Sunday, April 7, 2013
Operation Dark Heart
“To this day, I don’t know who finally pulled the plug on Able Danger-or why-but I do know that a lot of people were more concerned about their careers and getting that next promotion than they were about protecting their country. The army and SOCOM were ahead of their time in doing something about global terror. It was not a “failure of imagination” that resulted in the 9/11 attacks. It was pure bureaucratic bumbling and intellectual corruption.”
-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 176-7.
“General Vines knew the score, understood the intel and, in Patton-like style, wanted to take the war to the enemy-to show him no quarter. The Taliban was still there and was a threat to the long-term stability and economic programs that were just then taking root in Afghanistan. General Vines knew that he had to break the back of the counteroffensive before the Taliban could come back and take the country again.
”Privately, we assumed, he’d had to push back against Rumsfeld’s aggressive effort to turn activities in Afghanistan into a reconstruction-focused, postcombat, “permissive” environment, and to declare that the large-scale combat was over. After all, the focus of the main effort was Iraq. We wouldn’t want any bad news to tarnish the brilliant victory achieved in 2001 and 2002 in Afghanistan.”-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 176-7.
“Leadership-the White House, Rumsfeld, top brass at the Pentagon-just didn’t get it. They were focused on Iraq. They weren’t listening. You could see that: Rumsfeld was showing up in Kabul every few months and declaring the combat was over. I had to believe that people were passing the right information up the chain. Whether he got it, I don’t know. His deputies sure didn’t get it. The Taliban didn’t recognize international borders. The Paks were in bed with the Taliban. The intelligence was irrefutable. Believing otherwise was a failure of leadership at the highest level.”
-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 182.
“Then Rumsfeld showed up in Kabul and appeared to be seriously delusional. He and Karzai claimed that the Taliban were no danger to the country.
‘I’ve not seen any indication that the Taliban pose any military threat to the security of Afghanistan,’ Rumsfeld told reporters.”-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 257.
“I’m not saying torture should never be used. I’d torture someone, if say, I believed that they had information that would prevent a nuclear weapon from going off or would likely prevent a massive loss of life. Albeit those kinds of situations are exceedingly rare. In fact, they usually only occur in the movies, not in real life. In the vast majority of cases, I don’t believe torture works-nor should it be used.”-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on teh Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 259.
“I eventually testified twice, both times in February 2006, to the House Armed Services Committee and the House Government Reform Committee in open and closed sessions. I concluded in my testimony that the Able Danger project might have prevented 9/11-and in closed (top secret) session, I outlined exactly my judgement in great detail based on the larger work, which is still unknown to the public.
“After multiple denials, DOD was eventually forced to confirm that Able Danger did exist, and to confirm that it was an offensive operation designed to identify and attack Al Qaeda in a preemptive manner, two years before the 9/11 attacks. General Hugh Shelton publicly confirmed the existence of the operation and that he had come up with the idea and tasked it to General Pete Shoomaker, then commander of the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM).”
-Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan-and the Path to Victory, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, St. Martin’s Press, 2010, pg. 274.
from Twelve by Twelve by William Powers
“But is it possible to be rooted in a suburb, or is this oxymoronix?I’ve often reflected that those monotonous spaces clash with the nothion of being somewhere specific. Suburbs are entangled in twenty-first-century globalism, ina single Flat World culture that has become a ubiquitous nowhere. My Long Island rootlessness flowed naturally into a kind of jet-fueled global nomadic life, in which I lost an essential part of adulthood: finding one’s proper place.
Naipaul’s area of darkness is a colonial system that degrades the human spirit. My area of darkness is the price of my privilege, and ecocide that degrades and poisons the human being while it destroys our very host, Mother Earth. The global economy gobbles up authentic places and vomits up McWorld, increasingly turning our collective proper place, this planet, into a dystopia. I’m a child of ecocide, caught in a catch-22. How can I get on that plane-yet how can I not get on that plane-knowing that an estimated half of all species today could become extinct due to the effects of climate change? This is my area of darkness; a living earth, no longer underfoot.”[i]
[i] Powers, William, (2010). Twelve By Twelve, A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream, New World Library,84-85
from Dreamland by Charles Bowden
“Here is how it works: first some incident, say twelve men buried carefully in the backyard of a condo in a decent neighborhood, catches one’s attention. Then one investigates and sees the incident as part of a larger problem. Then one sees the problem as really an issue. Then one sees the issue as really a question that demands a new policy. Then, one feels comfort. Problem/issue/policy/defined and question answered. This is the death of the mind that slaughters the intellect of the educated on the line. Sometimes this death comes before anything but little fragments have been examined and the mind dies wrapped around the notion of, say, the drug war. Or of illegal immigration. Or of trade as embodied in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Cures are suggested: just say no, hire more narcs, an open border, guest worker permits, vigils against violence, poetry readings, plays, magazine stories such as I have written, heralding new horrors to savor.
I’ve moved into some place beyond that. I am here to announce the obvious, the war. It rages all along the line, it kills thousands, it slaughters beneath notice and it will spill gore on my ground when my bones rest in the brown earth I love. Thirty or forty years from now, the American adventures into the bowels of the Middle East will be forgotten details of bumbling imperialism. But what took place in this patio, what is taking place all along the line will profoundly alter the future of the United States. The future is here, even though I can’t even catch a trace of the rotting bodies with their gaping, toothy mouths.” [i]
...The machinery clanked in my mind. NAFTA had destroyed the future of peasant agriculture in Mexico and hurled millions toward the fence. NAFTA had spawned a legion of U.S. factories in Mexico and now they were going to China because Mexicans at ten bucks a day wanted too much pay. Nothing on the horizon would alter these facts. Millions were being starved out of their lives in Mexico and coming north. Drugs were simply one more thing accelerated by NAFTA: increased trade meant that searching vehicles for drugs became a mathematical farce. Every year the narc budget increased in the U.S., every year drugs became cheaper in the U.S., every year more people went to prison for drugs in the U.S….
The only flaw in my notion is this: the Mexican war is simply part of a global breakdown, the shredding of traditional cultures by the machinery of trade, by overpopulation, by the destruction of natural resources by teeming human numbers. It does not matter if it is a man slipping through the wire with a baby in my desert, or a teenager living in a village in Eastern Europe for the whorehouses of the West. It is all part of that big picture that wonks tend to in the temples of think tanks. But this one facet, the Mexican war, was happening on my watch, on my ground. [ii]
a frightened and meek puddle of acquiescence
"But decades of effective fear-mongering over everything from Communists to drug kingpins -- and particularly the last decade of invoking the all-justifying, Scary mantra of Terrorism -- has reduced much of the American citizenry into a frightened and meek puddle of acquiescence which not only tolerates, but craves, a complete deprivation of privacy."
Glenn Greenwald from:
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/09/27/privacy/index.html
a Nation of Pussies
Chief Sitting Bull
--Chief Sitting Bull, speaking at the Powder River Conference in 1877
All are lunatics
- Ambrose Bierce
4th of July at Diana and Peter's Bar, Grill, Garage and Hockshop
Video and editing by Josiah Grennell
G Minor Blues by the Flying Javelinas
Big Country by Bela Fleck and the Flecktones
Excert: Shadows at Dawn
Reckoning with this violence involves facing some of the more difficult aspects not only of the American past but of the historical enterprise itself. Unlike almost any other object of historical study, violence simultaneously destroys and creates history. The physical annihilation of another human produces a profound absence that distorts the historical record for all time. One of the most immediate manifestations of violence is thus a terrifying silence that no testimony of the past can fathom in its entirety. As Primo Levi once commented, “The destruction brought to an end, the job completed, was not told by anyone…no one ever returned to describe his own death.”
Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and Violence of History, Karl Jacoby, 2008, Penguin Books, pg. 3
That old spicy fish sauce may come in handy
bullets at protesters, who defended themselves with
homemade rockets, sharpened bamboo poles, and plastic bags
filled with spicy fish sauce...
from Harpers Magazine
A Message to Po Chu-I
From the New Yorker, March 8, 2010
by W. S. Merwin
In that tenth winter of your exile
the cold never letting go of you
and your hunger aching inside you
day and night while you heard the voices
out of the starving mouths around you
old ones and infants and animals
those curtains of bones swaying on stilts
and you heard the faint cries of the birds
searching in the frozen mud for something
to swallow and you watched the migrants
trapped in the cold the great geese growing
weaker by the day until their wings
could barely lift them above the ground
so that a gang of boys could catch one
in a net and drag him to market
to be cooked and it was then that you
saw him in his own exile and you
paid for him and kept him until he
could fly again and you let him go
but then where could he go in the world
of your time with its wars everywhere
and the soldiers hungry the fires lit
the knives out twelve hundred years ago
I have been wanting to let you know
the goose is well he is here with me
you would recognize the old migrant
he has been with me for a long time
and is in no hurry to leave here
the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2010/03/08/100308po_poem_merwin?printable=true#ixzz0jnWHPhvM
A Well-Written Sentence
Jack Nicholson and Jesus
Jesus was laughing and waving a glass of wine,
“Man, we watch that one all the time.
“John does the best imitation of you.
“Sit here and play me in the last supper scene.
“They won’t cast me in the part.
“Too short, and they suspect my sexual preferences.
“Hey, I don’t mind.
“Let ‘er roll.
“Drink up.
“Life is short and those crosses are real.”
-J.O. Teague
Why we are here
Legendary science writer Stephen Jay Gould on why we are here:
The human species has inhabited this planet for only 250,000 years or so-roughly.0015 percent of the history of life, the last inch of the cosmic mile. The world fared perfectly well without us for all but the last moment of earthly time–and this fact makes our appearance look more like an accidental afterthought than the culmination of a prefigured plan.
Moreover, the pathways that have led to our evolution are quirky, improbable, unrepeatable and utterly unpredictable. Human evolution is not random; it makes sense and can be explained after the fact. But wind back life's tape to the dawn of time and let it play again–and you will never get humans a second time.
We are here because one odd group of fishes had a peculiar fin anatomy that could transform into legs for terrestrial creatures; because the earth never froze entirely during an ice age; because a small and tenuous species, arising in Africa a quarter of a million years ago, has managed, so far, to survive by hook and by crook. We may yearn for a 'higher' answer – but none exists. This explanation, though superficially troubling, if not terrifying, is ultimately liberating and exhilarating. We cannot read the meaning of life passively in the facts of nature. We must construct these answers ourselves – from our own wisdom and ethical sense. There is no other way.
American Ex Ceptionalism
This eagerness to declare oneself exempt from the rules to which others are bound, on the grounds of one's own objective superiority, is always the animating sentiment behind nationalistic criminality. Here's what Orwell said about that in Notes on Nationalism:
"All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side . . . The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them."http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/feb/18/american-exceptionalism-north-korea-nukes
