Author: Muons

Is anyone else as confused as I am about who Bush is supporting in Iraq: Sunni or Shia? Let’s see: US support for Maliki’s Shia government is OK, but Iran’s support for Shias isn’t. The Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who is least likely to be aligned with Iran, is our enemy. But the most likely Shia cleric to be aligned with Iran, al-Hakim, is our friend. Chalabi, who’s a discredited friend of Iran, remains our friend. But it’s the foreign jihadists operating under bin Laden’s direction in Iraq who are our  real enemies–so things are becoming clearer. Even though there were even fewer of them in Iraq before we invaded. But we killed Zarqawi, who was a Salifist and not really a true blue al Qaeda, so things got better until they got worse. And Bush thinks Muqtada al-Sadr will attack Detroit any minute, even though he’s not al Qaeda, which is predominately Sunni. The Saudi Wahabists are still our friends even though they’re [unofficially] supplying Iraq’s Sunni militias, who are killing US troops.

I’m sooooo confused.
Leslie

The wingnuts, such as Michelle Malkin and Powerline’s John Hinderaker, Red State and David Horowitz and others, are claiming that the NYT Travel Section wants to assassinate Cheney and Rumsfeld. Because the NYT ran a story about the small Chesapeake Bay town of St. Michael’s and featured Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s weekend houses.

The homes are public knowledge and have been written about extensively by, among others, Newsmax, International Herald Tribune, the Boston Globe, the Washington Post, Salon [subscription required], General Aviation News, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Luxury Explorer. Just do a google search and you’ll find out that Rumsfeld’s house is called, Mount Misery, and that Frederick Douglass was beaten there while a slave. [Mr. Torture Rumsfeld would buy a house with that name and history.] Or you can find out that Cheney’s house, which he bought about a week after Katrina hit, cost $2.9 million and is called Ballintober.

The wingnuts are posting the addresses, phone numbers and emails of NYT staff on their blogs and encouraging people to harass them, implicitly encouraging violence. Some of the blogs aren’t so implicit! The Secret Service protects Cheney and Rumsfeld, but who protects the NYT staff and their families.

Glenn Greenwald, a NYC litigator on the First Amendment, has a post that goes into this extensively, and links to the wingnuts’ blogs.

Isn’t this a form of cyber-stalking and terrorism? Isn’t there a law against this? If there isn’t, there ought to be. Because I believe this is just the beginning of a right-wing witch-hunt targeting the press and Democrats.

From Defense Tech: “A few current and former signals intelligence guys have been checking in since this NSA domestic spying story broke. Their reactions range between mildly creeped out and completely pissed off.”

Is the NSA data-mining emails and phone calls, in a technological offshoot of Poindexter’s cancelled Total Information Awareness project? If so, then that would contradict Bush’s insistence that his warrantless domestic spying operation was limited to Americans with ties to terrorists operating overseas. Because data-mining is very broad–like looking for a needle in a haystack. It may also explain why the Bush administration would be reluctant and/or unable to obtain a warrant.

More evidence that this may be the case is a Times article that DefenseTech links to, which reports that the NSA expanded its eavesdropping to include people indirectly connected to suspected terrorists. People with ten or twelve degrees of separation from al Qaeda, which might include your grandma or anyone.

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Balkinization has an excellent analysis of the Bush administration’s arguments: “The basic problem is that when government officials are given exceptions from ordinary civil liberties protections to stop “terrorism” the definition of terrorism will inevitably expand.”

An article in the Online Journal by Mike Mejia ties former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds’ case to the outing of Valerie Plame and Brewster Jennings. The story involves the nuclear black market, which Plame and Brewster Jennings were investigating, and the possible illicit selling of US nuclear technology overseas by members of the Bush administration. In other words, Libby and others may have had a number of reasons to want to destroy Plame and Brewster Jennings beyond the Niger uranium story.

Here’s an excerpt from the article: The outing of Valerie Plame may have severely damaged a CIA operation to monitor a nuclear black market faciliated by the shadowy but well-connected Washington lobby group, the American Turkish Council (ATC). (Those familiar with the Sibel Edmonds case will know the ATC is the very same organization that the former FBI translator heard on wiretaps in connection with various alleged illegal activities, some connected to 9/11.) From Edmonds, Deliso obtained the following admission: “Plame’s undercover job involved the organizations [the FBI had been investigating], the ATC (American-Turkish Council) and the ATA (American-Turkish Association) . . . the Brewster Jennings network was very active in Turkey and with the Turkish community in the U.S. during the late 1990s, 2000, and 2001 . . . in places like Chicago, Boston, and Paterson, N.J.”

The American Turkish Council is also connected to the neocons like Perle and Feith, who are allies of Scooter Libby. Maybe the outing of Plame and Brewster Jennings was also intended to protect criminal activity?

Edmonds may have been silenced by the Supreme Court, but there are other avenues open to investigate this story. For example: Examining the role of former Ambassador to Turkey, recently turned lobbyist, Marc Grossman? Or the roles of John Bolton, Frederick Fleitz, David Wurmser, and another former ambassador to Turkey Eric Edelman?