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By Joe Conason
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by Juan Cole
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Eight CIA officers died after a suicide bomber set off an explosive vest at the Forward Operating Base Chapman in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday, marking the deadliest attack on U.S. intelligence officials since the early ’80s, according to the Los Angeles Times.
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By William Pfaff — Iran appears to be in the throes of popular uprising, yet the U.S. and Israel continue to flirt with military intervention for dubious reasons.
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AP / Evert Elzinga
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By Eugene Robinson — The United States will soon have about 100,000 troops chasing shadows in Afghanistan, not long after an airliner was nearly blown up by a terrorism suspect who had no connection to that country. What’s wrong with this picture?
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AP / Mary Altaffer
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By Chris Hedges — The gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process.
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Flickr / ninjawil
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You’re not still thinking about Afghanistan are you? The U.S. may be sending more troops and treasure there, but the real action is in other failed and failing states such as Somalia and Yemen, which has gotten visits from David Petraeus, Joe Lieberman and ... (continued)
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Flickr / Tanya N
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Even after the hoopla of President Barack Obama’s executive order barring torture, evidence is surfacing that CIA agents are cooperating with, and potentially supervising, Palestinian security agents who are detaining and allegedly torturing Hamas supporters in the West Bank.
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Was Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize speech just idle wordplay or something more “muscular”? “Left, Right & Center” regular Tony Blankley thinks it was tantamount to a “triumph of belief in words over actions” and even invokes deconstructionism (eek!) in his analysis. Is the CIA in bed with Blackwater? And are big banks really cracking down on egregious executive bonuses?
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Reports are coming out that mercenaries from Blackwater Worldwide played central roles in some of the CIA’s most sensitive missions, including clandestine raids and the transport of detainees. Many guards claimed that Blackwater’s participation was so routine that the lines between military and contractor were blurred.
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By Joe Conason — Now it’s “Obama’s war,” but we should not ignore the events that led us to this moment and the inexplicable decisions of the Bush administration.
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By William Pfaff — With Vietnam, John F. Kennedy counted on the fact that one of the most effective ways to take a decision is to postpone it until it no longer is relevant. This is what Barack Obama has been able to do until now.
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By Joe Conason — The loudest voices on the right never tire of telling us that they are the truest patriots, but when did fear-mongering in a time of war become an act of patriotism?
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Modified from an archival White House photo by David Morse
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By William Pfaff — Barack Obama has made a welcome change to the presidency, dropping the praetorian guard that used to flank his predecessor at every opportunity.
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AP / Herbert Knosowski
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By Robert Scheer — Mikhail Gorbachev is not honored enough for the example he set. His past practices and recent cautions about Afghanistan should be heeded by Barack Obama.
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By William Pfaff — The international conversation since the Second World War tended to be something of an American monologue, but that’s changing now that the United States is widely perceived as a large part of the current world problem.
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Flickr / lightmatter
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Twenty-three CIA agents are going to have to think twice about leaving the U.S. now that an Italian court has convicted them in absentia for snatching an imam in Milan and sending him to Egypt, where the cleric says he was tortured. (continued)
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By Amy Goodman — “Extraordinary rendition” is White House-speak for kidnapping. Just ask Maher Arar. He’s a Canadian citizen who was “rendered” by the U.S. to Syria, where he was tortured for almost a year.
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AP / David Guttenfelder
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By Scott Ritter — President Obama may have won the Nobel Peace Prize, but if he allows himself to be bullied into supporting Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s foray into Afghanistan, he will reveal himself as the worst kind of warmonger.
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By William Pfaff — Given the Western world’s obsession with al-Qaida, it’s remarkable that public discourse makes little mention of the fact that the terror group is going out of business.
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Flickr / U.S. Army
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By Robert Scheer — There is no indication that any of the contending forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban, are interested in bringing al-Qaida back. On the contrary, all the available evidence indicates that the Arab fighters are unwelcome and that it is their isolation from their former patrons that has led to their demise.
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AP / Lynne Sladky
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By Marie Cocco — With the arrest of Najbullah Zazi, the man allegedly behind the biggest terror plot since 9/11, the truth is clearer than ever: Law enforcement stops terrorism. Not secret island prisons.
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AP / The Weekly Standard
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By Norman Birnbaum — It is puzzling that obituary notices of Irving Kristol obviously intended to be positive designate him the “Godfather” of neoconservatism. Likening this group of thinkers and writers to a gang of Mafiosi may or may not be accurate; it is certainly not flattering.
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CIA / JFK Presidential Library
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How about that Eric Holder? The Justice Department plans to make it harder for the government to hide behind “national security” in legal cases—a process that has been abused since a highly flawed Supreme Court decision first allowed wide latitude in such matters.
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White House / Pete Souza
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Seven former heads of the CIA formally requested that President Obama halt an ongoing inquiry into suspect abuse (aka torture) by the agency, arguing that important CIA work would be hampered by such an investigation. Obama didn’t bite, claiming that “nobody’s above the law.” Except George W. Bush, it seems.
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theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
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Attorney General Eric Holder may be convinced that he should go forward with his probe into the interrogation techniques used on terror suspects by CIA agents during the Bush II era, but seven former directors of the intelligence agency disagree—and they’re asking Holder’s boss, President Barack Obama, to intervene.
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AP / John Russell
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Did then-Attorney General John Ashcroft violate the Constitution in his handling of certain national security investigations shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks? According to the Los Angeles Times, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has reason to believe that he did, and thus Ashcroft can be sued for prosecutorial abuses even this long after the fact, the paper reported Saturday.
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AP / David Guttenfelder
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By Robert Scheer — True, he doesn’t seem a bit like Lyndon Johnson, but the way he’s headed on Afghanistan, Barack Obama is threatened with a quagmire that could bog down his presidency. LBJ also had a progressive agenda in mind, but it was soon overwhelmed by the cost and divisiveness engendered by a meaningless, and seemingly endless, war in Vietnam.
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
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By Joe Conason — Former Vice President Dick Cheney and his supporters love America so much they would transform it into Stalinist Russia.
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By William Pfaff — Thus far in the torture debate that has gone on in the United States since 2001, I can think of only one high American government figure currently in office taking a stand on torture in terms of justice, honor and national integrity.
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AP / Ron Edmonds
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Hey, hasn’t something—or someone—been missing from this latest round of debate and discussion about America’s use of troublesome interrogation tactics in recent years? Who could it be? Oh, of course. Enter Dick Cheney, stage right.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Eugene Robinson — History’s demands can seem inconvenient, unfair or unreasonable. But they can’t be ignored. Especially when it comes to torture.
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White House
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CIA Director Leon Panetta might quit or get canned in the next year, reports ABC News. Anonymous officials said Panetta, who may have already threatened to walk, is unhappy with everything from his role in the hierarchy to some of the nasty things the agency is up to. Both the White House and the CIA vehemently deny the report.
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Wikimedia Commons / tales-of-iraq-war.blogspot.com
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Monday saw more than one move on the part of Team Obama to deal with U.S. intelligence agencies’ treatment of terror suspects: In addition to Attorney General Eric Holder’s bid to take a second look into certain CIA-related cases from years past, President Obama has approved the formation of an integrated interrogation central command called the High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group.
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theblacksentinel.wordpress.com
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Although President Obama and others who were privy to information about alleged prisoner abuse by CIA employees and contractors previously passed on the possibility of prosecution, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has taken a different tack after reviewing the cases. Updated
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zimbio.com
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Conservative columnist Robert Novak died Tuesday in Washington at 78 after fighting brain cancer since 2008. Novak’s career spanned half a century, but he knew many would most remember him for his central role in the outing of CIA agent Valerie Plame during the Bush II era.
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U.S. Army / Staff Sgt. Andrew Smith
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By Chris Hedges — Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.
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fortunespawn.com
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Former Vice President Dick Cheney may have some ’splainin’ to do, and to the House Intelligence Committee at that, when the panel kicks off its investigation into claims that the CIA kept information about a covert counterterrorism program secret from Congress for eight years. Rep. Jan Schakowsky announced the probe Friday.
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Rainer Hachfeld, Neues Deutschland, Germany —
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By Marie Cocco — The legacy of that administration’s anti-terrorism tactics cannot be washed away in a tide of feel-good rhetoric about moving on, nor will it fade eventually if we apply Obama’s spiritual wisdom that this should be a time for “reflection, not retribution.”
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White House / David Bohrer
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What is so controversial about killing al-Qaida bigwigs and avoiding civilian casualties that the CIA would have to conceal such things from Congress? The usual anonymous officials have emerged to explain the secret CIA program Dick Cheney and the agency are supposed to have hidden, and something smells awfully fishy.
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Original: Flickr / kiwanja
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It turns out George W. Bush’s warrantless wiretap program wasn’t just illegal, it was pretty useless. A new report by the inspectors general of the agencies charged with catching the evildoers determined that many agents were flummoxed by the vague information coming out of the overly secretive program, and those who weren’t couldn’t demonstrate how it was helpful.
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cia.gov
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House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes wrote that his panel “has been misled, has not been provided full and complete notifications, and (in at least one occasion) was affirmatively lied to” by the CIA. The committee learned of the matter in the secret testimony of CIA Director Leon Panetta, who revealed that the agency he just inherited has been deceiving Congress since 2001.
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Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted in his pajamas in a 1980s-style coup, while the CIA has begun recruiting laid-off Wall Street financial analysts to screw up other economies. Check out Jon Stewart’s take on things in this clip from Monday night’s “Daily Show.”
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By William Pfaff — The truly significant result of the suppressed Iranian revolt is that the most important Islamist radical movement in the contemporary world has demonstrated that it has become a brutally repressive dictatorship whose leaders rig elections and beat down clear popular demands.
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AP photo / Ali Zare
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By Chris Hedges — Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran.
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New declassified information reveals that the CIA’s torture programs produced false information. September 11th mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed admitted he made up stories under torture, refuting a long-standing and still-used Bush administration argument that harsh interrogation yields highly valuable information. Rachel Maddow provides the details.
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White House / David Bohrer / Archive
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Leon Panetta responds to the former vice president’s constant sniping in the latest New Yorker: “I think he smells some blood in the water on the national-security issue. ... It’s almost, a little bit, gallows politics. When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point. I think that’s dangerous politics.”
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By Eugene Robinson — I used to fear that the president was overestimating the power of his personal history as an instrument of foreign policy. Now I wonder if he might have been underestimating.
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Mr. Fish
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By Chris Hedges — We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration.
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Flickr / joewcampbell
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While George W. Bush’s torture policies stained the reputations of a number of administration lawyers, others have been lauded for their resistance to backing harsh interrogation. However, newly revealed communications show that there was broad consensus in the Justice Department—even among lawyers who opposed such practices—that torture was legal.
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