Year: 2014

Jon Stewart is Weeping for Joy

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Toronto’s world-renowned on crack-smoking mayor is standing for reelection:

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford officially launched his re-election campaign before a crowd of supporters Thursday night — sticking closely to the issues he has stressed over his last four years as mayor.

In a 30-minute speech before some 2,000 supporters, Ford pledged to fight special interests, to cut red tape and to keep taxes low if returned to office on Oct. 27.

“I’m running on my record and my record is second to none,” Ford told the crowd at the Toronto Congress Centre, the same venue where he celebrated his election victory back in 2010.

“Record second to none,” huh?

I would have to agree with that characterization, but I really do not see this as a positive.

What is Japanese for “Assholes Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth”?*

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I’m just wondering because some members of the Japanese Diet, upset by the ruling of the ICJ banning the Antarctic whale hunt, have done up a whale buffet as a F%$# you to the civilized world:

Japan may have called off its annual Antarctic whale hunt in deference to a ruling from the U.N.’s International Court of Justice, but the country’s whaling industry has yet to give up the fight.

 As a show of defiance, hundreds Japanese officials, politicians and other pro-whaling allies gathered Tuesday for a buffet featuring, what else, whale. According to the Associated Press, the group feasted on “Cutlets, sashimi, steak and other dishes made of whale meat” and shouted a one-word toast: ”Whale!”

 Meanwhile, Al Jazeera reports, a Japanese parliamentary committee unanimously passed a resolution calling on the government to fully investigate its options, saying that the court’s decision was “truly regrettable” but “does not necessarily prevent Japan’s whaling, which is a unique tradition and culture.” Among Japanese consumers, the AP notes, whale meat has been declining in popularity.

Japan literally had decades of whale meat in freezers, and these guys are throwing a tantrum.

Wankers.

*Google Translate gives, “出生時に溺れるれている必要がありますろくでなし,” and translating that back to English gives, “Bastard that must have been drowned at birth,” so it’s probably pretty close.

Linkage

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What Happened to Canada? (N+1) A good description of how a country of decent people is being converted to a, “rogue, reckless petrostate,” by the, “formidable disciplinary forces of late capitalism.”
Jack Halprin: As a Google Attorney, I Need the Homes of 7 Teachers, and Here’s Why (SF Weekly) Satirist gets in the head of a Google Lawyer who bought an apartment in San Francisco, and evicted everyone, including at least 2 teachers, just because.
In U.S., right wing extremists more deadly than jihadists (CNN)  Since 2001, 50% more deaths from right wing white supremacist extremists than from Islamist extremists
Court Says That Tweeting Someone Is ‘F**king Crazy’ Is Not Libelous (Crooks and Liars) What a relief that this f%$#ing crazy lawsuit was tossed out.

Jurassic Park as it should have been:

No Anthropogenic Climate Change, My Ass!

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Well, now I know why we had snow on Tuesday, the mid-Atlantic and Northeast US ended up an island of cool in an ocean of global warming:

NASA’s map of March temperatures around the globe is covered in orange and red, indicative of temperatures well above the norm and symptomatic of a planet running a fever for over 29 years. Yet various shades of blue light up eastern North America shivering under a cold regime which seized control in January.

 The wave after wave of bitter cold that has walloped the eastern half of the U.S. since the start of 2014 has truly been an anomaly set against the temperature pattern around the rest of the world. Incredibly, the eastern U.S. is the only region of the world that has been colder than normal each of the first three months this calendar year.

 ………

 So the tens of millions of winter weary residents of the eastern U.S. shouldn’t let the frigid weather in their backyard cloud their view of the relatively warm planet.

 While March produced areas of exceptional cold in the Great Lakes and Northeast – it was the third warmest March on record for the globe, 2 degrees (F) warmer than (the 1950-1981) average according to NASA.

Our climate is f%$#ed up and sh%$, and it is getting worse fast.

Would You Like a Loss of Civil Rights with Your Breakfast Cereal?

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General Mills is looking to make binding arbitration mandatory for people who take their lives into their hands when they eat their food:

Might downloading a 50-cent coupon for Cheerios cost you legal rights?

General Mills, the maker of cereals like Cheerios and Chex as well as brands like Bisquick and Betty Crocker, has quietly added language to its website to alert consumers that they give up their right to sue the company if they download coupons, “join” it in online communities like Facebook, enter a company-sponsored sweepstakes or contest or interact with it in a variety of other ways.

Instead, anyone who has received anything that could be construed as a benefit and who then has a dispute with the company over its products will have to use informal negotiation via email or go through arbitration to seek relief, according to the new terms posted on its site.

In language added on Tuesday after The New York Times contacted it about the changes, General Mills seemed to go even further, suggesting that buying its products would bind consumers to those terms.

“We’ve updated our privacy policy,” the company wrote in a thin, gray bar across the top of its home page. “Please note we also have new legal terms which require all disputes related to the purchase or use of any General Mills product or service to be resolved through binding arbitration.”

………

The change in legal terms, which occurred shortly after a judge refused to dismiss a case brought against the company by consumers in California, made General Mills one of the first, if not the first, major food companies to seek to impose what legal experts call “forced arbitration” on consumers.

“Although this is the first case I’ve seen of a food company moving in this direction, others will follow — why wouldn’t you?” said Julia Duncan, director of federal programs and an arbitration expert at the American Association for Justice, a trade group representing plaintiff trial lawyers. “It’s essentially trying to protect the company from all accountability, even when it lies, or say, an employee deliberately adds broken glass to a product.”

You have problem with Corporate Capitalist ™®©, comrade?*

We really need to pass Al Franken’s Arbitration Fairness Act, and put an end to this bullsh%$.

*H/t CZ at the Stellar Parthenon BBS for this quote.

Yes, this is the Very Epitome of Terrorizing the Populace

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Peter Schaapveld, a forensic psychologist, has surveyed people Yemenis who live in areas target by drones, and has determined that 92% of the populace is suffering from PTSD:

The people of Yemen can hear destruction before it arrives. In cities, towns and villages across this country, which hangs off the southern end of the Arabian Peninsula, the air buzzes with the sound of American drones flying overhead. The sound is a constant and terrible reminder: a robot plane, acting on secret intelligence, may calculate that the man across from you at the coffee shop, or the acquaintance with whom you’ve shared a passing word on the street, is an Al Qaeda operative. This intelligence may be accurate or it may not, but it doesn’t matter. If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chaotic buzzing above sharpens into the death-herald of an incoming missile.

Such quite literal existential uncertainty is coming at a deep psychological cost for the Yemeni people. For Americans, this military campaign is an abstraction. The drone strikes don’t require U.S. troops on the ground, and thus are easy to keep out of sight and out of mind. Over half of Yemen’s 24.8 million citizens – militants and civilians alike – are impacted every day. A war is happening, and one of the unforeseen casualties is the Yemeni mind.

Symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and anxiety are becoming rampant in the different corners of the country where drones are active. “Drones hover over an area for hours, sometimes days and weeks,” said Rooj Alwazir, a Yemeni-American anti-drone activist and cofounder of Support Yemen, a media collective raising awareness about issues afflicting the country. Yemenis widely describe suffering from constant sleeplessness, anxiety, short-tempers, an inability to concentrate and, unsurprisingly, paranoia.

Alwazir recalled a Yemeni villager telling her that the drones “are looking inside our homes and even at our women.'” She says that, “this feeling of infringement of privacy, combined with civilian casualties and constant fear and anxiety has a profound long time psychological effect on those living under drones.”

Last year, London-based forensic psychologist Peter Schaapveld presented research he’d conducted on the psychological impact of drone strikes in Yemen to a British parliamentary sub-committee. He reported that 92 percent of the population sample he examined was found to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder – with children being the demographic most significantly affected. Women, he found, claimed to be miscarrying from their fear of drones. “This is a population that by any figure is hugely suffering,” Schaapveld said. The fear of drones, he added, “is traumatizing an entire generation.”

Throughout Yemen, it seems, the endless blue heaven above has become a bad omen.

So, do you think that these folks will learn to hate the United States, and revisit violence with violence?

We are damaging a whole generation, and these damaged people will become tomorrow’s warriors determined to get vengeance.

Haterz Stop Hatin When It’s Them and Theirs

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The lawyer who defended the H8 amendment (Prop 8) in California, has “evolved” now that his daughter has come out:

The lawyer who argued before the Supreme Court in favour of upholding California’s ban on gay marriage learned while he was handling the case that one of his children is gay and now is helping her plan her wedding with another woman.

Attorney Charles Cooper says his view of same-sex marriage is evolving after having argued in court that gay unions could undermine marriages between a man and a woman.

The revelation is an unexpected footnote in the years-long debate over Proposition 8, the California measure struck down by the Supreme Court last year. It is also offers a glimpse, through the eyes of one family, of the country’s rapidly shifting opinions of gay marriage, with most public polls now showing majorities in favour of allowing the unions.

Cooper learned that his stepdaughter Ashley was gay as the Proposition 8 case wound its way through appellate court, according to a forthcoming book about the lengthy legal battle. And with the Supreme Court ruling now behind him, Cooper cast his personal opinion on gay marriage as an evolving process.

“My views evolve on issues of this kind the same way as other people’s do, and how I view this down the road may not be the way I view it now, or how I viewed it ten years ago,” Cooper said in journalist Jo Becker’s book “Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.”

Seriously, how many times has this happened?

They hate, and they want to make sure that the rest of society hates too, and then they discover that a loved one is gay, and they “reevaluate” their position on civil rights.

Seriously, why are conservatives solipsistic assholes?

I think that I just answered my own question.

H/t Joe.My.God.

Why We Have a College Funding Crisis

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The University of Maine is suffering the budgetary equivalent of the death of a thousand cuts, and they gave their vice chancellor for administration and finance a $40,000.00 raise:

While confronting a $36 million budget shortfall, the University of Maine System gave its top financial administrator a $40,000 raise between last fall and this spring, according to reports of employee salaries that the system publishes twice a year.

The salary for Rebecca Wyke, UMS vice chancellor for administration and finance, was listed at $205,000 annually as of April 8, 2014. That’s up from $165,000 listed in the report published Nov. 5, 2013.

“Is it a lot of money? Yes,” said University of Maine System Chancellor James Page, when asked Tuesday about the raise amid widespread budget cutting efforts at the seven UMS campuses and system office. “And we’re looking at reducing our financial management structure on an ongoing basis. But you do need to have the right people in place to get the job done.”

Page said Wyke was a finalist for a position at a higher education institution out of state that would have paid her more. He brought the question of her raise to the board of trustees in January, and they ratified the decision in an executive session. There was no mention of the raise in the open session.

“We determined that her leaving at this time would have significant adverse impact on the projects that we now have underway,” he said.

Wyke declined to be interviewed for this story.

The median salary of a vice chancellor at universities that award doctorate degrees in the United States is $326,863, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The median salary for a vice chancellor at any institution, including those that only have two-year programs, is $186,750.

………

The raise comes at a financially stressful time for the system. In November, Wyke told the board of trustees that the universities would need to cut $36 million, or about 6.6 percent of the system’s budget, in order to pass a balanced budget in fiscal year 2015.

Page told the state Legislature in March that up to 165 full-time jobs would have to be cut as a result of the budget shortfall.

The bureaucratic overhead at higher education has exploded over the past 50 years, and the upcoming crisis in student loans continues barreling down on us.

There is a genuine problem with looting in education, and it is at the administrative level where the problem exists, and not at the instructor level.

There are way too many people who have little interest in education beyond finding a way to loot education for their own personal benefit.  (I’m talking to you, Michelle “Sell the Public Schools to Wall Street” Rhee)

Linkage

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Best April Fools joke ever:

H/t Neo at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

New York City Racial Profiling Police Unit Shuttered

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Yes, Bill de Blasio being the Mayor of New York City makes a difference:

The New York Police Department has abandoned a secretive program that dispatched plainclothes detectives into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations and built detailed files on where people ate, prayed and shopped, the department said.

The decision by the nation’s largest police force to shutter the controversial surveillance program represents the first sign that William J. Bratton, the department’s new commissioner, is backing away from some of the post-9/11 intelligence-gathering practices of his predecessor. The Police Department’s tactics, which are the subject of two federal lawsuits, drew criticism from civil rights groups and a senior official with the Federal Bureau of Investigation who said they harmed national security by sowing mistrust for law enforcement in Muslim communities.

To many Muslims, the squad, known as the Demographics Unit, was a sign that the police viewed their every action with suspicion. The police mapped communities inside and outside the city, logging where customers in traditional Islamic clothes ate meals and documenting their lunch-counter conversations.

The program was evil and un-American, and played right into the hands of people who might actually be intending to do harm to the United States, because it alienated people from our law enforcement.

So Not Surprised

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Getting away from the mindless contrarianism* that Nate Silver’s rebooted Fivethirtyeight dot com seems to specialize in, Ben Casselman actually does some meaningful statistics, and discovers that the end of extended unemployment benefits has not led to more people finding jobs:

The cutoff of federal unemployment benefits doesn’t seem to be helping the long-term unemployed get back to work.

More than a million Americans saw their unemployment benefits expire at the start of the year, after Congress failed to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program. The program, which Congress created in 2008, had provided federally funded payments to unemployed workers when their state-funded benefits ran out, usually after 26 weeks.
The Senate recently voted to restore the benefits, but the House shows little sign of following suit.

Some economists had argued that the program was doing more harm than good by discouraging recipients from looking for work or taking jobs. They said that because the job market was improving, the time had come to cut off benefits. That would prod the unemployed to get back to work, perhaps leading them to accept offers that seem less than ideal.
So far, however, the evidence doesn’t seem to support that theory. Rather than finding jobs, the long-term unemployed continue to be out of luck.

We now have three months’ worth of job market data since the benefits program expired. The chart below shows job-finding rates for the long-term and short-term unemployed. Notice three things: First, the short-term unemployed have a much better chance of finding a job than the long-term unemployed and always have. Second, the short-term unemployed are seeing a steady improvement in their prospects, but the long-term jobless are not. And third, there’s been no major shift since the benefits program expired at the end of last year. (The chart shows the data as a 12-month rolling average, which could obscure a sudden shift. The un-smoothed data, however, doesn’t show a jump either.)

What a surprise.

The right wing economists, and those who listen to them, people who have been wrong about everything since at least 1929 are wrong again.

* AKA Michael Kinsley disease.

This is Complete and Total Contempt for the Law and Civil Rights

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Not only was the FBI spying on the defense counsel at the kangaroo courts military tribunals at Guantánamo, they actually flipped a member of the defense team with access to all their documents into an informant:

The US government’s troubled military trials of terrorism suspects were dealt another blow on Monday when proceedings were halted after an allegation surfaced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation turned a member of a 9/11 defendant’s defense team into a secret informant.

Judge James Pohl, the army colonel overseeing the controversial military commission at Guantánamo, gaveled a hearing out of session after barely 30 minutes on Monday morning, following the revelation of a motion filed by the defense stipulating that the FBI approached an unidentified member of the team during the course of an investigation into how a manifesto by accused 9/11 architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed found its way to the media.

Defense attorneys argued the government plunged them into a potential conflict of interest, as they would need to potentially defend themselves against a leak investigation, risking their ability to put their clients’ legal needs ahead of their own.

They implored Pohl to investigate, and if necessary, assign their clients with new independent counsel to advise the defendants about the existence and implications of conflict of interest. That could be a lengthy process – potentially the next delay for a proceeding that has yet to get out of the pretrial stage nearly two years after the latest incarnation of the 9/11 military trials began.

“We have an impossible situation in terms of representing our client … on any issue,” said James Harrington, a civilian attorney for Mohammed’s co-defendant Ramzi bin al-Shibh in the case, which carries the death penalty.

………

On 6 April two FBI agents approached the defense security officer assigned to bin al-Shibh’s defense team with a document that “in essence, seeks to enlist defense personnel” in an inquiry into the manifesto leak, said Walter Ruiz, an attorney for co-defendant Mustafa Ahmed al-Hasawi.

Harrington said the unnamed security officer, a contractor for the firm SRA International, had signed the document, which was written to indicate the start of an “ongoing” relationship with the bureau.

A defense security officer is a non-lawyer assigned by the commission’s convening authority to advise the defense team on the handling of classified information, among other issues. The officer would have had “unlimited access to our files,” Harrington said, although not to those of the other legal teams.

The presiding officer has adjourned hearings to determine who else might have been turned into a government agent. Of note is that even though the prosecution denies knowledge of any FBI investigation, “Joanna Baltes, an absent member of the prosecution team who recently became chief of staff to FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, played a role in the FBI involvement.” (emphasis mine)

Yea, sure, no collusion between the FBI and the Prosecutors at Guantánamo.  None at all. (Not)

On every single level, the military commissions have been a failure.

It was created to generate guaranteed convictions, and in so doing it eschewed the hundreds of years of developments that created the modern Unified Code of Military Justice, and the nearly 800 years of development of legal process that began with the Magna Carta.

These proceedings are an embarrassment to the nation which diminishes our stature throughout the world while serving as a highly effective recruiting tool for extremists,

The Onion to Shut Down and Lay off All Staff

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In a joint press conference today, editor Cole Bolton and CEO Steve Hannah have announced that The Onion will be ceasing publication immediately immediately, with all staff made redundant, and all assets put up for sale.

Bolton, shaking his head sadly, announced that following the in response to the declaration by the campaign for former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown for New Hampshire (this time) Senate that his opponent is, “A Senator from Massachusetts,” said that satire has been rendered obsolete by reality.

“I knew that it would be John Sununu who would destroy us,” said Bolton, the now former editor. “His continuous innovation in the area of unintentional self parody have always threatened us with obsolescence, and now he has finally made us completely irrelevant.”

John Sununu’s statement introducing Scott Brown at a campaign rally left the staff dumbstruck, with many in tears, even before the announced layoffs.

“We just gotta remind people that he’s coming back to his roots,” former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu told me after the Portsmouth rally. Sununu, in case you have forgotten, was one of Romney’s most ubiquitous and delightfully crotchety fsurrogates during the presidential campaign in 2012. In true Sununu fashion, he not only defended Brown’s alleged Live Free or Die bona fides; he’s gone on the attack. To him, it is Shaheen, not Brown, who’s the real outsider.

“She votes with Elizabeth Warren. She votes with [Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Ed] Markey. She is the third senator from Massachusetts,” Sununu told supporters at the Portsmouth rally before introducing Brown. “Scott’s happiest days as a young man were in New Hampshire. … So it’s going to be great to have a senator that was born virtually in the state of New Hampshire. Jean Shaheen, by the way, was born in Missouri!”

Did you catch how Sununu cleverly described Brown as “virtually” born in New Hampshire? He was actually born in Maine, which for Brown’s campaign is close enough for government work and has the great advantage of being closer than Missouri and not being Massachusetts. It is also rather audacious to paint Shaheen as a “senator from Massachusetts,” since Brown quite literally was, and very much wanted to remain, a senator from Massachusetts.

In related news, the General Manager and Editor-In-Chief of The Onion‘s AV Club, Josh Modell has announced, “I got nothing,” that they will shut down their studio, and cease producing satirical films, and simply re-broadcast cable news stories.

Dianne Feinstein* is Right, Both on the Principal, and the Form

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The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is asking the White House, and not the CIA to conduct the declassification review of the Senate torture report:

The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has called for the White House – not the Central Intelligence Agency – to lead the declassification process for the panel’s summary of its massive, scathing report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.

In a letter to President Barack Obama, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., challenged both the White House and CIA, which have suggested in recent days that the agency would spearhead the declassification.

“The CIA, in consultation with other agencies, will conduct the declassification review,” Caitlin Hayden, a spokeswoman for the White House National Security Council, said after the Intelligence Committee voted last week to declassify the 481-page executive summary.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the Obama administration wanted a thorough review.

“I agree that as much of the report as possible should be made public, of course allowing for redactions that are necessary to protect national security,” he told the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. “So I was pleased that the committee voted to send portions of the report forward for declassification.”

Holder recalled that Obama “believes that bringing this program into the light will help the American people understand what happened in the past and can help guide us as we move forward so that no administration contemplates such a program in the future.”

In her letter, Feinstein calls for swift action on the summary, findings and conclusions of the report. The summary, she says, should be released quickly and with minimal redactions.

“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the president and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that while only the CIA could declassify, “We’re trying to build up pressure on the White House and the CIA. It’s not just declassify. It’s to do a minimum of redactions.”

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a longtime critic of the CIA’s interrogation methods – widely regarded as torture – said he fully understood Feinstein’s concerns.

“She doesn’t trust the CIA. I think she’s probably right. I don’t trust them either,” he told McClatchy.

“This is the same outfit that destroyed the videos of the interrogations. That’s one of the most outrageous things I’ve ever seen in my life,” he said.

Also note that a target of the investigation, whose name was mentioned more than 1600 times in the Senate report, was the one who supervised CIA “Cooperation” (i.e. hacking into) Senate computers while staffers were reviewing documents.

The CIA is not to be trusted.

What’s more, they don’t have the authority to take lead on declassification, because they did not classify the program in the first place.

That was the White House:

Five years ago, I reported (BREAKING) that the Bush Administration (aka Dick Cheney) made the torture program a Special Access Program in unusual fashion. Rather than CIA Director George Tenet make torture a SAP, as mandated by the Executive Order governing such things, unnamed people in the National Security Council did so.

………
Since that time, I’ve asked experts in classification and they agree that something funky went down (note, too, that torture wasn’t a SAP at the very beginning).
I believe torture’s odd SAP status is one of the things that has implicated the Presidency, which the Obama Administration went to some lengths to cover up.

But it also should dictate the White House take the lead on declassification of the torture program.

Don’t take my word for it — take Dianne Feinstein’s word. In a letter to the White House, she invoked torture’s status as a “covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council” to call for the White House to lead declassification.

In a letter to the President dated April 7 and obtained by McClatchy, Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., called for swift action on the summary and the findings and conclusions of the report, which members voted last week to declassify. The summary, Feinstein said, should be released “quickly and with minimal redactions.”
“As this report covers a covert action program under the authority of the President and National Security Council, I respectfully request that the White House take the lead in the declassification process,” the letter reads.


Note, Dianne Feinstein has just formally confirmed the same detail the Obama Administration appealed to keep secret: torture was authorized by the President, not by OLC, not by George Tenet, not by John Rizzo. The President.

Which is why the President should take responsibility for releasing the report.

For some reason Barack Obama has the protection of Bush and Cheney as one of the most important goals of his presidency.

He may think that this position prevents a political schism, but what it really does is normalize corruption and create a criminogenic environment.

H/t Garrett at Daily Kos.

*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.

Barack Obama is Not a Member of the the Reality-Based Community

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The “reality-based” bon mot is, of course from Run Suskind’s description of the hubris and delusions of the Bush administration:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend — but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Well, it increasingly appears that Barack Obama comes from a very similar place:

Am I misjudging our time, or have we entered some accelerated cycle of American subversions, and then another cycle of coverups and disinformation that do not quite come off? In less than a year, the Obama administration has mounted four covert coup operations, all variants of the classic Cold War model, all costly of human life, all assuring us the contempt and animosity of many people for years to come.

In chronological order:

* The American-authorized coup in Egypt last July. In the disinformation universe, Washington watched at a distance. Since the coup, dead silence in the face of a blood bath, except for Secretary of State Kerry’s applause for the Egyptian army’s “restoration of democracy.”

• In the war to depose Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, the linchpin event is the chemical-weapons attack last Aug. 21. We are invited — required, actually — to believe Assad allowed U.N. inspectors in to determine responsibility for previous gas attacks and then launched another attack near Damascus while the inspectors were settled in their hotel rooms.

* The role of the U.S. and its European allies in financing, fomenting and steering the direction of the Ukraine coup requires little discussion at this point. Rather bizarrely in the face of all we have on record, the Obama people continue to insist Ukraine is nothing more than a case of Russian overreach. As order unravels in the eastern sections of the country, it is important to bear in mind the chronology of events — and from the beginning, not somewhere in the middle.

* In Venezuela, the foreign minister recently read aloud portions of intercepted cable traffic documenting American subterfuge. No, no, no: Nicolás Maduro, successor to the late Hugo Chávez, is just as paranoid as his mentor, and both were merely trying to distract Venezuelans from their economic problems. (Vigilance is always essential when Washington and the hacks marshal the “distraction” thesis.)

Cuba could go on this list, given news of Washington’s operation of a social-media network on Cuban soil via the customary collection of front companies, except that intruding covertly in Cuba is so routine as to be (appallingly) unremarkable.

And Seymour Hersh is all over how Barack Obama attempted to lie us into a Libya-type war:

In 2011 Barack Obama led an allied military intervention in Libya without consulting the US Congress. Last August, after the sarin attack on the Damascus suburb of Ghouta, he was ready to launch an allied air strike, this time to punish the Syrian government for allegedly crossing the ‘red line’ he had set in 2012 on the use of chemical weapons. Then with less than two days to go before the planned strike, he announced that he would seek congressional approval for the intervention. The strike was postponed as Congress prepared for hearings, and subsequently cancelled when Obama accepted Assad’s offer to relinquish his chemical arsenal in a deal brokered by Russia. Why did Obama delay and then relent on Syria when he was not shy about rushing into Libya? The answer lies in a clash between those in the administration who were committed to enforcing the red line, and military leaders who thought that going to war was both unjustified and potentially disastrous.

Obama’s change of mind had its origins at Porton Down, the defence laboratory in Wiltshire. British intelligence had obtained a sample of the sarin used in the 21 August attack and analysis demonstrated that the gas used didn’t match the batches known to exist in the Syrian army’s chemical weapons arsenal. The message that the case against Syria wouldn’t hold up was quickly relayed to the US joint chiefs of staff. The British report heightened doubts inside the Pentagon; the joint chiefs were already preparing to warn Obama that his plans for a far-reaching bomb and missile attack on Syria’s infrastructure could lead to a wider war in the Middle East. As a consequence the American officers delivered a last-minute caution to the president, which, in their view, eventually led to his cancelling the attack.

For months there had been acute concern among senior military leaders and the intelligence community about the role in the war of Syria’s neighbours, especially Turkey. Prime Minister Recep Erdoğan was known to be supporting the al-Nusra Front, a jihadist faction among the rebel opposition, as well as other Islamist rebel groups. ‘We knew there were some in the Turkish government,’ a former senior US intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, told me, ‘who believed they could get Assad’s nuts in a vice by dabbling with a sarin attack inside Syria – and forcing Obama to make good on his red line threat.’

………

A series of chemical weapon attacks in March and April 2013 was investigated over the next few months by a special UN mission to Syria. A person with close knowledge of the UN’s activity in Syria told me that there was evidence linking the Syrian opposition to the first gas attack, on 19 March in Khan Al-Assal, a village near Aleppo. In its final report in December, the mission said that at least 19 civilians and one Syrian soldier were among the fatalities, along with scores of injured. It had no mandate to assign responsibility for the attack, but the person with knowledge of the UN’s activities said: ‘Investigators interviewed the people who were there, including the doctors who treated the victims. It was clear that the rebels used the gas. It did not come out in public because no one wanted to know.’

In the months before the attacks began, a former senior Defense Department official told me, the DIA was circulating a daily classified report known as SYRUP on all intelligence related to the Syrian conflict, including material on chemical weapons. But in the spring, distribution of the part of the report concerning chemical weapons was severely curtailed on the orders of Denis McDonough, the White House chief of staff. ‘Something was in there that triggered a shit fit by McDonough,’ the former Defense Department official said. ‘One day it was a huge deal, and then, after the March and April sarin attacks’ – he snapped his fingers – ‘it’s no longer there.’ The decision to restrict distribution was made as the joint chiefs ordered intensive contingency planning for a possible ground invasion of Syria whose primary objective would be the elimination of chemical weapons.

………

In the aftermath of the 21 August attack Obama ordered the Pentagon to draw up targets for bombing. Early in the process, the former intelligence official said, ‘the White House rejected 35 target sets provided by the joint chiefs of staff as being insufficiently “painful” to the Assad regime.’ The original targets included only military sites and nothing by way of civilian infrastructure. Under White House pressure, the US attack plan evolved into ‘a monster strike’: two wings of B-52 bombers were shifted to airbases close to Syria, and navy submarines and ships equipped with Tomahawk missiles were deployed. ‘Every day the target list was getting longer,’ the former intelligence official told me. ‘The Pentagon planners said we can’t use only Tomahawks to strike at Syria’s missile sites because their warheads are buried too far below ground, so the two B-52 air wings with two-thousand pound bombs were assigned to the mission. Then we’ll need standby search-and-rescue teams to recover downed pilots and drones for target selection. It became huge.’ The new target list was meant to ‘completely eradicate any military capabilities Assad had’, the former intelligence official said. The core targets included electric power grids, oil and gas depots, all known logistic and weapons depots, all known command and control facilities, and all known military and intelligence buildings.

(emphasis mine)

Once again, what was sold as a strike for a specific purpose is actually being run as a flat out attempt at regime change.

I am not arguing that Barack Obama is simply George W. Bush with a prettier (and smarter) wife. (At least not today)

Rather, I am suggesting that, notwithstanding protestations of “Hope” and “Change”, Barack Obama is a creature of the political and bureaucratic institutions in Washington, and he lacks the inclination, and perhaps the power to challenge them.

This is far more worrying, because it means that it is not the elected officials, who periodically must submit themselves to the will of the voters, but rather the internal bureaucracies of our foreign policy/war making apparatus who are approaching our interests from a viewpoint detached from reality.

This makes our foreign policy missteps over the past decade or so an artifact of an ineluctably dysfunctional culture.

When one looks at history, this is a place occupied by empires just before their death throes.

This will not be pretty.

Why the NSA Cannot be Trusted with Our Cybersecurity

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Many of you may have heard of the “Heartbleed” bug, which may allow people to access passwords of users and the crypto keys of for websites using the most popular SSL program, OpenSSL.

It now appears that the NSA knew about Heartbleedfor 2 years, and kept it a secret so that they could use the exploit:

The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.

 The agency’s reported decision to keep the bug secret in pursuit of national security interests threatens to renew the rancorous debate over the role of the government’s top computer experts. The NSA, after declining to comment on the report, subsequently denied that it was aware of Heartbleed until the vulnerability was made public by a private security report earlier this month.

 “Reports that NSA or any other part of the government were aware of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability before 2014 are wrong,” according to an e-mailed statement from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Heartbleed appears to be one of the biggest flaws in the Internet’s history, affecting the basic security of as many as two-thirds of the world’s websites. Its discovery and the creation of a fix by researchers five days ago prompted consumers to change their passwords, the Canadian government to suspend electronic tax filing and computer companies including Cisco Systems Inc. to Juniper Networks Inc. to provide patches for their systems.

 Putting the Heartbleed bug in its arsenal, the NSA was able to obtain passwords and other basic data that are the building blocks of the sophisticated hacking operations at the core of its mission, but at a cost. Millions of ordinary users were left vulnerable to attack from other nations’ intelligence arms and criminal hackers.

This bug is, to Bowlderize Joe Biden, “A big f%$#ing deal.”

It basically completely breaks internet security, and the NSA sat on it, because they wanted to use the exploit.

The idea that anyone would allow the NSA in on any discussion of computer security is truly troubling.  It is like like allowing a young Willie Sutton to consult on bank security.*

* Later in life, after he got out of prison, Willie Sutton did actually consult on bank security.

I am Happy to be Wrong

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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have entered the United States, and they were not detained:

Despite fear over detention by the authorities, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — the first reporters to meet with Edward Snowden and receive access to his trove of leaked NSA documents — reentered the U.S. without trouble.

Both journalists feared detention or at the very least questioning on returning to U.S. soil. The Justice Department had refused to give any information about whether Greenwald and Poitras might be subject to a grand jury investigation. Furthermore, last year Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow airport for nine hours, his electronic devices confiscated, under a U.K. counterterror act. In this age, when journalism is all too often aligned with terrorism, Greenwald and Poitras were understandably concerned. Indeed, Poitras has been questioned for hours on end at U.S. airports in the past over her journalistic work pre-dating the Snowden leaks.

But, as Greenwald told reporters Friday, he “expected that they wouldn’t be that incredibly stupid and self-destructive to try and do something that in the eyes of the world would be viewed as incredibly authoritarian. … That would forever undermine their ability to criticize other governments for imprisoning journalists and for having a constitutional fight over the First Amendment that successive administrations have wanted to avoid.”

And indeed, the U.S. authorities were not so stupid, and Poitras and Greenwald entered the U.S. safely. That the two journalists feared detention at all remains grimly reflective of what whistle-blower attorney Jesselyn Raddack calls the current “war on information.” Lest we forget, Barrett Brown and Chelsea Manning sit behind bars; Edward Snowden faces hefty charges under the Espionage Act; AP journalists’ phone logs were surveilled by the DOJ; Fox News correspondent James Rosen was once named by the FBI as a possible “co-conspirator” in a crime for the journalistic act of obtaining leaked information. The NSA revelations, shedding light on a vast and unbounded corporate-government surveillance nexus, have unquestionably been in the public interest. The whistle-blower behind them should not fear persecution, nor should the journalists reporting the story. But where Poitras and Greenwald can point to the First Amendment (or whatever meek vestiges of it that the U.S. cares to recognize), Snowden has no such recourse and no such protection.

I would anticipate that they are being intensely watched, and that all their communications are monitored, but the fact there has been no official harassment yet is heartening.

Then again, the fact that I, and many others, expected official misconduct on the part of the US state security apparatus speaks volumes about the state of our society.