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia today. Instead, I want to share with you a few select points and coverage that got my attention:

Let’s start with the tongue and cheek protest sign in the above picture: “USA Why You Support Dectatour” Of course, these demonstrators, in fact almost the entire population in that part of the world, know the answer to this rhetorical question. I think they are trying to get Americans to ask this question and seek ‘real’ answers, no matter how unsavory, nauseating, awful…You see, this is what the US media is selling the majority as to why we support and maintain (pay for, defend…you name it) corrupt ruthless dictators:

Alliance with new governments to protect U.S. interests: security for Israel, sustainability of world energy supply and the fight against al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

That’s right: the above, instead of: dictators who will purchase our arms from our mega corporations, serve Israel’s interests, give us cheap oil, and become our official or semi-official base (aka: colony), and that at any price (that is, the price to the population and human rights there). Think Saudi Arabia, think Turkmenistan, Think Uzbekistan…Think about all the dictator allies we support, maintain and sustain. While we are at the topic of ‘sustaining,’ let me illustrate what I mean:

The same article source above, Bloomberg, lightly mentions the following:

Egypt is the fourth-largest recipient of U.S. aid, after Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel, according to the State Department’s 2011 budget, receiving more than $1.5 billion a year.

Another semi alternative publication (alternative in name only) goes only half a step further and actually adds it up, the US taxpayers’ dollars that is:

American support for the Egyptian government — to the tune of $60 billion in aid over the last 30 years — garnered virtually no regular attention before the protests began.

But here is one article, written by a true alternative journalist (an independent one), where American taxpayer dollars spent on this Dictatorship ally for the last 30 years come together, and actually add up nicely:

According to a mix of United States, Syrian and Algerian sources his personal fortune amounts to no less than US$40 billion – stolen from the public treasury in the form of “commissions”, on weapons sales, for instance. The Pharaoh controls loads of real estate, especially in the US; accounts in US, German, British and Swiss banks; and has “links” with corporations such as MacDonald’s, Vodafone, Hyundai and Hermes. Suzanne, the British-Irish Pharaoh’s wife, is worth at least $5 billion. And son Gamal – the one that may have fled to London, now stripped of his role as dynastic heir – also boasts a personal fortune of $17 billion.

Mubarak’s fortune, including his wife’s and son’s, is estimated to be …$40 Billion + $5 Billion + $17 Billion= $62 Billion. We Americans have been paying this man for 30 years, for a total of $60 Billion. Was it for infrastructure, job creation…you know, all those vital ingredients? Or was it to create another king, a dictator, or as Escobar puts it, a Pharaoh with a $Billions fortune? 

Here is more by another true alternative reporter:

Now, if through some incredible circumstance Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak decides to flee the country, à la Ben Ali, there’s a good chance his first-class flight would come courtesy of the American taxpayer.

Pentagon contracts show that the US government has spent at least $111,160,328 to purchase and maintain Mubarak’s fleet of nine Gulfstream business jets. (For those keeping score, Gulfstream is a subsidiary of General Dynamics.)

And this:

Hounshell also noticed a report that Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak once “commandeered a bus that had been bought with money from the United States Agency for International Development and that had been meant to carry children to school.”

            …

But wait a minute; let’s not forget another involved party these tax dollars happen to benefit. You know who I’m talking about, right? This is where our government takes our dollars, gives it to dictator allies, and then asks them to turn around, give that money (minus the personal share for personal wealth) to our military industrial complex corporations. Then, we have those CEO’s with $$$$$$$ salaries, and $$$$$$$ to the lobbyists and $$$$$$ to our elected representatives, who then in turn, sanction giving more money, aid, tax payers’ dollars, to these dictators; and the cycle repeats, repeats, repeats…well, it’s been repeating nonstop for more than half a century.

As for this great ally for ‘regional security’ my favorite site has the following on a recent Robert Gates-Egypt Defence Minister meeting involving the so-called partnership for ‘regional security’:

When the two military leaders met in May 2009 to discuss “a wide range of security issues,” Egyptian Defence Minister Hussein Tantawi presented US Defense Secretary Robert Gates with a set of gifts. They included a shotgun (with five bullets), a decorative rug and a gilded photo album.

With a confidence that, in retrospect, seems dubious, Gates said “he looks forward to expanding the two countries’ military-to-military relationships in ways that promote regional stability.”

Five months after that meeting, the Pentagon announced it would sell a new batch of two dozen F-16 fighter aircraft to Egypt—a $3.2 billion deal that is among the most recent of a long string of arms deliveries from America to its North African ally. These F-16s, according to the Pentagon announcement (pdf) would support “Egypt’s legitimate need for its own self-defense.”

Today the Egyptian Air Force buzzed a crowd of demonstrators in Cairo with fighter jets much like those supplied, over a period of decades, by the US. It was a tactical decision that bore little relation to “legitimate” national “self-defense,” although it can be construed as a desperate attempt to defend Hosni Mubarak’s three-decade hold on the presidency.

            …

Rest assured the American mainstream media won’t delve into these ‘real’ issues, because that would get into the real disease, our hypocrisy-ridden sick imperialistic foreign policy, where American taxpayers and the people of these nations are among the victims-losers, and a handful of corporations have been reaping the benefits. The media’s neocons have been twisting and intentionally misinterpreting the recent developments in Egypt. Please don’t think of only the Neocons of the Right, because the neocons of the left have been equally if not more involved in this deception game, and here is a recent example provided by Antiwar.Com, with excellent questions directed at the Israel lobby’s outspoken Maddow:

So you thought it was only the wackos on the neocon right who support Mubarak? Wrong! I’m listening right now to Rachel Maddow, MSNBC’s resident ultra-liberal, attack Rand Paul for being “offshore” because he calls for ending the $1.5 billion in “aid” to the Egyptian military.

What I’d like to know is this, though: why does Maddow think funding the Egyptian torture machine, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine, is good for America? How does it serve our legitimate interests? Is it “stimulus” money? Does she just support any and all government spending as a matter of high principle? Or does she really think it’s a good idea for us to be subsidizing a regime so brutal that even the US State Department characterizes it as “repressive”?

…

I am going to leave you with the following quotes from Escobar’s article:

Since the start of the protests, the Repulsive Ideology Trophy has got to go to former British prime minister and Iraq invader Tony Blair in his interview with CNN’s Piers Morgan. For Blair, democracy for the Middle East may be a good thing; but “we” have to manage it; and that means compromising with Mubarakism. Blair simply can’t understand that if Mubarakism survives with a facelift, blowback will be cosmic. And it will come from all sectors of Egyptian society, the young, the apolitical, secular and Islamists alike, and from the whole Arab world.

Slovenian Slavoj Zizek, the Elvis of philosophy, is right on the monstrous hypocrisy of Western liberals (or so-called liberals); “They publicly supported democracy, and now, when the people revolt against the tyrants on behalf of secular freedom and justice, not on behalf of religion, they are all deeply concerned.”

Real democracy can only be a dynamic grassroots process, from the bottom to the top. It’s not a fixed formula, it’s constantly reshaping itself. That’s bound to scare Western global elites – from “liberals” to the fear/warmonger set – because real democracy implies a huge loss of privilege for the “stable”, developing world comprador classes that are slaves to these haughty Western elites. No wonder they’re all as scared – and scary – as dead men walking.

            …

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Corey Pein recounts the creation of the recently launched groundbreaking site warisbusiness.com, a nonpartisan site covering military contracting, the global arms trade and the lobby, and how he began the project with two assumptions: The first- a lot of people are making money from war, while enjoying the comforts of anonymity (such people were once plainly called profiteers), and the second: Privatizing war inevitably prolongs it, creating what economists call a “perverse incentive.” Mr. Pein discusses the bought out generals and the militarization of the economy, and the latest on the ‘Rent-A-Generals’ exposé. He talks about scandals such as Mina Corp and the subsequent cover up, US Embassies as marketing arms of military corporations, the win-win outcome of elections for the Pentagon contractors and arms makers, Wikileaks, and more!

Corey Pein is an award-winning investigative reporter and long-form narrative journalist who writes about the military industrial complex, money, politics and violence from London, UK. Previously, he has lived in New Mexico, Oregon, Georgia and in Southeast Asia. His latest project is warisbusiness.com, a startup news site covering military contracting and the global arms trade. Mr. Pein has worked on staff at Columbia Journalism Review, Willamette Week, the Santa Fe Reporter and IHT ThaiDay, and contributed to Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, and CounterPunch, among others.

Here is our guest Corey Pein unplugged!

Note- Boiling Frogs selects warisbusiness.com as the best website of 2010!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

A belated happy new year to all our readers and friends here at Boiling Frogs Post. As you can tell I am just coming up for air. The holiday season happens to be the busiest time for my part-time work which involves a retail business, and my full-time motherhood task which has gotten at least three-fold harder during this not-so-terrible-twos stage. You see I say harder, but I’ll never call it ‘terrible’ because despite the tasking aspect it still remains the best and most rewarding role I’ve ever had; ever. My daughter is now 2.5 years old, and I’m happy to report: she is outspoken, highly opinionated, and on her way to becoming a real activist. She is already stopping those engaged in littering in their tracks for an earful lecture, and orders them to stop, ‘Go home, time out, and take bath!’ I am sharing a few of her recent pictures here. Many of you know all about my ‘no venture into my private life’ over here at BFP…except for an occasional relevant experience(s), or, like these here and the ones from last year to mark a new year at Boiling Frogs Post. Again, Happy New Year.

For the past two months I’ve been collecting and saving lots of articles to share with you here at BFP. The collection kept getting larger, the list of links grew longer, and I kept falling behind and unable to post regular BFP Round Ups. Some of those articles were time sensitive so they got discarded as ‘stale and no longer relevant’. Some are still sitting on the list waiting for the addition of my comments and analyses. And here are a few important and interesting ones from the past few weeks without much need for added sound bites:

Obama’s Whistleblower-Hunt: Whistleblowers Long for Bush-Cheney Era Leniency?

You thought the Bush-Cheney administration was bad? Think again; especially if you happen to be a whistleblower. Despite its awful record, the current administration witch-hunt like pursuit of whistleblowers and truth-tellers has many whistleblowers and truth-telling advocates longing for the Bush era climate. After all, everything is relevant, right? There was the bad, now it is the worse, or probably worst ever. Despite all the threats and muscle-flexing not a single whistleblower, including myself, got arrested or even pursued criminally under the previous regime. With Obama the era of threats has changed into an era of Punishment-Imprisonment and in some cases even torture. Here is one of the latest:

Former CIA officer indicted for leaks to reporter 
Peter Haldis, RCFP

A former CIA officer was indicted last month for allegedly providing a New York Times reporter with classified information. He is the latest in a string of leakers prosecuted by the Obama administration.

Jeffrey Sterling, 43, of O’Fallon, Mo., was indicted on 10 counts, including six counts of unauthorized disclosure of national defense information and one count of obstruction of justice. He was arrested Thursday in St. Louis.Sterling was indicted Dec. 22, 2010, and the indictment was unsealed Thursday.

…

Sterling is the fifth leaker to be prosecuted by the Obama administration. The others include: former National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who allegedly sent classified information to an unknown newspaper reporter; Stephen Kim, a former Department of State analyst who allegedly leaked an intelligence report to an unidentified reporter; Bradley Manning, a U.S. Army private alleged to have leaked classified information to Wikileaks; and Shamai Leibowitz, a former FBI linguist who was convicted in May 2010 of charges related to the leaking of classified information to an unidentified blogger and sentenced to 20 months in prison.

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 ‘Rent-A-Generals’ Consulting Firms: An Industry in Its Own

Last month I came across the following coverage at War Is Business by Corey Pein. This Monday Peter and I will be interviewing Mr. Pein, meanwhile if you haven’t seen this great website check it out now, and put it in your ‘Favorite’ list of websites. I am really looking forward to this interview, too many topics of interest to cover!

‘Rent-A-Generals’ & ‘the Militarization of Economy’ 
By Corey Pein, War Is Business

This man is William B Burdeshaw, a retired US Army Brigadier General and founder of what the Boston Globe, in its must-read investigation of rampant corruption in Pentagon procurement, calls “one of the oldest ‘rent-a-general’ consulting firms” in the country.

His company, Burdeshaw Associates Ltd, is essentially a fixer for corporations looking to land military contracts. The firm is apparently so good at this, its influential “associates”—mostly retired, high-ranking officers—can sell the Pentagon things it didn’t even know it needed.

Read Globe reporter Bryan Bender describe how Burdeshaw cleverly wrung $109 million from the Pentagon for the firm’s client, Northrop Grumman, which wanted to build a remote-controlled helicopter called the Fire Scout.

…

The Army wouldn’t comment. Northrop Grumman wouldn’t comment. Burdeshaw’s chief executive, retired Army General William Hartzog, wouldn’t comment. Bender did a remarkable job of putting this story together despite such obstacles.

Clearly, no one gained from this episode—except Northrop Grumman, the third-largest US military contractor, and Burdeshaw Associates. The firm’s eponym seems to be doing well for himself. Burdeshaw and his wife, Monica, own a massive $2 million home near the Potomac River in Maryland. Give the size of his firm, his personal wealth is likely many times that amount.

…

In its conclusion, Bender explains the growing demand for rent-a-generals as a consequence of “the increasing importance of the military to America’s industrial base.” Retired Army General and former Presidential candidate Wesley Clark calls it “the militarization of the economy.”

Too see what the militarization of the economy looks like, visit a discount grocer in any American city and count how many people pay with food stamps. Then ponder William Burdeshaw’s mansion.

Too see the effects of a simultaneous process—the commodification of the military—look no farther than Afghanistan, where contractors outnumber uniformed soldiers.

…

Read the rest of this well-done coverage here.

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A Great Example of Intentionally Awful Journalism by New York Times … Again

The following story, titled ‘Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him’ by the New York Times is another perfect example of purposefully awful journalism. For some reason we get to see this trend ‘awfully’ a lot in Times’ coverage of Afghan Heroin related topics (which they rarely cover). When you are reading it think of a badly made B grade movie by a bunch of amateurs (but in this case switch the amateurs with pretenders); think about some of those home-made films where bits and pieces are copied and pasted into a hodgepodge of a documentary with no beginning (it starts in the middle omitting the intro/history) ending with a never-kept promise of ‘to be continued;’ think about a bunch of main actors being taken out with their empty spots still hanging in the picture like big gaping holes, and think about sci-fi elements such as real-life people mixed with fiction characters making it neither a documentary nor a fiction film. Okay?

Now, why am I covering this intentionally awful junk? 1- The topic itself is EXTREMELY important; 2- The main character is a crucial key to many censored facts regarding our ‘real’ activities and operations; 3- Turkey is mentioned is passing (must be a major unintended slip by the Times’ stenographers); 4- Our readers here know how to read in between the lineJ So here it is [Emphasis in Bold are mine]:

Propping Up a Drug Lord, Then Arresting Him
By James Risen, New York Times

When Hajji Juma Khan was arrested and transported to New York to face charges under a new American narco-terrorism law in 2008, federal prosecutors described him as perhaps the biggest and most dangerous drug lord in Afghanistan, a shadowy figure who had helped keep the Taliban in business with a steady stream of money and weapons.

But what the government did not say was that Mr. Juma Khan was also a longtime American informer, who provided information about the Taliban, Afghan corruption and other drug traffickers. Central Intelligence Agency officers and Drug Enforcement Administration agents relied on him as a valued source for years, even as he was building one of Afghanistan’s biggest drug operations after the United States-led invasion of the country, according to current and former American officials. Along the way, he was also paid a large amount of cash by the United States.

At the height of his power, Mr. Juma Khan was secretly flown to Washington for a series of clandestine meetings with C.I.A. and D.E.A. officials in 2006. Even then, the United States was receiving reports that he was on his way to becoming Afghanistan’s most important narcotics trafficker by taking over the drug operations of his rivals and paying off Taliban leaders and corrupt politicians in President Hamid Karzai’s government.

…

By 2004, Mr. Juma Khan had gained control over routes from southern Afghanistan to Pakistan’s Makran Coast, where heroin is loaded onto freighters for the trip to the Middle East, as well as overland routes through western Afghanistan to Iran and Turkey. To keep his routes open and the drugs flowing, he lavished bribes on all the warring factions, from the Taliban to the Pakistani intelligence service to the Karzai government, according to current and former American officials.

The scale of his drug organization grew to stunning levels, according to the federal indictment against him. It was in both the wholesale and the retail drug businesses, providing raw materials for other drug organizations while also processing finished drugs on its own.

…

While the C.I.A. wanted information about the Taliban, the drug agency had its own agenda for the Washington meetings — information about other Afghan traffickers Mr. Juma Khan worked with, as well as contacts on the supply lines through Turkey and Europe.

One reason the Americans could justify bringing Mr. Juma Khan to Washington was that they claimed to have no solid evidence that he was smuggling drugs into the United States, and there were no criminal charges pending against him in this country.

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The following is a decent piece by Spiegel on the US courtship of Azerbaijan’s corrupt regime:

The US Befriends Azerbaijan’s Corrupt Elite

By Gregor Peter Schmitz, Spiegel

Azerbaijan is rife with corruption and comparisons to European feudalism in the Middle Ages are hardly a stretch. But with vast reserves of oil and natural gas at stake, the US is willing to risk the embarrassment that comes with courting the country.

…

Azerbaijan, which lies in the Caspian basin and has a population of 9 million, is one of the US’s strategic energy partners, despite being located within Russia’s sphere of influence. The country boasts proven energy reserves of roughly 7 billion barrels of oil and 1.3 trillion cubic meters of natural gas. Millions of barrels of these natural resources flow to the West each year via a pipeline connecting the Azerbaijani capital with Ceyhan, a Turkish port on the Mediterranean Sea.

…

The “Great Game” is what the 19th century battle between the British and the Russians over Central Asian influence was called. These days, the Americans are also on the frontlines of this battle — and the potential rewards are much larger. Unfortunately, as the State Department’s classified documents make clear, the price that American diplomats have to pay is also much greater.

Like the other oil-producing countries around the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan is an embarrassing partner to have. The country’s corrupt institutions are unable to deal with the oil boom and the billions of dollars it brings into the county, while the average annual growth rate of almost 15 percent is a much higher priority than enforcing and improving law and order. Independent media outlets are restricted, and dissidents are violently suppressed. Shortly before his death, Heydar Aliyev, the dictator who ruled Azerbaijan from 1993 to 2003, naturally handed over power to his son Ilham, who does things exactly the way his father did.

…

While a few Azerbaijani clans are getting richer and richer, thanks to all the dollars pouring into the country, the rest of the population is barely scraping by. Over 40 percent of the country’s inhabitants are living in poverty; the average monthly income is just €24. As Lala Shevkat, the leader of the Liberal Party of Azerbaijan, says: “Oil is our tragedy.”The Americans, however, have not let such problems frighten them away. On the contrary, they are even pushing for greater cooperation on security. Following the visit of an American envoy to Baku, one diplomat noted with satisfaction that he “underscored to President Aliyev the value that the US government attached to the relationship with Azerbaijan.”

…

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The following two pieces are related to our continuing ‘Police State’ series:

Terrorist watch list: One tip now enough to put name in database, officials say
By Ellen Nakashima, Washington Post

A year after a Nigerian man allegedly tried to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner, officials say they have made it easier to add individuals’ names to a terrorist watch list and improved the government’s ability to thwart an attack in the United States.

The failure to put Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab on the watch list last year renewed concerns that the government’s system to screen out potential terrorists was flawed. Even though Abdulmutallab’s father had told U.S. officials of his son’s radicalization in Yemen, government rules dictated that a single-source tip was insufficient to include a person’s name on the watch list.

Since then, senior counterterrorism officials say they have altered their criteria so that a single-source tip, as long as it is deemed credible, can lead to a name being placed on the watch list.

…

But civil liberties groups argue that the government’s new criteria, which went into effect over the summer, have made it even more likely that individuals who pose no threat will be swept up in the nation’s security apparatus, leading to potential violations of their privacy and making it difficult for them to travel.

“They are secret lists with no way for people to petition to get off or even to know if they’re on,” said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Officials insist they have been vigilant about keeping law-abiding people off the master list. The new criteria have led to only modest growth in the list, which stands at 440,000 people, about 5 percent larger than last year. The vast majority are non-U.S. citizens.

…

A Nation of Paranoids?

Florida Professor Arrested for Having a “Suspicious” Bagel on a Plane
By Todd Wright, NBC-Miami

A Florida professor was arrested and removed from a plane Monday after his fellow passengers alerted crew members they thought he had a suspicious package in the overhead compartment.

That “suspicious package” turned out to be keys, a bagel with cream cheese and a hat.

Ognjen Milatovic, 35, was flying from Boston to Washington D.C. on US Airways when he was escorted off the plane for disorderly conduct following the incident.

Monday’s incident is another example of other passengers essentially becoming the authority on terrorist activity on planes.

…

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Here is one of the latest on China-Turkmenistan Pipeline deals:
China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has announced the discovery of yet another gas field on the right bank of the Amu Darya River in Turkmenistan, holding in excess of 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas.
Separately, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow inaugurated a new compressor station at the Bagtiyarlyk fields, estimated by Chinese engineers to hold 1.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

In June this year, Ashgabad and Beijing agreed to increase Turkmen exports to China above the agreed level; the new compressor station will eventually raise the existing capacity to 22 bcm/y from the 6 bcm/y estimate of Chinese consumption of Turkmenistan-sourced gas for 2010.

Reports in the Indian press over the past month indicate that New Delhi is now following through strongly on its earlier expression of interest. Most interesting is the report that the four partners are seeking to recruit a major international energy firm to discuss costs in greater detail, with a view towards actual construction. The name, or even the nationality, of this firm has not even been hinted at openly.

            …

Okay, you can read the rest here.

As we all know the Cold war may be over, kinda, but not the fierce competition over natural resources. And the new battle grounds?  Forget the Old Middle East; I am talking about the New Energy Territories. I am going to use the following introduction paragraph from an article published by Central Asia- Caucasus Institute:

The U.S. has started to formulate and implement more comprehensive policies for Central Asia. The deepening involvement in the war in Afghanistan is the principal, but not sole cause for this policy initiative. Russia’s attempts to impose its hegemony upon Central Asia and oblige the U.S. to recognize it have triggered a reaction in Washington. Likewise, China’s completion of the pipeline to Turkmenistan and major investment projects in Central Asia forced the U.S. to devise new ways to enhance its energy and economic profile there as well. As a result, in early 2010, we now see the elements of a new and stronger policy initiative towards Central Asia.

…

The above paragraph, the introduction, is the only frank and sound point made in the article. Without going into the typical bologna-ridden point-making fluff used in the rest of the piece I’ll have you jump to the summation of their ‘analysis’:

CONCLUSIONS: The Obama Administration has evidently decided to make an important policy stand in Central Asia beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. Moreover, it is likely to invest more high-level political resources there and actively promote expanded economic ties between the U.S. and Central Asian states. While those governments will undoubtedly welcome this support and investment of those resources because they add to their room for maneuver among their neighboring great powers, Russia and China will obviously strive to minimize the U.S. presence, thrust, and impact. But they will also simultaneously be competing against each other; a fact that can only contribute to the greater independence and freedom of action of Central Asian states, a primary goal of U.S. policy. To the extent that the U.S. deems it necessary to expand its presence in Central Asia to shore up its campaign in Afghanistan it will in many ways, both foreseen and possibly unforeseen, contribute to the ability of these states to stand on their own feet, an outcome that is necessary both in regard to the threat of terrorism emanating from Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their affiliates, and also in regard to the threat to their effective independence coming from Moscow and/or Beijing.

You see we have two types of foreign policies when it comes to our pursuit of badly needed resources and crucial delivery arteries in our intended regional colonies:

1- The Written Policies (above example): to be used and promoted as marketing tools, yet to remain only as melodically written policy literature. This is where you hear phrases like cooperation on security and against terrorism, or better, democratization.

2- The Unwritten and Unspoken Policies: to be secretly, vigorously, and ferociously practiced and implemented, under the self-created carte blanche ‘The End Justifies the Means’

Think about it, wasn’t this how we carried out almost all our foreign policies during the Cold War? And what’s the difference now? The same competition, only now three-way, and the same objectives regardless of the fluffy and phony descriptions used in the ’written policies.’ 

Based on our consistent and ‘known’ history, my bet goes to the following predictions when it comes to our real foreign policy measures and responses to the latest developments on the Central Asia-Caucasus front:

Despite the absence of religious extremism and related terrorist groups, mysteriously (as far as our beneficiaries are concerned: Miraculously!), we’ll start reading terrorism related news headlines and incidents in this region, with some specifically targeting ‘pipelines.’ Here is a past example incident in Turkmenistan:

On 13 September 2008, the law enforcement agencies fought a bloody battle with a large gang of well trained and heavily armed drug dealers. The gang was finally suppressed but the toll was heavy: According to independent estimates, some 18 officers and troops may have lost their lives.

And this is how ‘they,’ people from those parts of the world who are familiar with our ‘real’ foreign policy practices in the past, question the above incident:
 

Is there any country that feels particularly frustrated by the gas deals that Turkmenistan signed recently with Russia and China?

Is there any country or countries that would benefit from terror and disorder in Turkmenistan?

Is there any country that routinely spreads disorder and chaos around the world, the most current examples being Bolivia and Venezuela?

Considering the timing, more importantly, considering our known M.O., who could blame those asking the above questions? As for our own policy-makers, this is how they played it:

The report mentioned the September 2008 violence in the Khitrova district of Ashgabat, where a protracted gun battle took place under circumstances that remain murky. The incident “forced the [g]overnment of Turkmenistan to reevaluate its counterterrorism program, training partners, and readiness,” the report said, without providing details.

Boooooooohhhh, the infamous ‘murky’ line: hmmmmm we wonder who did it and how.  And the wishful self-serving conclusion they drew, which is expressed as: ‘Turkmenistan to reevaluate its counterterrorism program, training partners, and readiness.’ Meaning, ‘we taught them a good lesson here…now they should know who they should choose as their partner…now they should dive into accepting our base ‘erection’ over there…’

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So, since this is not a licensed gambling site we won’t be taking monetary bets. But nonetheless it will be interesting. My bet: welcome a new wave of US- Mujahideen contracts, terrorism incidents along the Turkmenistan borders, and of course an explosion or two targeting the pipelines. Where do you place your bet? Please bring in your predictions.
# # # #

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In the last few weeks I’ve been reading and talking about the latest developments in Central Asia and the Caucasus. I am planning to post a few updates on the status of the score board in this region (pipeline rivalries, military base ‘erection’ scores- and what-not). Meanwhile, as I am dealing with all this I keep ending up with riddle-like situations. And instead of trying to solve or get out of these riddles, I’m going to give up and instead share one of them with you, my blogosphere friends.

Our enemies’ enemies are our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies are the enemies of our enemies, so that makes them what? Friends? Enemies? It depends? Both? And what would all this make our ‘real’ foreign policy makers? Enemies? Friends? Both? What?

Seriously! Think about it.

By now we all know, or should know, about our government and mainstream media’s past almost romantic relationship with the Mujahideen, Taliban-al Qaeda, during the 80s. Back then, in the 80s, they were fighting the Soviets, they were the enemies of our enemies, thus, our beloved friends, our trusted, financed and backed allies. Here are a few excerpts from what I wrote and quoted on this topic a while back:

Now let’s go back and search U.S. press coverage of Afghanistan’s ‘Freedom Fighters’ during the 80s and try to find any coverage related to these U.S. backed and supported operations’ intersection with the global narcotics trade. Are there any? I’m afraid we know the answer to this question. Here is further coverage based on the report by FAIR:

“The press coverage of this era was overwhelmingly positive, even glowing, with regard to the guerrillas’ conduct in Afghanistan. Their unsavory features were downplayed or omitted altogether…Virtually all papers favored some amount of U.S. military support; and there was near unanimous agreement that the guerrillas were “heroic,” “courageous” and above all “freedom fighters.“”

“According to the L.A. Times (6/23/86): “The Afghan guerrillas have earned the admiration of the American people for their courageous struggle…. The rebels deserve unstinting American political support and, within the limits of prudence, military hardware.“”

And here the axis of U.S. Government-U.S. Press- and the information spin or black-out:

“Another problem was direct manipulation of reporting by the U.S. government, which was supporting the Mujahiddin guerrillas during both the Carter and Reagan administrations. (Indeed, we now know that U.S. aid to the Mujahiddin was secretly begun in July 1979, six months before the Soviets invaded–International Politics, 6/00.) This press manipulation began early in the conflict. In January 1980, the New York Times (1/26/80) reported that the State Department had “relaxed” its accuracy code for reporting information on Afghanistan. As a result, the Carter administration generated “accounts suggesting Soviet actions for which the administration itself has no solid foundation.“”

During the 80s our ‘real’ foreign policymakers couldn’t care less about adjectives such as extremists, terrorists, fanatics, anti-west…They were the beloved enemies of our enemies, and we’d do anything to support and use them. And this wasn’t necessarily about we the people of the US or our benefits or our best interests. After all, in the end the American people were the ones to pay the price for those unholy alliances where we selected, trained and backed the evildoer Bin Laden, our enemies’ enemy, thus, our beloved friend:

Our enemies’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were the enemies of our enemies back then, so that made them our beloved friends.

Now, you may say, ‘that was a long time ago, it had to do with the Cold War, and it is simply not fair to criticize and judge based on this particular example…’And, I’d say, okay. Let’s fast forward. Let’s look at what we did with these same groups, in the 90s, after the wall came down and the Soviet empire collapsed.

The problem is this: without the Cold War excuse our foreign policymakers had a real hard time justifying our joint operations and terrorism schemes in the resource-rich ex Soviet states with these same groups, so they made sure they kept these policies unwritten and unspoken, and considering their grip on the mainstream media, largely unreported. Now what would your response be if I were to say, on the record, and if required, under oath:

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single major terrorist incident by Chechen rebels (and the Mujahideen) against Russia

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned, financed and helped execute every single uprising and terrorism related scheme in Xinxiang (aka East Turkistan and Uyghurstan)

Between 1996 and 2002, we, the United States, planned and carried out at least two assassination schemes against pro Russia officials in Azerbaijan

…

Those of you who are truly familiar with our real history and foreign policy making past would yawn, and say, ‘but of course. That has been our modus operandi for many decades.’ Unfortunately, the great majority would either be shocked if open minded, or shake their head in disbelief and write it off as another ‘conspiracy theory;’ well, thanks to our mainstream media.

You may remember one of these foreign policy makers from my State Secrets Privilege Gallery and my under oath testimony in the Krikorian case. Here is a quote from Graham A. Fuller, former Deputy Director of the CIA’s National Council on Intelligence:

‘The policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our adversaries worked marvelously well in Afghanistan against the Red Army. The same doctrines can still be used to destabilize what remains of Russian power, and especially to counter the Chinese influence in Central Asia.’

And this goes to the heart of our ‘real’ foreign policy practices showing our ‘real’ stand on Taliban years after the end of the Cold War and the first World Trade Center bombing:

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on South Asia, Congressman Dana Rohrabacher – former White House Special Assistant to President Reagan and now Senior Member of the House International Relations Committee – declared that ‘this administration has a covert policy that has empowered the Taliban and enabled this brutal movement to hold on to power’. The assumption is that ‘the Taliban would bring stability to Afghanistan and permit the building of oil pipelines from Central Asia through Afghanistan to Pakistan’. US companies involved in the project included UNOCAL and ENRON. As early as May 1996, UNOCAL had officially announced plans to build a pipeline to transport natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan through western Afghanistan.

And Chechens are good friends since they are the enemies of our enemy, Russia:

From the mid-1990s, bin Laden funded Chechen guerrilla leaders Shamil Basayev and Omar ibn al-Khattab to the tune of several millions of dollars per month, sidelining the moderate Chechen majority. US intelligence remained deeply involved until the end of the decade. According to Yossef Bodanksy, then-Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in ‘yet another anti-Russian jihad, ‘seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces’. US Government officials participated in ‘a formal meeting in Azerbaijan’ in December 1999 ‘in which specific programmes for the training and equipping of mujahidin from the Caucasus, Central/South Asia and the Arab world were discussed and agreed upon’, culminating in ‘Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US “private security companies”… to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing jihad for a long time.’ The US saw the sponsorship of ‘Islamist jihad in the Caucasus’ as a way to ‘deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism’.

…

Okay, so the partnership and joint operations between our operatives and the Mujahideen (including the Taliban & al Qaeda) continued after the Cold War, and even after the first World Trade Center bombing, Khobar Towers, and the 1998 Embassy Bombings. On one hand we were declaring these people as our enemies, on the other hand, in Central Asia-Caucaus-Balkans and Xinxiang, they were the enemies of our enemies , thus our good partners and dear old friends. Except, by this time, the majority of us had stopped considering the Russians and Chinese enemies, instead they were viewed as mere competitors. And with that, the riddle slightly changes here:

Our competitors’ enemies were our friends. Many of our nation’s enemies were willing to become the enemies of our competitors, so that made them our dear friends.

You’d think after the September 11 Terrorist Attacks our foreign policy makers would seriously rethink their past M.O. and cease certain friendships and unholy alliances, despite the severe monetary consequences for a handful in the oil and MIC industries. But no. That doesn’t appear to be the case. And, as always, you won’t get the ‘real’ stories on this from the MSM. Here is a recent example:

Persistent accounts of western forces in Afghanistan using their helicopters to ferry Taleban fighters, strongly denied by the military, is feeding mistrust of the forces that are supposed to be bringing order to the country.

One such tale came from a soldier from the 209th Shahin Corps of the Afghan National Army, fighting against the growing insurgency in Kunduz province in northern Afghanistan. Over several months, he had taken part in several pitched battles against the armed opposition.

“Just when the police and army managed to surround the Taleban in a village of Qala-e-Zaal district, we saw helicopters land with support teams,” he said. “They managed to rescue their friends from our encirclement, and even to inflict defeat on the Afghan National Army.”

This story, in one form or another, is being repeated throughout northern Afghanistan. Dozens of people claim to have seen Taleban fighters disembark from foreign helicopters in several provinces. The local talk is of the insurgency being consciously moved north, with international troops ferrying fighters in from the volatile south, to create mayhem in a new location.Helicopters are almost exclusively the domain of foreign forces in Afghanistan – the international military controls the air space, and has a virtual monopoly on aircraft. So when Afghans see choppers, they think foreign military.

“Our fight against the Taleban is nonsense,” said the soldier from Shahin Corps. “Our foreigner ‘friends’ are friendlier to the opposition.”

…

Let’s take a look at certain important northern neighbors in Afghanistan where our ‘real’ policymakers have been facing…hmmm… frustration, thus, in need of friends to get back at those who’ve been causing this…hmmmmm… frustration:

Previously close to Washington (which gave Uzbekistan half a billion dollars in aid in 2004, about a quarter of its military budget), the government of Uzbekistan has recently restricted American military use of the airbase at Karshi-Khanabad for air operations in neighboring Afghanistan.

The relationship between Uzbekistan and the United States began to deteriorate after the so-called “colour revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine (and to a lesser extent Kyrgyzstan). When the U.S. joined in a call for an independent international investigation of the bloody events at Andijon, the relationship took an additional nosedive, and President Islam Karimov changed the political alignment of the country to bring it closer to Russia and China, countries which chose not to criticise Uzbekistan’s leaders for their alleged human rights violations.

In late July 2005, the government of Uzbekistan ordered the United States to vacate an air base in Karshi-Kanabad (near Uzbekistan’s border with Afghanistan) within 180 days. Karimov had offered use of the base to the U.S. shortly after 9/11. It is also believed by some Uzbeks that the protests in Andijan were brought about by the U.K. and U.S. influences in the area of Andijan. This is another reason for the hostility between Uzbekistan and the West.

…

And this to sweeten the deal, or is it turning it into a rather strong vinegar, at least for the ones who count in making and implementing our unwritten and unspoken foreign policy practices:

The leaders of Uzbekistan and China on Wednesday said they had signed deals aimed at increasing cooperation on energy and regional security. Speaking ahead of an annual meeting of the Chinese-led Shanghai Cooperation Organisation meeting in Tashkent, Chinese President Hu Jintao and Uzbek President Islam Karimov pledged closer ties, particularly on nuclear fuel.

“One of the question we discussed was that of long-term and stable cooperation in the field of … uranium. It’s necessary to work in such a way to develop natural uranium and uranium fields,” Hu told reporters.

Although the leaders said they had signed a number of agreements regarding the purchase of energy from Uzbekistan, including uranium and natural gas, they declined to provide specifics details on the deals.

…

Okay, so you get the general picture on Uzbekistan. Right?

Next, let’s take a quick look at Turkmenistan:

Turkmenistan ranks fourth in the world to Russia, Iran and the United States in natural gas reserves. The Turkmenistan Natural Gas Company (Türkmengaz), under the auspices of the Ministry of Oil and Gas, controls gas extraction in the country. Gas production is the most dynamic and promising sector of the national economy. Turkmenistan’s gas reserves are estimated at 3.5-6.7 mcubic meters and its prospecting potential at up to 21 trillion cubic meters. In 2010 Ashgabat started a policy of diversifying export routes for its raw materials.

China is set to become the largest buyer of gas from Turkmenistan over the coming years as a pipeline linking the two countries, through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, reaches full capacity. In addition to supplying Russia, China and Iran, Ashgabat took concrete measures to accelerate progress in the construction of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan and India pipeline (TAPI). Turkmenistan has previously estimated the cost of the project at $3.3 billion. On May 21st, president Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov unexpectedly signed a decree stating that companies from Turkmenistan will build an internal East-West gas pipeline allowing the transfer of gas from the biggest deposits in Turkmenistan (Dowlatabad and Yolotan) to the Caspian coast. The East-West pipeline is planned to be around 1000 km long and have a carrying capacity of 30 bn m³ annually, at a cost of between one and one and a half billion US dollars.

…

And, this is the latest to truly pi.. off our ‘real’ foreign policy beneficiaries:

China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) has announced the discovery of yet another gas field on the right bank of the Amu Darya River in Turkmenistan, holding in excess of 100 billion cubic meters (bcm) of gas.

Separately, Turkmenistan President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow inaugurated a new compressor station at the Bagtiyarlyk fields, estimated by Chinese engineers to hold 1.6 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

These fields feed the Turkmenistan-China pipeline, which traverses Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan and was opened in December 2009 with a projected capacity of 40 billion cubic meters per year (bcm/y) by 2015, with some of that volume being consumed in southern Kazakhstan. (See Gas pipeline gigantism, Asia Times Online, July 17, 2008.)

In June this year, Ashgabad and Beijing agreed to increase Turkmen exports to China above the agreed level; the new compressor station will eventually raise the existing capacity to 22 bcm/y from the 6 bcm/y estimate of Chinese consumption of Turkmenistan-sourced gas for 2010.

…

And here, a brief snapshot of where Tajikistan stands:

Tajikistan is ready to further improve its cooperation in various fields with China, and make joint efforts to ensure the continued success of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), President Emomali Rakhmonov said in a recent interview with Chinese media.

The establishment of a friendly relationship with China was one of the great achievements that Tajikistan had made since its independence nearly 15 years ago, he said in his interview shortly ahead of the summit of the SCO heads of state to be held in Shanghai.

…

He mentioned in particular the opening of the Karasu pass on the Tajik-Chinese border.

“It is an important event in the history of the Tajik-Chinese relations, since it was the first time that the two countries were linked by motor traffic,” Rakhmonov said.

Trade between the two countries was developing rapidly and China’s influence on the Tajik economy was also growing, he said.

The president expressed satisfaction with the Tajik-Chinese trade volume which was increasing every year. In 2005, bilateral trade between the two countries had doubled from the previous year, he said.

…

And finally, if you’ve been following the recent turmoil and elections in Kyrgyzstan, you’d know that things haven’t been looking up for US business and bases over there:

In a surprise result which underscores what remains an extremely divided electorate in Kyrgyzstan, the parliamentary vote has led to the victory of the nationalist Fatherland Party (Ata-Jurt) and a very unclear road to a coalition government.

…

A Fatherland dominated government might bode ill for the Obama Administration’s designs on keeping a military base in Kyrgyzstan, as the party has spoken out against extending the US lease on the base past 2011.

…

Things certainly haven’t been looking up for our MIC, Oil, and related mega companies in that part of the world. And this kind of situation puts our ‘real’ foreign policy makers in their ‘enemies-of-our-enemies’ are needed mode. And when that happens the rest will follow: contracts for our good ole  Mujahideen friends, convenient terrorism related incidents and pipeline sabotages right and left, a more aggressive control of the opium trade to finance unwritten-unspoken foreign policy practices …

In the coming days I’ll be posting more updates and brief (not like this one!) commentaries and analysis on this topic, meanwhile, let’s round up our confusing but pretty much on target foreign policy riddle for the post 9/11 decade:

Our competitors’ enemies are our friends. Our nation’s government designated terrorist enemies are willing to become our competitors’ enemies, and that makes them our foreign policymakers’ convenient good friends while they remain our nation’s enemies. And that, my friend, makes our real foreign policy makers our (?)…

I’ll leave the solving and perfection of the above riddle to you. Please keep them coming.

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We all know the relevance and importance of a solid and sound background check when it comes to our elected and appointed officials and commissioners. Of course we all want to know about that big ‘conflict of interest’ factor. Okay, not all of us, especially not our MSM stenographers, but a few independent researchers and journalists here and there, and the rest of us among the ‘active and inquiring’ crowd. So let’s call this ‘chasing the chicken’ for now.’ Are you with me so far? Just hang in there and you’ll find out what I’m talking about, or at least I hope you will

Equally or even more significant is the need to follow up into post facto profiteering and connections of those assigned or elected for particular official posts. As in business, there is more than one method of payment and reimbursement for public figures serving interests other than the public, and in some cases interests totally in conflict with those of the public. Think of Former Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, and his post official position as a registered foreign agent for Turkey and his $35,000 a month payment. Or think about Former Defense Secretary, William Cohen, who went from heavily in debt and with negative net worth to multi millionaire in less than two years after leaving his public post. Unfortunately even fewer people, reporters and researchers, bother to cover and report on these important cases. Now, let’s call this ‘chasing the egg’ for the sake of what’s coming next.

Fortunately one independent reporter researched and reported on one such case, call it ‘chased the egg,’ on one of the 9/11 Commissioners, a Former Representative, Mr. Lee Hamilton, which I happened to come across yesterday. It was truly interesting to see how many ‘honorary’ positions Mr. Hamilton has been given, handed, by our government alone, just check out a few here:

-Co-chair of the Department of Energy Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future with Brent Scowcroft

-Serves on the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board & the FBI Director’s Advisory Board,

-Serves on the US Department of Homeland Security Task Force

- Serves on the CIA External Advisory Board

The White House, the CIA, and the FBI must have been extremely well-served by Hamilton’s performance as the commissioner to grant him this many prestigious quasi positions. No? For me, the most interesting aspect which was covered by CounterCurrents.Org had to do with Hamilton’s position with and current salary from the Woodrow Wilson Center, and his questionable corporate ties, particularly with BAE Systems, the main sponsor of his forthcoming gala dinner. Here are a few excerpts:

Back in May, I was unaware that WWC President Lee Hamilton is a board member of one of the Center’s top corporate donors, BAE Systems Inc. That’s the American division of the largest weapons and defense firm in the world, BAE Systems plc, based in the U.K., with annual sales exceeding $36 billion.

Lee Hamilton’s 34 years as Congressman (D-IN) and his service on the CIA External Advisory Board, FBI Director’s Advisory Board, 9/11 Commission, and elsewhere are cited in his biography on the WWC website.

Nowhere, however, does the WWC mention his simultaneous service to corporate America. Hamilton — whose WWC salary exceeds $410,000 and who qualifies for a hefty Congressional pension — is a member of the boards of not only BAE Systems Inc. (since 2004), but also Carbon Motors (since 2008), and the Albright Stonebridge Group (since 2006).

…

Hold on, it’s getting much worse, and I’m adding my own emphasis to the excerpts:

The latter is a DC-based “global strategy firm” headed by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright (co-chaired the so-called “ Genocide Prevention Task Force” with former Defense Secretary William Cohen, whose firm represents Turkish businesses; they both refuse to acknowledge the Armenian genocide) and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger (pled guilty to stealing classified documents needed by the 9/11 Commission).

…

Even aside from Hamilton’s corporate connections, can the WWC serve as a “neutral forum” for, and objectively analyze, the issues facing the American people when companies with mercenary agendas – overseas business interests, deals with sordid foreign governments, genocide denial, Federal contracts, and more – are helping to foot WWC’s budget?

BAE, for example, has lobbied against an Armenian genocide resolution in the U.S. Congress and, like several WWC donors, is a member of the American Turkish Council. The ATC is a business group that has shamelessly labored to defeat the Armenian resolution and that FBI whistle-blower Sibel Edmonds has accused of serious wrongdoing.

…

Here is more on BAE as a major criminal entity:

Earlier this year, a U.S. District Court judge slapped BAE with a $400 million criminal fine for its “deception, duplicity and knowing violations of law … on an enormous scale.”

Around the same time, BAE agreed to pay a fine of 30 million BP (about $50 million) to the U.K.

What had the genocide-denying BAE done wrong? Among other things, BAE had bribed Saudi officials, reportedly using slush funds, to buy jet fighters. The BBC says that the bribes were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. There were numerous other allegations of dishonest or unlawful practices by BAE in deals with Romania, South Africa, and Tanzania.

To avoid scrutiny, BAE had made illicit payments through intermediaries and front companies.The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said that BAE had “conspired to defraud the U.S. by impairing and impeding its lawful functions, [making] false statements … [and violating] the Arms Export Control Act.”

…

Can we say, all together ooh la la, and after that ‘Sibel, how stupid of you to even bother with testifying before the 9/11 Commission, and telling them all about the FBI’s Turkish criminal targets, The American Turkish Council(ATC), Brent Scowcroft, Marc Grossman, illegal weapon deals…??!!’

Okay, I’d rather be called naïve, futile…but I can see the point and ‘stupid’ certainly deserves its spot. And how about the rest of those witnesses who provided testimony and supporting documents on similar issues and targets to this commission of charlatans in bed with mega charlatans? Now please don’t jump and accuse me of something I don’t deserve, ‘Where have you been? You just woke up to smell the roses on the fraudulent 9/11 Commission?!’ No. I was one of the first to go on record with this fraudulent entity and the junk they put out there. And as we all know, Hamilton is not the only one. There are tons on the rest.

Now back to the article, where the official marriage between the BAEs -Hamiltons of our infested nation and those in highest offices come out of their hiding places:

On October 5, “a Gala will be held to celebrate the last decade at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and to honor Lee H. Hamilton.”

BAE Systems has shelled out $250,000 to be the evening’s sole “Presenting Sponsor.” …What does $250,000 buy BAE? President Linda Hudson (she’s also Executive Director of the parent BAE’s board) gets to be the event’s “Presenting Chair.”$250,000 surely also buys a lot of gratitude from attending dignitaries and WWC’s salaried staff, bureaucrats, and alleged scholars.

BAE is allowed to put a “branded give-away” in the evening’s “guest goodie bag.” The guests may include President Obama and the First Lady, the event’s “Honorary Chairs.” Obama and Hamilton are good friends. Hamilton even held a private dinner at the WWC with the president-elect and their staffs several days before the inauguration.

…

Boeing and Chevron have also paid $50,000 each to be “National Sponsors” of the WWC Gala. Both companies have lobbied, obviously at Turkey’s urging, against the Armenian genocide resolution. Executives of both companies have also received WWC’s “Corporate Citizenship Award.” Coincidentally, Chevron recently acquired a lease to explore for oil in Turkish waters. It obviously pays to play ball with Turkey.

WWC Trustee Ignacio Sanchez, among others, gave $15,000 to be a Gala “Benefactor.” Sanchez just happens to work for DLA Piper, a lobbying firm that is registered with the U.S. government as a foreign agent for Turkey. He “represents national and international clients on a broad range of issues … before Congress.” DLA Piper’s contract states specifically that “services shall include … preventing the introduction, debate and passage of legislation and other U.S. government action that harms Turkey’s interests and image.”

…

Instead of me quoting the entire article here is the link for you to go and read the entire piece yourself. But please don’t stop there. When you get a chance, do a search of your own on ATC and its Current Chairman Richard Armitage, its former Chairman Scowcroft, DLA Piper, Marc Grossman…That is if you are interested in the root causes of our nation’s severe infestation.

As for the chicken or the egg point: the culprit media failed our nation royally by not truly reporting on the real backgrounds of these so-called appointed commission members, and this despite the scandalous appointment of the commission’s initial chairman candidate, Henry Kissinger. And today, with all this exposed and well-known background information, the media still continues to provide a platform for these ex-commissioners such as Hamilton as revered experts with licenses for fear mongering geared to benefit the corporations who pay their six figure salaries and the government intent on expanding further its already vast powers. Meanwhile, you and I are stuck with all these infested chickens and rotten eggs, and expected not to know which one comes first.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Tom Engelhardt discusses his latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s, Washington’s ongoing commitment to military bases to extend its empire, and the US empire’s deep historical roots that precede the former administration and strongly continue today into the Presidency of Obama. He talks about Central Asia & the goal to dominate the future’s main energy sources in this region, and expands upon an interesting title for one the chapters in the book- “garrisoning of the planet.”

Tom Engelhardt is a founder of Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute where he is a Fellow. He is the author of The American Way of War, The End of Victory Culture, and of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing, as well as a collection of his Tomdispatch interviews, Mission Unaccomplished. Before that he worked as an editor at Pacific News Service in the early 1970s, and, these last three decades, as an editor in book publishing. For 15 years, he was Senior Editor at Pantheon Books where he edited and published award-winning works ranging from Art Spiegelman’s Maus and John Dower’s War Without Mercy to Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire trilogy. He is now Consulting Editor at Metropolitan Books, as well as co-founder and co-editor of Metropolitan’s The American Empire Project.

Here is our guest Tom Engelhardt unplugged!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Boiling Frogs Post presents an exclusive interview with Colonel Larry Wilkerson on the tyrannical presidency and politics of fear, Israel’s interests versus US interests and the question of loyalties, and more:

As a card carrying member of the Likud Party, whose interest did Douglas Feith really serve?

Is our current situation due to incompetent leadership or venal leadership exploiting politics of fear?

*A Special Thanks to Kristina Borjesson & Katrina Rill.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

As the first journalists to enter Kabul in 1981 for CBS News following the expulsion of the Western media the previous year, we continue to be amazed at how the American disinformation campaign between Hollywood, Washington and Wall Street built around the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan lives on. We’ve seen this pattern from the media again and again. It was particularly disturbing to read Ken Herman’s December 18 interview, Charlie Wilson pessimistic about future of Afghanistan, in the AUSTIN AMERICAN-STATESMAN filled with CIA disinformation. The secret campaign was activated before the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan to sell the American people on financing the coming Muslim holy war against the Soviet Union

Let’s separate the child-like fantasy that has been resurrected over and over again from the true nature of Charlie Wilson and his war effort. From the interview:

“…the former East Texas congressman — immortalized in a book and a movie about his exploits that helped the Afghans drive out the Soviet Union.”

FACT: Covert funding for the mujahideen began long before the Soviet invasion, not after. This covert aid was intended to lure the Soviets into the Afghan trap and hold them there, not drive them out, as claimed by Charlie Wilson. Both Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and Zbigniew Brzezinski – President Carter’s national security adviser, have admitted in print (Gates, in his 1997 book, From the Shadows; Brzezinski, 1998 interview in Le Nouvel Observateur, that the U.S. had been secretly undermining its own diplomatic efforts in order to give the Soviets their own Vietnam in Afghanistan.

The American press failed to report these revelations from high-ranking government officials as news, back then. More recently, Brzezinski’s remarks were addressed in an interview  with Samira Goetschel for her film, Our Own Private Bin Laden.  She asked:

“In your 1998 interview with the French Magazine Le Nouvel Observateur you said that you knowingly increased the probability of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.”

Brzezinski responded:

“The point very simply was this. We knew the Soviets were already conducting operations in Afghanistan. We knew there was opposition in Afghanistan to the progressive effort which had been made by the Soviets to take over. And we felt therefore it made a lot of sense to support those that were resisting. And we decided to do that. Of course this probably convinced the Soviets even more to do what they were planning to do…”

FACT: As we document in our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” the record contradicts Brzezinski’s assumption that the Soviets would have invaded had it not been for his intentional provocation to lure the Soviet’s into the “Afghan trap.”

FACT: It is well documented that Charlie Wilson’s war prolonged Afghanistan’s agony for another six years, provided a secure multibillion-dollar technological training base for Islamic terrorism, and set the stage for a privatized heroin industry of historic proportions. It’s bad enough that a Hollywood film continues to project the propaganda campaign that kept Americans in the dark about America’s role in helping terrorism grow in Afghanistan. At this late date, it is unconscionable for any media to perpetuate the fantasy that Charlie Wilson or the Congress wanted the Soviets out of Afghanistan. 

FACT: America’s mistake in Afghanistan was not “the endgame” problem depicted by “Charlie Wilson’s War.” The problem was in the conceptual framework created by America’s Cold War policy makers in the first place that made Afghanistan the bleeding ground it remains to this day.

FACT: Charlie Wilson’s War became the rallying cry for an arms buildup that would end­ public debate about American foreign policy on Afghanistan. The world was remade with the Soviet folly in Afghanistan, a Communist empire destroyed and the West’s pre-eminence assured. But the price in human suffering in Afghanistan and the impact on our democratic freedoms has yet to be understood.

Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began their experience in Afghanistan when they were the first American journalists to acquire permission to enter behind Soviet lines in 1981 for CBS News and produced a documentary, Afghanistan Between Three Worlds, for PBS. In 1983 they returned to Kabul with Harvard Negotiation project director Roger Fisher for ABC Nightline and contributed to the MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour. They continued to research, write and lecture about the long-term run-up that led to the US invasion of Afghanistan. They are featured in an award winning documentary by Samira Goetschel. Titled, Our own Private Bin Laden which traces the creation of the Osama bin Laden mythology in Afghanistan and how that mythology has been used to maintain the “war on terror” approach of the Bush administration.  Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story published by City Lights, January 2009 chronicles their three-decade-focus on Afghanistan and the media.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Not much in terms of site updates on this week’s Boiling Frogs Round Up. If you haven’t listened to our interview with Pepe Escobar, please do; click here.

Last week I failed to bring to your attention an interesting and noteworthy interview:

Peter B Collins interviewed David Krikorian, challenger to GOP Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio, on Schmidt’s efforts to squelch Krikorian’s First Amendment rights and the infamous Turkish Lobby’s covert and overt influence of Schmidt’s campaign. Krikorian ran against Mean Jean in 2008 and got 17% of the vote as an independent. After he announced he would challenge her again in 2010 as a Democrat, Schmidt filed legal actions over Krikorian’s sharp criticism of her support from Turkish interests. Schmidt’s lawyer is Bruce Fein, an erstwhile friend of the PBC show for his support of impeachment for Bush and Cheney; Fein is counsel to the Turkish American Legal Defense Fund and an apologist for Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide.

This is a very interesting, and informative interview. You can listen to it here at Peter B Collins’ website. I’m looking forward to your feedback on this; many of you know why.

Rep. Ron Paul on the Escalation in Afghanistan

Congressman Ron Paul has written an excellent editorial piece on our war in Afghanistan and President Obama’s escalation plans now in full action. As always he makes his points clearly and sincerely: No beating around the bush, no gobbledygook stuff, and no special interests or agenda to serve.

Dr. Paul hits some of the most important key words and phrases: Perpetual War, seeking out monsters to destroy abroad, Military Industrial Complex, the War Lobby, bypassing the Constitution, nebulous & never-ending conflicts, domestic liberties, nation-building, war-racketeers…Here are a couple of excerpts:

If anyone still doubted that this administration’s foreign policy would bring any kind of change, this week’s debate on Afghanistan should remove all doubt. The president’s stated justifications for sending more troops to Afghanistan and escalating the war amount to little more than recycling all the false reasons we began the conflict. It is so discouraging to see this coming from our new leadership, when the people were hoping for peace. New polls show that 49 percent of the people favor minding our own business on the world stage, up from 30 percent in 2002. Perpetual war is not solving anything. Indeed continually seeking out monsters to destroy abroad only threatens our security here at home as international resentment against us builds. The people understand this and are becoming increasingly frustrated at not being heard by the decision-makers. The leaders say some things the people want to hear, but change never comes.

We now find ourselves in another foreign policy quagmire with little hope of victory, and not even a definition of victory. Eisenhower said that only an alert and informed electorate could keep these war racketeering pressures at bay. He was right, and the key is for the people to ensure that their elected leaders follow the Constitution. The Constitution requires a declaration of war by Congress in order to legitimately go to war. Bypassing this critical step makes it far too easy to waste resources on nebulous and never-ending conflicts. Without clear goals, the conflicts last forever and drain the country of blood and treasure. The drafters of the Constitution gave Congress the power to declare war precisely because they feared allowing the executive unfettered discretion in military affairs. They understood that making it easy for leaders to wage foreign wars would threaten domestic liberties.

I don’t know about you but I for one always seem to find myself agreeing with Dr. Paul’s view on our foreign policy and the destructiveness of the long-in-power war party. You can read the brief but effective piece here. What do you think?
 

President Obama: Staunch Supporter of our Domestic Enemies?

It certainly appears that way. He’s been vehemently supporting the Patriot Act and its architects & defenders; he’s been relentlessly protecting the previous administrations’ wrongdoers and culprits involved in rendition and torture…And now this: White House wants suit against Yoo dismissed

The Obama administration has asked an appeals court to dismiss a lawsuit accusing former Bush administration attorney John Yoo of authorizing the torture of a terrorism suspect, saying federal law does not allow damage claims against lawyers who advise the president on national security issues.
…

Yoo, a UC Berkeley law professor, worked for the Justice Department from 2001 to 2003. He was the author of a 2002 memo that said rough treatment of captives amounts to torture only if it causes the same level of pain as “organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death.” The memo also said the president may have the power to authorize torture of enemy combatants.

We’ve been writing and talking about many cases, issues, and points where Obama has been supporting, defending, and continuing the Bush administration’s practices and abuses. Now can we think of any cases, examples, or issues where he, Obama, has actually been opposing or challenging the previous administration’s decisions, policies, or practices? In the Human Rights area? Our civil liberties? War(s)? I didn’t think so either…

The Revolving Doors Keeps Revolving

The revolving door phenomenon has always ranked high among my list of core issues at the heart of diseases that have been inflicted on and metastasized in our nation. A while ago I wrote a piece on this issue titled: The Auctioning of Former Statesmen & Dime a Dozen Generals . Well, here is a recent relevant article on this same disease:

The Army used a loophole in federal ethics law to award lucrative contracts to two recently retired generals, departing from its standard practice for hiring senior advisers, according to public records and interviews.

During the past two years, the Army wanted to bring back two former generals, John Vines and Dan McNeill, to advise commanders as part of its “senior mentor” program. But the service’s program is run by a defense contractor, Northrop Grumman, and federal ethics law prohibits newly retired senior employees from representing a company before their former agency for one year.

That “cooling off” period is designed to prohibit “acts by former government employees which may reasonably give the appearance of making unfair use of prior government employment,” according to ethics regulations. The Army found a way around the rule. Instead of hiring them as defense company subcontractors, as it does for roughly two dozen other Army mentors, the service contracted directly with McNeill and Vines. McNeill received his contract after the Army wrote specific bid solicitations that applied to him and perhaps a few other retired generals. Vines received contracts without competition, records show.

All told, the Army paid McNeill $281,625 from December 2008 through August 2009, federal records show. McNeill told USA Today he also consults for defense firms but declined to name them. He isn’t required to tell the Army about them, either.

Anyway; here is the link to the rest of this Army Times article.

Down the Police State Lane

On Monday I’ll be posting my belated Part IV of The Makings of a Police State series. Meanwhile, here is another item, an additional ingredient, to be added to our boiling pot: Homeland Security Embarks on Big Brother Programs to Read Our Minds and Emotions:

This past February, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) awarded a one-year, $2.6 million grant to the Cambridge, MA.-based Charles Stark Draper Laboratory to develop computerized sensors capable of detecting a person’s level of “malintent” — or intention to do harm. It’s only the most recent of numerous contracts awarded to Draper and assorted research outfits by the U.S. government over the past few years under the auspices of a project called “Future Attribute Screening Technologies,” or FAST. It’s the next wave of behavior surveillance from DHS and taxpayers have paid some $20 million on it so far.

Conceived as a cutting-edge counter-terrorism tool, the FAST program will ostensibly detect subjects’ bad intentions by monitoring their physiological characteristics, particularly those associated with fear and anxiety. It’s part of a broader “initiative to develop innovative, non-invasive technologies to screen people at security checkpoints,” according to DHS.

The “non-invasive” claim might be a bit of a stretch. A DHS report issued last December outlined some of the possible technological features of FAST, which include “a remote cardiovascular and respiratory sensor” to measure “heart rate, heart rate variability, respiration rate, and respiratory sinus arrhythmia,” a “remote eye tracker” that “uses a camera and processing software to track the position and gaze of the eyes (and, in some instances, the entire head),” “thermal cameras that provide detailed information on the changes in the thermal properties of the skin in the face,” and “a high resolution video that allows for highly detailed images of the face and body … and an audio system for analyzing human voice for pitch change.”
…

 
I’ll stop quoting here and urge you to go and read about this mind boggling plan. Once, if, when, it kicks in you may want to think twice before consuming your daily triple shot lattes before your departures. Ladies, you may want to plan departure dates based on your monthly cycle, since some of us know how our body temperature and blood pressure tend to fluctuate crazily during certain times of the month; those of you going through pre-menopause or menopause, you may want to consider not flying all together… I mean come on people; is this for real??!!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

This week we interviewed Mark Klein, the AT&T whistleblower; the interview should be posted in 3 or 4 weeks. I know you’re going to find it interesting and enlightening. Speaking of AT&T, check out our contributor Ishmael’s informative interview with Jeff Farias here.

I have a few noteworthy tidbits below. Don’t pay attention to their publication dates, since the issues, these cases and reports, are ‘timeless’ in nature.

Another Police State Government Villains & an Irate Minority Fighter Story

This week the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a privacy watchdog organization, released a comprehensive and eye-opening report on a bogus subpoena issued by a US attorney in Indiana to force Indymedia.us , an independent alternative news site to hand over all the data containing about their users who visited the site on a particular day. Not only that, consistent with other National Security Letters practices, the Justice Department issued gag order to prevent the site from speaking about the subpoena:

The report describes how, earlier this year, U.S. attorneys issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Indymedia.us administrator Kristina Clair demanding “all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us” for a particular date, potentially identifying every person who visited any news story on the Indymedia site. As the report explains, this overbroad demand for internet records not only violated federal privacy law but also violated Clair’s First Amendment rights, by ordering her not to disclose the existence of the subpoena without a U.S. attorney’s permission.

Because Indymedia follows EFF’s Best Practices for Online Service Providers and does not keep historical IP logs, there was no information for Indymedia to hand over, and the government withdrew the subpoena. However, as the report describes, that wasn’t the end of the tale: Ms. Clair wanted EFF to be able to tell the story of the subpoena and shine a light on the government’s illegal demand, yet the subpoena ordered silence. Under pressure from EFF, the government admitted that the subpoena’s gag order had no legal basis, and ultimately chose not to go to court to try to force Ms. Clair’s silence despite earlier threats to do so.

This is another story of our government villains determined to butcher the Constitution and speed up our descent towards a police state. This is another example illustrating how government abuses are thriving and expanding in secrecy. In this case, it took an irate, a determined, and a believer in Constitutional Rights, to get up and challenge the attempted despotism. In this particular case, the despotic villains backed down. But as EFF appropriately questions:

How often does the government attempt such illegal fishing expeditions through internet data? How many online service providers have received similarly bogus demands, and handed over how much data, violating how many internet users’ privacy? How many of those subpoena recipients have been intimidated into silence by unconstitutional gag orders?

Let’s hope the number of those who choose to speak up and fight back keeps increasing. But meanwhile, in addition to sitting and wishing and hoping, let us each be one of the irate minority who keeps on fighting until we become the majority, and the villains are restrained and ruled by we the people.

The Deceitful Media Pimping Tyranny

Freedom daily had a well-presented piece by James Bovard on the US media. I get tons of links and references everyday, and usually all I can do is a quick glance. With this one I was hooked after the first paragraph, and I’m sure those of you who’ve been visiting my site for a while would know why:

Why do politicians so easily get away with telling lies? In large part, because the news media are more interested in bonding with politicians than in exposing them. Americans are encouraged to believe that the media will serve as a check and a balance on the government. Instead, the press too often volunteer as unpaid pimps, helping politicians deceive the public.

And no, it is not because he uses my favorite adjective, pimp! Keep reading the article, because Bovard goes on providing some good and highly relevant examples and cases. Here is another right-on-target remark after he presents relevant cases supporting his view:

Deceit has become ritualized in U.S. foreign policy. From 2002 onwards, the White House Iraq Group spewed out false information that the New York Times and other prominent media outlets routinely accepted without criticism or verification. After many of the assertions were later discovered to be false, the White House and much of the media treated the falsehoods as irrelevant to the legitimacy of the U.S. invasion. The lack of attention paid to political lies is itself symptomatic of the bias in favor of submitting to rulers regardless of how much people are defrauded.

…

The pursuit of respectability in Washington usually entails acquiescing to government lies. Many if not most members of the Washington press corps are government dependents. Few Washington journalists have the will to expose government lies. That would require placing one in an explicitly adversarial position to the government. It is not that the typical journalist is intentionally covering up government lies, but that his radar is not set to detect such occurrences. Lies rarely register in Washington journalists’ minds because they are usually supplicants for government information, not dogged pursuers of the truth. Raising troublesome questions will not help you get any “silver platter” stories.

And finally his conclusion, the punch line, to which I wholeheartedly subscribe:

If Americans wish to retain the remnants of their liberty, they cannot trust the media to warn them about government tyranny. In order to recognize government deceit, there is no substitute for more citizens to make more effort to find the truth for themselves.

Don’t worry about the article’s November 5 date. It’s been relevant for many years, and will be relevant for the foreseeable future. So I encourage you to go read the piece, and come back

as an even more determined and irate minority!

 The Convergence of Interests: MIC & Members of Congress

Our friend and regular Boiling Frogs Post commenter Metem kindly sent this over a year old but way under-reported and highly important report my way, assuming I’d seen it already. Well, I had not, and although not surprised by its content, I am grateful to have it and share it with you here.

This article, Congress Invested in Defense Contracts, made it to the Project Censored top 25 censored stories for 2009-2010. It is based on a report issued by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which made public the fact that more than 151 members of Congress have up to $195 million invested in major defense contractors that are earning profits from the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:

When General David Petraeus, the top US military officer in Iraq, went to Capitol Hill to brief Congress in April of 2008, he was addressing lawmakers who had a lot more than just a political stake in the Iraq occupation. Along with their colleagues in the House and Senate, the politicians who got a status report from the general and the US ambassador to Iraq had millions of dollars of their own money invested in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD).

Guess which lawmaker made it to the top of the list, became number one, with the most money invested in companies with DoD contracts? Someone I am not familiar with: Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ), with $49,140,000.

But the number two man is familiar to all. I bet many of you are guessing McCain or Lieberman. Well, that’s not the case. Number two happens to be Senator John Kerry (D-Mass), with up to $38,209,020. Just in case the comas cause this to be difficult to make out, that is more than 38 million dollars, my friends.

Here are a few others who made it into the top 10: Rep. Hayes, with $37+ Million; Rep. Sensenbrenner Jr., with $7+ M; Rep. Harman, with $6 +M; Rep. Upton, with $8+M; and Sen. Rockefeller, with $2 million dollars.

And the implications:

Forty-seven members of Congress (or 9 percent of all members of the House and Senate) in 2006 were invested in companies that are primarily in the defense sector. The average share price of these corporations today is nearly twice what it was in 2004. Lawmakers’ investments in these contracting firms yielded them between $15.8 million and $62 million in income between 2004 and 2006, through dividends, capital gains, royalties and interest, the Center found.

Companies with congressional investors received more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006. The minimum value of Congress members’ personal investments in defense contracting firms increased 5 percent from 2004 to 2006, but because lawmakers are only required to report their assets in broad ranges, the value of these investments could have risen as much as 160 percent—or even dropped 51 percent.

The above data is only the personal gain minus ‘the lobby’ gain. There is more into this:

Lawmakers aren’t just benefiting from the defense sector personally, but also politically. In the first three months of 2009, the defense sector gave nearly $2 million to candidates, party committees and political action committees, with 57 percent of that going to Democrats. In the 2008 election cycle, the sector gave $23.5 million. Rep. John Murtha (D-Penn.), House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chairman, has collected more money from the sector than any other lawmaker since 1989 at $2.6 million. Murtha has gotten some heat—and a lot of attention—this year for his connections to now-defunct lobbying firm PMA Group, which the FBI is investigating for allegedly violating campaign finance laws. The firm’s clients were primarily defense companies that sought earmarks from Murtha’s subcommittee.

This is the sorry state of those entrusted with the oversight of our government and its practices. So who has the oversight of these overseers? Who gets to watch for these kinds of mammoth conflicts of interests, and who gets to hold the overseers who’ve been given the authority to exercise accountability accountable? Last time I checked, that was ‘we, the people.’ Now when will we, the people, start exercising these rights? When will we say ‘it is time to kick out, haul out, some a..es from the place called the United States Congress? Just asking…