Tag: DarkSide

Enemies List

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

[…]

…the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

Look, what I really want to know is: did Juan Cole knowingly or unkowingly ever text a picture of his wang to someone. Serious People must know. Why can’t we get serious answers to serious questions? If not: keep walking.

Enemies List

In 2005, the Bush CIA actually closed its unit whose mission had been to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. We don‘t know where Osama bin Laden was until 2005. But we do know that the home, that he was found in, was built for him in 2005. That same year that the CIA closed the unit that was hunting bin Laden.

Somehow that year, bin Laden got the feeling that he could settle down comfortably in a walled fortress in a Pakistan suburb.

Lawrence O’Donnell

So Bush really did lay the foundation for bin Laden’s eventual capture…

(via squee-gee)

I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority.

George W. Bush, speaking on March 13, 2002, whose policies are precisely why it took 10 years to track bin Laden down.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.

We can only hope that their shortsighted and foolish “bogeyman approach” to bin Laden now nucleates into a national desire to put an end to everything that was rolled out in his name. Then, and only then, will this be a “victory” of any kind for America.

Otherwise you’re just changing the name and picture at the top of Our Forever-War Commemorative Playing Card Set.

I have said it before and I will say it again: Impeachment is off the table.

Nancy Pelosi.  I wonder if we will be so fortunate with Speaker Boehner.  (via jonathan-cunningham)
I’d say it’s actually more important to recall that Pelosi was fairly literally dragged in front of cameras and forced to make this statement before it was even entirely clear just how many laws the Bush/Cheney trek to the DarkSide had broken or denied the existence of. Has Boehner even been asked? Of course he hasn’t. And won’t be. After all, Obama sets the agenda, and the GOP is certainly now pursuing a life of diligent Broderism.

Accountability Free?

Have to disagree with Greenwald’s take on Obama meeting Condoleeza Rice:

Still, the fact that Obama is not only shielding from all accountability, but meeting in the Oval Office with, the person who presided over the Bush White House’s torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War, speaks volumes about the accountability-free nature of Washington culture and this White House.

Actually, I think it’s a positive sign that says that something about Obama realizing just how dim his administration’s prospects for passing the new START treaty through the Senate really are (which we’ve touched on before). As the Democratic majority in the Senate stands right now, they’d need at least 8 GOP votes in an environment in which it’s hard to see where even ONE GOP vote would come from.
After November I think it’s pretty clear they’ll need even more than 8. The only way to get those votes is to paint the GOP into a rhetorical corner, and to get as many GOP All-Stars as possible on board right now to help with said painting. If that means taking a meeting with Condi to get her onboard, then so be it. Prosecuting her for whatever her involvement was (or wasn’t) with the Darkside policies of Bush/Cheney strikes me as far less pressing than greatly reducing the likelihood of total (or even partial or substantial) extermination of the human race. The fewer nukes sitting around the better, and seeing as we have approximately a zero percent chance of ever prosecuting Cheney or any of the other prime movers, much less Rice (who is certainly associated with but not clearly even for these policies), then I’d call that a fairly good trade to make. But then, that’s just me. Guess I’m not shrill after all.

Accountability Free?

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens

jonathan-cunningham:

jonathan-cunningham:

At this point, I didn’t believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record.  In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki’s father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims.  That’s not surprising:  both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality.  But what’s most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is “state secrets”:  in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are “state secrets,” and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

I never thought I could seriously type the title above.  It sounds crazy right?  The President running an assassination program where he can, without judicial or legislative oversight, kill any US citizen.  If Greenwald didn’t link to the legal document above, I wouldn’t have believed it.  Nothing can be done so long as the court sees it as a “state secret” so the only recourse is to elect another President in 2012.

Except that “electing another President” won’t help either. Implicit in the election of Obama (or any Democrat who ran in 2008, for that matter) was the notion that, leaving aside every other possible policy decision that might come up in their term, said Democrat would be working to reverse the worst excesses of the Bush/Cheney “Security State.” That this has not happened is an understatement. From what I can see, the Obama administration has largely embraced and extended the Bush/Cheney security state.
Electing “another President” won’t help either. Your choices come 2012 are going to be a) Obama (again, forgetting everything else that has happened by 2012: on the essential freedoms that were formerly implicit to citizenship he is a failure thus far and shows no sign of changing) or b) Palin/Romney/Pawlenty/whoever. Do you really think anyone the GOP runs is going to be to the left of Obama on basic freedoms and the rights of a citizen? I, for one, do not. Because, honestly, there is no way they let any Democrat seize the security state thing from them. It won’t even come up if they think they can’t get sufficiently far to the right of him.

One can only conclude that these policies are then, for all intents and purposes, permanent. You get one chance to roll them back: when the next person comes in. And Obama’s administration has decided they like them just fine. It would be one thing to charge and try Awlaki in absentia, and then issue the orders as something along the lines of “look, he’s a convicted criminal in a war zone; we’re bringing him to justice; he may well die in that effort, but we hope to bring him to face his sentence.” There are very few people who would argue with such a truly conservative approach. Instead: no charges, no trial, everything made a “state secret,” and not even a passing effort made at even implying that there’s a real, legal case that even can be made against this guy. He’s delivered some strident sermons. That’s the full case against him in five words. On those grounds, the future GOP-in-charge could choose to round up Jeremiah Wright. Is that a country we want to live in?

And yet the Tea Klan screams tyranny because they are still going to buy their health insurance from a private company come 2014 and the top marginal rates might rise slightly. Indeed they have their fingers on the pulse of The Founders’ deepest wishes.

Obama’s secret assassination program against US citizens

Uh, progress?

Glenn Greenwald takes an even dimmer view of the Awlaki “kill first, charge later” move:

It would actually be progress if the Obama administration were considering bringing charges against Awlaki in lieu of killing him without due process. But there’s no indication that’s so.

Worth noting for the tl;dr set: Awlaki is a US citizen, has been sentenced to death without actually being charged with anything, and is only “suspected” of inflammatory sermons…which are probably protected speech anyway. May God bless America!

Uh, progress?

The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to kill him and he is captured alive in Yemen.

Matt Apuzzo, writing for the Associated Press.
Nothing defines America more than these core Constitution protections: Kill first, then charge. Thank God the Founders had the foresight to put that in writing once and for all; truly a boon for citizens living some 225 years later.
Yet, one would assume, a poll of Tea Partiers and other Strict Constructionists would be broadly supportive of this kind of nonsense and would wonder after the squeamishness of questioning it at all.

Cause and Effect

unsolicitedanalysis:

So, of course you lead your rebuttal with two incidents that do not substantiate your argument.

Hey pal, you’re the one that disputed the very existence of a focused and systematic deconstruction of the regulatory apparatus on the part of successive GOP administrations dating back to Reagan and “government is the problem.” Just providing you with a few of the more brazenly obvious examples of said “unheard of” activities that go beyond fostering a merely “cozy” relationship between regulators and industry. The regulations themselves have been weakened through a focused and Bush-administration-mandated lack of enforcement coupled with Congressional oversight turning a blind-eye to what amounts to ignoring a Constitutional mandate that the Executive branch see to the enforcement of the law as it exists, not the law they wish they had. See: Statements, Signing.

On oil:

Proximate Cause: Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches and more robust blowout preventers would be an “undue burden” on the industry

Cause: Blowout valve that was placed was insufficient to seal the bore in event of catastrophic accident

Effect: Essentially unstoppable flow of oil into gulf until some other solution is found

Yes, Dick Cheney was evil!  Except no one knows why the blowout prevention system failed

The old “no one could have expected!” dodge. Uh, sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but we know exactly why it failed: Among other, more minor failings, even had everything worked perfectly the cutoff device was insufficiently robust to actually cut through the casing and seal the bore with the drilling and lining apparatus still in place.

The Deepwater Horizon’s blowout preventer had:

  • A dead battery;
  • Leaks in the hydraulic system that would activate the pistons in the [“unforeseeable”] event of an accident;
  • By design, 260 different failures that could require the BOP’s removal and replacement;
  • A useless test component installed, and;
  • Cutting tools that were not strong enough to shear through 10% of the joints in the piping.

You might note that each of these is a case directly addressable by a robust regulator assigned to oversee this activity. Any of these cases is found to exist: the work on drilling stops until they are rectified. The permit to drill can be suspended or revoked. Fines can be levied. None of these listed failures represents some condition that was unknowable or some totally unexpected chain of individually minor failures that led to the disaster. The primary cutoff system was insufficient to cut the bore. It should never have been placed. The regulatory apparatus as directly conceived and constructed by Bush/Cheney was asleep at the switch, a switch which they had furthermore allowed the oil industry to design and install (seeing as the regulatory reports were being filled out in pencil by the industry and “inked” by the regulators. Wonderful; indeed a searing indictment of the very concept that regulation can work. I guess we should just throw up our hands and forget about regulating industry.

But lets get back to your argument:

How do you stop “cronyism?”

How’s about by stopping cronyism? Simply deny the administration authority to undertake widespread replacement of the traditionally non-political, “career” civil service jobs (yes, I know you are shocked, shocked to hear that such a thing took place under Bush). And yes, Congress (lately in the fetid claws of The Democrat) desperately needs to flex its oversight power here; as a rule no administration should be allowed to sweep out what have been historically apolitical, career jobs in favor of putting unqualified hacks in place (that were, in this case, specifically placed to create the auto-affirming appearance of a government of by and for political hacks that is incapable of the simplest services or regulatory oversight). Undermining confidence in the government is/was the stated aim of these moves. And guess what: it’s working.

How do regulatory agencies take responsibility for decision-making that they don’t have absolute power over?  Do you believe in providing them with absolute power?

Give them absolute power. That’s the point of any well thought out regulation, to remove the potentially devastating outcome of precisely this kind of case-by-case, politically charged decision making (recall that BP received a personalized waiver on this project, one which was renewed on an apparently pro forma basis by the Obama administration) and in place of that patronage- and crony-based situation you build an impartial apparatus outside of the two/four/six year political cycle that impartially declares “we will allow BP to drill here, and these criteria will be met; these are the various levels of penalty for the different gradations of wrongdoing, be it accidental or willful. Here is how we will empirically determine compliance, stated in advance, such that BP can plan and act accordingly. In the event of accident, these are the guidelines…” Congress simply needs to find its institutional will to act, reengage its oversight function in a robust way (they are at least holding hearings again…), and ultimately force a broad reform that begins to cure a systemic ill.

Is that really so hard to understand?

Blue Sky

unsolicitedanalysis:

Did Reagan give the incompetent, corrupt motherfuckers in the Interior the gifts, lunches, or sport tickets?  His ghost must have turned their computers to porn.  And he personally instructed them to allow the drilling companies to fill out their inspection reports themselves.

[…]

What you’re doing instead is trying to pin the blame on a minority party for dubiously-documented “systematic weakening” based on a nebulous “anti-government right” with no cited paper trail of cause-inducing failure.

What color is the sky in your world? Two seconds worth of cursory googling:

And, in this instance, Cheney directly contributed to, and arguably caused this accident by determining that acoustic switches for blowout preventers would be an undue burden on the industry:

In secret meetings with the oil company officials in 2001, incoming Vice President Cheney set the foundation for a permissive, welcome mat with the oil industry.

After stocking the Federal government’s Material Management Service with his cronies, this agency reversed an earlier 2000 decision requiring a mandatory accusatorial regulator, allowing BP and others not to install a $500,000 acoustic switch to automatically shut down oil gushers.

Reversed the decision that would have prevented this accident. But, yeah, the take-home lesson here is that sensible regulatory agencies just won’t work. Ever. Nothing whatsoever can be done about it. The market will do all the regulating anyone could ever want. Best thing to do is pretend that no empirical data on the capability of regulation to sensibly manage industry exists and that nothing useful could be drawn from such information anyway. Keep walking. Some things in life are meant to be mysterious.