andrewmcintyre.ca

…I truly don’t know of another area of public policy where relevant facts and salient debates are more divorced from the public discussion — where ignorance and fear have more currency — than is the case with tech policy. The unreality of the debate tends to work out fine for the defense contractors, industry consultants, and major corporations involved in tech policy. But that state of affairs leaves the public in the dark.

Nancy Scola, writing for The American Prospect blog on the INTERNET KILL SWITCH (!!!!1) and “The Trouble With Tech Reporting“

From yesterday’s Rolling Stone:

From the start, General McChrystal was determined to place his personal stamp on Afghanistan, to use it as a laboratory for a controversial military strategy known as counterinsurgency. COIN, as the theory is known, is the new gospel of the Pentagon brass, a doctrine that attempts to square the military’s preference for high-tech violence with the demands of fighting protracted wars in failed states. COIN calls for sending huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation’s government.

“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,”  joked General Stanley McChrystal as reported in the New York Times in April.

General McChrystal recently got lost in the complexity of this spaghetti and meatballs plan for “winning” the war in Afghanistan, of which he was one of the chief architects. Michael Hastings, a shrewd reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, appears to have blended into the war-imbedded background as the proverbial fly on the wall while McChrystal and his senior aides’ frustrations boiled over.  To empathize, McChrystal’s agitation seems justified given the laughably quagmire-prone strategy that  he is attempting to execute (see above) and the recent report to the UN Security Council noting an “alarming” 94 percent increase in roadside bombings.

Correctly observing that “McChrystal and his men are in indisputable command of all military aspects of the war”  in his impressive exposé piece published today, among the numerous incendiary comments made by the top General and his posse, Hastings reported these additional gems:

In private, Team McChrystal likes to talk shit about many of Obama’s top people on the diplomatic side.

…

The most striking example of McChrystal’s usurpation of diplomatic policy is his handling of [Afghan pseudo-president] Karzai. It is McChrystal, not diplomats like Eikenberry or Holbrooke, who enjoys the best relationship with the man America is relying on to lead Afghanistan.

…

McChrystal thought Obama looked “uncomfortable and intimidated” by the roomful of military brass. Their first one-on-one meeting took place in the Oval Office four months later, after McChrystal got the Afghanistan job, and it didn’t go much better. “It was a 10-minute photo op,” says an adviser to McChrystal. “Obama clearly didn’t know anything about him, who he was. Here’s the guy who’s going to run his fucking war, but he didn’t seem very engaged. The Boss was pretty disappointed.”

…

After Cpl. Pat Tillman, the former-NFL-star-turned-Ranger, was accidentally killed by his own troops in Afghanistan in April 2004, McChrystal took an active role in creating the impression that Tillman had died at the hands of Taliban fighters. He signed off on a falsified recommendation for a Silver Star that suggested Tillman had been killed by enemy fire.

This is major scandal: a top military leader and his aides playing fast and loose with the facts,  undermining the authority of elected officials to create policy and pushing the United States and her NATO allies, including Canada, further into an incredibly expensive war. A war fraught with loosely defined, fuzzy objectives and tactics, as well as lacking: much public support to speak of, many key personnel and a clear exit strategy.

Undoubtedly, the continuing Western military operation in Afghanistan is being exploited for PR and recruitment purposes by al-Qaeda just across the porous border in Pakistan. And America’s policy towards Pakistan looks as though it is exacerbating the problem.  Three days into his presidency, Obama authorized the continuation of a Bush-era neoconservative policy (that persists to this day), which allows the CIA to conduct attacks from unmanned drones. Ignoring the fact that the US congress has never formally declared war on Pakistan, the results of the potentially illegal drone missions haven’t always been pretty. (As an aside, in a sort of  surreal post-modern haze, soldiers stationed in south-western United States are flying drone missions as a 9:00AM-5:00PM day job and are suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder just like soldiers on the battlefield.)

But to give a final hat tip to Hastings’ incredible reporting work, I’ll conclude with his analogy comparing the futile development effort (which is part of the bottomless-pit-of-blood-and-treasure-Afghan-war-plan) to America’s schizophrenic quasi-war policy towards Pakistan:

Dispatching 150,000 troops to build new schools, roads, mosques and water-treatment facilities around Kandahar is like trying to stop the drug war in Mexico by occupying Arkansas and building Baptist churches in Little Rock.

General McChrystal is expected to tender his resignation this morning.

When Dwight Eisenhower warned the world of the United States’ “military industrial complex” and their permanent armaments industry in his farewell address on Jan 17th 1961, he spoke of “the potential of the disastrous rise of misplaced power.”

This morning I watched with disgust as CNN’s John King lobbed typical softball questions at former US Vice President Dick Cheney. I listened to Cheney defend the use of torture and  assert the ridiculous claim that Obama’s foreign policy shift is making the US “less safe.” At one point in the interview, CNN cut to a commercial similar to this one, and part of the same “How” ad campaign:

As I watch this ad promoting Cold War era weapons and the virtue of “America’s Air Dominance” in the age of asymmetric, low-intensity warfare that characterize the Iraq and Afghanistan imperial misadventures, what becomes crystal clear is that Cheney, his band of neoconservative ideologues, and even CNN, are the very threats President Eisenhower warned about.

Absurd Comic-Book-Style Villainy

Aside from being a dungeon master, secretive oil baron, elusive media manipulator and avid gun enthusiast, this week Seymore Hersh revealed that Cheney was also the leader of a secret CIA assassination squad.  This, of course, comes as no surprise for those familiar with Cheney’s quest to centralize power in the executive branch where this sad comedy reached its pinnacle as he invoked executive privilege while simultaneously claiming not to be a member of the executive branch.

Here is the hilarious lead from the Boston Globe article related to his fight with the National Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office’s attempts to get him to disclose information:

Dick Cheney, who has wielded extraordinary executive power as he transformed the image of the vice presidency, is asserting that his office is not actually part of the executive branch.

The Iraqi journalist who threw a shoe at George W. Bush was sentenced to 3 years in prison this week. When will we see the key players in the Bush administration pay for their crimes? Or am I a fool for still believing the illusion that the rule of law exists in the United States?

Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency

I’m about half-way through reading Barton Gellman‘s “Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency,” a book based on his series of Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles in The Washington Post.  It is a gripping portrayal of one man’s ability to navigate the bureaucratic structure of the American government with skill and precision mimicking that of a veteran sniper’s ability to select a target and pull the trigger. No one said that running a secret assassination squad was easy.

Late Update: The supervillain highlight reel from TPMTV

And this great screen capture image from Crooks and Liars, tells the whole story better than my 1000 words: