Pentagon Propaganda Programmers Pardoned; Pro-War News at Eleven

by Jeff Huber

The man who was perhaps the last of the true investigative reporters on the Pentarchy beat may have just taken a swan dive into the canvas.

Look at those yo-yos. That's the way you do it.

For years, David Barstow of the New York Times, amid a phalanx of the warmongery’s favorite echo chamberlains, the likes of Michael R. Gordon and Dexter Filkins and the disgraceful Thomas E. Ricks, managed to dig up unpleasant truths about our Whack-a-Doodle Wars on Evil.  Even more incredibly, Barstow was able to get the truth to us via the NYT, the propaganda conduit of record that abetted Dick Cheney and his malignant mob in selling the snake-oil intelligence to the American public that led to the invasion of Iraq. 

Barstow’s crowing coup against American’s military-media junta was his 2008 expose of the Pentagon’s gray propaganda operation know as the Retired Military Analyst (RMA) program.  The RMA was launched by Donald Rumsfeld’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs (aka Head Assistant Bull Feather Merchant) Victoria Clarke in early 2002 to recruit “key influentials” to peddle Operation Iraqi Freedom on the Big Brother Broadcast. 

RMA was a glad-handing, highway-robbing, war-hawking, hootenanny.  Clarke’s spin commandos wined, dined, sipped and supped a gang of retired senior officers who had gone into the defense contracting and tank thinking field, and fed them an endless supply of finely crafted pro-war talking points.  The RMAs went on air and a) palmed off said talking points as their own original analyses and b) neglected to mention that they stood to profit from extension and escalation of the war by way of their business connections in the defense industry.  

That's "General Evil" to you. I didn't slaughter
my way to the four-star level to be called
"Mister Evil." 

Retired Army Colonel Ken Allard, one of the most prominent RMAs who, during his active duty career, taught information warfare at National Defense University, admitted the program was “Psyops [aka ‘psychological operations’] on steroids, a “coherent, active policy.”  If you played ball with your information handlers, you thrived.  If you didn’t, you got shut out and the news networks lost interest in you.  “Night and day,” Allard said, “I felt we’d been hosed.”  (So sad, Ken, but I’d feel a lot sorrier about you getting so wet if you hadn’t jumped up and volunteered right away when Dad asked who wanted to help wash the car.)

Along with Ken Allard, the names that go with the faces on the RMA Wall of Shame include Wayne Downing, Rick Francona, James Marks, Thomas McInerny, Monty Miegs, Bernie Trainor, John Warden, Thomas Wilkerson and Jack Jacobs, the Yoda-like war wonk who has forged a lucrative retirement career out of shamelessly shilling his Vietnam War Medal of Honor.  But the most heinous the RMA rangers was retired four-star general Barry McCaffrey, who so brazenly used his military credentials and his Washington insider influence to reap war profits that Barstow described his racket as a “one man’s military-industrial complex.”

It’s little wonder that McCaffrey stood head and haunches above the rest of the retired war panderers.  During his active duty days, he was one of the most malevolent military men to ever sport a service dress uniform.  If the military had a real judiciary instead of its Uniform Code of Marsupial Justice*, McCaffrey would have been convicted of capital felonies after the first Gulf War for the Massacre at Rumalia during which McCaffrey disobeyed direct orders to commit the premeditated mass murder of retreating Iraqi soldiers during a declared ceasefire. (According to a colleague, McCaffrey exhorted his subordinate commanders over the radio to find a way for him to “go kill all of those bastards.”)  Army investigators later exonerated McCaffrey of wrongdoing, just as Pentagon investigators later exonerated everyone at the Pentagon involved in the RMA Program.

What a bitter sample of uneven-handedness it was that Barstow had to be the one to write the Christmas Eve NYT story titled “Pentagon Finds No Fault in Ties to TV Analysts.”  One has to wonder if Barstow volunteered to write the story or if the onerous task was crammed past his tonsils by the NYT’s war-worshiping editorial staff.  Whatever the case, irony, if it were still alive in the collective American consciousness, would have savored the way that Barstow told the story.  If this was his last round, at least he went out fighting.

Hi.  I'm Jack Jacobs.  Aren't I cuddly?
Do you like my Medal of Honor?
Then please buy more of the wars I sell
here on NBC so I can make more
 money from them.  And don't forget to
SUPPORT THE TROOPS!

You’re not far into the story before you realize that the title should have read “Pentagon Finds No Fault with Itself in Ties to TV Analysts.”  It turns out that the recently completed two-year Pentagon inspector general (aka IG) inquiry is the second such inquiry into the RMA shenanigans Barstow tells us.  The IG’s office issued an earlier report, in 2009, that exonerated Pentagon Public Affairs and the RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program after it interviewed Pentagon Public Affairs personnel and RMAs and everyone else involved in the RMA program.

Shortly after 2009 report hit the streets, someone in the IG office who was senior to whoever had put it on the streets pulled it back off the streets, saying that it was so riddled with inaccuracies and flaws that none of its conclusions could be relied upon.  Later that year a second report was ordered, the one just released. 

The investigators who conjured the second report claimed that they could not find sufficient documentation to determine the program's strategy, objectives or intent.  So the “investigation” consisted of interviews with former Rumsfeld public affairs aids, including Victoria Clarke, who created and ran the RMA program.  From those interviews the “investigators” concluded that the “outreach activities were intended to serve as an open information exchange with credible third-party subject-matter experts” who could “explain military issues, actions and strategies to the American public.”

Though Barstow did not offer an authorial judgment statement on the second IG report’s conclusion, a slow child can see that it is the exact equivalent of a police chief pulling over a visibly, audibly and aromatically obviously intoxicated mayor, asking him if he has been drinking, and letting him drive away when he answers “No.”  The second IG RMA investigation has not been recalled, so whoever spiked the first one must have retired and been replaced by a, ah, less principled officer who more suitably conforms to the military's Petraeus-era standards of ethics.  

I didn't make my
first billion until
after I was a general.

Lamentably, much of the American population’s cognizant skills have fallen far beneath the level of a slow child’s. So when standard citizens see the likes of McCaffrey and Jacobs appearing on NBC as military analysts (yes, they’re baaaaaaaaaack), it won’t occur to them that these are the same retired bums who have been lying to them about our Woebegone Wars all along.  Or if they do remember anything about the RMA scandal, one of their FOX News aficionado chums will chime in with “Nah, they had two big investigations of those guys, went on for four years, didn’t find nothin’ on ‘em.  It was all bull roar.”

*The UCMJ is the justice system that sent retarded Army Private Lynndie England to jail over prison abuse while Donald Rumsfeld, chief architect of the prisoner abuse program, retired high on the dole in his mansion on the eastern shore, the one next to Dick Cheney’s multi-million dollar monstrosity.

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.  

Moving to Wednesdays

I completed the first draft of Sandbox Generals on 21 December.  Now it's time to take an operational pause for the cause and wait for a better sun angle before I re-attack and revise.  In the meantime, I'll be filling the psychic space with a number of other projects, among which will be mounting a slightly more fully developed version of the weekly P.S. column that I'll post on Wednesdays instead of Tuesdays, beginning on Wednesday 28 December.

I hope you're enjoying your holidays.

J

Newt the Impaler

By Jeff Huber

Newt circa 1465.

President Newt Gingrich (shudder) is likely to have a foreign policy as draconian as his domestic policies were during his reign of terror as House Speaker.  Newt’s cockamamie “Contract with America” that, if successful, would have impaled the nation’s middle and poor working classes ala Vlad Tepes, the real life model for Bram Stokers Dracula, long before young Messrs. Bush and Obama ever got a chance to.  While Newt’s domestic agenda channels Marie Antoinette’s infamous “Let the eat cake” decree, his attitude toward the rest of the planet can be best summarized as “Let them eat shrapnel”—the “them” in that statement being people who are Muslim and living anywhere within a B-2 bomber’s combat range of Jerusalem or American Israel Public Affair Committee (AIPAC) headquarters on H Street in Washington D.C., which pretty much includes all people who are Muslim.    

At the top of Newt’s wrong-color, wrong-creed, wrong-color target list are the Palestinians, who Newt claims are an “invented people.”

When criticized by his fellow GOP presidential hopefuls for his remark, Newt responded that what he said was “historically true” and “factually correct.”  That’s only the case if we view the term “true” in the context of Steven Colbert’s “truthiness” rubric, and if by “factually correct” we’re referring to the kinds of fabricated facts that conform to the sort of political correctness that resonates with Newt’s prospective rabid right voter base whose “conservative values” are rooted in cherished traditions like cross burnings and lynchings. (I'm in persistent wonderment at how American bigots who once hated Jews became I-Stand-with-Israelites once they were programmed to hate Muslims instead.)

The “invented people” meme was invented by AIPAC bull feather merchants to refute Palestinian claims of a right to a homeland.  AIPAC’s tank thinkers haven’t bothered to clarify who exactly they think invented the Palestinian people.  I’m guessing it wasn’t Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein or Mel Brooks’ either.  

It doesn’t take a historian, either a real one or a fake one like Newt, to realize that the people who invented the Palestinian people were other Palestinian people, and that Palestinian people have been making replicas of themselves since before the days of old testament references to Palestine.  If ever there were an invented people, it would be Americans like Newt whose ancestors, at the time that Old Testament Palestinians were making babies in Palestine, were making babies somewhere other than in America. 

Speaker Newt seduces an intern.

But that kind of clear thinking doesn’t interest a phony intellectual like Newt, who dedicates his acumen not to the acquisition of truth but to the acquisition of power.  And one of the best ways for Newt to acquire the kind of power he’s running for now is to align himself with whatever malignant purposes Israel would have him pursue, and to appeal to a fearful and hateful voter base.  

In that light, Newt’s stance toward Iran is hardly surprising.  Newt says we face a protracted ideological struggle with the Muslim world that will resemble he Cold War, and he casts Iran in the role of the old Soviet Union. 

Just shuck my jive, will you Newt?  Newt reminds me of a hard drinking retired Vietnam era Army veteran of my acquaintance who we’ll call Johnny Shiloh.  About seven Budweisers into lunch not long ago, the subject of refusing to hold diplomatic talks with Iran came up, and well, Johnny came to life and said the best story he ever heard on that there situation was about the hunter who ran into a bear in the woods.

The bear says, hey, don’t shoot, now.  All I want is a full stomach and all you want is a bear coat.  So why don’t you put that gun down and we’ll talk, and I’m sure we can come up with a solution that will give us both what we want.

So sure enough, Johnny said, the hunter put his gun down and the bear got a full belly and the hunter got a bear coat.  Johnny slapped his knee, and said, “Yep, best story on that subject I ever heard,” several times.

I said, “Johnny, in your story, the hunter is the United States and the bear is Iran, right?”

Johnny, taking a slug of Bud, shook his head hesitantly, figuring I was maybe about to shoot his allegory full of large caliber holes.  “Now Iran’s military budget is less than one percent the size of ours," I continued.  "In fact, our total defense related expenditures exceed Iran’s entire Gross Domestic Product.  Iran can’t project conventional power more than a stone’s throw from its borders and regardless of what Israel and its UN Stoogette Susan Rice bullied the International Atomic Energy Agency into saying in its latest report, Iran doesn't have a nuclear weapons program. 

Newt's lighter side.

So if Iran is the bear in this story, I told, Johnny, it’s not even a teddy bear.  It’s more of a gummy bear.  And how on earth, I asked Johnny to explain, did the hunter manage to get himself swallowed by a gummy bear?

Johnny took another slurp of Bud suds and said, “Best story I heard yet on the subject.”

By comparing Iran to the Soviet Bear, Newt is crafting a comparison every bit as asinine as Johnny Shiloh’s metaphor.  Yet people throughout the country are taking Newt seriously. 

It may be that America is finally ready for the Full Newt Monty.  He brings out the very worst in the very worst element of the American body politic.

So there’s an excellent chance he’ll win the GOP nomination. 

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. 

Dumb, Dumber and Doonesbury

by Jeff Huber

I’ve been mourning the lamentable state of the anti-war movement lately, especially the portion of it populated by the political left, a great percentage of whom appear to be more concerned with the slaughter of baby seals than with the slaughter of baby humans.  And why wouldn’t they be?  We’ve actually seen more images in our warmongering mainstream media of ice floe carnage than we’ve seen of the carnage of armed conflict.  Nobody in the deep-pockets pocket of the Pentarchy really cares if liberals manage to curb baby seal hunting.  There’s not that much money in it. 

Must remember...this is my shoulder,
this is my elbow, this is my shoulder...

To be fair, a considerable number of liberals have enough angst left over for a healthy hand-wringing or two about those pesky old wars after they’re done saving a) wild animals from hunters so they can be killed by other wild animals instead and b) trees that were grown for the specific purpose of being cut down and used in construction.  Lamentably, though, the few progressives who have the staying power to protest the uniquely American brand of man’s inhumanity to man can seldom discriminate between their shoulders and their elbows. 

Doubly disconcerting is that so many of these feckless war protesters are high-profile humorists, comedians, satirists and other makers of malcontent merriness who enjoy the uncritical adoration of The Huffington Post’s circulation, especially of those callow-eyed progressive cadets of Generations X, Y, and now even Z (nine-year olds who can’t stay up to watch Stewart and Colbert can catch them on reruns the next day).  

Case in point is Doonsebury cartoonist Garry Trudeau who, as friend of Pen and Sword J.P. White recently suggested, is living proof that one doesn’t have to be especially funny to be a commercially successful humorist, especially when said humorist attended Yale like Trudeau did.  As our present president and his immediate predecessor have proven, you don’t need talent to succeed in your chosen field if you have Ivy League credentials.    

When it comes to our woebegone Wars on Evil, Trudeau’s heart generally seems to be in the right place, but he has a penchant for letting his head hobble off to some cozy cranny where it’s isolated from the light of day and breathable air, like it appears to have done when Garry penned his 7 December strip in which a junior U.S. Army officer concedes that the omnipresent evildoers in Iraq are still able to bring the fight to us thanks to “a little help from Iran.”

I don’t dig trolling into other people’s web sites, but this couldn’t go unchallenged.  Here’s what I left in Garry’s “Blowback” inbox:

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Garry, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains. 

 Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)     

Someone named “Editor” posted my comment, and added the following curious caveat: “This seems a good occasion to remind readers that if GBT shared the beliefs of all of his characters, he would be deeply schizophrenic.”

Holy non-rebuttal.  Knowing it was a waste of effort, I further submitted this:

Satirists, perhaps more so than other literary figures, present a worldview of moral judgments, and owe it to their audience to indicate when their characters’ actions and words reflect their vision of the truth and when they do not.  Mark Twain knew exactly how to do this.  Garry does some of the time.  This time he did nothing to indicate that his character’s “with a little help from Iran” was intended with any degree of sardonicism.

...and dumber...

That submission hasn’t been blessed for live bandwidth at the Doonesbury site.  Maybe they have a one-per-disgruntled-customer policy.  Something that did make the cut, however, was an attempted disproval of my original post by one Dean Mitchell that began: “The evidence of Iranian involvement has been continuous, with lots of reporting.”  If you click on the “lots” and “reporting” links of Mr. Mitchell’s sentence, you’ll discover what kind of “evidence” he considers convincing. 

The “lots” link, as I noted in my second, unpublished Blowback submission, leads to “a story with Iran allegations penned by Michael R. Gordon, one the Pentarchy's very favorite echo chamberlains.  I'm sure [Mr. Mitchell] had no idea that Gordon was one of the journo-cads who helped Dick Cheney's mob pull the Nigergate hoax on us that led to the invasion of Iraq, and has been a go-to war propaganda conduit to this day.” 

...and BlackFive's Uncle Jimbo

The “reporting” link leads to a July 2011 piece from Britain’s right-wing The Telegraph that features the standard laundry list of unsubstantiated charges against Iran straight from the mouth of then Joint Chiefs chairman and Bull Feather Merchant Marine Corps Commandant Mike Mullen. 

It’s downright horrifying to reflect that not only are the likes of Mr. Mitchell gullible enough to guzzle undiluted war propaganda from the likes of Gordon and Mullen but, apparently, the likes of progressive icon Garry Trudeau are too!

Jesus, Mary and Curly Joe DeRita.  With anti-war liberals like these, who needs Pavlov’s Dogs of War like bathetic BlackFive pundit Uncle Jimbo?

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. 

  

Open Letter to Gary Trudeau

7 Dec. 2011

What a crushing disappointment to see in your 7 Dec. strip that you too have chugged the propaganda that blames Iran for our failures in Iraq.  The recent IAEA report was the latest piece of kangaroo courtliness to accuse Iran of malfeasance—this time in regard to its nuclear program—and support the charge with pure poppycock. 

The loop-tape allegations that Iran has armed and trained Shiite Iraqi rebels have never been substantiated.  The only verifiable outside aid and comfort to Shiite militiamen was the training and weapons then Lt. Gen. David Petraeus gave to Iraqi security force recruits—predominantly Shiites—who disappeared into the night with 190,000 AK-47s and other combat gear. 

Shame on you, Gary, for allowing yourself to become one of the warmongery’s leading echo chamberlains.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired)  

All Aboard for Zombieland!

by Jeff Huber

Elder Lady, a long-time friend of Pen and Sword and a keen observer of the sorry scene playing out across our country and the world, recently shared this quote from British author John le Carré: 

"God appointed America to save the world in any way that suits America. God appointed Israel to be the nexus of America's Middle Eastern policy and anyone who wants to mess with that idea is a) anti-Semitic, b) anti-American, c) with the enemy, and d) a terrorist."

 -- Published in The London Times, 15 Jan. 2003

Nine years after le Carre published that statement, America and its snippy British lap dog are imposing all new and improved set of draconian sanctions on Iran that, the political theory goes, will coerce Iran into doing things that the old shopworn set of draconian sanctions failed to make Iran do. 

American Diplomacy: It's code for "war."

The pretext for this latest round of “diplomatic” preparations for all out war on Iran was the recent International Atomic Energy Agency report
that said Iraq might still have a nuclear weapons program.  The report, which has been thoroughly refuted in every forum except the war wagging mainstream media, was based on hearsay evidence from “member nations” that could only have been Israel, the UK and the US, and on the activities of a “nuclear scientist” who turns out not to have been a nuclear scientist at all but a pioneer in the field of nanodiamond technology that is use for industrial and medical purposes.

Iranian Students stormed the British Embassy in Tehran, the Brits closed the embassy and hauled scones, and now we don’t even have second-hand diplomatic lines of communication with Iran. Still, the bull feather merchant marines who spin our foreign policy shenanigans can replay the Team Cheney meme that said "we tried diplomacy and it didn't work," even if said diplomacy consisted of refusing to speak directly to parties we were punishing with sanctions until they agreed to pre-conditions that no country in its right national mind would agree to.  (In the case of Iran, we insisted that they give up their UN guaranteed right to pursue nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.  What a surprise that they passed on the offer.  Telling the Iranians they could have a nuclear energy industry if they got their nuclear fuel from us was like telling them they could have an auto industry as long as they made their cars in Detroit and called them Buicks.)

I’ve delineated many times how possession of nuclear weapons would be, for the Iranians, the equivalent a doomsday device that would spell doom for the entire ancient Persian race.  I only know of one group of people crazy enough to take those sorts of risks in the name of acquiring more power, and that group of people is the group of people who led us down the Long War path that began in Iraq and that is about to intersect with the road to ruin.  

Who's your worst nightmare now?

It is perhaps because of the state of the economy and because our  our body politic has become such a FOX News driven menagerie that the American public continues to allow its government to slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocents overseas over…what?  Certainly not 9/11.  The evildoer young Mr. Bush swore to bring in dead or alive is sleeping with the whales.  Certainly not to preempt an invasion of our soil.  Despite what Mr. Bush’s speechwriters told us, the oceans still protect us from that sort of thing.  Nobody has the kind of army or air force or navy required to invade and occupy us the way we’ve made a national pastime out of doing to everyone who is a supposed threat to us, and nobody ever will have that kind of military force.   

We have gone from a mighty nation dedicated to become Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on the hill” to a global bad guy; a global bad guy who is about to dwarf the malignant accomplishments of every global bad guy who came before us.  As le Carré put it in 2003, “America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.”

Countless sages of eastern and western cultures have noted that human events have a way of leveling themselves in the same manner that nature does.  Actions produce opposite but equal reactions among societies just as they do in the physical universe.  As one popular volume of spiritual guidance admonishes us, “ye shall reap as ye shall sow,” and as we used to say in the Navy, “What goes around comes around.” 

The 2012 Tea Party Convention.  

The longer we as a nation stay on this neoconservative, post-modern imperialist crazy-train joy ride, the further we’re going to fall when China calls in our debt or the tea baggers turn the country into Zombieland or a space ship lands and a guy who looks like Michael Rennie steps out of it and tells us to pack our bags for a one-way trip to oblivion.

Say goodbye to hegemony.

My biggest concern regarding our inability to correct our behavior before God, nature or Mr. Spock’s relatives correct it for us is that the anti-war movement has been hijacked by paleo-conservative libertarians who don’t want to pay for roads because they don’t think we need roads and by latter-day hippies who are more interested in legalizing pot than in putting an end to self-defeating wars. 

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.        

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.