There’s a new documentary coming out about Sibel Edmonds, the famously gagged FBI whistle-blower who found out too much about the criminals who occupy the highest levels of power in this country and others.
It’s called Kill the Messenger. Watch the trailer here.
Make sure to follow the links to Lukery’s new Sibel blog, it’s already full of tons of information, as well as his wotisitgood4.blogspot.com, of course.
Andrew Sullivan has decided to give out a Nancy Grace Award. Criteria (suggested by Sullivan’s readers) include “a nauseating level of absolutist self-righteousness,” an “unflappable self-assurance that [the nominee’s] outrage represents the true moral high ground on any issue” despite a propensity to “flip flop” – and a habit of “excessive personal attacks.” [Emphasis added]… You mean like righteously bullying anyone who fails to support a war in Iraq, then turning around and righteously attacking the people who are prosecuting it? … Can you think of any nominees? I’m stumped.
Retired Air Force Col. Sam Gardiner, interviewed on Monday by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, had this to say about the possibility of U.S. military operations against Iran:
BLITZER: How close in your opinion is the Bush Administration to giving that go ahead.
GARDINER: It’s been given. In fact, we’ve probably been executing military operations inside Iran for at least 18 months. The evidence is overwhelming.
But of course they have a plan to attack Iran: doesn’t the U.S. have a “contingency” plan to attack each and every nation on earth, just in case? Ah, but there’s one difference here: “The plan has gone to the White House,” say Col. Gardiner. “That’s not normal planning. When the plan goes to the White House, that means we’ve gone to a different state.â€
As I’ve been arguing for quite some time now, we’ve all been in “a different state” since 9/11/01 — having slipped into an alternate universe that bears a frightening resemblance to Bizarro World as a result, I imagine, of the sheer concussive force of the terrorist attacks that day, which ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and delivered us to the not-so-tender mercies of a malevolent Bizarro God. I mean, what else does a Bizarro President do when faced with a losing war in Iraq, and hatred of America around the world? Why, start another war, of course ….
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A new piece by Tony Judt in the London Review of Books contains more than its fair share of memorable phrases — “America’s liberal armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror” — and one is tempted to simply copy and paste the whole thing, but I’ll resist and give you this delightful snippet:
“… [T]hose centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at ‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.
“Friedman is seconded by [Peter] Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’”
Judt, you’ll remember, authored a perceptive piece on the Mearsheimer-Walt controversy, speaking of which: the London Review of Books is sponsoring a debate on the question “The Israel Lobby: Does it have too much influence on American foreign policy?” September 28, at 7 p.m., in the Great Hall, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Square, New York. Debaters: John J. Mearsheimer, Shlomo Ben-Ami, Martin Indyk, Tony Judt, Rashid Khalidi, and Dennis Ross. Go here for more information.
Chuck Peña will be discussing his latest book, Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism, Friday afternoon in Washington, D.C. The Independent Institute-sponsored event will also feature Roger W. Cressey and Joseph Cirincione. Details here.
From Time magazine [Sept. 25] via Joshua Micah Marshall:
“The first message was routine enough: A ‘Prepare to Deploy’ order sent through naval communications channels to a submarine, an Aegis-class cruiser, two minesweepers and two mine hunters. The orders didn’t actually command the ships out of port; they just said to be ready to move by Oct. 1. But inside the Navy those messages generated more buzz than usual last week when a second request, from the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO), asked for fresh eyes on long-standing U.S. plans to blockade two Iranian oil ports on the Persian Gulf. The CNO had asked for a rundown on how a blockade of those strategic targets might work. When he didn’t like the analysis he received, he ordered his troops to work the lash up once again.
“What’s going on? The two orders offered tantalizing clues. There are only a few places in the world where minesweepers top the list of U.S. naval requirements. And every sailor, petroleum engineer and hedge-fund manager knows the name of the most important: the Strait of Hormuz, the 20-mile-wide bottleneck in the Persian Gulf through which roughly 40% of the world’s oil needs to pass each day. Coupled with the CNO’s request for a blockade review, a deployment of minesweepers to the west coast of Iran would seem to suggest that a much discussed—but until now largely theoretical—prospect has become real: that the U.S. may be preparing for war with Iran.”
