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Longwood Gardens. February, 2013. Photo by joanneleon.
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News and Opinion
New article by Sy Hersh. First I've seen from him in a long time. This is a short one.
Iraq, Ten Years Later: What About the Constitution?
So the question that presents itself is: What’s up with our Constitution? How could a small group of hard-line conservatives around President Bush, including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and a few neoconservatives so quickly throw us over the cliff?
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The question about all of these things that has yet to be asked—at a Presidential news conference or during Brennan’s confirmation hearing—is this: How many suspects on your list have been taken off the list because of unreliable intelligence or a conclusion that the “imminent” threat was no longer so imminent? The answer, according to people who know of such matters, is very few, if any.
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A second question that could be asked is: How many of the men and women who attend meetings about the kill lists have participated in Situation Room viewing of post-strike footage of the predator and drone raids? A retired senior intelligence officer said that some of those who have attended have wryly characterized it as watching “snuff movies.”
Nothing succeeds in Washington like being tougher than the next guy. And woe to those who express doubt. In its article last May, the Times quoted retired Admiral Dennis Blair, the Obama Administration’s first director of National Intelligence, who was replaced after just sixteen months on the job, as saying that the drone and predator strikes were talked about as “the only game in town”—in a way that “reminded me of body counts in Vietnam.” Vietnam. And Iraq, and Afghanistan. We have a lot of anniversaries to forget.
"...not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted"
What lessons have been learned? We see the same thing today with Syria, and saw the same thing just a couple of years ago with Libya when we started launching cruise missiles on the anniversary of the Iraq invasion on 3/19/2011.
That 'NYT' Mini-Culpa On Iraq
The following is excerpted from my book, which was published this week in an updated, expanded e-book edition, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits--and the Media--Failed on Iraq.
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Then consider this: "Editors at several levels who should have been challenging reporters and pressing for more skepticism were perhaps too intent on rushing scoops into the paper. Accounts of Iraqi defectors were not always weighed against their strong desire to have Saddam Hussein ousted. Articles based on dire claims about Iraq tended to get prominent display, while follow-up articles that called the original ones into question were sometimes buried. In some cases, there was no follow-up at all."
Yet nowhere does the Times suggest that it is penalizing any editors or reporters in any way.
Iraq's pain has only intensified since 2003
The country of my birth, already so damaged, is now crippled by fear of all-out civil war. But in the people there is hope
It has always been painful for me to write about Iraq and Baghdad, the land of my birth and the city of my childhood. They say that time is a great healer, but, along with most Iraqis, I feel the pain even more deeply today. But this time the tears for what has already happened are mixed with a crippling fear that worse is yet to come: an all-out civil war. Ten years on from the shock and awe of the 2003 Bush and Blair war – which followed 13 years of murderous sanctions, and 35 years of Saddamist dictatorship – my tormented land, once a cradle of civilisation, is staring into the abyss.
Wanton imperialist intervention and dictatorial rule have together been responsible for the deaths of more than a million people since 1991. And yet, according to both Tony Blair and the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, the "price is worth it". Blair, whom most Iraqis regard as a war criminal, is given VIP treatment by a culpable media. Iraqis listen in disbelief when he says: "I feel responsibility but no regret for removing Saddam Hussein." (As if Saddam and his henchmen were simply whisked away, leaving the people to build a democratic state). It enrages us to see Blair build a business empire, capitalising on his role in piling up more Iraqi skulls than even Saddam managed.
Losing too much of an audience by becoming an arm of the 2012 campaign and now an arm of the DNC? Or pushing Hayes out the door by giving him a time slot dominated by Fox (O'Reilly). Article says, and this seems likely, they are worried about the numbers on their demographics. I've mentioned a lot of times. From my experience, kids don't get their news from cable tv and don't watch much tv at all. With a show on weekend evenings, Ed is really losing a lot here. Hayes is the only one I will watch on MSNBC. Hope they don't wreck his show by making it a one hour slot. IMHO, people who like Maddow will be complaining every night about Chris, that he is too critical and his guests too controversial.
Chris Hayes to Take Over 8 P.M. Show on MSNBC
Mr. Hayes, a liberal intellectual who has hosted a well-regarded weekend morning program on MSNBC for the past 18 months, is a protege of Rachel Maddow, the highest-rated host on the channel. He will become the lead-in for her 9 p.m. program, “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
The change is predicated on the belief that MSNBC can win a wider audience with Mr. Hayes than it did with Mr. Schultz, a champion of the working class whose bluster didn’t always pair well with Ms. Maddow and the channel’s other prime time program, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell.” Mr. Hayes, on the other hand, is just as wonky as Ms. Maddow and Mr. O’Donnell, and is a regular contributor to both of their programs.
Mr. Hayes’s promotion was described by people who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it had not been officially announced by the channel yet. Once it takes effect, Mr. Hayes, 34, will be the youngest host of a prime-time show on any of the country’s major cable news channels, all of which seek out youthful viewers but tend to have middle-aged hosts and a core audience made up of senior citizens. Of Mr. Schultz’s one million viewers last year, for example, only 249,000 were between the ages of 25 and 54.
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“Up” doesn’t have a huge audience — it had about 139,000 viewers ages 25 to 54 last month — but it consistently beats CNN on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and it has been praised by media critics for allowing long, thoughtful conversations about politics and public policy, the kind rarely seen elsewhere on television.
Dayen describes the article he writes about as "bombshell". Are we surprised at this news? LOL. Shocked! Shocked, I tell you! JP Morgan (and how many other TBTF) are just organized crime orgs.
David Dayen: Out of Control – New Report Exposes JPMorgan Chase as Mostly a Criminal Enterprise
There’s been an unlikely yet welcome resurgence of chatter about breaking up the nation’s largest and most powerful banks. Bloomberg’s story quantifying the too big to fail subsidy grabbed some eyeballs (and there’s an upcoming GAO report on the subsidy that will do the same). Sherrod Brown announced an unlikely pairing with David Vitter working on legislation on the subject. Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher is going to give a big speech on Friday on breaking up the banks… at CPAC, the largest conservative political conference of the year.
At the same time the unending stream of reports of abuses and fraudulent actions give fuel to the movement. And we’ll get another one Friday, when Carl Levin’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations releases their report, complete with a companion hearing, on the London “Fail Whale” trades, the losses for which stretch as high as $8 billion. Early reports suggest that the report will be unsparing. Levin’s committee did an excellent job in prior investigations of Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs (which they gift-wrapped to the Justice Department as a criminal referral, only to see DoJ toss it in the wastebasket). People I’ve talked to expect the hearing to be explosive.
As an excellent preview for the Friday fireworks, I urge you to read an astonishing new report, which I’ve embedded below, from analyst Josh Rosner of Graham-Fisher and Co. The best way to describe the report, “JPM – Out of Control,” is that it reads like a rap sheet. Notably, Rosner takes mortgage abuses almost entirely out of the equation, and yet still manages to fill a 45-page report with documented case after documented case of serious fraud and abuse, most of which JPM has already admitted to (at least in the sense of reaching a settlement; given out captured regulatory structure the end result is invariably a settlement with the “neither admit nor deny wrongdoing” boilerplate appended). Rosner writes, “we could not find another ‘systemically important’ domestic bank that has recently been subject to as many public, non-mortgage related, regulatory actions or consent orders.”
Obviously this contrasts with Jamie Dimon’s spotless reputation (at least in Washington) and his bold talk of a “fortress balance sheet.” Yet as you read the report, it’s hard to see the bank as anything but a criminal racket just days away from imploding, were it not propped up by implicit bailout guarantees and light-touch regulators. Rosner paints a picture of a corporation saddled with pervasive internal control problems, which end up costing shareholders, and which “could materially impact profitability in the future.” He calculates that since 2009, JPM has paid out $8.5 billion in settlements for its outlaw activity, which equals nearly 12% of net income over the same period.
It’s hard to summarize all of the documented instances in this report of JPM has been breaking the law, but here’s my best shot. I try to keep up on these matters, and yet some of these I’m learning about for the first time:
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
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