Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

Cheney as the Smirking Man

Political life after 9/11 often seems to imitate fiction. Increasingly, pulp fiction, alas.

According to Seymour Hersh--who's probably the most respected investigative reporter of our time and who has sources in government that would make a James Bond criminal syndicate green with envy--the US government entered into the assassination business big time after 9/11, and without any oversight or legal guidelines.  It really sounds likes something out of "The X-Files", only with an infinitely less entertaining villain.

The symbolism is overwhelming and seems to prove every anti-W joke right: These momentous and politically explosive covert operations were approved not by the Commander in Chief but the Vice President.

Seymour Hersh: "Executive Assassination Ring" Answered to Cheney, Had No Congressional Oversight | Rights and Liberties | AlterNet

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...

"Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

"Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

"It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

"I’ve had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?’

"But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

In response to this explosive revelation, Cheney's ex-national security advisor assured the public in a CNN interview that

There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

I'm relieved to hear that these killings around the world were "extremely well-vetted." Hopefully, the vetting wasn't being done by the crack observers of Muslimdom who packed Gitmo with innocent people. Or the Beltway security officials who don't know the difference between Shia and Sunni. Much less the experts who brought us the Iraqi WMD fiasco.

Why should we worry? You only need checks & balances, due process and transparency for serious stuff. This only concerns life and death, rule of law, and the sovereignty of foreign nations.

How is it that we've reached a point of such lawlessness and deeply immoral and muddled thinking that our government can treat assassinations on foreign soil as trivial matters not requiring even the barest legal oversight? 

A contrarian take on the Blagojevich impeachment

Aziz over on Beliefnet just shared his relief at Blago's impeachment.

Now, I readily concede that this reaction is in certain respects eminently understandable, but I have a very different take.

As disgusting as this scandal is, I think this impeachment is shameful and, as he claims, kangeroo court-esque in how it tramples on due process.

Whether they're an ax murderer or a justly disgraced politician, everyone deserves a fair trial and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty in a court of law.  Once that sacred consitutional principle gets sacrificed on the altar of public opinion, we're all put at grave risk.

Below are my comments on Aziz's post.

Comment #1:

I certainly have no sympathy for any politician who engages in what Blogojevich stands accused of, but does this hurried process--with an elected official getting sacked before he's been found guilty of anything--threaten the integrity of the political process?

Officials have a right to due process, too, and being a jerk and/or crude (which is the only thing the recordings I've heard prove on their face as far as I can tell) is not illegal.

I think many of his criticisms of this crazy process are dead-on. Rule of Law should come before politics and PR (i.e., the understandable desire of Illinois politicans to get this behind them ASAP).
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/01/26/blagojevich-calls-illinois-state-senate-impeachment-trial-kangaroo-court/

Comment #2:

One more thing, to make one thing explicit: I'd argue that the serious procedural concerns with this impeachment, to the contrary, undermine one's faith in the process. It seems to me that what we've seen here is a state legislature demeaning itself and short-circuiting the legal process.

If one listens to recordings of previous presidents that have entered the public domain in recent years, one discovers that Blago's unsavory manner is hardly unique in the annals of American political history, so the argument that the impeachment can be justified purely by established norms of decorum strikes me as weak, as well. Venal, crude opportunists aren't exactly unheard of in political life.

Just my $0.02...

Aren't Obama's critics the ones who keep getting "duped"?

The ever insightful Jim Lobe injects some perspective into the vacuous Beltway debate about Obama's alleged naivete in being committed to talking rather than shooting first in the Middle East.

LobeLog.com » Blog Archive » The Chalabsey Twins*

Senators John McCain and Joseph Lieberman have been traveling around the country together repeatedly charging that Sen. Barack Obama’s foreign-policy ideas are “naive” and even “reckless.” But what they hope their audiences will forget is that both of them were taken in by the most-successful foreign-policy con man — and apparently a close friend of Iranian intelligence — of his generation, Ahmad Chalabi.

Touche. Lobe continues:

it seems frankly unseemly for the two of them to now charge Obama with being dangerously naive about foreign policy and what it takes to deal with crafty and malevolent Middle Eastern leaders, like Iran and its friends and allies. Not only were they completely taken in by Chalabi and the INC, but they were also, as Paul Wolfowitz now admits, completely “clueless” about what U.S. troops would face once they got to Iraq. And they obviously either failed to consult or disbelieved the Iraq experts in the State Department and the U.S. intelligence community, not to mention former Centcom commander Gen. Anthony Zinni, who had long before concluded that Chalabi was a con artist who could not be trusted.

With sophistication like that — in contrast to Obama’s naivete — a McCain administration would seem ripe for the picking by would-be Chalabis, if not by the master himself.

Give a man enough rope...

Is that roasted elephant I'm smelling?

GOP cancer: Party could lose 20 more seats - John F. Harris and Josh Kraushaar - Politico.com

For the past 18 months, ever since the 2006 elections, congressional Republicans have been like a hospital patient trying to convince visitors that he is not really all that sick: a bit under the weather; actually feel better than I sound; should be up and about any day; thanks for asking.

Suddenly — belatedly — all pretense is gone.

The Republican defeat in Tuesday’s special election in Mississippi, in a deeply conservative district where, in an average year, Democrats cannot even compete, was a clear sign that the GOP has the political equivalent of cancer that has spread throughout the body. Many House GOP operatives are privately predicting that the party could easily lose up to 20 seats this fall.

The number of Muslims in Congress has doubled

Indiana just elected a Muslim to Congress in a special election.

Second Muslim elected to Congress - Yahoo! News

Indiana voters on Tuesday elected a Muslim to Congress, only the second of that faith chosen in U.S. history. Andre Carson, grandson of the late Democrat Rep. Julia Carson, was elected to serve the balance of her term in the U.S. House of Representatives in a special election. She died in December 2007, after serving 11 years in the heavily Democratic district. The younger Carson, 33, a member of the Indianapolis City Council who converted to Islam about a decade ago, will serve out the remainder of his grandmother's term through calendar 2008. He beat Republican Jon Elrod and a third party candidate with 52 percent of the vote to 44 percent for Elrod.

Good news, but I really dislike this phenomenon of spouses and children inheriting" offices from deceased politicians. Blood doesn't confer qualifications or experience.

It's practically feudal. Our political culture is supposed to be more evolved than that.

What, we still have an Electoral College? Touché, I stand corrected. I guess this makes perfect sense.

[HT: Amad]

My post on MLK at Religion Dispatches

I have a post at Religion Dispatches on the perverse ironies of the unspoken complacency with which the legacy of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is often celebrated.

Here's the final paragraph.

Religion Dispatches - MLK's 'Dream' Unrealized and Undigested

It seems to me that given America's glaring gaps today in economic justice at home and principled, constructive involvement in the outside world, King's "Dream" speech should if anything play as a stinging reminder of how little of his mission has been fulfilled. Instead, his stirring words are more often than not deployed not as a call for renewed introspection or commitment to equality, but as a self-congratulatory coda to America's modern social history that seems highly premature -- like those iconic feminist-themed Virginia Slims billboards of the past -- not to mention fundamentally at odds with the message of the man and the holiday being celebrated. Like the self-satisfied Virginia Slims billboards of the past, in some respects we've come a long way, Baby, but the fact that we've reduced Reverend King's holistic and unapologetically revolutionary message to the toothless, politically correct sermonizing of a Benetton commercial shows that his dream remains more than unfulfilled -- it remains scandalously undigested.

Religion Dispatches - "UK Muslims & the 'War on Christmas'"

Have only written one piece so far, but I'm am now pleased to call myself a contributor to the interesting new progressive blog on religion Religion Dispatches. 

My first post is on the topic of "UK Muslims & the "War on Christmas":

Interesting and ironic news from the British front of the "War on Christmas." In the UK, some seemingly unlikely champions for the Christmas spirit are entering the lists. Muslims and Hindus are urging people not to throw the Baby Jesus out with the Yuletide bathwater by needlessly deemphasizing the holiday's theological message.

I also opine therein about how ironic it is that the Christmas season should find itself defended by such inveterate Grinches, with their coldly individualistic, dog-eat-dog vision of government and social policy.

Debate for sale in Washington

Posing as a shadowy emissary of a rich dictatorship, an investigative journalist approached a number of top lobbying firms in Washington DC and was promised with almost no questions asked all sorts of things--op-eds planted in newspapers, fake policy events hosted at think tanks, ...-that shouldn't be for sale in a democracy worth the name. It's a fascinating expose, though one I find sadly unsurprising after my own sojourn in the Beltway.

Kudos to Silverstein for Ali G-ing these rogues and giving Americans a glimpse of Washington's underworld, where everything's for sale.

Democracy Now! | In New Expose, Ken Silverstein of Harper's Magazine Goes Undercover to Find Out What US Lobbyists Do for Dictators

Ken Silverstein of Harper’s Magazine visited Washington’s top lobbying firms posing as a representative of a fictitious investment firm with a financial stake in Turkmenistan. He claimed that he was eager to bolster the image of a regime widely described as one of the most authoritarian in the world. Two prominent firms fell for the bait, promising unparalleled access to Washington’s decision makers and improved media coverage—for a fee of up to $1.2 million.

HT: FAIR

Was Blackwater just following orders?

The established stereotype is of diplomats as cautious and conflict-averse negotiators that struggle to rein in gung-ho generals and grunts, but as the Christian Science Monitor piece below shows in the Blackwater case it appears that it's the American diplomats who've been the trigger-happy buckaroos, violating even the modest safety protocols employed by soldiers in wartime. To the extent that an internal State review panel needed to remind them of that they need to make sure their guards look where they're shooting.

Not that I make any excuses whatsoever for the homicidal rampages of trigger-happy yahoos.  If you take a life wrongfully in my book you should hang (in some cases literally), in wartime as well as peace and with foreigners as well as your compatriots.  Still, it seems that a fair amount of this blood is on the hands of State Department officials, and not for simply for being "lax" in oversight of its guards.

It appears that at least some of these tragedies were predictable consequences of the State Department's homicidally lax policies, its excessive zeal in protecting its staff even at the cost of innocent life. Judging by this article, State had as a matter of policy given its security details carte blanche to wax civilians almost at the drop of a hat.

Don't blame Blackwater | csmonitor.com

But the issue isn't an overly aggressive contractor. It's the State Department's zero tolerance for casualties of its employees in Iraq. Such an approach makes tragedies such as the September episode more common – and it marginalizes the lives of innocent Iraqis who just might be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Placing so many diplomats and civil servants on nation-building assignments in the middle of a civil war has a high price – perhaps too high, as officials at State have finally started to acknowledge.

The US government appears to tolerate a certain number of casualties from the all-volunteer military. But civilian employees are a different story. Images of dead diplomats being dragged through Iraqi streets or videotaped beheadings of civil servants, it's assumed, would undermine already tenuous public support of the war.

The very branch of the US government charged with fostering relations with the Iraqi government and people is responsible for the behavior that has helped erode support from the Iraqi populace. The State Department Diplomatic Security Service set up aggressive rules for the use of force for its contractors in what's called the Mission Firearms Policy. These rules are more aggressive than those used by the military for its contracted forces. In fact, the Secretary of State's Panel on Personal Protective Services in Iraq recommended last month that these guidelines be amended to require basic assurances: "due regard for safety of innocent bystanders," "every effort to avoid civilian casualties," and only aimed shots – a nod to the fact that pointing and spraying rounds isn't explicitly banned.  

That stance may have a certain gut appeal at first blush. It makes for good patriotic posturing to declare you'll do "whatever it takes" to protect American civilians in harm's way, but foreign civilians manage to function in wars around the globe without such draconian methods. And what about when the approach is so heavy handed and irresponsible in practice that it guarantees regular killings of  civilians guilty of nothing more than going about their daily lives in their own communities?  When the operational protocols of an organization representing an ostensibly democratic and law-abiding nation treat the safety of the local populations as so trivial that security forces are free to riddle bystanders' cars with bullets for accidentally driving too close to a foreign convoy in  what they perhaps naively assume to be their country, you have a real breakdown in civilization itself, and on the part of its self-proclaimed bearers.

Obviously, State must and should do its utmost to protect its staff, but permitting indiscriminate bursts of gunfire at civilians in the absence of a serious demonstrated threat is reprehensible. And probably a war crime, when you really get down to it.

Now, if that's what they have to do to "get the job done" safely then that's probably an indication that they're in the wrong place doing the wrong job. If Iraq is so aboil that foreign officials and aid workers can't move about the country without feeling compelled to preemptively gun down women and children, then the situation's completely out of control and civilians shouldn't be there in the first place.

But I doubt such tactics are necessary, or that these problems are primarily driven by security. A more likely explanation, I think, is neo-colonial attitudes towards "natives", general ignorance, and the blinders imposed by MSM sensationalism and Islamophobic popular culture that make Muslims seem so inherently menacing to the average person that rational analysis of risk becomes impossible for all but the most hard-nosed and analytical. (Speaking of which, see John Mueller's sober and eye-opening--and thus heretically out of sync with most of what has passed for analysis in the Beltway --assessment of terror threats.)

Rather, it sounds to me like some decision-makers at State were thinking of Iraq like yuppie suburbanites who wet their pants at the thought of setting foot even momentarily in a majority-black neighborhood, deeming all interactions with the "natives" perilous. It's probably not conscious racism, but that doesn't make the root attitudes any less irresponsible or intellectually disreputable.

As in the case of the proverbial average white senior who thanks to racially-tinged media sensationalism about crime grips her handbag tightly when a black man joins her in the elevator, that reaction is perhaps psychologically understandable on the part of the average person caught in the crossfire of war--say, a caterer, delivering supplies to a base--but for an official on the ground it seems a damning mark of incompetence to me. If the repertoire of an official when faced with a mission as complex, multi-faceted and shifting as that of bringing peace and stability to Iraq consists only of sending a  message to the naives by allowing them to be periodically indiscriminately waxed, he or she should be pushing papers in Washington, if not serving time. Anything but calling the shots on the ground in a conflict they clearly misunderstand.

Iraq's a war zone and one with an increasingly active and menacing insurgency--a fact that hardly makes it unique in the annals of military history, it must be noted--not a graveyard in a B horror movie. I've never been there (though I have live across the water in the Gulf), but I doubt creatures inexplicably rise out of the muck at every turn and all but beg to be gunned down.

If I'm wrong about that, then our salvation in this conflict probably lies in deploying the current occupants of the White House and the coterie of pundits, lobbyists, religious zealots and ideologues  who cheerled for this farcical crusade from the beginning. Judging by their management of post-9/11 American foreign policy and their continuing obliviousness to the enormity of their catastrophic blunders, they'll have little to fear from zombies hungering for brains, anyway.

CNN propaganda against Michael Moore's "Sicko"

If you haven't seen "Sicko", Michael Moore's courageous and pioneering documentary on American health care or lack thereof, please get out there and support it while it's in the theaters.

CNN's "Situation Room" ran a hatchet job by media medical expert and, it appears, healthcare industry lobbyist, Sanjay Gupta. The invaluable media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has an alert on Gupta misinformed spin.

I was so disgusted that I called CNN and sent an email, included below.

This is the only way to get institutions--whether media, corporate or governmental--to mend their ways. You have to give them an earful and let them know you're watching.

---------------------
From: Svend White
To:    situationroom@cnn.com
CC:    president@cnn.com

Dear CNN:

Dr. Sanjay Gupta's misinformed aspersions on Michael
Moore's well researched and compelling documentary on
America's shamefully discriminatory health care turned
my stomach. As a parent of limited means struggling to
pay medical bills for his infant daughter--bills left
over, it should be noted, despite my having paid
through the nose for health insurance--I am shocked
that CNN would engage in such underhanded tactics.
Gupta's "fact checking" grossly misrepresented the
issues and evidence.  CNN needs to get the facts
straight before it takes shots at people who are
trying to do something about this diseased system.

Gupta makes a big deal out of the fact that Cuba is
listed even lower than the USA on the World Health
Organization's international health care rankings,
implying Moore to be hoodwinking his audience--though
the list containing Cuba appears in the film--but
neglects to point out the essential and obvious
context: Cuba is a third-world country, not to mention
one that has been under a crushing economic embargo
for decades. For the most powerful and wealthy nation
in the world to be *only* 2 rungs above Cuba (#39 vs.
the US' #37) is an absolute scandal of which Gupta
seems blissfully unaware.

Gupta also takes Moore to task but reveals himself to
be in need of tutoring from his target. First, in a
curious move for a fact checker, Gupta misrepresents
*both* Moore's film and the evidence the film cites.
He chides Moore for claiming that Cuba pays $25 per
capita, when the film actually said $251 and then
faults Moore for estimating the US expenses at $6,000
per capita, claiming that the correct figure is
$6,096. Wrong again. According to US Department of
Health statistics, we spent $7,092 last year and are
expected to spend $7,498 this one. And then he
seriously misrepresented an international study,
crowing that the USA beat Canada in wait times, but
overlooking the fact that we had longer times than
everybody else under review (Australia, Germany, New
Zealand, and the UK). Moore did his homework. Why
didn't Gupta?

As Gupta has noted, these issues are complex, so
perhaps this was an honest mistake.  Moore's website
and media watchdog group FAIR have provided evidence
to rebut his charges. Now the onus is on him as a
"fact checker", expert and independent critic to set
the record straight for the sake of the public relying
on CNN for their news. If he does not do so, it will
be difficult not to take him for yet another industry
shill, one of the diseased health care industry's many
hired guns in the media.

Finally, I must say that I'm disturbed that CNN felt
the need to attack Moore's much needed contribution to
the national discussion. Serious discussions about the
shameful state of health care in America and the role
of the industry in creating these problems are
chronically rare in the mainstream media. Thanks to
Moore's documentary, we're experiencing a brief moment
of debate on a matter that is a burning issue for
millions of Americans. Given how rare such debate
occurs, I would hope for CNN to display some
objectivity and neutrality, providing a platform for
long overdue debate, rather than rushing to censor
Moore like Fox News.

Perhaps people working for CNN are blessed with
reliable and reasonably priced health insurance. If
so, I'm happy for them. But many Americans are stuck
paying exorbitant fees for minimal services and
sometimes must choose between getting needed medical
care or putting food on the table.

Please don't add to our problems by misrepresenting
the facts with hatchet jobs of this sort. Kindly leave
the industry lobbying to the industry lobbyists.  I'm
sure they'll have the media singing their tune again
soon enough, anyway. Grant the millions of us living
without health insurance this one moment of dignity.

Sincerely

Svend White
Athens, GA