#Langley Has The Last Word:#ForeignPolicy On The#CIA

Foreign Policy, Military, The State

A Foreign Policy essay makes the case that the CIA is, effectively, running American foreign policy. It concedes what seems obvious: Despite a budget of billions ($14.7 billion in 2013, “up from the $4.8 billion in 1994”), the agency “was notoriously wrong about Saddam Hussein’s alleged arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, a cataclysmic mistake that eased the path to the Iraq War,” and it failed “to help detect or prevent the 9/11 plot.”

Some salient points:

* The agency has “a direct line to the White House for open-ended covert programs.”
* It has “explicit permission to use [drones] in larger areas of Pakistan than before.” “‘The CIA gets what it wants,’ Obama has told his aides.”
* “Through … machinations, the spy agency has managed to weaken or eliminate crucial counterweights to its own power.”
* “Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has steadily evolved from an agency devoted to its mission of spying on foreign governments to one whose current priority is tracking and killing individual militants in an increasing number of countries.”
* “… from drone strikes in the Middle East to the network of secret prisons around the world and the torture that occurred within their walls—[all] originated at Langley.”
* “… the agency had waded even more deeply into the dark world of assassinations by hiring outside contractors associated with Blackwater, a firm synonymous with abuses in Iraq, to kill individual militants on the ground.”
* “In Pakistan alone, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates, CIA drones killed as many as 960 civilians between June 2004 and April 2015, including up to 207 children.”
* The CIA’s has just about direct access to the White House. It “answers to no one except the president.”
* “… much of its workforce has been plugged into ‘the Ivy League, Eastern power structure of American politics.’ … its alumni are in key positions throughout the U.S. government.”
* Obama has embraced “the Bush-era CIA abuses,” this, presumably, includes torture, rendition, etc.

Since its creation in 1947, the CIA has steadily evolved from an agency devoted to its mission of spying on foreign governments to one whose current priority is tracking and killing individual militants in an increasing number of countries.

READ “Mission Unstoppable.”

#IraqWar Liars: We Knew Then What We Know Now

Bush, Iraq, Journalism, Just War, Media, Republicans, WMD

“Iraq Liars & Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now” is the current column, now on WND. An excerpt:

“If we knew what we know today, we would not have gone into Iraq”: This is as good an apology Republicans vying for the highest office are willing to offer, 12 years after launching a war that was immoral and unjust from the inception—as some of us pointed out from the inception—cost trillions in treasure, tens of thousands of lives (American and Iraqi), and flouted America’s national interests.

The big reveal began with Jeb Bush, who told anchor Megyn Kelly that knowing what we know now about Iraq, he would absolutely still have invaded Iraq. Broadcaster Laura Ingraham was having none of it. With the benefit of hindsight, she had arrived at the belated conclusion that the invasion was wrong. Ingraham suggested that Bush III was insane for sticking to his guns about Iraq.

Next to disgrace was Sen. Marco Rubio, also in the running. Six weeks back, Rubio had been unrepentant about the catastrophic invasion. After The Shaming of Jeb, Rubio changed his tune.

The title of Judith Chalabi Miller’s “rehab book tour” is, “If we knew what we now know … .” Over the pages of the New York Times, Miller, the Gray Lady’s prized reporter had shilled for the Iraq war like there was no tomorrow. In her reporting, she channeled Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi conman who fed the moronic Miller with misinformation and lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The other conman was Bush II, president at the time. His administration assisted Miller—a woman already prone to seeing faces in the clouds—to tune-out and become turned-on and hot for war (also the title of a January 2003, “Return To Reason” column). No tale was too tall for our Judith; no fabrication too fantastic.

Miller’s “mistakes,” and those of America’s news cartel, are no laughing matter. But it took a Comedy Central icon to deconstruct her national bid for redemption. The fact that others were on board, Republicans and Democrats, is not exculpatory. Idiocy is bipartisan. Not everybody got it wrong. Miller and her ilk chose not to consult those who got it right.

Miller had company. The Fox News war harpies were certainly a dream come true for many American men. Who cared about honest reporting or basic fact-checking when a heaving bosom is yelling from the screen, “Sock it to Saddam, Dubya!”?

In any event, the meme, “If we knew what we know now, we would not have gone to war in Iraq,” is false; a lie. We most certainly knew what we know now as far back as 2002, which was when this column wrote:

Iraq is a secular dictatorship profoundly at odds with Islamic fundamentalism. No less an authority than the former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism office, Vincent Cannistraro, stated categorically that there was no evidence of Iraq’s links to al-Qaeda. Even the putative Prague meeting between Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of Sept. 11, and Iraqi intelligence, turned out to be bogus. … Iraq has been 95-percent disarmed and has no weapons of mass destruction, an assessment backed by many experts in strategic studies.

The column excerpted was published on September 19, 2002, in Canada’s national newspaper. On that day, the flirty notes and the gracious dinner invitations from America’s leading neoconservatives ceased.

Indeed, there were many experts, credible ones, who categorically rejected the contention that there were WMD in Iraq. But they were silenced …

… Read the rest. “Iraq Liars & Deniers: We Knew Then What We Know Now” is now on WND.

Our Commoner Commentariat Discuss #MurdersinWoodleyPark

Crime, Media

Woodley Park, in Upper Northwest Washington, is where a family of four was murdered and their multimillion-dollar house set alight. Yes, it is a tony neighborhood. Reports repeat that the home targeted is “blocks away from the home of Vice-President Joe Biden.”

It transpires that our commoner commentariat—pukes such as Dana Perino and Juan Williams—are no strangers to these rarefied zip codes. They live in the vicinity, all the while championing the common American and pretending they’re “one of us.”

What’s perplexing is that these phonies have a following (of zombies).

In any case, “Police have named a man they believe held [the] family and housekeeper hostage in their home before killing them: Daron Dylon Wint, 34.”

The Carnage Continues, In #SouthAfrica & At Home (#ColinFlaherty)

America, Crime, Race, Racism, South-Africa

She devoted her life to helping the poor blacks of southwest Durban,* but Sister Gertrud Tiefenbacher’s goodness was no amulet against criminals from the communities she served. The “elderly nun [86] was savagely gang-raped and then murdered in her own bedroom at a South African convent, police say.”

Sister … Tiefenbacher was bound and gagged with an electric typewriter cord after bandits broke into the Sacred Heart Missionary in Ixopo. Her body was found Sunday.

It’s business as usual in South Africa.

And here at home, as Jack Kerwick reminds:

Colin Flaherty, the author of the best-seller “White Girl Bleed A lot,” has once again revealed his heroism in his latest, “Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry.”

Not since Ilana Mercer’s “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America from Post-Apartheid South Africa” have we witnessed such steely resolve in reckoning with the great unmentionable evil of black criminality and violence.

“Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry” consists of 511 pages, 944 endnotes, and a super abundance of references to videos meticulously documenting over 1,000 instances of black mob violence spanning just the last few years.

From sea to shining sea, in hundreds of cities both large and small, and in every region of the country, mobs of (mostly young) black people—males and females—have been busy unleashing reigns of terror upon virtually every other conceivable demographic: whites, Hispanics, and Asians; homosexuals; Jews; the elderly; women, small children, even babies; the mentally and physically disabled; bicyclists and hikers; veterans; Sikhs; and students.

The terror knows no boundaries. It takes holidays, but it takes them hostage, for Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and even Christmas Day have repeatedly been occasions for mass property destruction, brutal beatings, stabbings, and shootings. And beaches, parades, malls, shopping centers, sports stadia, high schools, college campuses, festivals (including Asian festivals), gas stations, parks, and biking trails have been among the locations for these displays of inhumanity.

Of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t list the police among the victims of black mob violence. It’s always the same: Hundreds of black people set their sights upon the properties and persons of their victims, the thin blue line asserts itself, and the rioters attack the forces of law and order with a range of weaponry: rocks, bricks, bottles, and—get this—even fireworks, i.e. makeshift bombs.

While the terror of Islamic militants is accompanied by cries to Allah, that of the black mobs is accompanied by…laughing.

Lots of laughing. …

READ Jack Kerwick’s column on my WND colleague’s new book.

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* “Into the Cannibal’s Pot” speaks about the very old, dwindling missionary community in that region.