King David and His Howling Commandos

As Renaissance political scientist Niccolo Machiavelli noted, the fall of Rome came about when its military elite, known as the Praetorian Guard, gained control over the emperor and the Senate. Had irony survived the Bush Jr. administration, it would relish that America’s empire is crumbling under the undue influence of its military elite, the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM).

A May 24 New York Times story by Mark Mazzetti informed us that last September “King David” Petraeus empowered himself, through a secret directive, to expand “clandestine military activity” throughout his Central Command (CENTCOM) area of responsibility without seeking permission of Congress or the commander in chief. “Clandestine military activity” involves SOCOM assets.

The Mazzetti story, sourced to unnamed “defense officials,” was the first volley in the next round of the information warfare being conducted among elements of the national security structure to avoid taking the fall for the miserable failures of our Iraq and Bananastan* misadventures while managing to keep the Long War going for an indeterminate length of time.

The rest of the media gave little bandwidth to Mazzetti’s story until unnamed “senior military and administration officials” leaked in anger to Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post. A June 4 article titled “U.S. ‘Secret War’ Expands Globally as Special Operations Forces Take Larger Role” announced that the “Obama administration has significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and other radical groups.”

DeYoung and Jaffe hint that the White House is driving the escalation of special force activity against the Evil Caliphate (the neocons’ post-Cold War successor to the Evil Empire), or is at least a willing victim. Special-ops types have “become a far more regular presence” at the executive mansion, even more so than they were during the Bush administration. “We have a lot more access,” one military official told DeYoung and Jaffe. From the way this military official talked, the White House is doing everything shy of handing out sexual favors to attract SOCOM’s help and loyalty. He says OBAMACOM is “asking for ideas and plans … calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’”

“These things” boil down to those things that Stanley McChrystal and his band of merry assassins did when he commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC): zorch around the western half of Asia like Sergeant Fury and his Howling Commandos blowing away “suspected” terrorists and civilians galore on the basis of intelligence gathered from human sewers – like Afghan drug lord Wali Karzai – who love nothing better than having the U.S. military pay them handsomely for the privilege of rubbing out their enemies.

(Here’s something else irony would have liked: Adm. Gary Roughead, the sycophant who became chief of Naval Operations after Adm. Mike Mullen got promoted to Joint Chiefs chairman for changing his vote to “aye, aye, sir” on the Iraq surge, said for the record in 2009 that “The biggest breakthrough in the current fight in [Iraq and Afghanistan] is the successful integration of intelligence with operations.” Judas hanging from a redbud tree, how do cement-heads like Roughead wind up in positions of such enormous power?)

What’s more, Gen. Stan and his Hooligan Clan pulled their deadly shenanigans under direct orders of Dick Cheney, who as vice president didn’t have a pig’s wings’ worth of constitutional or legal standing in the military chain of command. Special operators were shaking in their jump boots at the prospect that all their beautiful wickedness might melt away if a Democrat became their commander in chief, but lo! Obama turned out to be their newest, biggest, bestest buddy since Sgt. Hulka from Stripes.

Candidate Obama got his tongue stuck in a wringer when he begged for the war mongrel vote by promising to “get the job done” in Afghanistan. When it came time to decide whether to keep executing all those drone raids that were killing so many innocent Bananastani bystanders, Commander in Chief Obama said, sure, heck, what else we got going for us? YES YOU CAN execute more special force assassinations. This COIN (counterinsurgency) bull plop we’ve been feeding the public isn’t going to work. We have to do something, even if it’s something stupid like blindly striking at suspected evildoers and killing lots of civilians in the process. Sure, that just adds more recruits to the ranks of the evildoers than we had before, but it’s better than doing nothing, right?

So you’d think the SOCOM commandos have all the autonomy to spread mayhem globally that they could possibly want, but no, they’re howling for more. They don’t want to work for anyone who isn’t a special operator and doesn’t understand their special needs. They “bridle” at the authority of wimp ambassadors who “control who comes in and out of their country.” They “chafe” at needing permission from the president and secretary of defense to use lethal force outside of war zones. They want to wreak whatever havoc they feel like wreaking whenever and wherever the feel like wreaking it, and they don’t want to hear any guff about it.

Will no one protect the world from these psychopaths? This invertebrate president and Congress certainly won’t. The Constitution won’t save us. Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin would have anybody who challenged SOCOM in court bludgeoned to death with tea bags for failure to support the troops.

Be on the alert for Joe Lieberman or some other congressional concubine of the warmongery to introduce legislation that cancels the parts of Title 10 of U.S. Code that require SOCOM forces to conduct missions under the “command of the commander of the unified combatant command in whose geographic area the activity or mission is to be conducted” unless “otherwise directed by the president or the secretary of defense.”

Yeah, the snake eaters and frogmen have a good thing going now, what with their buddy Petraeus in charge of CENTCOM, and a pushover president, and bureaucratic twit Bob Gates for a SECDEF. But they’d like to get their civilian chain of command neutered in writing in case somebody with a pair of baby-makers ever gets elected president (you never know, it might happen).

And look for the recent discovery of “vast riches” of untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan to be the excuse Obama needs to cave in to the military’s demands to flush his withdrawal timeline all the way to the chow hall. The decades it will take for Afghanistan to exploit its riches plays into SOCOM’s “Era of Persistent Conflict” [.pdf] like an egret plays into an oil spill.

*The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our Central Asian banana republics where U.S. and NATO troops are under the command of “Bananas” Stan McChrystal.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com. 

King David Rules

While I was taking a week off to celebrate Memorial Day the story broke about “King David” Petraeus secretly giving himself authority back in September 2009 to start a war anywhere from the Horn of Africa to the Bananastans*. His secret directive allows him to bury America in another quagmire any time his black little heart desires without so much as a yes-you-may from the commander in chief or Congress. In a May 25 article, New York Times Pentagon stenographer Mark Mazzetti, to whom “military officials” showed the “secret” directive Petraeus had written, noted that “the precise operations that the directive authorizes are unclear” and that the order “does not appear to authorize offensive strikes in any specific countries.”

Mazzetti doubtless inserted the weasel wordiness at the behest of his buddies at Petraeus’  Central Command headquarters, whom he allowed to censor his exposé on them as a professional courtesy (he’s a nice, polite boy, that Mazzetti). The “precise operations that the directive authorizes” are whatever Petraeus decides he wants them to be at any given moment. That’s why he didn’t limit himself by clarifying what he was or wasn’t authorizing. You don’t fill in an amount when you write yourself a blank check.

As for the order not authorizing “offensive strikes,” any incursion of U.S. forces into a country without that country’s permission is an offensive action, one that the target countries should justifiably defend themselves against. Of course, the way the Mazzettis of the media spin things for the warmongery, once the penetrated country defends itself it becomes the aggressor, and our forces defend themselves by calling in air support and yahoo, Major Kong, we got us another war of necessity.

Mazzetti notes that spokesmodels for the Pentagon and the White House “declined to comment for this article.” No doubt they’re hoping The Oil Slick that Ate America will bury the story of how “Teflon General” Petraeus wholly devoured the legislative and executive branches of our government and got away with it.

That President Obama continues to duck a confrontation with King David confirms that our commander in chief has permanently subordinated himself to his generals. Young Mr. Bush, at least, only went along with whatever his four-stars said if his four-stars said what he wanted to hear. If they didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear, he got himself a passel of new four-stars who did (which is how Petraeus and his cronies came into power).

Obama should have busted everyone in the Department of Defense in the grade of bull colonel and above back to buck private citizen when he took office, and he should have canned every civilian with the word “secretary” in their title as well. Instead, he kept on the entire pogues’ gallery, and now we have a president who goes along with whatever his generals say even when they publicly tell him to kiss their keister like they did when they bullied him into going along with an Afghanistan surge.

It’s tough to tell who blabbed this tale to Mazzetti – it has the look and feel of both a sanctioned leak and a whistle recital. I doubt if the news came from Petraeus’ staff. Former CENTCOM commander Adm. William “Fox” Fallon had it right when he described Petraeus as an “a** kissing little chicken s***.” Petraeus is a back stabber, not someone who fights in the open, and there’s no reason to think he’d announce that he’d usurped civilian authority on the front page of the New York Times (or even on his favorite media outlet, Fox News.)

Whoever spilled is likely someone who doesn’t like Petraeus: but that hardly narrows the field of suspects. Mazzetti’s sources were almost certainly senior officers at the Pentagon, and the percentage of senior officers at the Pentagon who don’t like Petraeus is decimal points shy of three digits.

The rear-echelon colonels who haunt the Beltway often pass sensitive information to military correspondents, but for the most part they’re too concerned with holding on to their pensions and the cushy defense industry jobs waiting for them when they reach 30 years of service to do that sort of thing without high cover. Unlike, say, Karl Rove, these guys are subject to the kangaroo courtliness of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and they face real consequences for giving state secrets to the press. So you can bet a shiny new Virginia quarter that the okay to show and tell came from the four-star level. Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen is a prime candidate. The son of a high-profile Hollywood publicity agent, Mullen knows how to keep his name out of the press while using it to broadcast his message.

Maybe Mullen finally realizes what a monster he created by siding with Petraeus and the rest of the Long Warmongers to get himself appointed as chairman. Maybe he finally realizes that supporting the phony-baloney counterinsurgency (COIN) doctrine means his beloved Navy’s budget will bite the big beluga in the post-recession economy. Maybe he’s finally reached the time in life where he’s concerned about whether his immortal soul gets a good parking spot.

It’s also possible the leak is part of the ongoing psychological operation against Iran. But the information that we have snake eaters on the ground in that country, and that they’re there to help foment an insurgency (is that counter-counter insurgency?) and collect targeting data for a great big bombing campaign, has been on the street for quite some years.

Whoever leaked the story for whatever reason they leaked it, we can be pretty darn sure that Petraeus did, in fact, promote himself by secret fiat to Praetorian dictator of Central and Western Asia, and we know for a fact that it’s now an open secret, and we know for a fact that Congress and President Obama are playing see-no-evil about it.

Whether Obama approved of Petraeus’ unconstitutional hooliganism from the get-go or is merely tacitly approving of it now, the net result is that Petraeus and the neoconservative/AIPAC cabal that champions him control U.S. foreign policy, and by extension America’s energy and economic policies as well, to an even greater extent than they did during young Mr. Bush’s reign.

Thus it is that Barack Obama’s ballyhooed “change” has gone the way of Big Daddy Bush’s “peace dividend.”

*The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our banana republics in Central Asia where U.S. and NATO forces are led by “Banana” Stan McChrystal.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com

Gone Wishing...

I'm taking a couple weeks off for a stay-home vacation.  See you in mid-June.

Have a great summer.

Jeff

PS I'll see what I can do about the recent spam invasion.

Bull from the China Shop

As counterinsurgency (COIN) marches into the expanding ranks of failed U.S. military doctrines, the military-industrial-congressional complex casts about for a new raison d’être. Since manpower-centric, generational occupations of broken countries we can’t fix have finally fallen out of favor as our foreign policy tool of choice, the American warmongery is back to championing a high-price, high-tech force posture reminiscent of the Cold War days.

The “China Shop,” my label for an ad hoc cell within the neoconservative think-tankery, is consuming swaths of bandwidth in an attempt to make Americans believe an expanded, modernized Chinese navy is about to grab control of the world’s oceans and make us all work in laundries and restaurants for sub-minimum wages or something equally implausible but nonetheless horrifying to the rank and file of the insentient Right. A May 20 article by Human Events columnist Robert McGinnis warns us of “China’s High Seas Aggression.” A Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from the same date by Michael Auslin of the infamous American Enterprise Institute sends chills up our spine with haunting tales of “Asia’s Troubled Waters.” An ad placeholder at Military.com’s Defense Tech blubbers, “It’s Springtime for China’s Blue Water Navy.” Swim away! Swim away!

At the heart of this latest wave of Sinophobia is a pair of recent articles by U.S. Navy Commander James Kraska, a judge advocate general (AKA “lawyer”) who frames himself as the next coming of Ray Spruance. Kraska is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI), one of the oldest right-wing think-tanks in the country. Contributors to FPRI publications constitute a pogues gallery of neoconservatism: Max Boot, Eliot Cohen, Donald and Fred Kagan, James Woolsey, and more. Kraska is also on the faculty of the U.S. Naval War College, which is a de facto neocon think-tank. (Professor Mackubin Thomas Owens, an associate dean of academics at the college, was co-author of the neocon manifesto Rebuilding America’s Defenses. He is a regular National Reviewonline contributor and is also, by sheer coincidence I’m sure, a senior fellow at FPRI.)

Kraska follows the playbook used by nearly all pseudo-intellectual war peddlers, which prescribes specious emotional arguments based on flimsy premises and propped up with false assumptions, facetious analogies, contrived facts, and references to the unsupported claims of one’s neo-cronies.

In “China Set for Naval Hegemony,” a May 6 article for The Diplomat, Kraska blames China’s maritime force buildup on Bill Clinton, blames the Chinese navy for something two commercial cargo ships did, and infers that China spends more on its navy than we spend on our Navy when in fact China’s entire defense budget is roughly 10 percent of ours at the very most. But Kraska saved his wackiest shenanigans for an article in the winter 2010 edition of FPRI’s Orbis magazine (which just happens to be edited by Mackubin Thomas Owens) titled “How the United States Lost the Naval War of 2015.”

In this hallucinatory glimpse at a bizarro future war, Kraska fractures history to an extent that the head of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth would balk at. “Over the past five hundred years all of the world’s foremost powers achieved their position of leadership through reliance on unsurpassed naval capabilities,” Kraska claims. Even “Russia reached the apex of its standing on the global stage through naval power.”

Author Kraska and editor Owens, both instructors in an accredited, graduate-level program of military theory and history, should know that all three of those statements are bunkum of the nth magnitude. Neither Napoleon nor Fredrick the Great nor Adolf Hitler had any naval power worth writing Mom about. Russia became a superpower when the Red Army repelled Nazi Germany’s Heer in World War II. Cold War Soviet naval forces were never designed to do more than intercept U.S. carrier forces a maximum of 1,000 miles from the Russian coasts, and their consistently abysmal material readiness made even that modest goal unrealistic.

This is pure parochial tall-tale telling, but it goes over big with Kreska’s bosses at the Naval War College, so it’s full blurt ahead and damn the realities.

It’s in that vein that Kraska asserts the Army can fail “as it did in Vietnam” and America will survive, but the Navy can “never fail.” News flash, Jim Bob: America’s reign as global hegemon is taking a jackknife into an empty pool because the Army has failed to defeat a foe that doesn’t even have an army, yet the Navy is failing to defeat a fistful of teenage pirates from Somalia and nobody is batting an eye patch.

Kraska’s crowning achievement is his description of how the Chinese manage to sink the carrier USS George Washington with a ballistic missile and make it look like theGW put itself on the bottom by accident. Nobody believes incontrovertible evidence that the Chinese sank the carrier, which is somehow Colin Powell’s fault, and the whole affair comes about as a result of globalization and environmentalists and (again) Bill Clinton, and the usual assortment of hand-wringing sheet soakers who have “forgotten that the history of international security and freedom of the seas was a story intimately woven into the material of world politics, forming the basis for an Anglo-American world order.” He really said that. Seriously. Not in the middle of the piece where you might accidentally skip over it, but at the very end where nobody could miss it.

Kraska’s scenario reflects an abject ignorance, even for a JAG officer, of air and naval combat capabilities, and it sketches a political-strategic plotline that wouldn’t even be plausible in one of those young-adult fiction books Tom Clancy writes.

Lamentably, as laughable as the likes of Kraska and Owens are, movers and shakers in our capital take them seriously. These two highbrow hooligans teach at the nation’s most prestigious war college (the only one that confers a master of arts degree). They and entirely too many like them play influential advisory roles in the highest levels of our executive and legislative branches, yet the only thing they really know is how to ingratiate themselves in the halls of power. When called upon to provide expert opinion on whatever subjects they pretend to have mastery of, they seldom know what the hell they’re talking about, but that’s okay because the people posing the questions never know what the hell they’re asking about.

And so it is that when our nation’s decision-makers dredge the Capital’s intellectual sewers to discover what American needs to keep itself safe, Kraska and Owens and Boot and Cohen and the rest of them will say we need more naval carrier strike groups because the 10 we have are stretched thin by too many global commitments.

The truth is that 10 carriers are more than we really need. Eight would be more than sufficient. Two could begin putting the Chinese navy on the bottom right after lunch and be done in plenty of time for midrats. If the Navy is stretched thin it’s because it keeps signing on for missions it isn’t really designed to perform (like helping the Air Force and the CIA bomb the bejeebus out of Muslim weddings) to justify its bloated budget to Congress.

Giving the Navy more ships would merely be giving it more ships to get sunk. What the Navy needs are systems capable of defending the ships it already has from mines and torpedoes and anti-ship missiles, relatively low-tech weapons they been vulnerable to for decades.

But Congress won’t hear that message from ideology-driven fools like Commander James Kraska.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

The Five-Sided House of Usher

The tea leaves tell me we’re about to experience a seismic event that will produce the next collapse of our five-sided House of Usher, the Pentagon.

The last time we saw a temblor of that magnitude was in November 2006. Just before the mid-term election, young Mr. Bush assured us that then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld would stick around long enough to “get the job done.” The day after the Democrats regained control of Congress, Bush announced that Rummy would receive a Purple Heart for the bruise he got where the door hit him on his way out. Robert Gates got the top Defense slot, the Iraq Study Group got a bruise in the same place Rummy got his, “King David” Petraeus got command of the Iraq surge, and the rest is historical fiction, especially the parts about how the Iraq surge was a success and how Stan the Man McChrystal was going to repeat that success in the Bananastans.*

The Bush administration announced its intention to escalate the Iraq fiasco in January 2007. The surge has been a dismal flop. Iraq’s government and security forces are congenitally corrupt, incompetent, and ineffective, and we will never fix that. Results of the country’s latest purple-finger poll have been rejected by both major candidates for the prime minister slot, violence is on the uptick, and the Obama administration is once again stuttering into the microphone about how American troops may not be able to withdraw from Iraq on schedule. Ray “Desert Ox” Odierno has been making that kind of boo noise since he took command in Iraq in September 2008. In February 2009, Petraeus hagiographer Tom Ricks quoted Odie as saying he wanted to see 30,000 U.S. troops in Iraq until 2014 or so.

AfPak is going to Helmand in a handbag. Banana Stan’s Marjah offensive, the “test” of his strategy (Obama’s strategy, according to the Pentagon’s bull-feather merchants), went over like a lead zeppelin. The only thing McChrystal has done well in command of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is what he did well for five years as head assassin of the Joint Special Operations Command: kill a lot of civilians in the process of hunting down “suspected” terrorists. Even McChrystal knows he’s knocking up the puppy. On May 13, he told Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour, “Well, I think that, in the last year, we have made a lot of progress,” but “I think I would be prepared to say nobody is winning, at this point.” Shades of the Great Decider. Days before the 2006 election, Bush proclaimed, “Absolutely, we’re winning in Iraq.” Shortly after he put Rummy through the uprights, Bush allowed as how “We’re not winning” but “we’re not losing.”

When you’re the world’s sole superpower, and you’ve been bogged down for eight years by pismire adversaries who don’t have an air force or a navy or an army or even a defense budget, you’re not breaking even, you’re getting your heinie handed to you on a plate with a generous helping of grilled crow on the side. What could better symbolize our humiliating defeat than the recent spectacle of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton kissing up in public to Afghan sleaze peddler Hamid Karzai? (What a revolting development. In February 2008, then-Senator Biden stormed out of a formal dinner Karzai was giving in his honor. President Obama has called Karzai “unreliable” and “ineffective,” and Hillary has said that Karzai presides over a “narco-state.”)

And at long last, the people in charge of our militaristic Christian oligarchy are starting to realize that our armed excursions overseas are about to torpedo our ship of state, and all the power rangers are scrambling to the rat lines to avoid sharing an ocean-bottom tomb with Bush, Rummy, and Tommy Franks, the first chain of command in American history to both win and lose not one but two separate wars.

McChrystal, as witnessed by his performance on Newshour, is startling to look like a deer wondering what that red dot halfway up his muzzle might be. He’s the prime candidate for being the guy without a place to sit when the music stops. As journalist Gareth Porter points out, the recent Pentagon report indicates that Washington brass hats have “serious doubts” about McChrystal’s plan for Bananastan. In a May 9 piece for the Washington Post, David Ignatius quotes a “senior military official” calling Marjah a “mixed bag” and saying “we [i.e. McChrystal and Obama] don’t have a plan yet” for reconciling the disparate political entities in Afghanistan.

Ignatius doesn’t name the senior military official, but there’s a darn good chance he’s talking about the senior military official, a guy who learned how to leak messages through his pals in the media from his father, who was a high-rolling Hollywood publicity agent. Whoever Ignatius’ unnamed senior military official actually is, the senior military official named Mike Mullen undoubtedly hopes that nobody remembers he soundly endorsed McChrystal’s nomination to take charge in AfPak, and that he urged not one but two escalations in support of McChrystal’s strategy. Mullen likely also prays that nobody mentions too loudly about how he was against the Iraq surge as chief of naval operations but foursquare behind it when he became the Joint Chiefs chairman (and probably a little before that, one would imagine).

“Teflon General” Petraeus has been keeping a low profile of late as the counterinsurgency doctrine he supposedly wrote goes down in flames. Gates is beginning to agree with tank-thinkers like Andrew Exum of the Washington-based Center for a New American Security, who says, “I think everyone realizes counterinsurgency is a losing proposition for U.S. combat troops.” (Get out! Really?) Gates says we “can’t afford” another Iraq or Afghanistan. It’s funny how when Gates took over we could afford to surge in Iraq and later to re-re-surge in Afghanistan.

Newsweek’s Johnathan Alter has a new book out that says in the first week of October 2009, Obama, unhappy about being “boxed-in” by his military, called Gates and Mullen into his office and gave them “a presidential dressing-down unlike any in the United States in more than half a century.” One can’t help wonder how the administration spin merchant who fed that story to Alter came by such intimate knowledge of the last 50 years of presidential dressing-downs. It’s nice to think that Obama actually ran a cheese grater across his generals’ faces at one point, but he should have transferred them to civilian command when he took office, and he should have transferred them to Fort Palooka when they couldn’t describe an end game in Afghanistan, and he should have transferred them to Fort Leavenworth when they used the media to extort him into going along with the AfPak escalations.

Were irony were still among us, it would have chortled with glee at the “ridiculous spectacle” of Obama in the Rose Garden last Friday, angrily denouncing the oil executives who pointed fingers at each other over the Gulf of Mexico oil spill while he and his generals play the same shameful blame game over our woebegone war on -ism.

* The Bananastans are Afghanistan and Pakistan, our Central Asian banana republics.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.

The Gray Lady and Officials Anonymous

The New York Times, the “Gray Lady” that abetted the efforts of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to dupe America into supporting the Iraq invasion, is still the willing echo chambermaid of the warmongery. The most egregious piece of covert propaganda the NYT ran during the run-up to Gulf War II was the Sept. 8, 2002, article by its access-poisoned reporters Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller that heralded “HUSSEIN INTENSIFIES QUEST FOR A-BOMB PARTS.”

We now know that the article was part of the elaborate Nigergate hoax, and that Gordon and Miller were establishing a practice that would become the NYT’s standard disinformation tactic for years and perhaps decades to come. In presenting the case that Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons capability from Niger, Gordon and Miller cited unnamed administration officials, American officials, senior officials, intelligence officials, government officials, United Nations officials and plain old generic “officials” a walloping 28 times.

In May 2004, the NYT’s editorial board gave a smirking apology that allowed as how it “found a number of instances of coverage that was not as rigorous as it should have been” in its pre-invasion reporting. Nonetheless, the editors maintained that in most cases “what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted” from sources that were “themselves dependent on sketchy information.” And these sources passing along sketchy information were who? “Administration officials” who “now acknowledge that they sometimes fell for misinformation.” Poppycock. Those officials fell for the misinformation they wanted to hear, and they had no qualms about passing it along to the unsuspecting public.

If the NYT had been sincerely contrite about leading us down a primrose path to quagmire, it would have stopped allowing faceless officials to make baseless assertions about the threats posed by presumed “enemies.” NYT’s editors weren’t a smidgen rueful, or course, and only an industrial-strength case of Orwellian doublethink could have led them to believe their sources were unaware that the information they were passing along was as genuine as a round dollar bill.

Don’t think for a moment that the 2008 election brought about a change in the NYT’s pro-war position; it will exploit any flimsy excuse to help keep the public scared witless. Stanley McChrystal canonizer Dexter Filkins is but one of the many NYTreporters whose noses are permanently embedded up the COINdinistas‘ tent flap.

I wasn’t a bit surprised to see the story frequent Filkins collaborators Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane filed on May 5 that evoked phantom-sourced tales of the evildoers’ latest act of evil derring-do. “Evidence Mounts for Taliban Role in Bomb Plot” the headline blared. Hmm.

Who do you suppose is trying to beat up support to stay the course in the Bananastans*, and maybe re-re-re-escalate the reindeer games there? Why, “American officials,” of course. They tell the NYT it is “very likely” that the Pakistani Taliban, “once thought unable to attack the United States” helped “inspire and train” Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen (immigrant!) under arrest for allegedly attempting to bomb Times Square on May 1.

The NYT says information about the Shahzad-Taliban connection comes from interrogations of Shahzad, which in turn comes from the aforementioned unnamed officials, who say unnamed “investigators” have “accumulated other evidence that they would not disclose,” and in fact, somewhere down around paragraph six, Filkins and Mazzetti admit that the officials, who only spoke with Filkins and Mazzetti on the condition they could stay anonymous (of course), “gave few details about what Mr. Shahzad had told investigators.” Just enough, apparently, for the NYT to run a front-page story with a headline that says the Taliban were behind the Times Square bombing.

The Filkins-Mazzetti story contains a pile of other trash about how the Times Square attempt ties in with other terror attempts and other terror groups, and how it’s President Obama’s drone attacks that are getting all these terrorizers riled up at us, and how some officials think Obama has “not taken the Pakistani Taliban threat seriously,” an eye-watering claim considering that we’re fighting the Taliban in a stupid, seemingly endless war half a world away.

I can’t speak with any authority about what motivated the Mazzetti-Shane article, but the piece has the earmarks of being part of an effort by team McChrystal – most notably by his information warfare officer, Rear Adm. Greg Smith – to ward off the oncoming bus that the Obama administration and a senior element within the five-sided hunker bunker are preparing to throw Banana Stan under subsequent to his failure-in-a-box Marjah offensive.

And all this hoopla is over another terrorkind who was an even bigger screw-up than the panty bomber. Shahzad built a bomb that couldn’t have caused a large explosion even if it had gone off. He locked the keys in both the car bomb car and the getaway car so he had to take a subway car home and beg his landlord to let him into his apartment. He got caught because the number in the memory of a cell phone he left in the car bomb car matched one he’d given customs authorities earlier. When officials arrested him on an aircraft about to take off for Dubai, Shahzad said, “I was expecting you.” He should have said, “What took you bozos so long?”

On May 8, the NYT’s Jane Perlez reported that anonymous officials say the locked-car bombing attempt came “amid increasing debate within the administration about how to expand the American military’s influence – and even a boots-on-the-ground presence – on Pakistani soil.” One of the officials says we’re telling Pakistan, “Sorry, if there is a successful attack, we will have to act,” by further escalating our presence in that country.

Lost in the NYT-generated hoopla is reporting by the Associated Press from May 5 – the same day the Mazzetti-Shane fright piece hit the streets – that authorities don’t believe there are any other suspects in the plot and that several arrests in Pakistan in the past two days were not related. The Pakistani Talibani have denied any connection with Shahzad, and even McChrystal’s mentor “King David” Petraeus admits that Shahzad was a “lone wolf.”

The New York Times continues to set unprecedented sub-standards in printing third-hand innuendo and framing it as cold fact. Imagine what this country would be like if the NYT took its “newspaper of record” buzz-label seriously and not as license to get away with journalistic murder, literal murder of both our troops and of civilians in the countries they occupy.

* The Bananastans are Pakistan and Afghanistan, our Central Asian banana republics.

Originally posted @ Antiwar.com.