Besieged, Bothered, Bewildered - and Busted

[bemildred]

A fine rant.


Neocon-gate: It's one big neocon nervous breakdown
by Justin Raimondo
"It's not fun to be accused of war crimes," opines
Gary Schmitt, executive director of the Project for a
New American Century (PNAC). It's even less fun to
be victimized by war criminals, but, then again, why
should the neocons at PNAC care about that? After
all, as we all know, the scandal that's increasingly
making top officials of this administration look like
the inmates at Charenton, is all about them. These
are "Tough Times for Neocons," as the title of a piece
in Wednesday's Los Angeles Times put it. The poor
babies feel "embattled," "besieged," and, worst yet:

"Where neoconservatives were once seen as having a
future in Republican administrations, the setbacks in
Iraq could make it difficult for the group's leading
members to win Senate confirmation for top posts in
the future."

Oh, some of the neocons have a future, alright -
wearing one of those cute little orange jumpsuits and
making some tatooed bruiser named Butch very
happy. It's not legal to out CIA agents, feed forgeries
to U.S. intelligence, and employ methods that, if used
by any other nation on earth, would certainly be
judged as war crimes. If you write legal opinions
tortuously rationalizing the most degraded forms of
barbarism, you could be charged as an accessory to a
war crime, and if you signed off on orders allowing
such methods to be used, and then try to cover up the
evidence, you aren't merely "besieged" - you're
busted.

AntiWar.com

[UpInArms]

1. thanks for the post bemildred!

I needed the laugh.

:nopity: for the neocons

[pearl]

2. Absolutely!

I'm saving this. love it . Poor babies.

[Miss Authoritiva]

3. Too clever by seven-eighths.

Leave it to a dimwitted president to have a brain trust comprised of idiot savants.

[teryang]

4. The elephant in the living room

...911. The reason why all the above well made points concerning Iraq and the neo-cons may go nowhere.

911 was a carefully orchestrated conspiracy with a bi-partisan character (especially when one considers the obstruction after the fact) and goes to the core of the permanent "shadow government." Investigations into neo-con gate are going to run afoul of 911 threads. The whole sweater could come undone, if someone starts pulling on it. For that reason its focus needs to be managed carefully and may go nowhere before the election. Watergate went nowhere before Nixon's re-election, even though careful observers understood its impact before the election.

The Mena, Arkansas, Iran-Contra, gun running, money laundering, drug dealing "conspiracy," (actually a CIA operation from start to finish), stopped Clinton's impeachment dead in its tracks, because Clinton's accusers were in on it up to their eyeballs.

I may be wrong, but it seems like the author is isolating the chimp from culpability. This is actually by design. Some observers commented that the neo-con legend was established to pin blame on a small group of mid level zealots, while letting the power elite off the hook for their blatant agression and disregard of the law. Per usual anyone named bush comes out unscathed.

As wars go, this one has been successful for its proponents. The lackeys may express disillusionment at the absence of rose petals, but these are crocodile tears. The strategic position they have taken
in Iraq is exactly what they desired and the costs mean little to them. Their clientele, the oil corporations, the defense contractors, the investment bankers, and the Israeli lobbyists couldn't be more pleased. The only people disaffected are the victims, soldiers and the public (who cares what they think!).

The greatest blunder is the trail of culpability for war crimes straight to the white house. This is so blatant, one must surmise that it was deliberately done as a self destruct mechanism, or that the leadership (which is totally devoid of legal talent at the top), was intentionally trying to establish a fascist dictatorship. People shouldn't celebrate too soon. With this blatant a trail of crime and human rights violations leading straight to the white house, if this regime doesn't fall, the ramifications are overwhelming.

Er, blame it on the neo-cons.

[bemildred]

5. I concur, but ...

It is always a mistake to think that the shadow government is monolithic,
many things go on all at once, many factions exist, most of the people that
works in the bowels of these bureaucracies are in some degree sincere, many
of the people that become involved in these machinations are not too bright.
It is the slackjawed gullibility of the public as much as any native cleverness
of the perpetrators that allows the show to go on, and it has gone on for quite
a long time now, since the Civil War or thereabouts.

You are correct that November is the critical point, to get Kerry elected and
to have four years for damage control and rehabilitation efforts is the goal.

The Iraq War will have consequences as profound as VietNam, probably more so,
chickens long absent from the nest are coming home to roost, economically,
in energy policy, in foreign affairs. US political and economic hegemony are
crumbling, and propping up the US is being replaced with seeing that the collapse
of the US is somewhat orderly as the primary strategic purpose. Meanwhile, as
you said elsewhere WRT Korea and Taiwan, nations look for security where they
can find it independent of US wishes and orders. Have you seen the blathering
over the US desire to patrol the Straits of Malacca?

Having been a fan of Justin's rants for some time, I doubt that he is deliberately
protecting Shrub or Shrub's family. The power elites, of course, will try to do
that, perhaps dishing out a token drubbing, after all "The King Can Do No Wrong",
and we are yet far from the Peasants with Pitchforks stage.

[teryang]

6. We never arrive at the "peasants with pitchforks stage"

But I understand your point.

I have no problem with the author's rant. I found it thought provoking. I admire it.

The isolation of the chimp from the neo-con cabal is by design. This is why Time tries so hard to portray him as being "misled" by his advisors. I don't think that the author is a participant or has been fooled, and if I implied that it is because of my careless writing. The author tactfully adheres like all others who expect to be taken seriously to the rule of avoiding 911 conspiracy discussion wherever possible. I don't need to do this because I don't have to. The 911 conspiracy dwarfs all considerations even when it isn't discussed.

The "invisible government" isn't monolithic but the Congress and the FBI are hopelessly compromised. It is generally immune from oversight and unaccountable until some power struggle emerges. Some people tend to view the CIA as some sort of savior in the current situation. It is really just a bunch of posturing. They are enablers and guilty as hell. They are always the heroes in the complex tapestry they weave to cover their tracks. They are accountable to no one except the elites they serve. Other departments of the government have had their power seriously undermined by the "homeland security" reorganization which really has a totalitarian flavor. Obviously, there are differences among elites, and events cannot always be controlled. But the extent of control is always underestimated. I don't underestimate the intelligence of the people at the top of the government(except for the chimp) but they do have blind spots. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Powell are brilliant machiavellian manipulators. That is how they got to be who they are. I mean, after all, these people weren't even elected.

As for the rank and file in the Pentagon, State and all the intelligence agencies, of course there are people of all persuasions. Their role is really minimized as power (now more than ever) flows from the top down. Only when there is a power struggle, because some among the powers that be decide enough is enough, do they become a factor. I always cite the Army in this regard because I know a good deal about it. It can be a player like other traditional institutions when those who manipulate it blunder.

I think the focus of the group currently in power is to weaken and circumvent the traditional institutions, to undermine the important role they play in pluralistic constitutional government. It is though, in fact, the strength of individual virtually anonymous American characters and foreign actors who have introduced the uncontrollability of events into the equation.

After all, the casualties in this war have resulted in an uproar out of proportion to their relative size in spite of the corporate controlled media.

On edit: The Iraqis are the "peasants with pitchforks."

[bemildred]

7. I can't find anything to quibble with there.

My experience is primarily Army too, although I have had occasion to work
with all of the services. I tend to respect the Army the most, at least at the
echelons I dealt with, but that probably says a good deal more about me than
anything else.

The thing about such as "Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet, and Powell" is that while
you describe them well, their expertise is narrow, they have the ability to seize
and exercise power, but they lack the knowledge, insight and emotional depth to
govern well, and that is their Achilles heel. I worked with many such (although
not at that level, God forbid), often being a sort of firefighter sent around to
clean up messes, and there were always plenty of messes.

In using the term "peasants and pitchforks" I was thinking of the civil unrest of the
60s, the Bonus Army of 1932, features of the Civil War, times when the US has
had it's own home-grown "destabilization" problems. The US population is generally
well-armed and if is foolish to think those times cannot come again. If you get
enough people of the persuasion of the DC snipers or Tim Mcveigh, there are
bound to be a few who are good at it, and if the ruling elites are forced to drop the
mask of popular rule beyond a certain point, as in the sixties, the levers of power
stop working in the expected way and all bets are off as to the outcome.

One of the things that was striking about the violence-prone "radicals" in the sixties
was what a bunch of naive incompetent twits they were. In most cases they shit
all over themselves, and the FBI was there every step to help them smear it around.

It still seems to be the case that the vast majority of the public continues to
believe everything that is dished out as part of the national political soap opera.
If we get a week of coverage of Reagan's funeral, it is because there really are a
lot of people who liked The Gipper, or a shameless attempt to shore up Shrub.
Whereas I submit that the truth is that the reason we have a week of it 24/7 is
neither of those, but rather to shore up the Religion of the State and the legitimacy
of the government as a whole, which stands revealed in all its feckless incompetence
and treason to the Constitution that it claims to derive its power from. If the
public ever begins to realize that it is all show biz, then things will start to get
interesting. The thing I found most telling about the rise of Reagan was that
they put a man who really was an Actor in the White House. That ought to have
told us all we need to know about how things are really run in this country.

[teryang]

9. Well said.

I got the impression during the nineties that people with communications degrees were on the rise inside the government, particularly on the conservative side. It actually didn't matter what the government really did, it was what it said it did.

Later I was fortunate enough to get an inside view of Hill & Knowlton and some of the other PR spinners' professional techniques for corporate tort feasors who's primary mission is destruction of the truth. Of course all the exhibits are "confidential" as proprietary trade "secrets" which would damage corporate reputations beyond belief. This administration has adopted the corporate "media trained" practice on a scale that I at least had not seen before.

[bemildred]

8. I do concur about 9/11.

I is just amazing how fast that Patriot Act got passed, and the Homeland
Security stuff, and the tax code changes and the extra money for all these
little wars here and there; but when it comes to any domestic agenda suddenly
all these legislators cannot seem to get along somehow. Watching Daschle and
Frist pretend to be enemies is very funny in a sour sort of way.