Good Morning!
Longwood Gardens. Photos by joanneleon. January, 2013
Steely Dan - Fire in the Hole
|
Drop in any time
day or night
to say hello, to post news, art, music, etc.
and feel free to promote your own work,
no matter where it lives.
|
News and Opinion
I have to admit that I haven't an ounce of respect left for Kathryn Bigelow. I never had any for Mark Boal from the first time I saw him interviewed. It would not surprise me if Dick Cheney himself was one of his sources of "first-hand accounts". Valtin has finally weighed in on the movie and on Bigelow's pathetic op-ed. It's well worth reading in its entirety. He touches on some things and some perspectives that have not been well analyzed elsewhere.
Zero Dark Thirty: A Nihilist View of the War on Terror
Having seen the criticisms, the negative responses are certainly justified. Screenwriter Mark Boal reportedly worked with CIA contacts and others in the administration to craft the story, as at the very beginning of the movie a screen title informs us the picture is based on "first-hand accounts."
[...]
As the movie progresses, casual comments are pointedly thrown out to let us know that the CIA is having its hands tied by liberals, who criticize torture, and want to let terrorist suspects have attorneys, who then can go to Al Qaeda and inform them what is revealed to their clients at Guantanamo. This is not a movie that merely wants to "objectively" portray the war on terror: it has a point of view, and even a mission. And that point of view is decidedly similar to that of former Vice President Dick "Dark Side" Cheney.
The movie is also racist in outlook, portraying Muslims, and in particular dark-skinned Afghans and Pakistanis as inscrutable, if exotic, orientals. The CIA heroes move among this mysterious and treacherous environment trying to save lives, only to be inexplicably attacked with bombs and suicide-vest wearing terrorists.
[...]
Are we supposed to feel sympathy for the sacrifice of this woman's personal life to the hunt for Bin Laden? For the sacrifice of billions of dollars and thousands of lives to sustain this hunt?
[...]
In the end, the movie has no vision of where it means to gets to. Stung by recent criticisms over her portrayal of torture, Bigelow penned an op-ed in today's Los Angeles Times (emphasis in original):
Bin Laden wasn't defeated by superheroes zooming down from the sky; he was defeated by ordinary Americans who fought bravely even as they sometimes crossed moral lines, who labored greatly and intently, who gave all of themselves in both victory and defeat, in life and in death, for the defense of this nation.
Despite her statement that she "support[s] all protests against the use of torture," her qualification of torturers as people that "sometimes crossed moral lines" shows where her real alliances lie. The movie's nihilism lies in the fact that it exists only to be a propaganda piece for the CIA. It has nothing to say about history, about current events, about politics, about torture, or about what it means to be caught up in all this, except what the CIA has to say about any of it. The last bit of humanity -- that tear at the end -- is both cynical and possibly also real. It represented perhaps the last sign of humanity in a filmmaker who has sold out moral integrity for a deal with amoral types whose actual crimes she barely begins to understand, if she even ever cared.
U.S. Military Stops Sending Detainees to Some Afghan Prisons on Rights Fears
“There has been some misbehavior by A.L.P., there are members who have violated Afghan law and who do things they shouldn’t do,” Colonel Bryant said. “Show me a police program anywhere in the world that is perfect.”
The Afghan general in charge of the program nationwide, Gen. Alisha Ahmadzai, acknowledged concerns about the forces, but said officials had acted to prosecute abusers and insisted that most of the 20,000 local police members did a good job. “We know that there are some problems and complaints from our local police forces about the A.L.P., and therefore we have arrested 65 or 66 local police officers, who were accused of murder, rape, theft, torture or dereliction of duty,” he said.
Colonel Bryant said in most places Afghan Local Police units had been important in fighting insurgents and had suffered three times as many attacks by the insurgents as other Afghan security forces, which he said was a measure of their importance in the war.
Recruited in their local communities and vouchsafed by elders in a process overseen mostly by Army Special Operations troops, the local police units receive less pay and training than normal police units.
“One of the beauties of the A.L.P. program is that it is Afghan-sustainable,” Colonel Bryant said, adding that by June, 15,000 of the local policemen would have been completely transferred from oversight by Special Operations troops to purely Afghan authority and support.
VA. Tech Shooting Survivor: Obama's Gun Plan a 1st Step, But "We Need a Movement" to Overcome NRA
It's interesting that the prosecution said last week that they would be introducing new evidence that an AQ member delivered information that came from state dept. cables to bin Laden. The trial was postponed again because of the new evidence. Where did the new evidence come from? Was it from the documents found at the bin Laden compound? There were reports of things found at the compound but as far as I know, none of it was ever disclosed. If the govt. had this evidence earlier in Manning's trial, why did they not introduce it then? Why the sudden introduction of new evidence last week?
Judge: Govt Must Prove Manning Wanted to 'Aid Enemy'
Defense argues lack of speedy trial requires charges be dropped
A military judge ruled Wednesday that in order to convict Bradley Manning of the most serious charge he faces—aiding the enemy—the government must prove that he knew or should have known that the documents he's accused of releasing would be seen by al-Qaida members.
Col. Denise Lind also ruled that Manning's defense lawyers can present evidence that that he purposely selected documents that he knew would not harm the country.
[...]
At approximately 2 p.m. Wednesday, Kevin Gosztola of Firedoglake tweeted, "Thus far, govt has presented no evidence #Manning knew of some kind of alliance, cooperation or ties between WikiLeaks & Al Qaeda."
An editorial Saturday in the LA Times argued that refusing to dismiss the most serious charge of aiding the enemy "strikes us as excessive in the absence of evidence that Manning consciously colluded with hostile nations or terrorists. A prosecutor indicated that the Army would proceed with flimsier evidence, including information that Osama bin Laden asked an Al Qaeda associate for some of the material that Manning allegedly gave to WikiLeaks. By that theory, the New York Times, which ran some WikiLeaks material, could be accused of espionage if Bin Laden picked up a copy of the paper."
A Window Into Infiltration: The FBI Informant File of Sheila Louise O'Connor
The story of 1970s FBI informant Sheila O'Connor provides lessons for today's progressive organizations about infiltration by the state security apparatus.
Back in 1972, Sheila O'Connor was a busy woman. She had a job in the Washington, DC office of the National Lawyers Guild. In her off time, she attended demonstrations organized by the Youth International Party (YIPPIES!), went to meetings of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War/Winter Soldier Organization, and was a committed member of a study group of the Revolutionary Union, a Maoist organization now called the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
She had one other job: She was a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, code named "Reverend."
The bombing of Mali highlights all the lessons of western intervention
The west African nation becomes the eighth country in the last four years alone where Muslims are killed by the west
First, as the New York Times' background account from this morning makes clear, much of the instability in Mali is the direct result of Nato's intervention in Libya. Specifically, "heavily armed, battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya" and "the big weaponry coming out of Libya and the different, more Islamic fighters who came back" played the precipitating role in the collapse of the US-supported central government. As Owen Jones wrote in an excellent column this morning in the Independent:
"This intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi's dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media. . . . [T]he Libyan war was seen as a success . . . and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback."
[...]
Second, the overthrow of the Malian government was enabled by US-trained-and-armed soldiers who defected. From the NYT: "commanders of this nation's elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training, defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian military officials." And then: "an American-trained officer overthrew Mali's elected government, setting the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic extremists."
In other words, the west is once again at war with the very forces that it trained, funded and armed. Nobody is better at creating its own enemies, and thus ensuring a posture of endless war, than the US and its allies. Where the US cannot find enemies to fight against it, it simply empowers them.
Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann: accountability for prosecutorial abuse
Imposing real consequences on these federal prosecutors in the Aaron Swartz case is vital for both justice and reform
Whenever an avoidable tragedy occurs, it's common for there to be an intense spate of anger in its immediate aftermath which quickly dissipates as people move on to the next outrage. That's a key dynamic that enables people in positions of authority to evade consequences for their bad acts. But as more facts emerge regarding the conduct of the federal prosecutors in the case of Aaron Swartz - Massachusetts' US attorney Carmen Ortiz and assistant US attorney Stephen Heymann - the opposite seems to be taking place: there is greater and greater momentum for real investigations, accountability and reform. It is urgent that this opportunity not be squandered, that this interest be sustained.
Blog Posts and Tweets of Interest
Evening Blues
Sweden eliminates forced sterilization of transgender people
The White House Rejects Solutions to the Mess it Made. We Will Pay for it With Austerity
It Now Takes 100,000 Voices To Be Heard
US execs call for raising retirement age to 70: Reuters
Obama EPA Shut Down Study on Fracking Water Contamination in Texas
Why Unions Are Different
Firing Swartz Prosecutors (TWO hackers have committed suicide on their watch): Why It's Not Easy
US already has high elder poverty rate, so why are Social Security cuts even on the table?
Remember when progressive debate was about our values and not about a "progressive" candidate? Remember when progressive websites championed progressive values and didn't tell progressives to shut up about values so that "progressive" candidates can get elected?
Come to where the debate is not constrained by oaths of fealty to persons or parties.
Come to where the pie is served in a variety of flavors.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum." ~ Noam Chomsky
|