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Today my toast looks like Christ,
like planet earth,
like Venus
like me in a dinosaur-proof suit,
bristling with spikes
that I invented when I was afraid to fall asleep.
But I don’t have time for visions. Christ,
I don’t have time for anything!
Bombs in the basement. That’s for the NSA.
A toast to the NSA!
(Lift up your cups, your mugs, comrades!)
The NSA keeps us mad.
Mad as a Hatter.
Without madness I just start
thinking about whether I flossed last night.
I can’t tell you what I’m really thinking.
But it’s whispering.
(I tell spirit in the stone-people’s lodge, I
sweat out truths that are so far beyond
anything I can put to words.
Sometimes sweat speaks louder than words.)
I wish I trusted my instincts!
Damn this
buzzing in my head. Can’t
think clearly. Want a revolution.
You too?
(My toast wants a revolution!)
I’m a Vietnam peace-veteran. And
so much more. They took my childhood,
my youth, my old age.
(Next life I’m going to
get ‘em back.) They took my father’s soul for
Christ’s sake. . .He was a Marine. . .
But he got it back before he died.
I was there. He got it back!
Bombs, bombs, I mean Buddha
in the basement.
Good morning NSA.
It’s a metaphor, you idiots. You literalists.
It’s code for, you guys should get out more.
This whole piece of toast is looking like Snowden now
who looks like Christ, by the way,
who looks like you and me and Buddha
flossing under the Bodhi tree,
who looks like Snowden.
Dear Snowden,
It snowed yesterday.
And I still have gardens to put to bed. . .
 

— Gary Lindorff

 
Lara Logan is a formidable TV reporter who has covered wars and other stories at significant risk. She’s supremely confident and has a powerful journalistic institution supporting her. But as a would-be ethical journalist, she seems to rely too much on her sexual allure and to be too tight with elite elements of the US military establishment.

When it comes to TV reporters, the 42-year-old Logan’s persona epitomizes the pop adjective hot. She’s a beautiful South African blonde with a come-hither sultry voice. It’s noteworthy that she’s married to a US civilian defense contractor from Texas she met covering the war in Afghanistan. They have two young kids. She made her aggressive militarist credentials clear in a 2012 speech in which she unambiguously called for vengeance by US “clandestine warriors” following the Benghazi attack.

As a journalist, Logan always seems to be falling off Albert Camus’ famous ridgeline separating the two abysses of Frivolous Art and Propaganda. In her case, the Propaganda abyss she’s falling into involves her breathy, seductive adoration of male “warriors” and adventurers she is inclined to report on and interview.

Lara Logan, her interview with Morgan Jones (really Dylan Davies), his book and Benghazi burning

The dust-up over her October 27th 60 Minutes interview with a macho warrior cum bullshit artist about his fantasy heroics in Benghazi makes her sexy style a fair issue for discussion. Her story was timed perfectly and played right into the hands of men like California Rep. Darrel Issa, Senator Lindsey Graham, Sean Hannity and other right-wing elements doing their mightiest to undermine the Obama administration.

It’s not that President Obama’s Libya actions don’t deserve fair criticism; it’s that Lara Logan’s story featuring “security officer” Dylan Davies (using the pseudonym Morgan Jones) posturing as a brave clandestine war hero turned out to be pandering, right wing militarist garbage. Even Fox News was leery of Davies and washed their hands of the man. Finally, Davies as Morgan Jones had produced a ghost-written book called The Embassy House published by Threshold Editions, a right wing imprint owned by Simon and Schuster, which is owned by Lara Logan’s boss, CBS, something she failed to mention in her interview.

So National Security Agency Director Keith B. Alexander, who, along with his boss, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr., thinks that “if you can collect it, you should collect it,” now is asking whether it might not be such a good idea in the case of spying on the citizens of US allies like Germany, France, Spain et al.

“What’s more important,” the chief spook reportedly asked, following revelations by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the NSA has been spying on the electronic communications and phone conversations of millions of people in European other countries around the world. “Partnering with countries may be more important than collecting on them.”

This unusual moment of reflection came before the later disclosure that the Alexander’s super spying outfit was also tapping the cell phones of the leaders of America’s major allies, including France and Germany, not to mention Brazil.

Caught with his electronic pants down, Alexander, who is also a four-star active-duty general, is suddenly acknowledging that spying might have a downside.

In this case, the downside he is acknowledging is a diplomatic one: if you spy on the people — and the leaders — of a friendly state, violating a basic trust that had been taken for granted, you risk losing that trust and losing a long-time friend. Alliances can founder over such abuses of trust.

What Alexander and his truth-challenged boss Clapper are not considering, though, is whether there is also a bigger question: Isn’t maintaining democratic freedoms and the trust of the American people more important than collecting every possible datum of information about them, and monitoring their every move and every communication?”

The answer, of course, is obvious, which is why Alexander and Clapper are not asking it.

Spoof NSA T-shirt: Way back in 2011, the agency threatened to sue the company, LibertyManiacs.com, on the basis of an obsure federal law outlawing the “mutilation or alteration of government seals,” in order to prevent sale of the shirt (click on image to check out the company).

            In brutish, crass, profanity-spitting L.A., in developer-ravaged $2500-a-month “elegant density” L.A., in have-and-have-not ethnically separated L.A., in get-out-of-my-way-asshole, hit-and-run texting-and-primping-while-driving L.A. . . .

            Gentle things still happen.

            She sat at the front table at Papa Cristo’s, the Greek place at Pico and Normandie in the so-called Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Across the street from St. Sofia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral and St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church, or, more appropriately considering that masses come with mariachis, Iglesia Santo Tomas Apostol.

            “This is excellent!” she said, and, really, it was amazing she could say anything at all, let alone in a clear, commanding voice. The withered and dry autumn leaves on the sycamore trees in the neighborhood were stronger. This was, to be indelicate, a corpse that hadn’t gotten around to officially dying. Stick limbs, prune skin, sunken cheeks. Talk about frailty, thy name is woman. . .

            “Okay, Babe,” said her companion, a young guy with brown curls pulled back in a pony tail. “I’ve got you.” And he steadied her as he removed her walker, and then helped her ease into a wooden chair at one of Papa Cristo’s wobbly tables. She didn’t seem comfortable.

            “Does your butt hurt?” said her companion.

            What butt, I wondered. Nothing there but bones.

Esther Cicconi, lifetime Communist and icon of LA's left fringe, says 'hello, not goodbye'

President Obama finds himself under fire on two disparate fronts these days, both for the botched rollout of his signature health care program and for the secret spying on allied heads of state.
– Peter Baker, The New York Times
 
It’s one of those elegant solutions to a mix of problems where you wonder why no one thought of it before.

President Obama is under assault for two very tricky problems. The first is the so-far ineffective communication program for the Affordable Care Act, a key component to the administration’s goal to improve the delivery of health care to all Americans.

The second problem is that the National Security Agency has been listening very aggressively (and very competently) to the cell phone calls and emails of people like German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The NSA has been doing this to Merkel for the past 11 years, which includes the entire five years of the Obama presidency. Ms Merkel and others are now quite exercised and perturbed.

Thanks to the talented Edward Snowden we now know how effective the NSA has been in figuring out how to track and listen in on the phone calls and emails of world leaders, as well as ordinary Americans. Of course, we’re told, the NSA only monitors US citizen calls if we dial a potential foreign al Qaeda agent. The NSA’s credibility is such that the reaction to that has been a resounding: “Yeh, sure!” Still, you have to admit, it’s pretty incredible what they are able to do. Personally, I’m still awed by landline telephones and that our voices somehow travel with hundreds of other voices over wire or clear cable as laser light. But even that’s like two Campbell soup cans and a wire when it comes to the marvels of the 21st century technological communication skills harnessed by the NSA.

The Obama administration and the NSA are now acting like kids pointing their stubby little fingers at each other. “Gee, I didn’t know that was going on,” the president said. “Oh yeh? Well, we told your people what we were doing. If they didn’t tell you, that’s your problem,” the nation’s spy chiefs replied.

US chief spy General James E. Clapper, Edward Snowden and a common listening device

Top spy James E. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, conceded the President of the United States could not know everything, although reports on the NSA would suggest General Clapper was trying to reach that goal himself. It’s important to understand that the 66-year-old leviathan Clapper oversees does not shift with the political winds every four or eight years. The leadership of the NSA (and the CIA and the Pentagon, for that matter) does not have to kiss American voter ass to get re-elected. They operate on an inexorably rising through-line that began with the super confidence of the immediate post-World War Two moment and the Cold War infused fear of losing that dominant top-dog feeling. Accordingly, our intelligence matrix has been able to grow steadily, mostly in secret, since the current National Security State was officially enacted in 1947 and the NSA was added to the intelligence-gathering mix in 1952.

“We’re talking about a huge enterprise here,” Clapper recently told a congressional hearing. Spy chiefs, of course, are notorious masters of understatement, and what he rules is actually much larger than “huge.” It’s mind-boggling. We poor citizen schmucks have only the minutest hint of what the hell it does — for us and to us.

The technology of MUSCULAR, a program jointly carried on by the NSA and its British counterpart, isn’t hard to explain. Essentially, technologists at the spy agency have figured out a way to intercept data being exchanged among servers that store everything you do on Google and Yahoo.

A revealing page-one article in today’s New York Times (“Tap on Merkel Provides Peek a Vast Spy Net”) reports on how the NSA’s global spying program, dating back at least to early in the Bush/Cheney administration, was vacuuming up the phone conversations (and no doubt later the internet communications) of not just leaders like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but opposition leader Merkel before her party took power in Germany.

As the Times puts it, the phone monitoring, which actually dates back to the Cold War Era before 1990, “is hardly limited to the 35 leaders of countries like Germany, and also includes their top aides and the heads of opposing parties.”

That’s pretty far-reaching, and the paper says that it has learned, primarily courtesy of revelations from the documents released by fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden, that the spying went even beyond that, to target up-and-coming potential leaders of so-called “friendly states.”

But the Times buys without question the explanation offered by professional liar James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence and ultimate head of the embattled National Security Agency, that the NSA’s spying on leaders and potential was and is and has been, first of all, well known to presidents, and secondly that its purpose was simply to see “if what they’re saying gels with what’s actually going on, as well as how other countries’ policies “impact us across a whole range of issues.”

That’s pretty broad. The first explanation is really a euphemistic way of saying the NSA wants to see if American’s purported friends and allies are lying. The second is a euphemistic way of saying that the US is spying to gain inside information about its allies’ political goals and strategies, and probably their negotiating positions on things like trade treaties, international regulations, etc.

What the Times does not ask in its entire report on this spying program on leaders and potential leaders is whether there could be another motive for this extraordinary spying campaign on leaders: blackmail.

Is President Obama listening in on others courtesy the NSA, or is the NSA listening in on him, and if so, for whom?

Nonetheless, at the time, most news organizations simply accepted at face value the shifting and thin official accounts of the strange events. Today few give the still-unfolding saga even the most minimal attention. And it is most certainly still unfolding, as we shall see. The Little-Noticed Post-Marathon Hunt The FBI’s strange obsession with marginal figures …

Continue reading “Feds Accused Of Harassing “Boston Bomber” Friends, And Friends Of Friends”

To: Jofi Joseph, Washington DC

Dear Mr Joseph:

I read of your firing as a low-level national security adviser in the White House thanks to your “snarky” tweeting about various Obama administration officials above you in the pecking order.

I understand you are contrite and a bit embarrassed and said that your tweeting escapade as @NatSecWonk started as innocent fun and turned into something else. Even the New York Times reporters who told your story on their front page today seemed hard pressed not to treat it comically. The headline was: “White House Official’s Career Twitters Out.” Twittering out is hardly a dignified downfall. In the annals of schadenfreude over the downfall of promising national office holders via the internet, at least you did not tweet anyone images of your penis.

Jofi Joseph

From here on out I’m going to treat your situation seriously, since I feel your predicament is instructive. I know you and your wife certainly see it as serious, since she remains on the Washington national-security-state power merry-go-round.

On the Rachel Maddow Show Wednesday night, yours was not the only Twitter-based story. Maddow gave much more time to, and was quite laudatory about, a tweeter named Tom Matzzie, a man who once worked for MoveOn.org.

Mattzie made blow-by-blow tweets from a Washington to New York Acela train of a loud, off-the-record cell phone interview being given in the seat directly behind him. The interviewee, Michael Hayden, as you must know, was the NSA director under President Clinton and CIA director under Presidents Bush and Obama; he now works for the Chertoff Group, which according to its website, “provides business and government leaders with the same kind of high-level, strategic thinking and diligent execution that have kept the American homeland and its people safe since 9/11.”

When Hayden was informed via his cell phone that an ordinary schmuck had just done a surveillance job on him from the seat ahead, the master spy introduced himself and graciously posed with Matzzie for a photograph. As any good spy knows, it’s important to always remain cool and make the best of things when caught with your pants down. (The photo is at the end of this missive.)

Last week President Obama was largely successful at blacking out from the American public word that Nobel Peace Prize nominee Malala Yousafzai, the courageous Pakistani advocate of girls’ education nearly killed by Taliban gunmen a year ago, used a photo-op invitation to the White House to ask the president to halt to his drone killings of Pakistanis. But Obama cannot so easily silence the condemnations today of his remote drone “Murder, Inc.” program by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

In a pair of reports released yesterday, the two respected human rights organizations blasted the US for its use of missile-firing drone aircraft over Pakistan and Yemen to kill alleged Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders, saying that both campaigns were causing extensive civilian deaths. Both reports — Human Right’s Watch’s report on the Yemen drone campaign, and Amnesty International’s report on the much larger Pakistani drone campaign, assert that the heavy civilian casualties from the strikes may constitute war crimes. The Amnesty report goes further, suggesting that even leaving aside the civilian killings, the extra-judicial killing of Taliban and Qaeda leaders themselves constitute war crimes under the Geneva codes.

While drone strikes date back to the presidency of Bill Clinton, and were employed to a significant extent in Afghanistan and Pakistan under President George W. Bush, since President Obama took office in January 2009, the frequency of drone-fired missile attacks, particularly in Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province, has soared. One analysis by the New America Foundation suggests that there have been 365 such strikes there–313 of them on Obama’s watch as commandeer in chief. These attacks are said to have killed between 1,611 and 2767 militants,along with with between 258 and 307 civilians. Other estimates of civilian casualties are higher, with the organization Drones Watch, which investigates drone strikes by the US in Pakistan, reporting that as of last January over 3000 people had been killed, “the vast majority of them civilians.” That report gave the names and ages of 172 of the dead in those attacks who were all children.

China has begun selling armed drones in the international arms bazaar, meaning the US has lost its drone monopoly