Fog and Friction are Stranger than Fiction

That unnamed "senior
Pantagon official" you're
heard so much from.

by Jeff Huber

I took a long enough oxygen break from the novel project (Sandbox Generals) this week to catch a whiff of the story about how we bombed the smithereens out of some of our little Paki pals.  At least 25 of the Central Asian buggers shuffled off to party with however many virgins it is non-terrorist Muslims shuffle off to when they shuffle off.  One thing you can be sure of is that none of the non-Muslims who shuffled them off the face of the planet could give a gnat’s eyelash less where the Hajis hi-hoed to or how many hoes they had when they got there. 

A gram of war truth that managed to sneak under the radarscopes of the Pentarchy’s echo chamberlains at the New York Times was a November 24 story by Andrew E. Kramer about how many Iraqi widows and fatherless children nine years of war in that country have created.  A UN report states that at the peak of sectarian violence in 2006, nearly 100 women were widowed every day. 

I grow increasingly appalled at the number of people, most of whom likely consider themselves God-fearing Christians, continue to support our overseas armed abominations.  Sure, we can look down our noses at the non-sentient masses who are hooked on a study diet of Fox News, Rabid Radio and the rest of the Big Brother Broadcast, but they aren’t the only ones passively supporting our national atrocities.  All those liberals camped out across the country because they’re mad at the rich could long ago have stopped our psychotic hegemony in Iraq and the Bananastans and Libya and in all the 120 or so other places where we’re freeing peace-loving peoples of all creeds and colors and nationalities by relieving them of the burden of existence.  

The Times, our newspaper of revised record, identified the parties who parted the Pakistani patriots from this mortal coil as “NATO aircraft" that “killed at least 25 soldiers in strikes against two [Pakistani] military posts.”  Two major things are wrong with this take of the story.

The first is that "NATO" is propaganda peddler code for "US." The combatant commander of NATO is, always was and always will be an American four-star and hence NATO's commander in chief is and always was and always will be the President of the United States.  Pointing a blood-stained finger at NATO every time one of our cockamamie conflicts turns another corner for the worse illustrates our psychopathic refusal to bear responsibility for our actions.  

Second, "NATO aircraft" are kind of like guns.  NATO aircraft don’t kill people.  People flying in NATO aircraft kill people.  This business of making war more palatable by framing its human toll in terms of remotely controlled violence needs to end.  People in manned NATO aircraft and/or people flying UAVs over Kabul from air conditioned bunkers in Nevada are hands-on killing their victims as surely as the special ops cats who snipe at alleged evildoers from a thousand yards away or skewer them at something less than arm’s length with a high-tech Ka-bar they bought at the “tactical store” just outside the front gate at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek.

We have met the barbarians, and they are us.

The more we’ve managed to depersonalize the horrors of war, the more palatable war has become.  Donald Rumsfeld used to cry like a wet wicked witch about how all the “terrible images” the mainstream media were showing us were turning popular opinion against his Morass in Mesopotamia.  That dose of mind detergent flowed through the BBB until everyone, even a majority of the self-proclaimed cognoscenti who should have known better, believed that they had in fact seen all sorts of grisly war zone violence in the popular electronic and tree-centric media.  In reality nobody had seen anything remotely close to the sorts of apocalyptic horror that we have created in the name of the “9/11” meme.  We have killed well over 50 brown and yellow overseas people for every American who died in the Twin Towers and Pentagon air strikes that the multi-billion dollar North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) failed to defend us against (because, I’ve always suspected, they had already tweaked their radars to track Santa’s sleigh and weren’t looking that closely at jumbo jets veering off their assigned courses and altitudes and on hot vectors for national landmarks).  

But they’re brown and yellow people we’re killing, and they’re halfway across the world, and our gutless wonder press has gone belly up for bull feather merchant marines like Maj. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, warriors whose full time mission it is to wage information operations against the American people, culling us into believing that ou fundamental security hinges upon our support of an exorbitant war against enemies who have no armies or navies or air forces or even a defense budget. 

The likes of General Jeff in this man’s military, along with their trusty little Tom Ricks wannabe helpers in the woefully misnamed fourth estate, also have the programmed masses believing that military leaders like “King” David Petraeus actually know something about the art of war when, as the latest bottom burp with the Pakistanis clearly illustrates, they don’t know their helmets from their mess kits from the things that mark their skivvies.  

"That was close!" says "Revoltin'" John Bolton.

One doesn't need a PhD in post-Clausewitzean bebop theory to understand the truth of Sun Tzu’s caution that “No nation ever profited from a long war.”  But what did the tank thinkers at the Pentagon cook up as their overarching post-9/11 strategy?  The Long War and the Era of Persistent Conflict.  Clausewitz admonished that all actions in war should contribute to the war’s political aim.  But the only political aim the Long War seems to further is to make itself as long as possible, possibly forever or until Dick Cheney and John Bolton and the rest of the New American Centurions draw a “Get Out of Hell Free” card, which ever comes first.   

The Clausewitzean concept of critical vulnerabilities is something the military artist is supposed to identify or create in the adversary, allowing friendly forces to attack the tragic flaw in an enemy’s armor and causing him to collapse with relatively minor own-force expense and effort.  Throughout our persistently conflicted Long War, we have take pains to create vulnerabilities in our own armor.  Especially notable among these right now is our reliance on a line of supply that runs through Pakistan, a country that is as much of an enemy as it is an ally, and one that we consistently double-dog-dare to shut down our flow of war material into our primary theater of operations.  If the guys running the Bungle in Bananastan had been in charge of the Normandy invasion, they would have routed Allied supply lines through German occupied Poland. 

I abandoned earlier treatments of Sandbox Generals because every time I dreamt up some incredibly stupid stunt for Prince Albert and Fix Felon and the rest of the Pentarchs to pull, their real life counterparts would pull something incredibly dumber.  It seemed, at first effort (and second and third effort as well, in this case), impossible to write a farce that burlesques real life events that are themselves parodies of human political behavior.   

But then I recalled how it occurred to me once that the most accurate film portrayal of the American west was probably Blazing Saddles.  That gave me the measure of the problem, and I hope to have the current draft-in-progress completed in time for the Baby Jeebus to preview it, or Baby New Year at the latest.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Holiday Haitus Humbuggery and Book Leave

By Jeff Huber

I’ll be putting the column on the back burner for the rest of the year in hopes of completing the first draft of Sandbox Generals by Baby Jeebus Day.  In lieu of an actual essay that requires disciplined and organized thought and writing, I’ll be posting a headline or two that’s caught my eye lately and something form the work-in-progress that covers the territory.

This week I came upon this story about the V-22 Osprey, the lean, mean Marine killing machine that even Dark Lord Cheney couldn’t put to death.  Even Big Dick can’t fight Daddy Warbucks.

A comment on the budget impasse:  I used to maintain that the difference between Republicans and Libertarians is that Republicans want someone else to pay for the roads and Libertarians don’t think we need roads.  The gap seems to have narrowed to the width of a gnat’s eyelash toward the Libertarian ideal. 

How dare he say those true
 things about me?  Curses!

When it comes to the defense budget, though, war spending is like Jell-o:  there’s always room for it.  Heck, war’s our biggest job creator!  And on that note, please give your consideration to the following public service preview:

Unknown to just about anyone besides the inner Centurion circle—which included Buzz, which meant Jack knew about it too—was that one of the first things Fix unfarkled, once he found himself in the human skin-upholstered seat of power at the head of the petrified round table in the Voodoo Hunker Bunker at the bottom of the hole beneath the White House, was to get rid of most of that expensive crap like stealth bombers and aircraft carriers and flying submarines and SCUBA tanks and pretend like he hadn’t gotten rid of them. 

Fix got that idea from his trusty but unwitting adviser Jack, who had suggested in his WinstonSmith.com column that the only way to get the Pentarchy to scrap most of its arsenal would be to do allow it to do so in secret while continuing to charge its maintenance and operating costs on the tax payers’ revolving charge account with China.  The way weapons acquisition worked, Jack explained, was that once the arms industry had a contract to build fantastical killing machines, it put the Government in a conundrum, a pickle, a jam, a fait accompli, a Catch-22 if you will. 

As soon as the industry got a contract to make X numbers of Death Doodads for Y dollars per copy, it revised the Death Doodad’s cost estimate to reflect, say, the rising price of suntan oil at Ipanema Beach in Brazil, vacation spot for the thousands of Brazilian workers who grew and harvested the bananas that the riveters who riveted the wings and rudders and keels and tires on the Death Doodad in North Buttplug, South Dakota peeled and sliced and placed on top of their children’s’ bowls of breakfast cereal every morning.  As per federal regulations regarding compensation of employees of firms under federal contract to provide goods and services relating to national security, the inflated bananas necessitated a raise in said employees cost of living allowances (COLAs).  The COLA increase, by law, had to be a set percentage of the annual earnings of the employees, and the increase had to apply to all employees of the company under contract whether that employee worked directly on the Death Doodad or not.  Otherwise an employee might be unfairly punished by being transferred from riveting the Death Doodad to screwing rubber nipples to the tops of baby bottles, thus losing income needed to buy his or her children food sufficiently nourishing to compensate for the ketchup soup and baked bean burgers they were eating at school.    

I'm afraid we've experienced cost
overruns with the Death Doodad.
Darn the bad luck!

The riveters received sufficient extra pay to purchase the pricier bananas.  That alone wouldn’t have had that much effect on the per-copy cost of the Death Doodad.  Things got expensive as the COLA percentage increase was applied to the compensation packages of the chief executive officers and finance officers and operating officers and administrative officers and training officers and safety officers and human resource officers and horoscope officers and presidents and executive vice presidents and vice presidents and executive assistant vice presidents and so on.  When the smoke finally cleared, a half-percent increase in the cost of Brazilian bananas could jack the per-copy cost of X Death Doodad from Z bazillion simoleons to 2Z bazillion or even 3Z.  

And if Congress didn’t play along and pass the 2 or 3Z appropriation, the contracting company’s chief propaganda officers, most of whom by Sandbox Generals day had been trained by Flip or one of Flip’s protégés, launched an ad campaign on the Big Brother Broadcast decrying that Congress was taking the bananas off of the cereal of the children of honest American Death Doodad Riveters. 

As soon as the defense contracting company got the new appropriation for the Death Doodad, its researchers discovered that the Doodad didn’t do what it was designed to do if it didn’t have a Destruction Dealie attached to it.  Destruction Dealies wouldn’t have been so costly except that they had to be made from non-stainless steel, an alloy that could only be manufactured by a process specially invented that took the chromium out of stainless steel.  And no, steel that hadn’t been turned into stainless steel wouldn’t do for reasons having to do with aerospace-age chemistry highly classified (heh!).  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Letting Israel Lead Us Around by the Potty Wand

by Jeff Huber

Mitt Romney and 51 percent
of his constituency.

The best political joke of the election season so far has been Mitt Romney’s assertion that we should let Israel dictate our Middle East Policy.  Jesus at the temple, Mitt; catch up.  Israel has had undue influence on our policies in that part of the world since its inception in 1948.  Since the neocon/Likudnik cabal came into power with the pseudo-election of young Mr. Bush in 2002, Israel has been leading our Middle East policy around the potty wand. 

The latest evidence of our abject obedience to Israel's interests was the latest two-prong offensive against Iran, the most recent operation in a long propaganda campaign aimed at turning the Persian state into a post-modern incarnation of the Evil Soviet Empire. 

Phase one of Operation Persian Poppycock was a Keystone Kop caper cooked up by the DEA and the FBI that took a drug dealer looking to ditch hard jail time and an alcoholic wife-abusing dead beat and framed them as key conspirators in a Iranian Quds Force scheme to blow a big shot Saudi and an Israeli Embassy to smithereens.  Even though the warmonger friendly New York Times and Washington Post did their very best to peddle the pathetic plot to the proletariat, the story was quickly dismissed by the cognizant majority as bunker mentality bunkum. 

The IAEA Report on Iraq

Less probal to thinking was the grand scale deception the Pentarchy's bull feather merchant marines conducted regarding accusations about Iran’s nuclear intentions centered on the release of the recent report of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).  This canard too was supported by the warmongery’s select echo chamberlains, most notably the deplorable David E. Sanger of the New York Times and the irredeemable Job Warwick of the Washington Post, both of whom tumbled tokeses over teakettles to cite the most irresponsible and incendiary sources available on the subject of Iran’s nuclear program, including fake nuclear weapons shaman and prominent AIPAC prostitute David Albright. 

Israeli Prime Minister Bebe Netanyahu, who French President Nicholas Sarkozy recently had the moral spine to call a liar in front of U.S. President Barack Obama, took advantage of the mainstream bullhorn to criticize the IAEA report because “only things that could be proven were written” in it, but, “in reality there are many other things that we see."  In reality one needs a microscope and a fertile imagination to see anything provable whatsoever in the IAEA report.   

I cannot tell a lie.  Know what
I mean?  Eh?  Know what I mean?
Wink, wink.   Nudge, nudge.
Say no more.

The crux of the report’s allegations that Iran may yet be working toward building a nuclear weapon rest on its claim that a former Soviet nuclear weapons scientist had helped Iran construct a detonation system that could be used for a nuclear weapon.  But as my colleague Gareth Porter quickly pointed out, the scientist, identified in news reports as Vyacheslav Danilenko, is not a nuclear weapons scientist at all.  Danilenko, as research of open source documents revealed, has specialized for his entire career in the production of detonation nanodiamonds, which are diamond particles used for industrial and medical purposes including the treatment of cancer.  Iran, coincidentally, has been endeavoring to establish a nanodiamond industry.  Maybe that's the next plank in our Iran policy: they can have a nanodiamond industry as long as they buy their nanodiamonds from us.  

The IAEA could easily have researched the materials that Porter researched and arrived at the same conclusions that he reached.  Considering the report’s predictably profound impact on international relations, one might think that the IAEA would have to taken as much trouble as Porter took to get its facts straight.  But one would be sadly mistaken, and one should be furious to find that the IAEA chose instead to use unchallenged information fed to it by an undisclosed “member nation,” much in the same manner that the New York Times and Washington Post repeat pro-war propaganda channeled though it by unnamed “senior officials.”  I can’t say for sure what that member nation’s identity might be, but I’d bet a dollar of my own money that its first initial stands for “Israel.”  You never know, though.  The member nation’s first initial might also stand for “United.”

Not shockingly, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post nor any of the rest of the mainstream news foppery has bothered to take the trouble to break the news that their breaking news about the IAEA report was pure unadulterated bull roar. 

This monkey business of accusing Iran of everything from killing our soldiers in Iraq to building nukes to getting dairy goats pregnant without providing a scrap of credible evidence to back the accusations up has been going on since at least 2007 when Mr. Bush’s bunch was looking for excuses to extend the War on Evil in Iraq indefinitely with a “surge” escalation.  If a tenth of shenanigans the Pentarchy has charged Iran with being up to were true, there would be no excuse on earth for not having bombed the entire Persian race into the carrier pigeon mode by now.  

Yet Minister of Peace Leon Panetta wasted little time in calling a news conference and cautioning, oh, no, no, we don’t want to bomb Iran, that might bring on “unintended consequences,” yepper, yup, yup, yo!  It must be that Uncle Leo has reached the age where he's worried about the destination of his immortal soul.  

Iran is not a military threat to anyone—except possibly to itself if it ever were to acquire nuclear weapons.  Nukes in the hands of Iran would be the third-world equivalent of a doomsday machine, and as Doctor Strangelove admonished the Soviet Ambassador in the eponymous film by Stanley Kubrick, a doomsday machine doesn’t serve its purpose unless you tell everyone that you have it.  Once Iran were to announce its possession of a nuclear arsenal, Fork-Tongued Bebe would have his flying circus turn Iran into a parking lot for our permanent occupation forces in Iraq and the Bananastans.

Despite plain evidence that our Iran policy is the epitome of rogue hegemony, we continue to demonize Iran in accordance with the dictates of the Israelis, who could populate the world’s museums with the galleries' worth of U.S. politicians it has purchased over the years.  I have suggested that if we really want to vouchsafe Israel’s security we should make it the 51^st state.  But Israel isn’t likely to go along with that.  As I mentioned a moment ago, they don’t need formal legislative representation here because they already own our Congress, and if they become a state they’ll have to pay our taxes and obey our laws.

Israel has a much better deal the way things are now.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.

Jeff

...And Keep Lying Some More...

By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Let's Keep Lying!

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and side boy William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter rumps when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy* and hence put their careers with the phony-baloney Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Hey, I Know What. Let's Lie Some More about Iran.

8 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The Pentarchy* continues to blow smoke about Iran despite its long-standing inability to produce a smoking gun. 

In a 3 November piece for the Middle East Research and Information Project titled “Debunking the Iran ‘Terror Plot,’” my colleague Gareth Porter knocked the bottom out of what little credibility was left of assertions that elements of Iran’s QODs force were behind a plot to assassinate a Saudi ambassador and commit other tawdry terrorisms.

Hey, Abbott!  

A still image from Abbot and Costello
Meet the FBI.

The FBI’s cock-eyed case was a keystone caper from creation to conclusion.  A narcotics seller turned DEA informant was dope-dealing his way out of a long prison sentence by dangling a hook in front an Iranian-American named Mansour J. “Scarface” Arbabsiar, a middle-aged alcoholic shipwreck best known for his unreliability, his slovenliness, his business and relationship failures and his limited ability to discriminate between perception and reality. 

A brigade of Jack Bauer wannabes in DEA, the FBI and other Justice Department booby hatcheries decided to make their careers by trumping up a fairy tale of evil deeds and the evil doers who do them for their equally career-minded bosses.  The next thing you knew we had a Tailor of Panama/Our Man in Havana scenario where a head of state, in this case young Mr. Obama, made a draconian foreign policy commitment based on the fabrications of subordinates who were blindingly over-ambitious and dazzlingly under-competent. 

The Scarface farce may has dipped back beneath the radar for now, the companion piece of the latest Iran scare stratagem has roared to the forefront.  While Mr. Obama was telling us that he knew for sure the Iranian government was up to infamous infamies because a dope dealer said that an aging drunk said so (and that was good enough for him), he also sprang the news that UN inspectors had new proof that Iran has a nuclear weapons program, though he didn’t say what that proof was, just like he doesn’t elaborate on the legal arguments he says support his unitary decisions to suspend the Constitution.

Keystone Kondi Klaims the Persians Puke a Peck of Split Pea Soup

Possessed by Dick Cheney or just stoned?

Over the weekend, the usual echo chamberlains launched the second wave of disingenuous accusations regarding Iran’s nuclear intentions.  Ghoulish Condi Rice, one of the most persistent political herpes strains gifted to us by the Bush administration, made an appearance on ABC’s This Week to blab about how Team Obama is undoing all the beautiful wickedness she helped Dark Lord Cheney accomplish during the two-term Bush disaster.  As ever, Condi’s eyes stubbornly focused on a point somewhere above the camera and far, far away, as if somewhere in the sub-language labyrinth of her cognizance she realizes just how full of used horse lunch she is. 

On the subject of Iran, Condi quacked her standard loco litany of invective, stating that, “It’s trying to get a nuclear weapon.”  Condi didn’t offer any proof of her statement, and This Week host Christiane Amanpour, a once credible Middle East correspondent, didn’t push her for any.  It was Amanpour, in fact, who fed Condi her Iran-bash straight line by saying that this week the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is "about to reveal, apparently, more details showing, apparently, that Iran is trying to weaponize.” (My italics).  Christiane had apparently been reading the apparently unrevised anti-Iran propaganda her print colleagues had polluted the information environment with. 

Fredrick Dahl of Reuters filed a Sunday piece that leads with “The U.N. nuclear watchdog is expected this week to issue its most detailed report yet on research in Iran seen as geared to developing atomic bombs.”  Only near the end of the story does Dahl admit that the report "is not believed to contain an explicit assessment that Iran is developing a nuclear weapons capability” and that a reliable source says the report is unlikely to contain any "smoking guns."   

Dahl notes that although U.S. intelligence agencies stated outright in a 2007 intelligence assessment that Iran had stopped whatever nuclear weapons program it may have had in 2003, “Many conservative experts criticized the 2007 findings as inaccurate and naïve.”  Dahl doesn't mention that those “conservative experts” are the very same ones who cooked the intelligence on Iraq.  Dahl also states that, “U.S. intelligence agencies now believe Iranian leaders have resumed closed-door debates over the last four years about whether to build a nuclear bomb.”  Not until his next paragraph do we learn that “U.S. intelligence agencies” consist of Peter Crail of the Arms Control Association, a subsidiary of the ASAN Institute for Policy Studies, a neoconservative tank thinkery that schmoozes Donald Rumsfeld and other prominent warlords of our Era of Persistent Conflict. 

But the unlimited weight class winner of the Thomas E. Ricks Journalistic Warmongering Award in last Sunday’s round of Iran-related media mendacity was Joby Warwich of the Washington Post.  His headline proclaimed “IAEA says foreign expertise has brought Iran to threshold of nuclear capability,”  and his first sentence warned, “Intelligence provided to U.N. nuclear officials shows that Iran’s government has mastered the critical steps needed to build a nuclear weapon.”

Self-designated UN weapons inspector
David Albright. 

You have to actually read the whole story carefully to glean that nobody actually knows what the IAEA report actually says, and that Warwick’s only actual knowledge of the report’s content actually comes from a PowerPoint presentation on it given by David Albright, who Warwick describes as “a former U.N. weapons inspector who has reviewed the intelligence files” but who is actually a posturing AIPAC propaganda peddler who likely had nothing at all to do with the IAEA inspections of Iran's nuclear facilities.

R.I.P. Shame  

You hear plenty of talk these days about the decline in American morality, and you mostly hear it from the kind of people who chug the Kool-Aid and snort the glue they get from rabid radio and FOX News.  At blame for the decline of our national virtue, according to the self-appointed keepers of our national ethos, are the standard scapegoats: MTV, web porn, liberal judges, Rachel Maddow and so on.  

What nobody seems willing to own up to is that the most immoral acts committed in the New American Century have been the lies that the hegemon’s leaders told that world that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents and the abject suffering of untold millions more.  That the lies that support unjust wars keep getting told, and that so many people in our leading institutions continue to help spread them, is the utterly condemning fact of contemporary American culture. 

We haven’t had a firm foothold on the moral high ground since Pearl Harbor.  We started slipping down the slope around the time of the Dresden massacre.  At this point we’re so from being Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” that I doubt we’ll ever gain the wisdom and enlightenment that we should have possessed before we ascended to the role of sole global superpower.

Update: Double Shame! Triple Shame!

Journo-swine David E. Sanger

The detestable David E. Sanger co-wrote a New York Times story posted on Tuesday afternoon titled “U.N. Finds Signs of Work by Iran Toward Nuclear Device.”

The story began: “United Nations weapons inspectors released a trove of new evidence on Tuesday that they say makes a ‘credible’ case that ‘Iran has carried out activities relevant to the development of a nuclear device’ and that the project may still be under way.”  Sanger and sidekick William J. Broad go on to sketch an ominous picture of the IAEA’s findings which pretty much seem to condemn Iran until you get clear to the first sentence of paragraph bloody twelve, which reads:

The report corroborates the conclusion of a much-debated classified National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003.

Great.  Caesars.  Ghost.  What unadulterated, shameless journalistic humbuggery.  That should have been the story’s lead sentence.  It alone refutes everything else in the piece and every other syllable of the last four years of bull roar that’s been flung at Iran about its nuclear intentions.  Sanger and Broad included it to cover their little reporter bottoms when the rest of the story proves to be tripe, but they buried it where nobody would read it so as not to displease their sources in the Pentarchy and hence put their careers with the Newspaper of Record at risk.

Sanger and Broad and the rest of the warmongering mainstream media simply cannot start burning in hell soon enough. They simply cannot.  

Quadruple Shame!


By this morning the Sanger/Broad bull roar piece on the IAEA report had been altered, and the remarks about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate were promoted to paragraph six.  The key sentence now reads:

The inspectors agreed with a much-debated classified United States National Intelligence Estimate issued in 2007 that Iran had dismantled a highly focused effort to build a bomb in late 2003...

You can see the IAEA report in the raw here.   If you can get past the Guardian's incendiary intro and manage to merely skim the report from head to tail, you'll come away with the strong impression that it's loaded with he said/she said allegations that clearly came from the U.S. and Israel, not from actual scientific inspection.

The ongoing campaign to bully the UN into going along with the anti-Iran strategy seems to have established a permanent base camp in the New York headquarters.  When the neocons and likudniks read the IAEA report their lips must have been moving.  It occurs to me that liberal dog of war Susan Rice, our Ambassador to the UN, is accomplishing things that Revoltin' John Bolton only dreamed of. 

More Update: Hooray for Gareth Porter!

My pal Gareth socked a walk-off four-bagger with his investigative piece on the latest journo-jive on Iran.  The title tells it all: "IAEA’s ‘Soviet Nuclear Scientist’ Never Worked on Weapons."

Kinda shakes your faith in the New York Times and the Washington Post, doesn't it? (Heh.)

You might also want to read the analysis of the cooked IAEA report at Moon of Alabama.

I'll have further choice observations to make on the affair in next Tuesday's column.

Ciao, hounds, and remember: warmongers aren't just right-wing nut cases anymore.  Susan Rice is even word than Condi Rice was.  

*The Pentarchy is that cabal of sandbox generals, bathtub admirals, beltway bandits, AIPAC rats, Warlord Fauntleroys, New American Centurions, Long War legislators, Dr. Strangeloves, G.I. Joe Six-Packs, Pavlov’s dogs of war, patriotic psychopaths and other oligarchs whose narrow self interests and well-funded efforts have made the long dreamed-of permanent American security state a reality. 

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) is author of the critically lauded novel Bathtub Admirals, a lampoon on America’s rise to global dominance.

Get Over It Getting Over Over There

1 Nov 2011

by Jeff Huber

The about face happened even faster than I thought it would.  Only two Fridays ago young Mr. Obama announced that the last American soldier would leave Iraq by the end of this year.  

The last soldier, that is, except for the Marine contingent we’ll leave behind at the embassy/fortress we built in Baghdad.  But Marines aren’t in the Army, so they’re not technically soldiers are they?  That's why they call them "Marines," isn't it?  And the mutant CIA ninjas we’re leaving behind aren’t soldiers either, so they don’t count.  And the heavy brigade of Blackwater mobsters we’re leaving behind under the control of State Department clerks, they don’t count as soldiers, either. 

Some undetermined number of “advisers” we’ll leave behind even though the Status of Forces Agreement says we can't will be special force types, but lots of them will be Navy SEALs, who aren’t soldiers because they're sailors.  Some of the advisers we leave behind will be Army Green Berets, who are soldiers if you want to be a stickler about it.  But their operational chain of command goes through the Unified Combatant Command called U.S. Special Operations Command aka USSOCOM (pronounced “U.S. so calm”).  But SOCOM (for short) has its own budget just like one of the uniformed services (i.e., Army, Navy, Air Tunes) so it’s kind of a separate uniformed service itself. 

SOCOM, even operates under different laws and legislative oversight procedures than the rest of the armed services do, so it can do things that mere mortal soldiers and sailors and Marines can't do.  SOCOM is like the CIA in that regard, but the CIA, which isn't part of the Department of Defense at all, operates under a different set of laws and oversights than SOCOM, so that if some dirty deed needs doing that SOCOM doesn't have the legal dope deal to deal with, then the CIA can deal with it instead (and vice versa).  In case some totally rat's-fundament-filthy dirty deed needs doing that neither the CIA nor SOCOM can do then it gets done by mercenaries like the Blackwater gunsels we’re leaving behind at the embassy in Baghdad, whose activities overseas aren’t governed by any laws of God or man. 

"Fabios of Fortune" can wear
their hair much longer than their
military counterparts are allowed to.  

There’s bound to be talk sooner or later, if there isn’t already, about how this system of having three separate dirty deed doing directorates is inefficient and costly, and that we should just pour the SOCOM and CIA appropriations directly into our Blackwater thug budget.  That way, not only can our dirty deed doers commit atrocities with impunity; they can pitch national treasure into the wind to their black little hearts' delight.

The counterargument to completely outsourcing our dirty deeds, and it’s a good one, says that if we ax the CIA and SOCOM in favor of commercial thuggery, we’ll eliminate the commercial thugs industry's training program.  Pretty soon we won’t have anybody qualified to do dirty deeds for hire, sort of like how we’d soon run out of airline pilots if we shot down military aviation. 

But the counter-counter argument says that we can just pay Blackwater to recruit and train goons for us.  This counter-counter approach offers several strategic advantages over the present system.

For starters, we ditch the cumbersome requirement to track the money used for training because once we turn it over to Blackwater it falls into a black hole, the same way that we’re now saying the $6.6 billion we thought maybe we left on the seat of a Baghdad bus is “found” because we discovered it was “transferred” to the Central Bank of Iraq.  Where that $6.6 billion was transferred from there is irrelevant, by Jupiter; we’ve got a phony-baloney receipt for it and that’s all that counts. 

Next, we don’t have to apply the same entrance qualification standards to our Blackwater trainees that we require of our military enlistees.  That lets us recruit hoodlums straight from the hood, where they’ll come to us with prior experience of firearms and lethal violence and an innate disdain for law and order. 

Best of all, if we recruit criminal ruffians and train them to operate outside the limits of decent restraint from the get-go then we don’t have the problem of reprogramming military and CIA snake snackers, who have been conditioned to pay at least a modicum of attention to legal limits, as they transition to the private sector.

The Senate Armed Services Select Committee

But for the time being we’re stuck with fuddy-duddy CIA and SOCOM, some of whose activities do, in fact, have to endure legislative scrutiny.  That’s okay, though.  The congressional scrutinizers who scrutinize them get on select scrutiny committees the same way one gets adopted into the Soprano family.  You’re the new kid on the block and somebody does you a big favor and gets you on a select committee.  They feed you a few dirty secrets and let you approve of things that it isn’t legal for you to approve of, and the next thing you know you’re a bona fide law breaking lawmaker, a made member of the Pentarchy, and you’re knocking back ice-cold shots of Stoli with Revoltin' John Bolton ringside at the Bada-Bing.  

So anything the Pentarchy wants from you you’re pretty much going to approve, just like you won’t ever again put up a fuss about it when a president bypasses Congress completely and starts a war on the authority of his Ambassador to the UN, the way Bombardier Barry started the lollapalooza in Libya. 

And don’t worry that something might crop up in the Middle East that SOCO or CIA can’t carry out once the “soldiers” leave Iraq, because the soldiers aren’t going very far.  As prominent Pentagon propagandist Tom Shanker of the New York Times announced this past Saturday, the Obama administration plans to replace the soldiers in Iraq with soldiers in Kuwait.  This, Shanker tells us, is in case they need to “respond to a collapse of security in Iraq or a military confrontation with Iran.”

This Shanker cat has got to be
jiving me, man.

Man-oh-Manischewitz.  What an irredeemable line of unlimited weight class bull roar.  Security in Iraq collapsed in 2003 when we invaded the place and it hasn't recovered to this day.  As for a military confrontation with Iran, Iran can’t project land or air power any further than any other country in that region, which is about three miles from its border.  The only potential military confrontation we might have with Iran is the one we instigate on the next set of fabricated and unsupported accusations that no one in the three pillars or fourth estate of our failed experiment in government will question because everyone in them is part of the war mob, a mob for which there is no witness protection program because the people who would protect you are the very people you’d be witnessing against.

Our country, fellow citizens, is captive in the clutch of warmongers and the fearful fools who follow them.  

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. 

Fat Ladies, Promises and Iraq

25 October 2011

By Jeff Huber

Please don’t be duped into thinking that young Mr. Obama’s “troops will be home for the holidays” announcement last Friday really means that the proverbial plump soprano has crooned the coda of our Wagnerian Iliad in Iraq: the troops’ journey home is likely to resemble the one in The Odyssey that dragged on for ten years or so after the Trojan War ended.  Also don’t fall into the perception traps that might lead you to think Obama is beginning to keep his last set of campaign promises just in time to cook up some new ones, or that he’s finally gotten control of his New Praetorian Generals or of the New Centurion Pentarchy. 

And whatever you do, don’t buy the lysergic assertion that Obama’s announcement heralds the beginning of the end of our Long War aka Era of Persistent Conflict aka the Global War on Terrorism (aka GWOT) aka the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism (aka GSAVE) War on Evil (aka WOE).  No, Americans will still be consuming pro-war bull feather merchandising when Gen Y is puling like a herd of kittens about Gen Z’s reluctance to buy into Social Security and Public Health Care.   

CIA Director Petraeus was just kidding
back when he said he'd get us
out of Iraq (hah!).

It’s worth noting that Mr. O didn’t specify which holidays of which year the troops would be home from Iraq by.  One doesn't like to think that our wartime leaders would play us with that level of weasel wordplay, but you never know.  Obama might be following the successful example of his fair-haired step-general Dave Petraeus who, back in summer of 2007, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee that his objective as Supreme Sultan of the Surgin’ Safari in Sumaria was to create “conditions that would allow our soldiers to disengage."  King David didn't say if he was aiming to allow out soldiers to disengage in this American Century or the next one.  We know from Petraeus consecrator and camp concubine Thomas E. Ricks that the general’s real intention was “not to bring the war to a close” but to con the American people into sticking with it even longer. 

Here we are four years and lunch money after the surge with an Iraq that’s as up for grabs as it ever was, and John Boehner is expressing concerns that a full withdrawal from Iraq could “jeopardize” the “gains” we’ve achieved.  Holy mackerel, Sapphire.  Where do we find such tanning bed bimbos?  That’s like Jonah worrying if the whale can get by on an empty stomach.

Obama’s “withdrawal” from Iraq doesn't just leave the back door open; it leaves the front of the building blown off.  There’s still a “possibility” that we’ll leave an unspecified number of “trainers” behind to “advise” Iraqi troops.  Military advisers have a way of making like bunnies, folks.  We didn’t end the Vietnam War by putting advisers in country.  That’s how we started the Vietnam War.  There will also, of course be a Marine security contingent at our embassy in Baghdad.  That’s standard procedure in the capitol of every nation that still sucks up to us. 

What’s not standard procedure about our embassy in Baghdad—a compound the size of Vatican City that looks like the fortress in The Guns of Navarone—is that in addition to the Marines it will also be infested by what Mark Landler of the New York Times describes as “4,000 to 5,000 private State Department security contractors” (aka Blackwater hoodlums) “as well as a significant [my italics] CIA presence.”  You start adding on the soldiers of ill-gotten fortune that Exxon and Halliburton and KBR and the rest of the war buckaroos will bring with them and pretty soon you’re talking about a force the equivalent of a U.S. Army division (the embassy mercenary corps alone is brigade size). 

Lawyers, Guns and Hillary

The “advisers” will be special force phantoms who, along with the CIA spooks, operate outside of any chain of command you can define with a wire diagram.  The mercenaries, once they’re abroad, run amok unrestrained by any written or unwritten laws of God or man.  The only authority they’re concerned about is the one that signs their paychecks, who in this case is our warmongering Secretary of State.  Cruella Clinton can now commit our nation to war without the consent of Congress or the judiciary or even the commander in chief whenever she gets the notion, which puts her on equal footing with our UN Ambassador Susie Rice, who started our whackadoodle-do in Libya by carping the Security Council into passing a bombs-away resolution. 

No, the fat lady isn’t singing in Iraq.  She hasn’t even sprayed her throat yet.

Claims that Obama’s non-withdrawal announcement show he’s living up to campaign promises to shut the Iraq WOE down are as legitimate as blue money.  The deadline to haul heinie out of Iraq at the end of this year was in the status of forces agreement the Bush regime signed onto when the UN mandate ran out.  Obama is semi-bringing the troops home because his Pentarchs couldn’t bully the Iraqi government into granting indefinite legal immunity to whatever troops we decided to leave behind.  If an agreement to leave troops in place had been reached, Obama would have gone slut-puppy for it just like he’s done with everything else his velvet junta generals have ordered him to do.

We've got to drop all those leftover bombs on somebody!

In no way have the Pentagon brass hats given up on maintaining a permanent presence in Iraq.  Senior sanctioned leakers are feeding the Tom Ricks wannabe echo chamberlains tag lines about how we'll have to get by with a “smaller footprint” to administer “training” and “guidance,” and to provide Iraq with air defense from, uh, the Kurdish Air Force, I guess.  But, hey, you know, if we leave people behind to do that stuff we’ll need additional security personnel to protect them, and we’ll need additional support personnel to cook food and make beds and fix stopped up toilets for the additional security personnel, and then we’ll need extra additional security personnel to provide security for the additional security personnel’s additional support personnel, and then we’ll need extra additional support personnel to support the extra additional security personnel, and so on and so on and so on. 

But aside from that, everybody is coming home.  

With Moammar "The Ram" Gadhafi
gone, who's next? 

Any talk that Obama’s homecoming address is another sign that he’s reining in our warhorses is pure reconstituted horse lunch.  We no sooner get done having those images of Moammar Gadhafi looking like Mickey Roark at the end of The Wrestler jammed in our eyes like pencils than Pops McCain starts howling about how now we can start bombing the living Christ our Lord and Savior out of Syria!

Remember thinking the warmongery was kaput when McCain lost the election?

THIS JUST IN: TURKISH TANKS ENTER NORTHERN IRAQ.

Hi ho!

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now. 

The Persian Paranoia Ploy

18 Oct. 2011

by Jeff Huber

I thought about calling this essay “The Boys Who Cried Iran,’” but that title had a cross-purpose parallel problem. The lesson of the “Boy Who Cried Wolf” parallel is that the townspeople eventually ignore the boy’s false alarms.  It seems, on the other hand, that we the people will never tire of hearing the “Bomb, Bomb, Bomb Iran” mantra. 

The Iranians vant to
drink your blood!

This time around, the Pentarchy’s bull feather merchants have manage to cull a confluence of Persian Peril Paranoia with our by now Pavlovian terror of terrorism.  An Iranian-American used-car salesman is accused of being the key figure in an Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the U.S. and to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Washington.  Scary, huh kids?

The used-car salesman in question is 56 year-old Mansour J. Arbabsiar (aka “Scarface), whose apprehension by the FBI was in keeping with the legendary Homeland Security sting operations that netted the Dirty Bomber who turned out to be too retarded to make a dirty bomb, and the Panty Bomber whose panty bomb didn’t even put third-degree burns on his party favor, and the Times Square Screw Up who locked himself out of his bomb car and his getaway car andhis apartment. 

Scarface, if that really is his international underground terrorist cabal code name, is a 30 year resident of Texas, a state renowned for another Justice Department fiasco of fame that unfolded in the town of Waco, a travesty during which Janet Reno’s Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) hooligans immolated 76 lonesome losers whose heinous crime was allowing themselves to be brainwashed by cult leader David Koresh.  Scarface Arbabsiar inhabited Texas for three decades during which he racked up a string of failed businesses, a covey of angry creditors, and a furious former spouse who sought a protective order against him.  His friends describe him as “perennially disheveled” and “hopelessly disorganized.”  His socks never matched and he constantly lost his keys and cell phone.  A rival used-car salesman described Arbabisiar as “worthless.”

Mansour J. Arbabsiar was a mark so perfect for a pre-election propaganda con game that the fool infested FBI couldn’t have overlooked him if they were wearing two blindfolds instead of the single one that was their standard issue in the years that led up to the 9/11 attacks.    

Attorney General Holder and senior Justice Dept. Staff

At the uber-helm of this cockamamie caper was Attorney General Eric Holder, who is to Barack Obama’s Justice Department what Ford Sterling was to Mack Sennett’s Keystone Kops: the chief buffoon.  It was no doubt coincidence, it just had to have been, that the Scarface assassination scare story hit the mainstream fire hose the day after Holder was subpoenaed to do some ‘splainin’ to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee about the ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious, a gun-walking campaign that should have been dubbed “Faster and Funnier.”  In the course of groping though an investigation trying to trace firearms from American gun dealers to Mexican drug gangs, Holder’s ATF-ups managed to lose track of 1,400 to 2,000 guns that migrated into the mitts of the Mexican drug gangsters they were trying to keep guns from migrating into the mitts of. 

I’d characterize Faster and Funnier as a Petraeus-class fumble, but that would be incredibly unfair to Holder and the ATF.  When then three-star general David Petraeus let U.S supplied guns tiptoe into the hands of Shiite militiamen, he didn’t just hand over a couple thousand of the things.  Petraeus gave away 190,000 of the things, more than enough to arm 10 United States Army infantry divisions.  Funny how the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee never subpoenaed King David to explain how that happened.  It must have been an oversight on their part (heh).  

It's the old "They can't
be that stupid so they
must be that stupid" ploy.

According to the Runyonesque scenario Holder and Company spin, the case just happened to fall together when some Defense Enforcement Agency Dunderhead had a chance meeting with Johnny Scars and a pair of Iran’s elite Quds Force baddies who just happened to be operating on American soil in plain sight of every federal, state and local law enforcement official and intelligence agent in the great state of Texas.  Our best intelligence (double heh) alleges that officials at the highest levels of Iran’s government pulled stunts that prompted Robert Baer, a former CIA case officer in the Middle East and author of several books on Iran, said there was “sloppiness about the case that defies belief.”  “Sloppy” is a kind euphemism.  According to Holder’s Heroes, top Iranian leaders left a paper and electronic trail leading back to themselves that Inspector Clousseau could have followed. 

But incredulity is by no means grounds among the Obama inner-war party for stiff-arming a chance to pacify the Pentarchy with the citizenry marching on Wall Street and an election on the horizon.  State Secretary Cruella Clinton said of the case “The idea that they [the Iranians, I guess she means] would attempt to go to a Mexican drug cartel to solicit murder-for-hire to kill the Saudi ambassador, nobody could make that up, right?”  Wake up and smell the napalm, Hillary.  Remember the whoppers Big Dick Cheney and his Delaware Destroyers fabricated about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction and his ties al Qaeda and his connections to 9/11 that got us into the Iraq quagmire that you voted for?  Conjuring incredible tales so the American public will let you bomb or invade other countries is neocon de rigueur.  If you ain’t lyin’ they ain’t buyin’, that’s the warmongery’s motto when it comes to constructing a casus belli from hydrogen molecules.     

Holder's argument that top Iranian government officials were involved in a plot to hire Mexican Drug runners to assassinate a Saudi diplomat and bomb an Israeli embassy has more holes in it than Scientology dogma.  But that’s okay because young Mr. Obama said in a 13 October press conference that, “the facts are there for all to see,” though he failed to mention what any of those facts are or where any of us might go to see them.     

When Holder's Iranian/Mexican assassination/bomb plot accusations began generating guffaws globally, Obama’s spin physicians switched to another cherished wolf cry.  Favored Pentarchy echo chamberlain David E. Sanger of the New York Times relays to us that “President Obama is pressing United Nations nuclear inspectors to release classified intelligence information showing that Iran is designing and experimenting with nuclear weapons technology.”  If you crawl between the gutters in this puff piece you pick up that the “classified intelligence information” they’re talking about is the so-called “smoking laptop” documents that were proven to be forgeries five freaking years ago. 

But young Mr. Obama’s story is that Iran wants to kill Saudis and Israelis and they’ll do it with hired banditos or nukes or trick-or-treaters or whatever it takes, and he’s sticking to it, and he’ll get away with this used mare's oats mendacity because beating war drums appeases the neocons and today's liberals are too vaginal to stand up to him.    

Where do we find such candidates?

Why do we elect such men to the highest office in our land?  Oh, that’s right.  The choice was him and Bazooka Joe or Grampaw Pettibone and Patriotic Barbie.  The difference between the two tickets doesn’t seem so clear in the rearview mirror, does it?  This Obama person who promised to put the brakes on the neocon agenda is starting to make Barry Goldwater look like a peace pansy.    

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.