'Toontime: Surrender to Insanity

[credit:Morin, The Miami Herald ]

Obamanon Wins Border Clash

While corporate political pundits are pointing to Senator Clinton's establishment win in California, Senator Obama's narrow victory in Missouri is the more telling result from "Superduper Tuesday." If any state can be viewed as a microcosm of the American electorate, it is Missouri or Missoura depending on which part of the state you call home. Iowa is too homogeniously northern, white and rural to qualify as a representative demographic. New Hampshire's small population is too regional and idiosyncratic. South Carolina is too regional and ethnic. The Missouri win shows that Obama's decisive victories in Iowa and South Carolina were not flukes. He has claimed during the campaign that of the two remaining Democratic candidates, he has the most crossover appeal and Missouri proves he is correct. Missouri is both a southern and northern state, rural and urban, ethnic and anglo, evangelical and established church. Obama has managed to bridge a divide within the Democratic Party that is not just racial but socio-economic as well. His movement is from below, not top down. It will take a movement, not just a campaign, to win enough idenpendent and liberal Republican votes to beat the Republican money machine in the general election.

Obama also offers the most contrast with the Republican front runner, John McCain. These two candidates represent two very divergent views of America. McCain is an old warhorse, a tragic hero of a failed foreign policy. He intends to continue the military-industrial security state and global hegemon we have inherited from ten consecutive administrations, Republican and Democratic, since the end of World War II . His vision for American is a hundred year occupation of Iraq and continued global confrontation with our competitors if we take him at his word. Senator Clinton has often identified herself with her husband's foreign policy which did not differ in significant ways from his predecessors in office. The idea of regime change in Iraq came to fruition in Bill Clinton's administration. The current Regime acted with force on that established policy. For a Senator who is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee to claim she was surprised by the Charlatan's use of military force after granting him the authority, is completely disingenuous, or indicative of her lack of discernment of the militarists in power, or reflects her true willingness to use American military power in the same way John McCain would: to maintain a world-wide hegemony at the expense of domestic programs. Senator Obama offers the hope of a long awaited change in this disfunctional and costly paradigm. He is talking about national security in terms of social justice and economic prosperity, and an America rebuilt to lead in solving global crises, to be more energy self sufficient, and more caring of our citizens. Obama wants to reorder America's policy priorities because the operative dynamic of world affairs has change drastically since the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight. Barak Obama has become the historic face of change.

Whales Win Protection

LATEST:Environmentalists and the NRDC won another court victory against the establishment of a permanent imperial presidency. Federal Court Judge Florence-Maria Cooper threw out the waiver granted to the Navy by the Regime to operate its lethal mid range sonar near California's Channel Islands and the coastline, the home of five species of endangered whales. Environmental groups hailed the decision to curb sonar use by the Navy, which scientists say "can damage the brains and ears of marine mammals." In last night's ruling, Judge Cooper called the Navy's so-called national security emergency "a creature of its own making," and reaffirmed that the military can train effectively without needlessly harming whales. Why to go NRDC!
UPDATE: Fifteen years after the Cold War, paranoia still reigns in the Bunker on Pennsylvania Avenue. The Charlatan granted the US Navy a national security waiver from the National Environmental Protection Act and the Coastal Zone Management Act on Tuesday so it could continue to kill marine mammals using lethal mid range sonar near the California coast. Both the NRDC and the California Coastal Commission will fight the exemptions in court. The exemptions based upon a finding that sonar use in coastal waters is "essential" to national security are unprecedented. Contribute to NRDC so we can continue to fight for protection of these beautiful and intelligent creatures.

By the Navy's own estimates, about 400 whales would suffer permanent injury if it was allowed to use mid range sonar off the California coast. A federal judge has come to their rescue however, ruling that the Navy's plan to protect the marine mammals from injury and death was "grossly inadequate". The court also ordered precautionary measures suggested by the NRDC to protect whales who hunt and migrate up and down the California coast. The Navy will not be permitted to use mid range sonar within 12 miles of the coast or in the Catalina Basin, a submerged canyon which is frequented by whales. This part of the ruling must be especially upsetting to the Navy since it believes that enemy submarines will use underwater canyons to lurk, waiting for targets. The Basin is close enough to Los Angeles to be within range of sea launched ballistic missiles. The Navy will also have to keep a lookout for whales and dolphins during sonar exercises. If any marine mammals are spotted within 2200 yards of the emitting ship, the sonar must be shut off. Thank you, NRDC and those many activists whose supported the legal action against the Navy. Not even the military is above the law in this nation, and they must be reminded of that from time to time.

Dept. of Deja Vu: The CIA Train

The 1958 coup against the pro-western monarch of Iraq, Nuri Said, by a cabal of Army officers caught the CIA completely by surprise, again. The new regime, led by General Abdel Qasim, quickly unearthed the CIA's network of bribed officials in the monarchy. After a CIA contract agent disappeared without a trace, officers fled the station in Baghdad. Qasim tilted to the Soviets by allowing their political and cultural delegations into Iraq. Red warning flags went up all over the halls of power in Washington. Soviet hegemony in a region so vital to the United States because of it's oil reserves was simply intolerable.

Enter James Critchfield, the CIA's liason officer with former Nazi and Abwher General Reinhard Gehlen in Germany. Critchfield was made Near East division chief and quickly became interested in the Ba'ath Party of Iraq as a means of overthrowing Qasim. Members of the party had tried to assassinate Qasim in a wild gun battle. Critchfield's officers also tried to assassinate Qasim using a poisoned handkerchief, a slightly preposterous idea that was endorsed all the way to the top of the CIA command structure. The CIA was apparently fond of poisoning in unusual ways as a modus operandi. (They tried a poison ice cream cone on Fidel Castro). Nevertheless, the agency finally backed a successful coup five years later in 1963. According to the Ba'ath Party interior minister in the 1960's, Ali Saleh Sa'adi, "we came to power on a CIA train" [1]. Saddam Hussein, a rising party assassin, was on board that train. There is evidence that the agency was heavily involved with the coup plotters. The agency provided money, command and control and even a hit list of Iraqis whose extermination was deemed necessary for the coup's success. Relations between the agency and the Ba'athists were very close even after the overthrow. In return for help against Qasim's forces they provided the CIA with models of MiG fighters and Soviet armor not yet in US hands.

[1] A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Aburish 2001

FISA Fight Continues

Update: On Friday the Charlatan issued a 15 day extension of the so-called Protect America Act which allows greatly expanded spying on Americans' telecommunications. The bill to renew FISA is stalled in the Senate because he insists on legal immunity for his corporate supporters for their cooperation with the Regime's extralegal surveillance program. Earlier the Democrats successfully blocked a cloture vote to cut off debate. The Charlatan threatens to veto any further extension of the law while berating opponents for supporting terror. We now resume our regular Britney Spears coverage.

Republicans are screaming bloody terror again over Democratic efforts to make sure wiretapping for foreign intelligence does not invade Americans' right to privacy. Also, the dispute over immunity for telecom companies that cooperated with the Regime's warrantless wiretapping of US persons has prevented the current bill from going forward. Republicans have been unable to agree on several Democratic amendments to the underlying Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act bill, approved by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Sens. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) all offered amendments to strengthen protections for citizens, but Republicans succeeded in blocking action on those proposals. Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has called for a cloture vote just before the Charlatan's last State of the Union speech. Its unclear whether the Democratic Senators Obama and Clinton will leave the campaign trail and return to Washington to support their leader and the American people's right to be free from warrantless eavesdropping. Tell your Senators to support the Constitution and the rule of law by voting against cloture.

'Toontime: Bushed

[credit: Lee Judge, Kansas City Star]

Dept. of Deja Vu: Project Artichoke

The interrogation center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is not unique in American history, at least not unique in the familiar history of the United States. The CIA set up clandestine prisons for interrogation purposes during the Cold War in Germany, Japan and the largest, in the Panama Canal Zone. The "overseas interrogation program" dated to 1948 when Richard Helms realized his officers were being bamboozled by Soviet double agents in occupied Germany. An emergency program to interrogate suspected doubles and captured agents was undertaken at the beginning of the Korean War in 1950. Chief of covert operations Allen Dulles asked the military to help. Only the Navy responded giving the agency a former Navy brig in the Zone which the agency adapted into a interrogation prison and a secure location in which to test techniques of "mind control". These techniques centered around the use of psychological stress, hypnosis, and psychotropic drugs, including the newly discovered LSD. In these secret cells located in legal limbos the agency conducted harsh interrogations which under today's international (and US) legal standards constitute torture. The project was code named "Project Artichoke". In one experiment codenamed, "Ultra" federal prisoners in Kentucky were kept high on LSD for 77 consecutive days. When a civilian Army employee was slipped an LSD mickey he jumped out of his New York hotel window to his death. These men were considered expendable in the war against communism. Senior CIA officials including Helms, who later became director of CIA, destroyed almost all the records of America's early use of the same techniques used by it's totalitarian adversaries for fear of adverse public reaction. The fragmentary evidence that remains strongly indicates that interrogations using harsh techniques and drugs went on throughout the fifties. CIA scientists and doctors met monthly to discuss progress in Project Artichoke until 1956. Senate investigations, notably the Church Committee, got close to the project thirty years ago, but Congress never fully investigated the true nature of the agency's first overseas interrogations.
[source: Legacy of Ashes, Weiner 2007]