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From MSNBC
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Keith Olbermann-Stupid Jeff Fredrick
It would be really funny to watch if it wasn't so sad. This is what The Party of Lincoln has become:
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That whole "good leftist/bad leftist" thing...
...got just a tee-tiny titch more meaningless today. From Aporrea, an interesting little note:
Translation mine.
This is doubly interesting. It means that Chile and Honduras both have now shrugged off the "no contact with Cuba" yoke imposed on them more than three decades ago by the Washington Consensus. Since Bachelet left for Havana from Tegucigalpa, it means that Honduras as well as Chile is now in the process of establishing normal relations with Cuba.
What else might it mean? Well, as Chileans have been benefiting indirectly from Cuba's free healthcare system (via Venezuela's health missions, which have provided free transportation to and from Cuba), I suspect Chile might soon be playing host to a number of Cuban doctors in its poorer parts. And I don't think Michelle could just stand idly by, observing Venezuela and Bolivia's resounding success at achieving full literacy with Cuban help, either. Something tells me she'll be seeking help from the Brothers Castro on that front, too.
Above all, it means that Dubya's efforts to drive wedges between the "good" (docile) and "bad" (uppity) leftists of South America have been one hell of an Epic Fail. The terrible truth is, the "good" leftists get along famously with the "bad". Lula has spared Chavecito no praises, and it's obvious that Michelle thinks highly of Evo, if her sea-access agreement with him is any indication.
All in all, it looks like LatAm integration is proceeding rather nicely, and the whole "good leftist/bad leftist" dichotomy is just so much horseshit.
Or, in other words: Latin America is nobody's backyard anymore.
From News of the Restless
The president of Chile, Michelle Bachelet, confirmed yesterday in Honduras that she would travel to Cuba "without any type of inhibitions" to make the first official visit in 37 years and with reference to the late president Salvador Allende.
Bachelet, who made a ten-hour visit to Honduras, gave a press conference with her host, Honduran president Manuel Zelaya, where she announced her upcoming visit to Cuba, for which she left yesterday afternoon from Tegucigalpa.
"We have agreed on an agenda between both our governments, and I believe it will be an important visit, since it's been more than 37 years since a Chilean president has been there," Bachelet said, recalling Salvador Allende's visit to the island in 1972.
"Any topic which appears to me to be indispensable to the interests of the country, I will discuss not only with the government of Cuba, but with any government," Bachelet said to the press.
Zelaya and Bachelet signed several co-operation agreements in technology and exterior relations.
Translation mine.
This is doubly interesting. It means that Chile and Honduras both have now shrugged off the "no contact with Cuba" yoke imposed on them more than three decades ago by the Washington Consensus. Since Bachelet left for Havana from Tegucigalpa, it means that Honduras as well as Chile is now in the process of establishing normal relations with Cuba.
What else might it mean? Well, as Chileans have been benefiting indirectly from Cuba's free healthcare system (via Venezuela's health missions, which have provided free transportation to and from Cuba), I suspect Chile might soon be playing host to a number of Cuban doctors in its poorer parts. And I don't think Michelle could just stand idly by, observing Venezuela and Bolivia's resounding success at achieving full literacy with Cuban help, either. Something tells me she'll be seeking help from the Brothers Castro on that front, too.
Above all, it means that Dubya's efforts to drive wedges between the "good" (docile) and "bad" (uppity) leftists of South America have been one hell of an Epic Fail. The terrible truth is, the "good" leftists get along famously with the "bad". Lula has spared Chavecito no praises, and it's obvious that Michelle thinks highly of Evo, if her sea-access agreement with him is any indication.
All in all, it looks like LatAm integration is proceeding rather nicely, and the whole "good leftist/bad leftist" dichotomy is just so much horseshit.
Or, in other words: Latin America is nobody's backyard anymore.
From News of the Restless
So...about that "anti-semitic climate" in Venezuela...
To hear the lamestream media up here tell it, Venezuela is well down on the slippery slope to being the next Nazi Germany. If it's not Chavecito's cordial relations with Iran, it's that synagogue mishegoss. Apparently all this is "evidence" of an "official policy of anti-Semitism", to hear the Miami Herald tell it.
Well, Miami Morons, I hope you can read and comprehend English, because something about the synagogue thing just came out on Venezuelanalysis that makes you look like feces-flinging monkeys:
So much for that "climate of anti-Semitism", eh? Turns out, the climate is just plain old warm and tropical down there after all.
Looks like they'll have to gin up some other excuse to stop the referendum, which is now five days away and pretty much a walk-in for Chavecito.
From News of the Restless
Well, Miami Morons, I hope you can read and comprehend English, because something about the synagogue thing just came out on Venezuelanalysis that makes you look like feces-flinging monkeys:
A confession by security guard Víctor Escalona revealed that a personal struggle over money was the motive of the crime. Edgar Cordero, a Caracas police officer and bodyguard of Rabbi Isaac Cohen had been denied a loan by the rabbi, so he planned to rob money from the synagogue's coffers, and approached Escalona for assistance, according to investigators from the from Venezuela's national Criminal, Penal, and Scientific Investigations Unit (CICPC).And here's minister Tarek El-Aissami, on video, pointing out all that boring evidentiary stuff (for those who can comprehend Spanish, and/or need to see it in order to believe it):
El Aissami said anti-Semitism was not the motive, but rather a tactic used for two purposes, "First, to weaken the investigation, and second, to direct the blame toward the national government."
El Aissami also detailed other evidence gathered during the investigation that implicated the security guard Escalona. "We observe that the fence was cut from the inside out and there is no evidence that would demonstrate that it was climbed or broken into from the outside," said the minister, pointing to photos of the scene of the crime.
"Another thing we found was that the security guard [Escalona] declared he had been tied up and did not see anything, but we discovered that at one o'clock in the morning he sent a text message to the rabbi's bodyguard [Cordero]," and had been separated from other security guards who were tied up, El-Aissami reported.
Haz click en cualquier video para verlo
Puedes ver otros en radiomundial.com.ve
Puedes ver otros en radiomundial.com.ve
So much for that "climate of anti-Semitism", eh? Turns out, the climate is just plain old warm and tropical down there after all.
Looks like they'll have to gin up some other excuse to stop the referendum, which is now five days away and pretty much a walk-in for Chavecito.
From News of the Restless
Brave American Takes Courageous Stand For Slave-Owner Rights in Bolivia
By Revolter
Bolivia's National Institute of Agricultural Reform plans to seize 139 square miles from 5 Santa Cruz families for keeping Indigenous Guarani farmers as "virtual slaves", and give their traditional lands back to the ingrate Injuns. One of the landowners is renowned non-Bolivian Ronald Larsen, whose American family is said to own another 162 sq mi in the eastern department. Despite a lack of jail-time for keeping SLAVES, Larsen and his crazy crowd are not going quietly. Some are calling for civil disobedience to stave off the land seizures. Others advocate more extreme measures:
Bolivia's National Institute of Agricultural Reform plans to seize 139 square miles from 5 Santa Cruz families for keeping Indigenous Guarani farmers as "virtual slaves", and give their traditional lands back to the ingrate Injuns. One of the landowners is renowned non-Bolivian Ronald Larsen, whose American family is said to own another 162 sq mi in the eastern department. Despite a lack of jail-time for keeping SLAVES, Larsen and his crazy crowd are not going quietly. Some are calling for civil disobedience to stave off the land seizures. Others advocate more extreme measures:While Larsen insists he won't turn to violence, he says his neighbors might: "They've said it on television: 'We're not leaving alive.'" Larsen is also upset that the government recently began giving out food in Guarani communities -- to break the people's dependence on him for employment, he says. "These people, their main thing in life is where they're going to get their next bowl of rice," he said. "A few bags of rice buys a lot of support."Classy. Anyway he should know. The Montana native has been "hiring" and "educating" Guaranis living on his Bolivian ranch since 1969. For more on this great symbol of gringo generosity and his famous sexpot/dirtbag son, check out El Duderino's post from last year.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
Titulares & Asininity
* Despite the intense media campaign against him, Hugo Chavez remains inexplicably popular among Venezuela's poor, who continue to selfishly prioritize "education" and "health clinics" and "the overall well-being of their children."
* The Moonies are concerned that "joint Iran / Bolivia mining operations" are maybe just secret code for...nuclear bombs!
* If you come from a left-leaning Latin American country, you're now going to have to be fingerprinted and pay a "processing fee" to get into England, but no hard feelings, hey.
* Forget the oil money, Bolivia's going to start building low-income housing out of Venezuelan petroleum waste byproduct, eww.
* Oh jeez here's a frightening video featuring the mayor of Buenos Aires singing Freddie Mercury.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
* The Moonies are concerned that "joint Iran / Bolivia mining operations" are maybe just secret code for...nuclear bombs!
* If you come from a left-leaning Latin American country, you're now going to have to be fingerprinted and pay a
* Forget the oil money, Bolivia's going to start building low-income housing out of Venezuelan petroleum waste byproduct, eww.
* Oh jeez here's a frightening video featuring the mayor of Buenos Aires singing Freddie Mercury.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
CNN Guy Gets Punk'd, By Nice UN Lady
Hey you guys should all learn Spanish and then come watch this, because it's funny. Ok, back? So this TV station, CNN "en Español," invited some nice lady from the United Nations Economic Commission on Somethingorother onto some program recently, to catch Hugo Chavez in a terrible lie. Apparently the big guy had gone on the teevee once to say her UN group praised Venezuela for its wonderful achievements in equality, which is obvious nonsense because Chavez is a socialist who once called George W. Bush the devil.
At the height of the big gotcha moment the lady spoils it by going, "um yeah it's true, obvs, and let's talk about all these awesome accomplishments in Venezuela, blah blah blah." Then they go to commercial, the end. The VIO has an English transcript, here.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
At the height of the big gotcha moment the lady spoils it by going, "um yeah it's true, obvs, and let's talk about all these awesome accomplishments in Venezuela, blah blah blah." Then they go to commercial, the end. The VIO has an English transcript, here.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
Jackson Diehl Responds To Criticism with Hilarious "Lying" Strategy
The "Editorial Judgment" thingy at the Washington Post, where they allow anonymous posters to comment on their stupid opinion pieces, is sort of not working out the way they intended, maybe. Today everybody from righteous leftists to the unapologetic opposition dude at Caracas Chronicles is calling Diehl out on his dumb anti-Semitism bullshit. Now Diehl has responded, with hilarious lies! Let's laugh at them, shall we, after the jump.First, Here's Diehl's response:
Thanks for all the comments. In response to those who say we are equating Chavez's attacks on Israel with anti-semitism, it is important to point out that his rhetoric has not been limited to Israel. He also directly challenged Venezuelan Jews to repudiate the "Holocaust" he said was occurring in Gaza. Would it make sense for those Venezuelans, or anyone else, to equate the deaths of approximately 1,300 Palestinians during a military conflict with the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis? Dooes making such a comparison constitute legitimate criticism of Israel? In fact Chavez has a long record of anti-semitic remarks. In 2006 he said "the devil" within Israelis caused the war in Lebon. On Christmas eve in 2005, he attacked "the descendants of those who murdered Christ." But I agree with the poster who said that Chavez's main aim is to attract the support of those around the world who hate Israel--a large audience indeed.First of all, does that "the descendants of those who murdered Christ" quote sound familiar? That's the story that led to newspaper retractions after it was learned that the Wiesenthal Center had deliberately edited a Chavez quote to make it look bad, and then "forgot" to put in the dot-dot-dots," and then the Venezuelan Jewish Community demanded that the center retract their claim. The rest of the world knows it was a forgery, but for Jackson Diehl, it's a talking point.
Then there's the part about asking Venezuelan Jews to repudiate Israeli violence. This is ant-Semitic. Ok, sure, maybe. But as WaPo commentator Santos1 nicely noted, "I'll remember that the next time your newspaper calls on moderate Muslims in the US to repudiate Islamist violence half a world away."
So far, no anonymous commenters have engaged in ugly Jew-baiting, which is a good thing because if they did it would naturally prove that Barack Obama is an anti-Semite, somehow!
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
First we kill Che, then God loses the election
January 26, 2009
by T'anta Wawa
One of the major rallying-points for those campaigning for a No in this referendum has been religion. A rather minor change of phrasing in the new constitution shifts the relationship between the Catholic church and the state from one of official support to detachment. In the previous constitution (which now looks to have been voted out of existence), the Bolivian state ‘recognise(d) and sustain(ed) the apostolic Roman Catholic religion’, while guaranteeing the freedom to practice other faiths. In the new constitution, the state is declared independent of the church for the first time, while religious freedoms are guaranteed, including freedom of religious instruction. But don’t take my word for it, let’s ask Xavier Albó, Jesuit priest, anthropologist, national treasure and one-man publishing industry:
(This first appeared in La Razón, but the English translation is mine)
‘In my nights of insomnia I wonder, ‘And if the ‘Yes’ vote wins, will God lose an election for the first time? That’s how it goes in Bolivia: first we kill Che (Guevara), then they want to prohibit us from playing football at high altitudes, and now God loses a referendum! ‘Welcome to Bolivia, where anything can happen’, lovely motto to attract tourists. Or ‘Welcome to Bolivia, be careful, the insanity is contagious’
From T'anta Wawa Talks
by T'anta Wawa
One of the major rallying-points for those campaigning for a No in this referendum has been religion. A rather minor change of phrasing in the new constitution shifts the relationship between the Catholic church and the state from one of official support to detachment. In the previous constitution (which now looks to have been voted out of existence), the Bolivian state ‘recognise(d) and sustain(ed) the apostolic Roman Catholic religion’, while guaranteeing the freedom to practice other faiths. In the new constitution, the state is declared independent of the church for the first time, while religious freedoms are guaranteed, including freedom of religious instruction. But don’t take my word for it, let’s ask Xavier Albó, Jesuit priest, anthropologist, national treasure and one-man publishing industry:
(This first appeared in La Razón, but the English translation is mine)
The crude attempt to manipulate religious feelings in the run-up to the 25 January referendum has toppled into vulgarity, if not farce, and I will not waste time refuting it. I will limit myself to outlining the similarities and differences between the two proposals in play in this referendum with regard to the relationship between the State and religion.Of course, those campaigning against the new constitution were not to be put off by the gulf of meaning between a legal separation of church and state and *doom music* !1OMGoutlawingJesus!1! Hence an outpouring of TV ads showing Evo and Christ side by side (usually a comparison only made by naive European leftists, and then more favourably, hem hem) and intoning in fire-and-brimstone tones, ‘WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON?’ I’ll come clean and admit that I haven’t seen this ad, because tragically I no longer live in Bolivia, but since it’s been described to me by three different people as well as on the ever-reliable intertubes, no srsly, by Jim Schultz no less, I’m going to be unscientific and assume it’s true. Vote for the new constitution and Christ will forsake you personally. At least it prompted this reflection from a commenter on Red Erbol (who also catalogues a couple of the more flagrantly outrageous pronouncements in the media from medialunistas recently)
In article 3 of the current Constitution, which will continue if the No vote wins, we may distinguish between three components: (a) the State recognises and sustains the Roman Catholic apostolic religion, (b) it guarantees the public practice of every other faith, and (c) relations with the Catholic Church will be regulated by means of concordats and agreements between the Bolivian state and the Holy See.
In article 4 of the new Constitution (which will come into force if the Yes vote wins) , the focus will be on broadening the current component (b). It says: ‘The State respects and guarantees the freedom of religion and spiritual beliefs, according to different worldviews. The state is independent of religion.’ The Bolivian bishops do not object to this formulation, although some would like more clarity about what is meant by ‘independent’.
This formulation is more similar to the first draft of the Constitution produced by Bolivar, which already directly proposed freedom of worship. But the members of the Constituent Assembly of 1826 rejected it and instead imposed a confessional State: ‘the Catholic religion…is that of the Republic, to the exclusion of any other public worship’. The system which is in place today was only introduced in 1880. Catholicism is no longer the official religion of the State, although the State ‘sustains it’ as a symbolic compensation for the Church property which it took over. There was a timid addition, not made official until 1906: ‘allowing the free practice of any other faith’. In 1938 ‘allowing’ was changed to ‘guaranteeing’, and freedom of religious instruction was added.
And now this guarantee and freedom is to be extended to all. Further still, in line with the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, for the first time their spiritual beliefs in accordance with their worldviews are recognised and protected (see also articles 21.3 and 30.2)
In other words, no atheism, nothing anti-religious…(snip) It only implies separation – or autonomy – as between Church and State. This began in the brand-new United States in the nineteenth century, putting an end to the ‘official’ status of the Anglican church, and the majority of modern states now follow it. Pope Benedict XVI himself said this last December in an address to the Italian government: ‘The Church not only recognises and respects the distinction and autonomy of the State in relation to itself, but also rejoices in it as a great advance for humanity’.
‘In my nights of insomnia I wonder, ‘And if the ‘Yes’ vote wins, will God lose an election for the first time? That’s how it goes in Bolivia: first we kill Che (Guevara), then they want to prohibit us from playing football at high altitudes, and now God loses a referendum! ‘Welcome to Bolivia, where anything can happen’, lovely motto to attract tourists. Or ‘Welcome to Bolivia, be careful, the insanity is contagious’
From T'anta Wawa Talks
From Rab C to Ronald L: RIGHT up ye.
February 6, 2009
by T'anta Wawa
Remember how last year, the Minister for Agrarian Reform, his employees and a load of Guarani people were kidnapped, beaten up and threatened by cartoon-baddy estate owner Ronald Larsen as they went about trying to establish legal titling for indigenous lands in the East? No?
Larsen’s the rancher from Montana who moved to Bolivia in the late 60s and, along with his family, bought up land three times the size of the city of Santa Cruz. Luckily for him, like many estates in the area, his ranch came with a captive labour force of indigenous Guarani people, who have been working there in conditions of servitude ever since.
Last year, a fact-finding mission from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organisation of American States and the Bolivian government investigated forced labour and servitude on various large estates in Santa Cruz and other departments, and found that hundreds of Guarani families were living in conditions ‘analogous to slavery’, where landowners had supplanted the State and were operating with impunity, obliging people to work for laughably low pay or none at all, preventing them from getting an education or living in humane conditions, limiting their movements and violently repressing attempts to organise, create or join a trade union or speak to human rights organisations.
Even after being held at gunpoint by Larsen’s thugs for a couple of days and then kicked out of the area, the personnel from the Ministry of Agrarian Reform returned later on last year to carry on with the investigations and legal processes to find out if the land on this estate and others was held legally, and if people were being forced to live in conditions of servitude, in violation of various international laws (and, you know, basic human decency). They found a whole shitload of weapons, to start with, and they must have found evidence of substantial human rights violations, because guess what? The Larsens and several other large landholders are having their estates confiscated. I know, I know, but it’s so hard to get the help these days! I mean, have you ever tried running a 15,262 hectare estate without a captive workforce who’ll carry out forced labour under physical threat? It’s a nightmare, Matilda. One’s heart simply bleeds for those poor wee oligarchs kicked off their humble thirty-thousand-acre fincas.
Here’s the full story at Bolpress. (Incidentally, can someone have a word with the webmasters at Los Tiempos and La Prensa, PLEASE? I had links to the stories they ran about these events archived, and it looks like they’ve just not bothered storing online editions for 2007 and 2008, leaving me with a load of useless dead links. WTF arg etc - I don’t like only using Bolpress as the source, but they’re the only ones who take the trouble to make sure their old links work!)
My translation into English under the cut:
The National Institue for Agrarian Reform will return 10 haciendas which maintained dozens of Guarani families in servitude
The State will return 36,425 hectares of land in the Cordillera province of the department of Santa Cruz which do not fulfil the Social and Economic Function (FES) and where more than 50 Guarani families living in conditions of servitude are subject to forced labour.
The INRA concluded the legalisation of 88,000 Ha in the 3d and 4th polygons of the Community Lands or Origin of Alto Parapeti. 88 properties were identified and in 10 of these there was evidence of relations of servitude and failure to fulfil the FES. The national director of INRA, Juan Carlos Rojas, informed that it will recognise the rights of 78 small and medium scale agricultural and livestock-farming properties, peasant settlements and communal properties, which will receive their legal titles to ownership.
The State will revert the rural estates ‘El Rey (1,935 Ha), property of Aniceto Corcuy, ‘San Isidro’ (3,790 has), property of Babil Chavez, ‘Huaraca and ‘Iticay’, (10, 958 Has), belonging to Julia Aguilera de Chavez and others, and ‘Caraparicito I’, ‘Caraparicito II’, ‘Reserva Privada de Patrimonio Nacional’ and ‘Yaguapoa’ (15,262 Ha) belonging to Duston Larsen Metenbrink (crikey, that’s Mister Bolivia! - TW) and others.
Rojas assures that the evaluation of INRA is in compliance with international laws such as the ILO 169 on Indigenous Peoples in Independent Countries, the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples and the Costa Rica pact.
The Bolivian Ombudsman, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture, confirmed that hundreds of indigenous families survive as feudal serfs, without land, wages or education, bound to large estates in Cordillera province.
By means of the Supreme Decree 29802 of 19 Novemeber 2008, the Executive branch of government instructed INRA to declare incompliance with with FES in all rural agricultural estates which maintain systems of peonage, forced labour, capitivity, servitude or its analogues, against the collective benefit and interest.
A system of servitude exists when communities, families or persons work or serve the proprietor or title-holder to a rural estate, in an outline of violation of fundamental rights, under domination and without full consent: or when obligations to pay a salary is not fulfilled, whether it be in kind or below national minimum wage.
Decree 29802 indicates that forced displacement of communities, families or people from agricultural estates, whether by psychological pressure, with tricks or through violent means, shall be considered an indication of relations of servitude.
The INRA brigades resumed legalisation of land on 21 November in the TCo of Alto Parapeti, and verified in fieldwork that the estate owners did not comply with laboral laws, paid their workers amounts far below national minimum wage, or paid them in kind (with food, coca, alcohol, old clothes etc). Some children work more than eight hours a day without receiving a salary.
The patrons forbid their peones to organise themselves, belong or affiliate to a trade union and some displaced Guarani families have been victims of physical and psychological mistreatment.
The Malpartidas were the most violent and abusive patrons of the area, and pay a monthly salary of 300 Bs (about $42 or £20 - TW) to day labourers who work from 6 in the morning to 7 at night. Malpartida was put on trial for flogging Guaranies in Cuevo on 13th April, and for scaring off community members from Itakuatia with firearms, and for stripping them of their radio communication equipment so that they would not denounce these abuses.
The Malpartida and Larson families headed up the ‘committee for the defense of lands’ which carried out a violent demonstration by landlords between February and June of 2008 in Cordillera province.
The North American Larson arrived to the Bolivian Chaco in 1968 and acquired the Caraparicito estate in 1969 for agriculture and livestock-rearing, but his estate was converted into a touristic complex awarded prizes by the Prefectura of Santa Cruz for constituting ‘an example of sustainable environmental management’.
Larsen owns 57,145 hectares in Santa Cruz department and has a mining concession in Nuflo de Chavez province, canto Saturnino Saucedo.
From T'anta Wawa Talks
by T'anta Wawa
Remember how last year, the Minister for Agrarian Reform, his employees and a load of Guarani people were kidnapped, beaten up and threatened by cartoon-baddy estate owner Ronald Larsen as they went about trying to establish legal titling for indigenous lands in the East? No?
Larsen’s the rancher from Montana who moved to Bolivia in the late 60s and, along with his family, bought up land three times the size of the city of Santa Cruz. Luckily for him, like many estates in the area, his ranch came with a captive labour force of indigenous Guarani people, who have been working there in conditions of servitude ever since.
Last year, a fact-finding mission from the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organisation of American States and the Bolivian government investigated forced labour and servitude on various large estates in Santa Cruz and other departments, and found that hundreds of Guarani families were living in conditions ‘analogous to slavery’, where landowners had supplanted the State and were operating with impunity, obliging people to work for laughably low pay or none at all, preventing them from getting an education or living in humane conditions, limiting their movements and violently repressing attempts to organise, create or join a trade union or speak to human rights organisations.
Even after being held at gunpoint by Larsen’s thugs for a couple of days and then kicked out of the area, the personnel from the Ministry of Agrarian Reform returned later on last year to carry on with the investigations and legal processes to find out if the land on this estate and others was held legally, and if people were being forced to live in conditions of servitude, in violation of various international laws (and, you know, basic human decency). They found a whole shitload of weapons, to start with, and they must have found evidence of substantial human rights violations, because guess what? The Larsens and several other
Here’s the full story at Bolpress. (Incidentally, can someone have a word with the webmasters at Los Tiempos and La Prensa, PLEASE? I had links to the stories they ran about these events archived, and it looks like they’ve just not bothered storing online editions for 2007 and 2008, leaving me with a load of useless dead links. WTF arg etc - I don’t like only using Bolpress as the source, but they’re the only ones who take the trouble to make sure their old links work!)
My translation into English under the cut:
The National Institue for Agrarian Reform will return 10 haciendas which maintained dozens of Guarani families in servitude
The State will return 36,425 hectares of land in the Cordillera province of the department of Santa Cruz which do not fulfil the Social and Economic Function (FES) and where more than 50 Guarani families living in conditions of servitude are subject to forced labour.
The INRA concluded the legalisation of 88,000 Ha in the 3d and 4th polygons of the Community Lands or Origin of Alto Parapeti. 88 properties were identified and in 10 of these there was evidence of relations of servitude and failure to fulfil the FES. The national director of INRA, Juan Carlos Rojas, informed that it will recognise the rights of 78 small and medium scale agricultural and livestock-farming properties, peasant settlements and communal properties, which will receive their legal titles to ownership.
The State will revert the rural estates ‘El Rey (1,935 Ha), property of Aniceto Corcuy, ‘San Isidro’ (3,790 has), property of Babil Chavez, ‘Huaraca and ‘Iticay’, (10, 958 Has), belonging to Julia Aguilera de Chavez and others, and ‘Caraparicito I’, ‘Caraparicito II’, ‘Reserva Privada de Patrimonio Nacional’ and ‘Yaguapoa’ (15,262 Ha) belonging to Duston Larsen Metenbrink (crikey, that’s Mister Bolivia! - TW) and others.
Rojas assures that the evaluation of INRA is in compliance with international laws such as the ILO 169 on Indigenous Peoples in Independent Countries, the UN Declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples and the Costa Rica pact.
The Bolivian Ombudsman, the International Labour Organisation (ILO), the Interamerican Commission on Human Rights and the World Organisation Against Torture, confirmed that hundreds of indigenous families survive as feudal serfs, without land, wages or education, bound to large estates in Cordillera province.
By means of the Supreme Decree 29802 of 19 Novemeber 2008, the Executive branch of government instructed INRA to declare incompliance with with FES in all rural agricultural estates which maintain systems of peonage, forced labour, capitivity, servitude or its analogues, against the collective benefit and interest.
A system of servitude exists when communities, families or persons work or serve the proprietor or title-holder to a rural estate, in an outline of violation of fundamental rights, under domination and without full consent: or when obligations to pay a salary is not fulfilled, whether it be in kind or below national minimum wage.
Decree 29802 indicates that forced displacement of communities, families or people from agricultural estates, whether by psychological pressure, with tricks or through violent means, shall be considered an indication of relations of servitude.
The INRA brigades resumed legalisation of land on 21 November in the TCo of Alto Parapeti, and verified in fieldwork that the estate owners did not comply with laboral laws, paid their workers amounts far below national minimum wage, or paid them in kind (with food, coca, alcohol, old clothes etc). Some children work more than eight hours a day without receiving a salary.
The patrons forbid their peones to organise themselves, belong or affiliate to a trade union and some displaced Guarani families have been victims of physical and psychological mistreatment.
The Malpartidas were the most violent and abusive patrons of the area, and pay a monthly salary of 300 Bs (about $42 or £20 - TW) to day labourers who work from 6 in the morning to 7 at night. Malpartida was put on trial for flogging Guaranies in Cuevo on 13th April, and for scaring off community members from Itakuatia with firearms, and for stripping them of their radio communication equipment so that they would not denounce these abuses.
The Malpartida and Larson families headed up the ‘committee for the defense of lands’ which carried out a violent demonstration by landlords between February and June of 2008 in Cordillera province.
The North American Larson arrived to the Bolivian Chaco in 1968 and acquired the Caraparicito estate in 1969 for agriculture and livestock-rearing, but his estate was converted into a touristic complex awarded prizes by the Prefectura of Santa Cruz for constituting ‘an example of sustainable environmental management’.
Larsen owns 57,145 hectares in Santa Cruz department and has a mining concession in Nuflo de Chavez province, canto Saturnino Saucedo.
From T'anta Wawa Talks
Monday, February 16, 2009
Titulares & Asininity
* If there is anyone Alvaro Uribe hates more than leftists, it's reporters. And human rights activists. And critics. Man he just wants them all dead.
* GAO: Maybe $32 million dollars a year to make dumb TV shows for Cubans who will never see it is sort of a stupid idea.
* Oh boy now everybody wants to run against Rafael Correa
* Venezuela just arrested 11 people in that synagogue attack
* Oh jeez now the Vatican offices in Caracas have been trashed by unknown assailants. Why does Chavez hate the Christians?
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
* GAO: Maybe $32 million dollars a year to make dumb TV shows for Cubans who will never see it is sort of a stupid idea.
* Oh boy now everybody wants to run against Rafael Correa
* Venezuela just arrested 11 people in that synagogue attack
* Oh jeez now the Vatican offices in Caracas have been trashed by unknown assailants. Why does Chavez hate the Christians?
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution
Latin American Press Coverage: Just Cold Runnin' The Numbers
Hi Everybody, I'm Metrix. BoRev consistently points out the skewed quality of U.S. media coverage of South America, but for number geeks, the quantity of the coverage is equally fascinating.You'd expect that the amount of U.S. news coverage a country receives would be at least somewhat related to the country's economy, population or military power. But the numbers tell a different, and cryptic, story. I'll be back often to explore the mad numbers game of Latin American Press coverage, but for today let's start with what I suspect will be a long journey down the rabbit hole.
The population of Brazil (close your eyes and guess first, no one get this right) is 190 million people. That's 2/3rds of the way to us and bigger than 216 of the 221 countries in the world! Venezuela, in humble contrast, is 28 million people--less than 1/6th the size. I mean fucking Canada has more people than this place. Brazil's GDP is five times Venezuela's but do you ever hear about Brazil? Could most Americans distinguish its leader from Castro if you put a beret on his head and stuck a cigar in his mouth? Likely not, because Venezuela actually gets more TV and radio coverage in the U.S. than its neighbor to the south. Way more, if you put it into proportion. Let's run the numbers, after the jump.
We created the Metrix Factor to illustrate these disparities. The Metrix Factor will compare the coverage something should receive under certain logic assumptions to what it does receive under god knows what. The higher the number, the more illogical. (You can click on either of these graphs for a bigger, popup version)
WTF?
The two charts show you the difference between the proverbial blue pill, where there is no clear meaning to what happens, or the red pill, where things relate to logical frames of reference.
Brazil's population is 6.79 times higher than Venezuela's so it should receive a corresponding number of TV stories. But in this reality, Venezuela gets 1.15 times as many stories. If things were accurate, Brazil would have got 8,609 stories. Instead they got 1102.
The Metrix Factor is a summary that shows the distortion. In this case, Venezuela gets 7.8 times as many broadcast stories as the base population logic suggests it should.
For a numbers man like me, this leads to an epistemological search: a search for the meaning of media itself. On what basis are the media making their decisions on which states to cover? I have no idea and suspect there is a small pathetic man behind a curtain somewhere making shit up and waiting to have his ass exposed. Stay tuned for future comparisons using:
-State sponsors of terrorism!
-Oil producing states!
-Nuclear states!
-Neighboring states!
-Religion, language and more!
Feel free to Email your suggestions to MetrixFactor@Gmail.com
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution (See, I really am trying to make this site more tasteful and offensive (or is it supposed to be more tasteless and less offensive? I get that mixed up all the time) so that BoRev can get unbanned from Barracuda. The full title sounds so much more dignified.)
General Betrayus
I guess this and this answers who was right and who was wrong in the Move On ad in the NYT. Everyone of those spineless Democrats who voted for the condemnation of Move On should now sponser a resolution demanding the resignation of Petreus and Odierno and asking forgiveness from Move On. After all, fair is fair.Oh, I forgot. The DINOsaurs in Congress would have to pull their collective noses out of the asses of John Bonior and Mitch McConnell to write such a resolution.
General Petraeus Springs A Leak
By: Siun
February 10, 2009
More news is coming out about the Petraeus/Odierno/Keane effort to undercut President Obama and his plans to withdrawal from Iraq. As before, IPS’s Gareth Porter is the one breaking the news –and his latest story is stunning.
This weekend, a number of reports described a January 21st meeting between President Obama and his commanders. The story that circulated in McClatchy and the AP amongst others “appears to indicate that Obama is moving away from the 16-month plan he had vowed during the campaign to implement if elected.”
Porter reports that “a military source close to the general, who insisted on anonymity” contacted him after his report 'Generals Seek to Reverse Obama Withdrawal Decision’ was published – and that source pitched the account of the January 21 meeting that was picked up in the weekend press:
It sure looks more and more like we need a purge of the Cheney era generals who are doing everything they can to keep us in Iraq – and more reporters like Gareth Porter.
From Firedoglake
More news is coming out about the Petraeus/Odierno/Keane effort to undercut President Obama and his plans to withdrawal from Iraq. As before, IPS’s Gareth Porter is the one breaking the news –and his latest story is stunning.This weekend, a number of reports described a January 21st meeting between President Obama and his commanders. The story that circulated in McClatchy and the AP amongst others “appears to indicate that Obama is moving away from the 16-month plan he had vowed during the campaign to implement if elected.”
Porter reports that “a military source close to the general, who insisted on anonymity” contacted him after his report 'Generals Seek to Reverse Obama Withdrawal Decision’ was published – and that source pitched the account of the January 21 meeting that was picked up in the weekend press:
The military source provided the following carefully worded statement: "We were specifically asked to provide projections, assumptions and risks for the accomplishment of objectives associated with 16-, 19- and 23-month drawdown options." That was exactly the sentence published by McClatchy the following day, except that "specifically" was left out.Porter however did a little digging:
But a White House official told IPS Monday that the Petraeus account was untrue. "The assessments of the three drawdown dates were not requested by the president," said the official, who insisted on not being identified because he had not been authorised to comment on the matter. "He never said, 'Give me three drawdown plans'."Porter mentions that “McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef” noted that Obama’s aides presented a different version from the Petraeus related leak but it is Porter who seems to get the real story here:
By implying that Obama had requested the three plans without saying so explicitly, the sentence leaked by Petraeus seems to have been calculated to create a misleading story…As Porter notes:
But the Petraeus leak also serves to promote the idea that Obama is moving away from his campaign pledge on a 16-month combat troop withdrawal, which has already been the dominant theme in news media coverage of the issue.
On top of the interest of Petraeus and other senior officers in keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for as long as possible, Petraeus has personal political interests at stake in the struggle over Iraq policy. He has been widely regarded as a possible Republican Presidential candidate in 2012.There’s more – which you can read here.
It sure looks more and more like we need a purge of the Cheney era generals who are doing everything they can to keep us in Iraq – and more reporters like Gareth Porter.
From Firedoglake
A Note to Naderites and Clintonites
by: David Sirota
Tue Feb 10, 2009
I need to get something off my chest - something that's been bothering me for a while. Over the last few weeks, I've received a river of "I Told You So" email from both Ralph Nader fans and from Hillary Clinton sycophants claiming that because President Obama has made some tactical mistakes and ideologically odious moves - and because I've been critical of some of these - that it means I was abhorrently wrong for being generally supportive of his candidacy during the primary and the general election; that I need to apologetically throw myself on the mercy of the court; and that I need to beg for forgiveness.*
These rants - and they are really, truly half-deranged rants - represent a kind of reductionism that's just braindead. I stand by everything I wrote and said about Obama during the election - that includes both the praise and criticism. I, and many others who supported Obama, weren't misled by him. I had my eyes wide open - just read the Nation piece I wrote about Obama after spending a day with him. He's not a perfect president, and he's not what I would call a movement progressive. I'm not happy about that, but I never thought otherwise.
But I did think - and continue to think - he was far and away the best and most progressive person for the job, among the serious contenders out there. Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich were never going to win the presidency - I wish I lived in a country where people with their politics could win the presidency, but that's not America yet (though I'm trying to do my part every day to make that day possible). Likewise, if you think Hillary Clinton would be a more progressive president, then you either weren't born - or weren't paying attention - over the last 17 years of the Clinton administration (which she played a major role in) and Hillary Clinton's career in the senate.
The Clinton argument, in particular, is so utterly stupid and silly. A big part of what Obama has to do right now is clean up after Clintonism. Granted, lots of the criticism directed at him is aimed at his failure to take on Clintonism, but the idea that Hillary Clinton would be better at taking on the ideology and policies she herself helped craft is inane.
Among Naderites, the "I Told You So" rants are a way to justify disengagement. They look at Obama's failings as reason to simply sit on the sidelines and complain. They never consider the inherent failure of the Nader model - a model that said it was more important to run a quixotic campaign for the presidency than to do the hard ground-up work of building a real third party in America.
Among Clintonites, the "I Told You So" rants are just straight-up sore-loser-ism. Unable to accept that a first-term senator defeated their candidate who had every single advantage, they cannot embrace the new president, even as that new president (wrongly, IMHO) appoints her to a top position in his administration.
And so the Naderites rant and rave about "never voting in an election again," and the Clintonites come up with fantastical narratives claiming Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who championed NAFTA and voted for the Iraq War and did almost nothing progressive of note in the U.S. Senate - would have been America's progressive savior. And both of them accuse anyone who said anything supportive of Obama - and now says anything critical of him - as somehow hypocritical.
Here's the undeniable truth: Other than votes for final passage in Congress, politics is rarely a binary black-and-white, red versus blue paradigm. Candidates are inherently flawed, inherently some mix of ideology. Movements and activists and voters have to choose the best among this imperfect pool of possibilities. Journalists like me - if we're interested in the truth - will end up being both critical and supportive of candidates because those candidate aren't typically 100% bad or 100% good. That doesn't make the criticism or the praise "hypocritical" - it makes the reporting authentic and real, rather than sycophantic and propagandistic, and it certainly doesn't make it "hypocritical."
I'm very proud of the reporting I did during the campaign, and of the work I'm doing with the team at OpenLeft. We don't carry water for individual politicians - we're honest and straightforward about trying to do our part to build a movement. And that means there's going to be praise and criticism - all at the same time. That doesn't make us the hypocrites in American politics - not even close. Indeed, the real hypocrites are those who insist they care about the future of this country, but either disengage or actively work to undermine a president because their favored candidate didn't win.
So my message is pretty simple:
1. I - and other Obama supporters - have nothing to apologize for on this score. Nothing at all. If telling the truth makes you dislike me or anyone else, that's your problem, not mine.
2. To Naderites, STFU and start doing the unglamorous work of building the third-party you say you really want.
3. To Clintonites, just STFU and slither back to your rathole of bitterness. Your candidate lost because she helped create the problems we now have to fix. Deal with that and become a productive member of society, or again, just STFU.
* I also continue to get email from Obama sycophants who are angry that anyone criticizes Obama and insist that we should "wait and see what he does" - even though the criticism is directed at what he is, in fact, doing. But that's fodder for another post.
From Open Left
Tue Feb 10, 2009
I need to get something off my chest - something that's been bothering me for a while. Over the last few weeks, I've received a river of "I Told You So" email from both Ralph Nader fans and from Hillary Clinton sycophants claiming that because President Obama has made some tactical mistakes and ideologically odious moves - and because I've been critical of some of these - that it means I was abhorrently wrong for being generally supportive of his candidacy during the primary and the general election; that I need to apologetically throw myself on the mercy of the court; and that I need to beg for forgiveness.*
These rants - and they are really, truly half-deranged rants - represent a kind of reductionism that's just braindead. I stand by everything I wrote and said about Obama during the election - that includes both the praise and criticism. I, and many others who supported Obama, weren't misled by him. I had my eyes wide open - just read the Nation piece I wrote about Obama after spending a day with him. He's not a perfect president, and he's not what I would call a movement progressive. I'm not happy about that, but I never thought otherwise.
But I did think - and continue to think - he was far and away the best and most progressive person for the job, among the serious contenders out there. Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich were never going to win the presidency - I wish I lived in a country where people with their politics could win the presidency, but that's not America yet (though I'm trying to do my part every day to make that day possible). Likewise, if you think Hillary Clinton would be a more progressive president, then you either weren't born - or weren't paying attention - over the last 17 years of the Clinton administration (which she played a major role in) and Hillary Clinton's career in the senate.
The Clinton argument, in particular, is so utterly stupid and silly. A big part of what Obama has to do right now is clean up after Clintonism. Granted, lots of the criticism directed at him is aimed at his failure to take on Clintonism, but the idea that Hillary Clinton would be better at taking on the ideology and policies she herself helped craft is inane.
Among Naderites, the "I Told You So" rants are a way to justify disengagement. They look at Obama's failings as reason to simply sit on the sidelines and complain. They never consider the inherent failure of the Nader model - a model that said it was more important to run a quixotic campaign for the presidency than to do the hard ground-up work of building a real third party in America.
Among Clintonites, the "I Told You So" rants are just straight-up sore-loser-ism. Unable to accept that a first-term senator defeated their candidate who had every single advantage, they cannot embrace the new president, even as that new president (wrongly, IMHO) appoints her to a top position in his administration.
And so the Naderites rant and rave about "never voting in an election again," and the Clintonites come up with fantastical narratives claiming Hillary Clinton - the same Hillary Clinton who championed NAFTA and voted for the Iraq War and did almost nothing progressive of note in the U.S. Senate - would have been America's progressive savior. And both of them accuse anyone who said anything supportive of Obama - and now says anything critical of him - as somehow hypocritical.
Here's the undeniable truth: Other than votes for final passage in Congress, politics is rarely a binary black-and-white, red versus blue paradigm. Candidates are inherently flawed, inherently some mix of ideology. Movements and activists and voters have to choose the best among this imperfect pool of possibilities. Journalists like me - if we're interested in the truth - will end up being both critical and supportive of candidates because those candidate aren't typically 100% bad or 100% good. That doesn't make the criticism or the praise "hypocritical" - it makes the reporting authentic and real, rather than sycophantic and propagandistic, and it certainly doesn't make it "hypocritical."
I'm very proud of the reporting I did during the campaign, and of the work I'm doing with the team at OpenLeft. We don't carry water for individual politicians - we're honest and straightforward about trying to do our part to build a movement. And that means there's going to be praise and criticism - all at the same time. That doesn't make us the hypocrites in American politics - not even close. Indeed, the real hypocrites are those who insist they care about the future of this country, but either disengage or actively work to undermine a president because their favored candidate didn't win.
So my message is pretty simple:
1. I - and other Obama supporters - have nothing to apologize for on this score. Nothing at all. If telling the truth makes you dislike me or anyone else, that's your problem, not mine.
2. To Naderites, STFU and start doing the unglamorous work of building the third-party you say you really want.
3. To Clintonites, just STFU and slither back to your rathole of bitterness. Your candidate lost because she helped create the problems we now have to fix. Deal with that and become a productive member of society, or again, just STFU.
* I also continue to get email from Obama sycophants who are angry that anyone criticizes Obama and insist that we should "wait and see what he does" - even though the criticism is directed at what he is, in fact, doing. But that's fodder for another post.
From Open Left
Is Evo secretly Dr. Strangelove?
Monday, February 09, 2009
So a guess it was only a matter of time, but the Washington Times has finally connected the dots.
Iran is doing business with Bolivia. Bolivia has uranium. Bolivia's President Evo Morales is a scary "Indian peasant". Therefore, Evo is clearly supplying Iran's nuclear program.
We know this because conservative Bolivian businessmen don't like Evo, a Canadian consortium has uranium mining concessions, and "Venezuela's Mr. Chavez has openly backed Iran's nuclear ambitions and expressed interest in developing his own nuclear-energy program with technology from Russia."
If that does not make any sense to you, well, you can just shut up.
From Abiding in Bolivia
So a guess it was only a matter of time, but the Washington Times has finally connected the dots.Iran is doing business with Bolivia. Bolivia has uranium. Bolivia's President Evo Morales is a scary "Indian peasant". Therefore, Evo is clearly supplying Iran's nuclear program.
We know this because conservative Bolivian businessmen don't like Evo, a Canadian consortium has uranium mining concessions, and "Venezuela's Mr. Chavez has openly backed Iran's nuclear ambitions and expressed interest in developing his own nuclear-energy program with technology from Russia."
If that does not make any sense to you, well, you can just shut up.
From Abiding in Bolivia
Demon cows plot our demise!
Monday, February 09, 2009
Sorry I got it so wrong last week. It is not the Iranian tractors we should be so worried about "meddling" in Bolivia but Iranian diary factories, and hospitals, and cement plants, oh my! Just read one of Tyler Bridges heart stopping paragraphs describing the terrorist operation:
But you know what's worse? Iran's investments are "only a fraction" of what the Venezuelans are pouring in. These Hugomaniacs are even trying to purchase the "hard hitting" paper La Razón, so hard hitting it even fabricates stories.
Even worse, Tyler Bridges doesn't have the patriotic balls to tell the American people that Venezuela's investments are only a fraction of the BILLIONS Evo's Israel hating government receives from selling natural gas to Brazil and Argentina. Clearly we ought to bomb all these countries until they learn to accept only good'ol US investments.
hat tip BoRev
From Abiding in Bolivia
Sorry I got it so wrong last week. It is not the Iranian tractors we should be so worried about "meddling" in Bolivia but Iranian diary factories, and hospitals, and cement plants, oh my! Just read one of Tyler Bridges heart stopping paragraphs describing the terrorist operation:In the meantime, some 90 Bolivians are building the Iranian-financed milk factory in Achacachi, a town two hours west of La Paz, the capital.Good God, what next! Roofs? Then how will our satellites be able to see what happens inside?
A few miles away, workers maneuvered wheelbarrows full of wet cement while others hammered away at the half-constructed factory.
Johny Zegarra, the crew foreman, said an Iranian representative had visited the construction site four times over the past month.
But you know what's worse? Iran's investments are "only a fraction" of what the Venezuelans are pouring in. These Hugomaniacs are even trying to purchase the "hard hitting" paper La Razón, so hard hitting it even fabricates stories.
Even worse, Tyler Bridges doesn't have the patriotic balls to tell the American people that Venezuela's investments are only a fraction of the BILLIONS Evo's Israel hating government receives from selling natural gas to Brazil and Argentina. Clearly we ought to bomb all these countries until they learn to accept only good'ol US investments.
hat tip BoRev
From Abiding in Bolivia
Tom Ricks and the Neocons
by Jeff Huber
Parts I, II and III of the “Ministry of Truth and Peace” series discussed how Pentagon propaganda operations represent the confluence of Big Oil, Big War, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century. Part IV examines how General David Petraeus and his followers are waging unrestricted information warfare on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mandate.
Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has become the center of gravity in the U.S. military’s information war on the American public.
On February 2, policy analyst Gareth Porter reported that General David Petreus, General Ray Odierno, retired Army general Jack Keane and others were preparing a campaign to mobilize public opinion against President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months. Keane co-authored, with fellow American Enterprise Institute neoconservative Frederick Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the January 2007 study that outlined the Iraq surge strategy.
The onset of the information campaign came close behind Porter’s forecast. On Sunday, February 8, Tom Ricks captured the airways and the headlines, appearing on Meet the Press as the first of his two part series on the stratagem behind the surge strategy appeared in the Washington Post. Ricks’s new book on the surge hits the shelves, not surprisingly, on Tuesday February 10.
Ricks gives us an astonishing insider’s look at the machinations behind the campaign to force a “long war” of indefinite occupation on Mr. Obama. Some of Ricks’s narrative sounds wholly credible, some reeks of Orwellian fabrication, and none of it constitutes objective reporting.
In his Sunday piece, “The Dissenter Who Changed the War,” Ricks paints a doubtful portrait of Ray Odierno as the “true father” of the surge strategy. It was Odierno taking all the risks, Ricks assures us, “bypassing his superiors” like General George Casey “to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military” to make the case for escalating the Iraq war.
Odierno may well have gone around his chain of command; that was standard operating procedure in the Bush years. But given the cast of Machiavellians in this three-ring kabuki, it’s unlikely that big Ray was the kingpin. Odierno more suitably fits the profile of fall guy; he’s been the one making public statements about how the military will stay in Iraq longer than 16 months whether the commander in chief likes it or not, something that would earn a less politically connected officer administrative punishment at the very least. Petraeus has been, as always, circumspect on this subject. You’ll have to look very hard to find a written record of an insubordinate syllable passing Petraeus’s lips at any moment in his career. If Petraeus wants to trash a superior, he’s the type to have somebody like his pet ox Odierno do it for him.
The most telling part of Ricks’s version of the surge genesis is what it omits. Ricks makes no mention of the American Enterprise Institute, or of Fred Kagan, or of the neoconservative movement’s role in selling the surge to the public, an effort spearheaded by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, FOX News, the New York Times, AEI and the Project for the New American Century.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press and in his Monday Post article, Ricks describes with often horrifying candor how Petraeus set out to pave the way for a “long war” that would last well beyond the Bush presidency. Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” That the surge has, as Ricks acknowledges, “failed politically,” is of little consequence.
The generals’ gambit, as Ricks explained it to David Gregory on Meet the Press, is “they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the—you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, ‘We're going to get all these guys out.’”
Thus did Ricks, wearing the beard of an impartial journalist, deliver the ultimatum for Petraeus, Odierno, Keane, Kristol, and the rest of the warmongery. Obama can either accede to the their goal, which is and always has been a permanent military occupation of Iraq, or be vilified as the wimp who betrayed the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace pansy vote.
Ricks saved the punch line for the end of his interview with Gregory. “Iran has…its fingers throughout the Iraqi government. This is something that General Odierno mentioned several months ago and got in some trouble for, for talking about so publicly. Iran really does worry me in, in this situation.”
The Petraeus gang has been stacking the deck around the Iran card since the surge was unveiled in January 2007, leveling one accusation after the next against the Shiite Persian state to frame it as the point defense rationale for staying in Iraq. They haven’t proven a single allegation in all that time, but most Americans, numb by now from the constant bombardment of messages demonizing Iran, have accepted them as gospel truth. And, hey, if Tom Ricks is worried about Iran, shouldn’t the rest of us be worried about it too?
I knew Ricks had fallen like a schoolgirl for Petraeus when, in an April 2007 interview for NPR, he described the general as “a force of nature” and gushed, “He’s famous, for example, for his one-armed push-up contest against privates. You know—challenging a guy half his age to one-arm push-ups. But basically Petraeus [is determined] he’ll do one more than the other guy will, no matter how many the other guy does.”
Ricks was once the respected dean of the Pentagon beat. As of Sunday, he displaced Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times as chief echo chamberlain of the neoconservative junta. One can’t help suspect Ricks is at the top of the list to become Minister of Truth and Peace in the Petraeus administration. He has all the qualifications.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From At Largely
Parts I, II and III of the “Ministry of Truth and Peace” series discussed how Pentagon propaganda operations represent the confluence of Big Oil, Big War, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century. Part IV examines how General David Petraeus and his followers are waging unrestricted information warfare on President Barack Obama’s foreign policy mandate.Pentagon correspondent Thomas E. Ricks has become the center of gravity in the U.S. military’s information war on the American public.
On February 2, policy analyst Gareth Porter reported that General David Petreus, General Ray Odierno, retired Army general Jack Keane and others were preparing a campaign to mobilize public opinion against President Barack Obama’s pledge to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq in 16 months. Keane co-authored, with fellow American Enterprise Institute neoconservative Frederick Kagan, “Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq,” the January 2007 study that outlined the Iraq surge strategy.
The onset of the information campaign came close behind Porter’s forecast. On Sunday, February 8, Tom Ricks captured the airways and the headlines, appearing on Meet the Press as the first of his two part series on the stratagem behind the surge strategy appeared in the Washington Post. Ricks’s new book on the surge hits the shelves, not surprisingly, on Tuesday February 10.
Ricks gives us an astonishing insider’s look at the machinations behind the campaign to force a “long war” of indefinite occupation on Mr. Obama. Some of Ricks’s narrative sounds wholly credible, some reeks of Orwellian fabrication, and none of it constitutes objective reporting.
In his Sunday piece, “The Dissenter Who Changed the War,” Ricks paints a doubtful portrait of Ray Odierno as the “true father” of the surge strategy. It was Odierno taking all the risks, Ricks assures us, “bypassing his superiors” like General George Casey “to talk through Keane to White House staff members and key figures in the military” to make the case for escalating the Iraq war.
Odierno may well have gone around his chain of command; that was standard operating procedure in the Bush years. But given the cast of Machiavellians in this three-ring kabuki, it’s unlikely that big Ray was the kingpin. Odierno more suitably fits the profile of fall guy; he’s been the one making public statements about how the military will stay in Iraq longer than 16 months whether the commander in chief likes it or not, something that would earn a less politically connected officer administrative punishment at the very least. Petraeus has been, as always, circumspect on this subject. You’ll have to look very hard to find a written record of an insubordinate syllable passing Petraeus’s lips at any moment in his career. If Petraeus wants to trash a superior, he’s the type to have somebody like his pet ox Odierno do it for him.
The most telling part of Ricks’s version of the surge genesis is what it omits. Ricks makes no mention of the American Enterprise Institute, or of Fred Kagan, or of the neoconservative movement’s role in selling the surge to the public, an effort spearheaded by Bill Kristol of The Weekly Standard, FOX News, the New York Times, AEI and the Project for the New American Century.
On Sunday’s Meet the Press and in his Monday Post article, Ricks describes with often horrifying candor how Petraeus set out to pave the way for a “long war” that would last well beyond the Bush presidency. Petraeus needed time “not to bring the war to a close, but simply to show enough genuine progress that the American people would be willing to stick with it even longer.” That the surge has, as Ricks acknowledges, “failed politically,” is of little consequence.
The generals’ gambit, as Ricks explained it to David Gregory on Meet the Press, is “they feel they have made huge sacrifices, that they have had friends die and sons bleed, and that they don't want to throw that all away on the—you know, because some guy said on the campaign trail, ‘We're going to get all these guys out.’”
Thus did Ricks, wearing the beard of an impartial journalist, deliver the ultimatum for Petraeus, Odierno, Keane, Kristol, and the rest of the warmongery. Obama can either accede to the their goal, which is and always has been a permanent military occupation of Iraq, or be vilified as the wimp who betrayed the troops because of a campaign promise he made to get the peace pansy vote.
Ricks saved the punch line for the end of his interview with Gregory. “Iran has…its fingers throughout the Iraqi government. This is something that General Odierno mentioned several months ago and got in some trouble for, for talking about so publicly. Iran really does worry me in, in this situation.”
The Petraeus gang has been stacking the deck around the Iran card since the surge was unveiled in January 2007, leveling one accusation after the next against the Shiite Persian state to frame it as the point defense rationale for staying in Iraq. They haven’t proven a single allegation in all that time, but most Americans, numb by now from the constant bombardment of messages demonizing Iran, have accepted them as gospel truth. And, hey, if Tom Ricks is worried about Iran, shouldn’t the rest of us be worried about it too?
I knew Ricks had fallen like a schoolgirl for Petraeus when, in an April 2007 interview for NPR, he described the general as “a force of nature” and gushed, “He’s famous, for example, for his one-armed push-up contest against privates. You know—challenging a guy half his age to one-arm push-ups. But basically Petraeus [is determined] he’ll do one more than the other guy will, no matter how many the other guy does.”
Ricks was once the respected dean of the Pentagon beat. As of Sunday, he displaced Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times as chief echo chamberlain of the neoconservative junta. One can’t help suspect Ricks is at the top of the list to become Minister of Truth and Peace in the Petraeus administration. He has all the qualifications.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From At Largely
War and Piece of the Action
Tuesday, February 03, 2009
Parts I and II of the "Ministry of Truth and Peace" series described the Pentagon propaganda program that the Department of Defense inspector general didn't judge to be a propaganda program because he couldn't find a definition of "propaganda." Part III examines how one retired military media analyst made a killing from our woebegone war on terror.
Retired military media analysts aided the Pentagon's propaganda campaign in support of the Bush administration's wars for a variety of reasons. The analyst with the broadest motivations was undoubtedly retired Army four-star Barry McCaffrey, who exemplified the confluence of Big War, Big Bucks, Big Message, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century.
In a November 2009 New York Times profile of McCaffrey, reporter David Barstow described him as "a force in Washington’s power elite." That's putting it politely: it's understatement to call McCaffrey a great white military-industrial-media shark. His use of access and influence to pursue personal profit from war was singularly predatory.
McCaffrey was an early advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was board member of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of influential neoconservative tank thinkers with ties to the George W. Bush administration and the now infamous Project for the New American Century. He started BR McCaffrey Associates in 2001 to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors. McCaffrey was also one of more than 75 media military "experts" recruited into the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program, initiated in 2002 to help sell the public on the Iraq War. One of the analysts, retired Army colonel Ken Allard, called the program "PSYOPS [psychological operations] on steroids."
McCaffrey began his career as a media analyst for NBC shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Just prior to that, he had become a key member of the advisory council of Veritas Capital, a small player looking to grow in the defense sector. Veritas gave advisers like McCaffrey board membership in its military companies, along with profit sharing and revenue stakes. McCaffrey, like so many of the power elite, had much to gain from what the Pentagon would later refer to as the "long war."
In his first months on the air, McCaffrey called for increases in defense spending to fight the war on terrorism. He specifically touted the virtue of high tech weapons like precision munitions and unmanned aircraft supported by defense companies in the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 military cargo aircraft—also a source of Veritas contracts—a "national treasure."
McCaffrey had early doubts about the Iraq war plan; he was one of many observers who thought the invasion force was too small. But on NBC, he assured viewers that the war would be brief, telling Brian Williams “These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less.” Years afterward, McCaffrey claimed he knew the post invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said. But before the invasion, he waxed ecstatic on NBC with Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.
Days before the invasion, when Tom Brokaw asked “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” McCaffrey answered, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”
In March 2003, shortly after the war began, McCaffrey shouted on MSNBC, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and…the Bradley fighting vehicle." That same month, Integrated Defense Technologies, a Veritas company, received more than $14 million in contracts relating to the Abrams and the Bradley.
In spring of 2007, a small defense company called Defense Solutions hired McCaffrey as a consultant. Four days later, McCaffrey wrote a letter to then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus recommending the bid by Defense Solutions to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles. McCaffrey didn't his connection with Defense Solutions or his letter to Petraeus the next month when he told Congress that it should immediately buy a large number of armored vehicles for Iraq and criticized a Pentagon plan to use armored vehicles provided by a Defense Solutions competitor.
These incidents were not lapses of judgment; they were emblematic of McCaffrey's standard operating procedure, a behavior that any sane, intelligent adult can see is both unethical and immoral. Yet McCaffrey's apologists, under his employ or otherwise, are quick to defend his honor. "His motive is pure," says his publicist Robert Weiner. “It is national interest.” In this regard, McCaffrey is like every other megalomaniac; what's good for him is good for his country, the world, the solar system, the universe and whatever awaits us in the afterlife.
Other McCaffrey supporters excuse his mendacity by pointing to his criticism of the way former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld conducted the war, but that's like forgiving all mortal transgressions because the sinner condemns the way Satan runs hell.
One Pentagon correspondent, an "old friend" of the former general, admonishes us to "remember that McCaffrey is one of the most highly decorated combat Soldiers ever to wear general’s stars, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War."
How sad it is to see heroism become, like patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
Parts I and II of the "Ministry of Truth and Peace" series described the Pentagon propaganda program that the Department of Defense inspector general didn't judge to be a propaganda program because he couldn't find a definition of "propaganda." Part III examines how one retired military media analyst made a killing from our woebegone war on terror.Retired military media analysts aided the Pentagon's propaganda campaign in support of the Bush administration's wars for a variety of reasons. The analyst with the broadest motivations was undoubtedly retired Army four-star Barry McCaffrey, who exemplified the confluence of Big War, Big Bucks, Big Message, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze in the new American century.
In a November 2009 New York Times profile of McCaffrey, reporter David Barstow described him as "a force in Washington’s power elite." That's putting it politely: it's understatement to call McCaffrey a great white military-industrial-media shark. His use of access and influence to pursue personal profit from war was singularly predatory.
McCaffrey was an early advocate of the Iraq invasion. He was board member of the now-defunct Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, a group of influential neoconservative tank thinkers with ties to the George W. Bush administration and the now infamous Project for the New American Century. He started BR McCaffrey Associates in 2001 to "build linkages" between government officials and contractors. McCaffrey was also one of more than 75 media military "experts" recruited into the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program, initiated in 2002 to help sell the public on the Iraq War. One of the analysts, retired Army colonel Ken Allard, called the program "PSYOPS [psychological operations] on steroids."
McCaffrey began his career as a media analyst for NBC shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Just prior to that, he had become a key member of the advisory council of Veritas Capital, a small player looking to grow in the defense sector. Veritas gave advisers like McCaffrey board membership in its military companies, along with profit sharing and revenue stakes. McCaffrey, like so many of the power elite, had much to gain from what the Pentagon would later refer to as the "long war."
In his first months on the air, McCaffrey called for increases in defense spending to fight the war on terrorism. He specifically touted the virtue of high tech weapons like precision munitions and unmanned aircraft supported by defense companies in the Veritas portfolio. He called the C-17 military cargo aircraft—also a source of Veritas contracts—a "national treasure."
McCaffrey had early doubts about the Iraq war plan; he was one of many observers who thought the invasion force was too small. But on NBC, he assured viewers that the war would be brief, telling Brian Williams “These people are going to come apart in 21 days or less.” Years afterward, McCaffrey claimed he knew the post invasion planning was a disaster. “They were warned very categorically and directly by many of us prior to that war,” he said. But before the invasion, he waxed ecstatic on NBC with Pentagon talking points about the “astonishing amount” of postwar planning.
Days before the invasion, when Tom Brokaw asked “What are your concerns if we were to go to war by the end of this week?” McCaffrey answered, “Well, I don’t think I have any real serious ones.”
In March 2003, shortly after the war began, McCaffrey shouted on MSNBC, "Thank God for the Abrams tank and…the Bradley fighting vehicle." That same month, Integrated Defense Technologies, a Veritas company, received more than $14 million in contracts relating to the Abrams and the Bradley.
In spring of 2007, a small defense company called Defense Solutions hired McCaffrey as a consultant. Four days later, McCaffrey wrote a letter to then commander of U.S. forces in Iraq General David Petraeus recommending the bid by Defense Solutions to supply Iraq with 5,000 armored vehicles. McCaffrey didn't his connection with Defense Solutions or his letter to Petraeus the next month when he told Congress that it should immediately buy a large number of armored vehicles for Iraq and criticized a Pentagon plan to use armored vehicles provided by a Defense Solutions competitor.
These incidents were not lapses of judgment; they were emblematic of McCaffrey's standard operating procedure, a behavior that any sane, intelligent adult can see is both unethical and immoral. Yet McCaffrey's apologists, under his employ or otherwise, are quick to defend his honor. "His motive is pure," says his publicist Robert Weiner. “It is national interest.” In this regard, McCaffrey is like every other megalomaniac; what's good for him is good for his country, the world, the solar system, the universe and whatever awaits us in the afterlife.
Other McCaffrey supporters excuse his mendacity by pointing to his criticism of the way former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld conducted the war, but that's like forgiving all mortal transgressions because the sinner condemns the way Satan runs hell.
One Pentagon correspondent, an "old friend" of the former general, admonishes us to "remember that McCaffrey is one of the most highly decorated combat Soldiers ever to wear general’s stars, with two awards of the Distinguished Service Cross and three Purple Hearts for wounds he suffered in the Vietnam War."
How sad it is to see heroism become, like patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
Ministry of Truth and Peace (Part II)
Friday, January 30, 2009
Part I described how the Pentagon's use of retired military media analysts to funnel propaganda through the mainstream media fit into a larger operation aimed at rewriting history as it happened.
On January 16, the Friday before Barack Obama's inauguration, the Defense Department inspector general released the report of an investigation of the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program. The report stated that, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that the program had "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."
Miriam-Webster OnLine defines propaganda as "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." In April 2008, an in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed that the RMA program had employed retired military officers in a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance."
So all that really remains unclear in this context is why the I.G. didn't look up the definition of "propaganda." Maybe that was outside the scope of his investigation.
Sock Puppets
"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," by David Barstow was a watershed story for the New York Times, the paper that, more than any other mainstream media outlet, had allowed the Bush administration to use it as a conduit for the false propaganda that convinced the country of the need to invade Iraq. Where Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller cited unnamed "officials" nearly 30 times in their September 2002 article that fraudulently asserted Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons technology, Barstow's investigative report was an exemplar of cold fact and attributed testimony.
Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, an NBC analyst, called the RMA program a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he told Barstow.
Barstow referenced internal Pentagon documents that "repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"
Don Myer, aide to assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Torie Clarke, told Barstow that a strategic decision was made in 2002 to use the analysts as the main focus of the public relations push to argue the case for war with Iraq. Another Clarke aid, Brent T. Krueger, said the idea was to have the analysts be in effect “writing the op-ed” for the war.
In all, the program recruited more than 75 retired officers, all of them cleared by Donald Rumsfeld, the largest contingent of whom, not surprisingly, worked for FOX News.
“You could see that they were messaging,” Krueger told Barstow. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over… You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”
The Pentagon "armed its analysts with talking points" and expected to hear them echoed in the media. Former Green Beret and FOX News analyst Robert S. Bevelacqua admitted, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ”
Ironically, White House spokesmodel Brian Whitman told Barstow it is “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”
It would have been incredible to think that in another American century, but not in this one. Up until the very end of the Rumsfeld reign, the Pentagon kept its analysts on a short leash the same way it manipulated the rest of the media, by granting access to those who played ball and denying access to those who refused to.
I Cannot Tell a Lie, Unless…
Retired army general and FOX News commentator Paul E. Vallely confessed to Barstow that when the Pentagon flew him and other retired military analysts to Iraq in 2003, he immediately saw that "things were going south." On returning home, however, Vallely told Fox anchor Alan Colmes "You can't believe the progress."
Vallely's mendacity was in part motivated by his belief in the hallucination that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because of unfavorable press coverage. Vallely and others of his generation have ingrained this mantra on younger military personnel to the point where it is now an indelible part of the American military ethos; it never occurs to any of them that with deployments of up to a half million troops and all the material support a force could possibly want over a span of more than a decade, the country couldn’t have supported the war any more than it did, and that it wasn’t bad press that caused the war to be lost, it was the lost war that caused the bad press.
Delusional as he is, we might grant Vallely virtue points for sincerity. Other analysts, though, were in the game for the money, a lot more money than the per-appearance fees they got from the news networks. Most of them were connected to military contractors and stood to profit from the war they were promoting.
Part III will describe how the Retired Military Analyst program served as a confluence of Big War, Big Message, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
Part I described how the Pentagon's use of retired military media analysts to funnel propaganda through the mainstream media fit into a larger operation aimed at rewriting history as it happened.On January 16, the Friday before Barack Obama's inauguration, the Defense Department inspector general released the report of an investigation of the Pentagon's Retired Military Analyst program. The report stated that, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that the program had "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."
Miriam-Webster OnLine defines propaganda as "the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person." In April 2008, an in-depth investigation by the New York Times revealed that the RMA program had employed retired military officers in a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance."
So all that really remains unclear in this context is why the I.G. didn't look up the definition of "propaganda." Maybe that was outside the scope of his investigation.
Sock Puppets
"Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon’s Hidden Hand," by David Barstow was a watershed story for the New York Times, the paper that, more than any other mainstream media outlet, had allowed the Bush administration to use it as a conduit for the false propaganda that convinced the country of the need to invade Iraq. Where Michael R. Gordon and Judith Miller cited unnamed "officials" nearly 30 times in their September 2002 article that fraudulently asserted Saddam Hussein was pursuing nuclear weapons technology, Barstow's investigative report was an exemplar of cold fact and attributed testimony.
Retired Army colonel Ken Allard, an NBC analyst, called the RMA program a sophisticated information operation. “This was a coherent, active policy,” he told Barstow.
Barstow referenced internal Pentagon documents that "repeatedly refer to the military analysts as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and messages' to millions of Americans 'in the form of their own opinions.'"
Don Myer, aide to assistant secretary of defense for public affairs Torie Clarke, told Barstow that a strategic decision was made in 2002 to use the analysts as the main focus of the public relations push to argue the case for war with Iraq. Another Clarke aid, Brent T. Krueger, said the idea was to have the analysts be in effect “writing the op-ed” for the war.
In all, the program recruited more than 75 retired officers, all of them cleared by Donald Rumsfeld, the largest contingent of whom, not surprisingly, worked for FOX News.
“You could see that they were messaging,” Krueger told Barstow. “You could see they were taking verbatim what the secretary was saying or what the technical specialists were saying. And they were saying it over and over and over… You’d look at them and say, ‘This is working.’ ”
The Pentagon "armed its analysts with talking points" and expected to hear them echoed in the media. Former Green Beret and FOX News analyst Robert S. Bevelacqua admitted, “It was them saying, ‘We need to stick our hands up your back and move your mouth for you,’ ”
Ironically, White House spokesmodel Brian Whitman told Barstow it is “a bit incredible” to think retired military officers could be “wound up” and turned into “puppets of the Defense Department.”
It would have been incredible to think that in another American century, but not in this one. Up until the very end of the Rumsfeld reign, the Pentagon kept its analysts on a short leash the same way it manipulated the rest of the media, by granting access to those who played ball and denying access to those who refused to.
I Cannot Tell a Lie, Unless…
Retired army general and FOX News commentator Paul E. Vallely confessed to Barstow that when the Pentagon flew him and other retired military analysts to Iraq in 2003, he immediately saw that "things were going south." On returning home, however, Vallely told Fox anchor Alan Colmes "You can't believe the progress."
Vallely's mendacity was in part motivated by his belief in the hallucination that the U.S. lost the Vietnam War because of unfavorable press coverage. Vallely and others of his generation have ingrained this mantra on younger military personnel to the point where it is now an indelible part of the American military ethos; it never occurs to any of them that with deployments of up to a half million troops and all the material support a force could possibly want over a span of more than a decade, the country couldn’t have supported the war any more than it did, and that it wasn’t bad press that caused the war to be lost, it was the lost war that caused the bad press.
Delusional as he is, we might grant Vallely virtue points for sincerity. Other analysts, though, were in the game for the money, a lot more money than the per-appearance fees they got from the news networks. Most of them were connected to military contractors and stood to profit from the war they were promoting.
Part III will describe how the Retired Military Analyst program served as a confluence of Big War, Big Message, Big Bucks, Big Brother and the Big Schmooze.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
Ministry of Truth and Peace
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
It's fitting that as young Mr. Bush exited the world stage, the military pardoned itself for lying about his woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. A report released on January 16 by the Pentagon's inspector general stated, "we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper," and concluded that further investigation into the matter "was not warranted."
The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance." The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of the RMA program—nearly six years after it had been initiated. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon's web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that RMA activities "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."
So it all depends what your definition of "propaganda" is. I feel the I.G.'s pain, don't you?
Rewriting Military History
I first started hearing the expression "we're losing the public affairs war" about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.
Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure each and every one of those reporters got on and off the ship safely and received a triple dose of gee whiz by watching flight operations from Vulture's Row high atop the ship's island.
What the air wing did over the beach didn't matter; the targets they bombed were mainly plywood decoys. I didn't have to worry about defending the ship, either. Bad Guy's Navy was sinking at the pier. We never did accomplish our original objective, which had something to do with keeping Bad Guy Milosevic from cleansing his ethnics, who were the good guys in this particular war because then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said they were. Milosevic cleansed as many ethnics as he wanted to before he quit and everyone left him alone, a technique the Israelis later exploited to great effect in Lebanon and Gaza. None of our guys got killed in combat. In fact, the biggest friendly casualties of the war were the careers of most of the flag and general officers involved, some of whom retired in disgust, and some who just got caught taking their pants off in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong company, a trait they shared with their commander in chief, who unlike them managed to keep his job for a few more years.
In all, the Kosovo Conflict was a perfect play war to end the 20th century with.
Boondoggle or no, we came home to heroes' welcomes, and our carrier was hailed as a keystone of the greatest naval and air victory ever won under the command of a clueless Army general. The carrier Navy held onto its slab of the defense budget, and lived to play war in a new American century.
Bull Feather Merchants
The Kosovo War was a watershed conflict in that it illustrated—or should have illustrated—that the efficacy of American military power was nearing the terminus of its collision course with a brick wall. No one could really say the Kosovo War had defended America or had protected its interests overseas or had even protected innocents abroad because the good guys in the conflict were no better than the bad guys. At that point in history, the military's full time mission shifted to self-preservation, and the purpose of the relatively new "information warfare" specialty went from supporting armed conflicts to fabricating convincing arguments for having them.
Shortly after 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Office of Strategic Influence, an information warfare directorate with "a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use[d] disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases," according to its chief, Air Force one star Simon P. Worden. Protests arose when the Pentagon announced that the OSI would "provide news items, possibly even false ones." Rumsfeld shut down OSI to quell the controversy. Well, he sort of shut it down. "You can have the [OSI] name," he said at a press conference, "but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."
Before it skulked out the servants' door, OSI spawned a number of truth sub-ministries within DoD, one of which was the Retired Military Analyst program.
Part II will analyze RMA as a microcosm of the Pentagon's propaganda campaign to protect and defend the military industrial complex.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
It's fitting that as young Mr. Bush exited the world stage, the military pardoned itself for lying about his woebegone wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere. A report released on January 16 by the Pentagon's inspector general stated, "we found the evidence insufficient to conclude that RMA (retired military analysts) outreach activities were improper," and concluded that further investigation into the matter "was not warranted."The RMA program flew under the radar until an April 2008 New York Times article revealed that the Pentagon had recruited media military analysts for a "campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance." The article discomfited the Pentagon I.G. office into launching an investigation of the RMA program—nearly six years after it had been initiated. The I.G. report, posted on the Pentagon's web site the Friday before the inauguration so everyone would be sure to notice it, explained, "the evidence in this case was insufficient to conclude" that RMA activities "violated statutory prohibitions on publicity or propaganda," but conceded that the judgment had been difficult to arrive at because "the definition of propaganda in this context remains unclear."
So it all depends what your definition of "propaganda" is. I feel the I.G.'s pain, don't you?
Rewriting Military History
I first started hearing the expression "we're losing the public affairs war" about the time of Desert Storm, when the Air Force was grabbing the headlines for winning the air battle and Navy carrier participation got piddled into the footnotes.
Time passed. During the 1999 Kosovo War, my ship, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt, entertained more members of the foreign press than the number of combat sorties she launched. As a wartime operations officer of a U.S. Navy flagship, my number one concern was to make sure each and every one of those reporters got on and off the ship safely and received a triple dose of gee whiz by watching flight operations from Vulture's Row high atop the ship's island.
What the air wing did over the beach didn't matter; the targets they bombed were mainly plywood decoys. I didn't have to worry about defending the ship, either. Bad Guy's Navy was sinking at the pier. We never did accomplish our original objective, which had something to do with keeping Bad Guy Milosevic from cleansing his ethnics, who were the good guys in this particular war because then Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said they were. Milosevic cleansed as many ethnics as he wanted to before he quit and everyone left him alone, a technique the Israelis later exploited to great effect in Lebanon and Gaza. None of our guys got killed in combat. In fact, the biggest friendly casualties of the war were the careers of most of the flag and general officers involved, some of whom retired in disgust, and some who just got caught taking their pants off in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong company, a trait they shared with their commander in chief, who unlike them managed to keep his job for a few more years.
In all, the Kosovo Conflict was a perfect play war to end the 20th century with.
Boondoggle or no, we came home to heroes' welcomes, and our carrier was hailed as a keystone of the greatest naval and air victory ever won under the command of a clueless Army general. The carrier Navy held onto its slab of the defense budget, and lived to play war in a new American century.
Bull Feather Merchants
The Kosovo War was a watershed conflict in that it illustrated—or should have illustrated—that the efficacy of American military power was nearing the terminus of its collision course with a brick wall. No one could really say the Kosovo War had defended America or had protected its interests overseas or had even protected innocents abroad because the good guys in the conflict were no better than the bad guys. At that point in history, the military's full time mission shifted to self-preservation, and the purpose of the relatively new "information warfare" specialty went from supporting armed conflicts to fabricating convincing arguments for having them.
Shortly after 9/11, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Office of Strategic Influence, an information warfare directorate with "a broad mission ranging from 'black' campaigns that use[d] disinformation and other covert activities to 'white' public affairs that rely on truthful news releases," according to its chief, Air Force one star Simon P. Worden. Protests arose when the Pentagon announced that the OSI would "provide news items, possibly even false ones." Rumsfeld shut down OSI to quell the controversy. Well, he sort of shut it down. "You can have the [OSI] name," he said at a press conference, "but I'm gonna keep doing every single thing that needs to be done and I have."
Before it skulked out the servants' door, OSI spawned a number of truth sub-ministries within DoD, one of which was the Retired Military Analyst program.
Part II will analyze RMA as a microcosm of the Pentagon's propaganda campaign to protect and defend the military industrial complex.
Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.
From Pen and Sword
Ooooh, Barracuda!
A reader writes:
Dear Readers, this is a Terrible! Injustice! Clearly a political plot by the our autocratic government to stifle dissent! Any fair, uncensored analysis would note that we are "tasty" and offensive.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution (There! That ought to be tasteful and offensive enough...or is it inoffensive...I always get those mixed up.)
When I'm at work, I'm blocked from accessing many websites. I just discovered that includes yours
Dear Readers, this is a Terrible! Injustice! Clearly a political plot by the our autocratic government to stifle dissent! Any fair, uncensored analysis would note that we are "tasty" and offensive.
From Dispatches From The Bolivarian Revolution (There! That ought to be tasteful and offensive enough...or is it inoffensive...I always get those mixed up.)
Obama needs a Labor Secretary. It's time to end Republican obstruction of Hilda Solis
By David Neiwert
Tuesday Feb 10, 2009
It's becoming clear that Republicans are going to make their valiant Last Stand around the Employee Free Choice Act, even though it's becoming clear their talking points fall apart readily and the facts are not on their side.
The biggest indicator: Even though Hilda Solis was nominated to become the new Labor Secretary on Dec. 19, and the thinly veiled obstruction of her confirmation became clear shortly after Obama's inauguration, Republicans continue to block her -- this time raising the phony issue of her husband's back taxes to cause a delay.
John Nichols in The Nation observes:
Hilda Solis has had experiences that are very different from most of the people with whom she would serve in Barack Obama's cabinet. But her experiences are not so very different from those of working Americans, including the small business owners who struggle to get by on main streets in cities and towns across this country--communities that look and feel a lot more like Irwindale than Washington. That is what makes Hilda Solis such an attractive nominee.
In fact, far from disqualifying Solis, the minor tax troubles related to her husband's small business confirm the congresswoman as a more attractive nominee than most of those advanced by Obama. Those members of the Senate who fail to recognize this fact--and their amen corner in the media--are merely confirming the extent to which they are dramatically disconnected with the experience of working Americans.
Barack Obama made the right pick when he chose Hilda Solis to serve as his secretary of labor. The president should not be dissuaded by the silly spin that would equate the circumstances of a Tom Daschle with those of Hilda Solis. Obama and his allies in the Senate need to inject a measure of perspective--along with realism--into the Washington discourse by demanding that this worthy nominee be confirmed before the week is done.
Change to Win has created at FreeHilda.com site, which has a a petition you can sign.
Here's SEIU's Andy Stern:
From Crooks and Liars
Tuesday Feb 10, 2009
It's becoming clear that Republicans are going to make their valiant Last Stand around the Employee Free Choice Act, even though it's becoming clear their talking points fall apart readily and the facts are not on their side.
The biggest indicator: Even though Hilda Solis was nominated to become the new Labor Secretary on Dec. 19, and the thinly veiled obstruction of her confirmation became clear shortly after Obama's inauguration, Republicans continue to block her -- this time raising the phony issue of her husband's back taxes to cause a delay.
John Nichols in The Nation observes:
Hilda Solis has had experiences that are very different from most of the people with whom she would serve in Barack Obama's cabinet. But her experiences are not so very different from those of working Americans, including the small business owners who struggle to get by on main streets in cities and towns across this country--communities that look and feel a lot more like Irwindale than Washington. That is what makes Hilda Solis such an attractive nominee.
In fact, far from disqualifying Solis, the minor tax troubles related to her husband's small business confirm the congresswoman as a more attractive nominee than most of those advanced by Obama. Those members of the Senate who fail to recognize this fact--and their amen corner in the media--are merely confirming the extent to which they are dramatically disconnected with the experience of working Americans.
Barack Obama made the right pick when he chose Hilda Solis to serve as his secretary of labor. The president should not be dissuaded by the silly spin that would equate the circumstances of a Tom Daschle with those of Hilda Solis. Obama and his allies in the Senate need to inject a measure of perspective--along with realism--into the Washington discourse by demanding that this worthy nominee be confirmed before the week is done.
Change to Win has created at FreeHilda.com site, which has a a petition you can sign.
Here's SEIU's Andy Stern:
From Crooks and Liars
Emerald Passport's McQuirter Was Involved in Ecoterror Plot
Is Emerald Passport a Shell For Terrorists?
Posted Feb 5, 2009
Posted Feb 5, 2009
James Alexander McQuirter, the former Grand Wizard of the Canadian Ku Klux Klan.
When we first revealed here that former KKK Grand Wizard and convicted coup plotter James Alexander McQuirter worked for an MLM scheme called Emerald Passport here in Panama, the response from that outfit was mainly that McQuirter had served his time in prison and "changed his ways" since. That, however, appears to be a lie according to a recent story in the Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail. The article describes an elaborate plot to cause an ecological disaster with either fruit flies or virus strains that would harm North American food supply, by much the same cast of characters that was involved in the Dominica coup plot. At the end of the story, McQuirter is mentioned:
Mr. Macdonald has said in earlier testimony that he received a German SS sword as a hospitality gift from James Alexander McQuirter, for letting him stay at his residence. Mr. McQuirter is a former grand wizard of the Canadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
As we said: The man is a neo-Nazi and will always be a neo-Nazi. Another source just wrote us about the relation between McQuirter and Emerald Passport owner Sam Lajic:
What is equally interesting is I received a phone call from an Emerald Passport distributor who told me that in the past year, Sam Lajic repeatedly introduced James Alexander as his good friend for ``more than a quarter of a century``. This distributor said that he along with a number of others quit in disgust as when they did the math, it became clear to them that Sam Lajic must have become good friends with McQuirter during ``Operation Red Dog`` or at the very least during the KKK days.
So, again we wonder: Whom or what is being funded by Emerald Passport?
From Bananama Republic
Mr. Macdonald has said in earlier testimony that he received a German SS sword as a hospitality gift from James Alexander McQuirter, for letting him stay at his residence. Mr. McQuirter is a former grand wizard of the Canadian Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
As we said: The man is a neo-Nazi and will always be a neo-Nazi. Another source just wrote us about the relation between McQuirter and Emerald Passport owner Sam Lajic:
What is equally interesting is I received a phone call from an Emerald Passport distributor who told me that in the past year, Sam Lajic repeatedly introduced James Alexander as his good friend for ``more than a quarter of a century``. This distributor said that he along with a number of others quit in disgust as when they did the math, it became clear to them that Sam Lajic must have become good friends with McQuirter during ``Operation Red Dog`` or at the very least during the KKK days.
So, again we wonder: Whom or what is being funded by Emerald Passport?
From Bananama Republic
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Yesterday Once More
Back in the 80s, in an effort to drum up American support for the brutal war against popular leftist movements in Central America, the Reagan Administration famously fanned fake stories of Sandinista anti-Semitism, which the major media largely published without investigating. The campaign has since become a textbook example of government propaganda efforts studied and decried on college campuses across the country. Nowadays of course we're wiser and more cynical and we'd never ever fall for crap like that again (ha ha).Last week a synagogue in Caracas was broken into at night and vandalized with terrible hate speech. It was an ugly, nasty crime with no apparent links to the government, except, of course, in the US press coverage, where many of the stories have been pretty much snatched wholesale from the headlines of 1983. This one today in the Post will surely be studied one day as a classic of the genre. From the second paragraph:
President Hugo Chávez condemned the Jan. 30 attack, which has shaken the country's political establishment. But Jewish leaders, supported by Israeli and U.S. officials, have said the populist government's often incendiary rhetoric toward the Jewish state, coupled with rising anti-Semitic diatribes in pro-government media, has helped foster a climate of intolerance.You see how that works? Criticism of Israeli foreign policy "helped foster a climate" of anti-Semitism leading to violence, according to "Israeli and U.S. officials." Also, diatribes, not in government publications, but in the "pro-Government media," have contributed to the problem. So there you go, this terrible crime would never have happened if Chavez would just muzzle the press and keep his mouth shut about the Gaza massacre, for freedom. Thwk thwk thwk. What's that sound? Oh hey it's Otto Reich, masturbating.
From Bolivarian Revolution
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