CIA, Italy, Rendition (and Afghanistan and Drugs)

Something I posted on the White House Facebook Wall:

Italy Convicts 23 Americans for C.I.A. Renditions - NYTimes.com



Christine Beirne DeCamp
I just read about this.....interesting to see if obama decides to hang our CIA out to dry too.
Yesterday at 1:36pm

Todd Stark
the CIA has some of the dirtiest hands know to man....I doubt obama will change any of that
Yesterday at 1:50pm

Berd Whitlock
Unfortunately, I think the CIA poses one of the greatest threats to the health and well-being of the President. We only have to look at the events surrounding the assassination of JFK JR. to begin to ask the difficult questions that need to be asked about whom, and what, controls US foreign policy.

When the President speaks out, the President very well may be putting his own life in danger. I don't think anyone wants that. What we need to do is educate the public about the CIA.
Yesterday at 1:58pm

Berd Whitlock
Well, one important aspect to consider is that the Taliban had all but eradicated opium production. That was then, before the invasion. -Now, Afghanistan produces 93% of the world's opium supplies. I heard a statistic that opium production has increased 35-FOLD since the 2001 US/NATO invasion.

CIA and Drugs... There's a lot of information published about this connection - even a story about George HW Bush allegedly using an F-104 to run suspicious missions.
Yesterday at 2:17pm

Al Croke
Great video on the CIA Drug Trade
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbfuTv6ZJ8I&eurl
Yesterday at 2:21pm

Brian Willcock
Al that reminded me of this:http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/Library/studies/cu/cu44.htm
Yesterday at 2:28pm

Bill Halstead
I wish I could say I like this, but the grim fact is the CIA operatives are not the guilty ones - just like Lynddie England and others are not the guilty ones for the crimes they were convicted of. Yes, they were wrong, yes they should be punished, but ONLY if the investigations push on up the chains of command. It is unjust to punish the front line people and not the masterminds - Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee et al. These are the REAL criminals here...

Hold the Torturers Accountable

Constitutional Limits of Executive Power

Link to video of July 25th, 2008 House Judiciary Committee Hearing:

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=280000-1&showVid=true

This video is essential viewing. Really, if you care about holding members of the Bush Administration to account for their various improprieties you owe it to yourself to watch this.

Here's a description from the c-span site:

The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "Executive Power and Its Constitutional Limitations" to examine legal and legislative responses to allegations of misconduct and the expansion of executive branch power by the Bush administration. Topics include allegations of: (1) improper politicization of the Justice Department and the U.S. Attorneys offices, including potential misuse of authority with regard to election and voting controversies; (2) misuse of executive branch authority and the adoption and implementation of the so-called unitary executive theory, including in the areas of presidential signing statements and regulatory authority; (3) misuse of investigatory and detention authority with regard to U.S. citizens and foreign nationals, including questions regarding the legality of the administration's surveillance, detention, interrogation, and rendition programs; (4) manipulation of intelligence and misuse of war powers, including possible misrepresentations to Congress related thereto; (5) improper retaliation against administration critics, including disclosing information concerning CIA operative Valerie Plame, and obstruction of justice related thereto; and (6) misuse of authority in denying Congress and the American people the ability to oversee and scrutinize conduct within the administration, including through the use of various asserted privileges and immunities.

SJM 8016: Requesting Investigations into Impeachable Offenses

[for more information about impeachment in WA State, please see Washington for Impeachment]

The Washington State Senate Committee on Governmental Operations and Elections had a hearing on a bill that would call on the US Congress to investigate Bush Administration Officials for impeachable offenses. more information: SJM 8016

For video and audio of the January 17, 2008 hearing, point your browser to www.tvw.org and enter "8016" into the search field.

Here are some more photos from yesterday:

Blowback...

Chalmers Johnson writes about Charlie Wilson's war in Afghanistan as portrayed in George Crile's book, and Tom Hanks's new movie:

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...he never once mentions that the 'tens of thousands of fanatical Muslim fundamentalists' the CIA armed are the same people who in 1996 killed nineteen American airmen at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, blew a hole in the side of the U.S.S. Cole in Aden Harbor in 2000, and on September 11, 2001, flew hijacked airliners into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
...

[edit: here's more from Kenneth Turan of the LA Times:]

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By Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 21, 2007
"CHARLIE Wilson's War" is an anachronism, the wrong movie at the wrong time. Not only does it tell its tale in a style that feels dated and artificial, the story itself focuses on events that history has overtaken. The moving finger has written and moved on, and not even the combined star power of Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, writer Aaron Sorkin and director Mike Nichols can do anything about it.

Based on the bestselling book by George Crile, "Charlie Wilson's War" does tell a most unusual 1980s true story. It relates how Wilson, a pleasure-loving congressman from Texas (Hanks), joined forces with a wealthy and reactionary socialite (Roberts) and a grumpy CIA operative (Philip Seymour Hoffman) to use billions of dollars in U.S. and Saudi aid to arm Afghan mujahedin, or "freedom fighters," and oust the invading Soviet Union.

[edit]...


Though "Charlie Wilson's War" makes a few attempts near the conclusion to reference the chaos that is to come, they are too little and too late. Harder to deal with is the fact that, because Muslims around the world, as Crile notes, thought the victory in Afghanistan was the work of Allah, "we set in motion the spirit of jihad and the belief in our surrogate soldiers that, having brought down one superpower, they could just as easily take on another." The rest, as they say, is history.

Anti-oil-exploition Nationalist MP's Attacked in Green Zone, Baghdad

From Raed in the Middle [go to original]:

The attack on the Iraqi parliament was very strange. I don't think it was a suicide bomber. Take a look at this video and note that the explosion is way bigger than what an explosive belt would do. Besides, why would anyone blow himself up to kill the only anti-occupation group in the greenzone?

The official spokesman of a secular group that lost an MP in the explosion announced that the attack was aimed at silencing "nationalist MPs who are against splitting
iraq and against the oil law".Looking at who was killed and injured in the attack, it seems like they were ALL nationalists. Also, considering that the parliament was just about to begin debating the oil law this week, the timing of the attack was very convenient for the bush/imf/separatists.
...
The only way to stop the growing violence in Iraq is to end all the foriegn intervention and give Iraq back to the Iraqis.

This attack was convenient and it stinks to hell. I wonder if anyone at the CIA knows what happened. I also agree that the best way to stop the violence is to end US maneuvers to dominate and exploit the Iraqi economy.

Top Planners Expect Troop 'Surge' to Fail

This article appears in Salon.com - please take a look at it.

The Pentagon's not-so-little secret

As the president and Republicans continue to hype the surge -- and stifle debate about it -- Bush's own war planners are preparing for failure in Iraq.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Feb. 8, 2007 | Deep within the bowels of the Pentagon, policy planners are conducting secret meetings to discuss what to do in the worst-case scenario in Iraq about a year from today if and when President Bush's escalation of more than 20,000 troops fails, a participant in those discussions told me. None of those who are taking part in these exercises, shielded from the public view and the immediate scrutiny of the White House, believes that the so-called surge will succeed. On the contrary, everyone thinks it will not only fail to achieve its aims but also accelerate instability by providing a glaring example of U.S. incapacity and incompetence.

The profoundly pessimistic thinking that permeates the senior military and the intelligence community, however, is forbidden in the sanitized atmosphere of mind-cure boosterism that surrounds Bush. "He's tried this two times -- it's failed twice," Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said on Jan. 24 about the "surge" tactic. "I asked him at the White House, 'Mr. President, why do you think this time it's going to work?' And he said, 'Because I told them it had to.'" She repeated his words: "'I told them that they had to.' That was the end of it. That's the way it is."

On Feb. 2, the National Intelligence Council, representing all intelligence agencies, issued a new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, as harsh an antidote to wishful thinking as could be imagined. "The Intelligence Community judges that the term 'civil war' does not adequately capture the complexity of the conflict in Iraq, which includes extensive Shia-on-Shia violence, al-Qaida and Sunni insurgent attacks on Coalition forces, and widespread criminally motivated violence. Nonetheless, the term 'civil war' accurately describes key elements of the Iraqi conflict, including the hardening of ethno-sectarian identities, a sea change in the character of the violence, ethno-sectarian mobilization, and population displacements."
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The American Empire and "Blowback"

I love America: the diversity of people and ideas, the geography, the natural beauty, the opportunity, among many other aspects, make this a great place to live; and a great place to fight for the future of - a better future without the threat of global economic hegemonists barking for more bloodletting. I love America, but not Empire. I have a vision for a future America that is free of imperial pursuits. That's why I am posting this:

Chalmers Johnson
Empire v. Democracy
...
I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public. These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as well as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.
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