The Rag Blog

I have good news for you. American “consumer sentiment has improved to a 3 years high, propelled by falling gasoline prices and a favorable view of personal finances and economic growth” says a survey. You must be happy. This means more savings for you so you can consume more, eat and spend some more. Go right ahead and anesthetize yourself.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte on Friday cited the Bush administration’s recently disbanded domestic spying program as a critically important post-September 11 change in intelligence practices.

In his final public assessment of U.S. espionage reform, Negroponte said the intelligence community’s 16 agencies have had significant success in restructuring and integration during his 20-month tenure as the first U.S. director of national intelligence.

“Over the last two years, the (community) has achieved good results,” he told an audience of intelligence officials at his office’s headquarters in Washington.

“A great deal of structural change has occurred … in direct response both to our most important past failures and our most important pressing threats.”

The 67-year-old spy chief, who has been nominated to become deputy to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, cited specific achievements by agencies including the National Security Agency that has run President George W. Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

“NSA has been vital in helping support the global war on terror,” Negroponte said.

“In this regard, I would emphasize the critical contributions the terrorist surveillance program has made to protect American lives and interests.”

The NSA surveillance program, exposed by The New York Times in December 2005, was authorized by Bush to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens, without first obtaining a court warrant.

It caused a political uproar among Democrats and some Republicans who said it violated U.S. law.

Obviously, President George W. Bush is busily looking for a Gulf of Tonkin-like incident in order to further escalate the war in Iraq and to start a fresh one with Iran.

Let us remember that when the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, another Texan, wanted to escalate the war against North Vietnam, in 1964, it fabricated a tale about a maritime incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, which many historians believe never happened. Congress was then steamrolled into passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which was used by the Johnson administration, and later by the Nixon administration, to escalate U.S. military involvement in Indochina. Tens of thousands of young Americans and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese died as a consequence of this resolution.

And the same scenario is repeating itself today. Politicians, when facing a quagmire of their own making and feeling powerless and under attack, will spend unlimited amounts of public money and will sacrifice unlimited numbers of other people’s lives, in order to save face. —Anxious to provoke Iran into a military confrontation, George W. Bush authorized, in early January, an attack on an Iranian consulate in the town of Irbil, in Iraq, capturing five staff members. This was an act of war, because it was carried out on a diplomatic compound. The Iraqi and Iranian governments have both called for the men’s release.

This aggression came after the Bush-Cheney administration sent two large nuclear aircraft carriers, the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower and the USS John C. Stennis, each accompanied by guided-missile cruisers, destroyers, frigates, submarine escorts and supply ships, to the Persian Gulf. As a consequence, the Persian Gulf is teeming with American military gear.

In this relatively small sea, such a concentration of military equipment is bound to result in accidents. Indeed, around January 8, a U.S. nuclear submarine hit a Japanese oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz near the Arabian Sea. The Strait of Hormuz connects the Persian Gulf with the Arabian Sea and is a most strategic shipping lane for transporting oil products from countries such as Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Members of the Hells Angels, including an Army lieutenant colonel from Illinois, have served the U.S. military in Iraq. Another Iraq war veteran, a Marine who belongs to the Maniac Latin Disciples street gang, is charged with shooting three teens in Aurora.

They are examples of growing gang activity in the military, which “poses a threat to law enforcement officials and national security,” according to a new FBI report obtained by the Sun-Times.

“The military enlistment of gang members could ultimately lead to the worldwide expansion of U.S.-based gangs,” the report warned.

The report by the FBI’s National Gang Intelligence Center said gang members sneak into the military by failing to report criminal convictions or using fake documents. Some have sealed juvenile records unavailable to recruiters. And most of the recruiters are not properly trained to recognize gang affiliation, the report said.

“Military recruiters under pressure to meet recruiting goals have engaged in criminal violations such as overly aggressive recruiting tactics and document falsification,” said the report.

While gang members constitute a “fraction” of the military, the extent of the problem is difficult to gauge because the military is not required to provide the FBI with statistics on crime at military posts. Still, the FBI has documented disturbing examples of how gang members get into the military — and the crimes they commit in the service.

In 2005, for instance, a Latin Kings member was allegedly recruited into the Army at a Brooklyn, N.Y., courthouse while awaiting trial for assaulting a New York police officer with a razor. He was reportedly instructed by the recruiter to conceal his gang affiliation, the report said.

Reportedly steal weapons

Many members of the Illinois-based Outlaw Motorcycle Gang and the Hells Angels have military experience and have been known to recruit soldiers due to their explosives and firearms experience, the report said. One of the most violent gangs — the MS-13 — is increasing its presence on or near U.S. military installations, the FBI said.

Some gang members use their military positions to steal weapons and other equipment.

It’s been a repetitive phenomenon of these last years — when fears about disaster (or further disaster, or even the farthest reaches of disaster) in Iraq rise, so does the specter of Vietnam. Despite the obvious dissimilarities between the two situations, Vietnam has been the shadow war we’re still fighting. The Bush administration began its 2003 invasion by planning a non-Vietnam War scenario right down to not having “body counts,” those grim, ridiculed death chants of that long-past era. His administration, as the President put it before the November mid-term elections, wasn’t going to be a “body-count team.” But the Vietnam experience has proven nothing short of irresistible in a crisis. Within the last month, after Bush himself bemoaned the lack of a body count in the vicinity, the body count slipped back into the news as a way to measure success in Iraq.

And that was only the beginning. With the recent plummeting of presidential approval ratings and the dismal polling reactions to Bush’s “new way forward” in Iraq, the Vietnam scenario is experiencing something like a renaissance. Sometimes, these days, it seems as if top administration officials are simply spending their time preparing mock-Vietnam material for Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show. The recent “surge” plan, for instance, brought that essential Vietnam vocabulary word, “escalation,” back into currency. (It was on Democratic lips all last week.) Even worse, the President’s plan was the kind of “incremental escalation” that military commanders coming out of Vietnam had sworn would never, ever be used again.

In any case, when Republican Senator (and surge opponent) Chuck Hagel questioned Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice about the E-word last week, she denied it was an appropriate moniker. Here’s what she suggested instead. “I would call it, Senator, an augmentation that allows the Iraqis to deal with this very serious problem that they have in Baghdad.” (And, of course, Stewart promptly pounced…)

BAGHDAD, Jan. 19 — After months of tense bargaining, a cabinet-level committee has produced a draft law governing Iraq’s vast oil fields that would distribute all revenues through the federal government and grant Baghdad wide powers in exploration, development and awarding of major international contracts.

The draft, described today by several members of the committee, could still change and must be approved by the Iraqi cabinet and Parliament before it becomes law. Negotiations have veered off track unexpectedly in the past, and members of the political and sectarian groups with interest in the law could still object as they read it more closely.

But if approved in anything close to its present form, the law would appear to settle a longstanding debate over whether the oil industry and its revenues should be overseen by the central government or the regions dominated by Kurds in the north and Shiite Arabs in the south, where the richest oil fields are located.

The draft comes down firmly on the side of central oversight, a decision that advocates for Iraq’s unity are likely to trumpet as a triumph. Because control of the oil industry touches so directly on the interests of all Iraq’s warring sectarian groups, and therefore the future of the country, the proposed law has been described as the most critical piece of pending legislation.

“This will give us the basis of the unity of this country,” said Ali Baban, the Iraqi planning minister and a member of the Sunni-dominated Iraqi Islamic Party who serves on the negotiating committee. “We pushed for the center in Baghdad, but we didn’t neglect the Kurds and other regions,” Mr. Baban said.

Negotiators said that the final weeks of wrangling on the draft focused on a federal committee that will be set up to review the oil contracts. Kurdish, and to some extent Shiite, parties wanted to maintain regional control over the contracts, while Sunni Arabs, with few oil resources in territories they dominate, insisted that the federal committee have the power to approve contracts, rather than just reviewing them and offering advice.

01/20/07 “ICHBlog” President Bush is invoking his “commander in chief” authority to escalate the war in Iraq, and he will likely also invoke it to launch an aerial attack against Iran. Congress has long ago abdicated and delegated to the President its constitutional responsibility to initiate wars. Yet Congress still has one surefire way to influence events: it has the constitutional authority to make the “nuclear option” against Iran illegal. In so doing, it would stop the relentless drive to war against Iran dead in its tracks.

Notwithstanding Joe Biden’s threat of a “constitutional confrontation” if Bush attacks Iran without Congressional authorization, the fact is that such an attack would be perfectly legal: the War Powers Act gives the US President legal authority to wage war against any country for 60 days. It would also be legal for Bush to order nuclear strikes against Iran: under NSC-30 of 1948, “the decision as to the employment of atomic weapons in the event of war is to be made by the Chief Executive”. Neither nor votes to withold funding will have any effect on preventing such events.

However, Congress could pass a law making a nuclear attack on a non-nuclear nation in the absence of Congressional authorization illegal. In so doing, Congress would effectively be preventing Bush from launching any attack against Iran without its authorization, thus reclaiming its broader constitutionally assigned duties. Because Bush will not dare putting 150,000 American lives in Iraq at risk of Iranian retaliation without having the nuclear option on the table. By removing the nuclear option from the Bush toolkit, Congress would be forcefully imposing its will and that of the American people on an administration gone mad.

If Congress chooses not to face the fact that US military action against Iran is likely to lead to the first US use of nuclear weapons since Nagasaki, each one of its members will share responsibility for the nefarious chain of events that is likely to follow, and should be preparing to face his/her very own nuclear Nuremberg trial.

Preparations for the Iran attack

The following recent events have led to widespread suspicions that a US/ Israeli attack on Iran is imminent:

* Additional aircraft carriers deployed to the Persian Gulf.
* US Patriot missiles just deployed to the Persian Gulf.
* F16 fighter planes just deployed to the Incirlik base in Turkey.
* Increased number of US nuclear submarines in Persian Gulf.
* Admiral Fallon named Centcom commander.
* Israeli pilots training for Iran bombing mission.
* Increased rethoric and provocations against Iran.

The F-16’s can deliver B61-11 nuclear bunker busters, and there may be such bombs at Incirlik.

01/20/07 “ICHBlog” — The central question of our time is, can the American people gain enough factual information to determine the truth about the issues that face them?

Sadly, I’m inclined to think not. In the past, America was dotted with newspapers that were owned by people who lived in the community they served – newspapers that were supported by the advertising of businesses that were owned by people living in the community. In both cases, this economic independence translated into independence of thought.

Today, that is far less true. Probably a majority of newspapers, radio stations and television stations are owned by absentee corporations. Most of the businesses whose advertising supports local media are likewise owned by absentee corporations.

To understand what a tremendous change this is, remember that owners decide – everybody else is an employee whose future with the corporation rests solely on pleasing the owners. No employee, whether an executive or a worker, can afford to antagonize the owners if he values his job. And everything except ownership is a job.

Ah, but what about the Internet? In the first place, there are fewer computer owners than you might think, and not all of them are computer literate. A huge amount of the information on the Internet is junk and rubbish and propaganda. There are more information spewers than there are information gatherers. A great deal of it is geek talk, reflecting the endless fascination of some people with gadgets. There is gossip and entertainment hype, and there are the unsubstantiated opinions of people who just want to vent.

As the old saying goes, opinions are like elbows: Most people have at least two. But whether an opinion is of any value or not depends on the amount of research and intelligence behind it. Certainly if you had a heart attack, you wouldn’t go to a car salesman for an opinion about what you should do. A great many opinions are birthed by paycheck and self-interest. You wouldn’t last very long at the Heritage Foundation if you decided that there were serious flaws in capitalism that needed addressing.

It goes back to the golden rule: Those who have the gold rule. Big donors to various foundations and think tanks aren’t supporting pure research; they are subsidizing opinions and interests they already hold. The fact is that despite the communications revolution, or perhaps because of it, finding facts and truth are more difficult today than in the past.

It’s also a fact that government routinely lies, and so do many corporations. That mysterious commitment to the public good, which once joined Americans from many different classes and positions, seems to have dissolved. Integrity, which simply means being true regardless of consequences to one’s own beliefs, seems to have no market value in America today.

Self-government only works if the people have access to the truth. If they are lied to and propagandized instead of informed, then they, in fact, live in a dictatorship, though one carefully disguised by their controllers. That’s why Thomas Jefferson said that newspapers that whore for political parties or other interests are no different than newspapers controlled by a government.

Take this little test: Pick out any national issue or any national political figure and ask yourself, What do I really know about this issue or this person? The honest answer in most cases will be not much that hasn’t been spoon-fed to you by liars and propagandists.

The Pentagon is helping to create a grim future for all of us: a struggle for energy primacy abroad and Big Brother at home.

It has once again become fashionable for the dwindling supporters of President Bush’s futile war in Iraq to stress the danger of “Islamo-fascism” and the supposed drive by followers of Osama bin Laden to establish a monolithic, Taliban-like regime — a “Caliphate” — stretching from Gibraltar to Indonesia. The President himself has employed this term on occasion over the years, using it to describe efforts by Muslim extremists to create “a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.” While there may indeed be hundreds, even thousands, of disturbed and suicidal individuals who share this delusional vision, the world actually faces a far more substantial and universal threat, which might be dubbed: Energo-fascism, or the militarization of the global struggle over ever-diminishing supplies of energy.

Unlike Islamo-fascism, Energo-fascism will, in time, affect nearly every person on the planet. Either we will be compelled to participate in or finance foreign wars to secure vital supplies of energy, such as the current conflict in Iraq; or we will be at the mercy of those who control the energy spigot, like the customers of the Russian energy juggernaut Gazprom in Ukraine, Belarus, and Georgia; or sooner or later we may find ourselves under constant state surveillance, lest we consume more than our allotted share of fuel or engage in illicit energy transactions. This is not simply some future dystopian nightmare, but a potentially all-encompassing reality whose basic features, largely unnoticed, are developing today.

These include:

* The transformation of the U.S. military into a global oil protection service whose primary mission is to defend America’s overseas sources of oil and natural gas, while patrolling the world’s major pipelines and supply routes.

* The transformation of Russia into an energy superpower with control over Eurasia’s largest supplies of oil and natural gas and the resolve to convert these assets into ever increasing political influence over neighboring states.

* A ruthless scramble among the great powers for the remaining oil, natural gas, and uranium reserves of Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and Asia, accompanied by recurring military interventions, the constant installation and replacement of client regimes, systemic corruption and repression, and the continued impoverishment of the great majority of those who have the misfortune to inhabit such energy-rich regions.

* Increased state intrusion into, and surveillance of, public and private life as reliance on nuclear power grows, bringing with it an increased threat of sabotage, accident, and the diversion of fissionable materials into the hands of illicit nuclear proliferators.