Glenn Greenwald’s Mirror vs. Bill Maher’s Blind Spot

Posted on | May 16, 2013 | 6 Comments

Bill Maher is a funny guy.

But he’s not very reflective.

That’s because, quite ironically, he’s fallen into the War on Terror trap—the comfortable and comforting stereotype of angry Muslims as irrational ideologues armed with religious hair-triggers and little else.

Like so many of the so-called “Left” in America, Maher has basically accepted the key notion that a whole population of like-minded people have decided to kill Americans because of an irrational religious belief system.

Maher’s go-to example of the Muslim world’s “unique” religious insanity is the way Muslims seem to go ballistic whenever “The Prophet” is offended—in cartoons, bad movies or by American soldiers burning Korans.

It’s not that it hasn’t happened. It has. Muslim outrage over real or perceived sleights to The Prophet and Islam—which forbids graven imagery of God and, in some cases, Mohammed—is no laughing matter.

But isn’t it interesting that the supposedly “Liberal” Obama Administration is currently fending off scandal-hungry Republicans because they tried to pawn off a “terrorist” attack on a paramilitary target (the Benghazi “diplomatic facility” also housed a “CIA annex”) as little more than a predictably frenzied Muslim response to an offensive movie?

That’s where Maher picked it up on an episode of “Real Time” when the topic strayed from GOP efforts to hang Benghazi on the Democrats to Maher’s relentless drumbeat about the inherent nuttiness of Muslims. Bill even entertained the possibility that it is better to keep dictatorships in control of Muslims because, like the Arab Spring in Egypt, when you let them have some freedom, they naturally become a mob of theocratic loonies. In other words, their kooky religion means Muslim masses cannot be trusted to govern themselves.

Unfortunately for Maher, he had Glenn Greenwald—America’s leading voice of reason and roving moral conscience—sitting across the table from him. Not coincidentally, Greenwald lives in Brazil and writes for a British paper, but those aspects of his pseudo-exiled status haven’t stopped him from holding a sharply-focused mirror up to America’s darker side, or from reaching a growing audience of disillusioned Americans.

And when it came time to hold up a mirror to Maher’s jingoistic and oddly unreflective take on Egypt, Greenwald did not disappoint:

Maher’s dismissive take on the consequences of American imperialism is not only puzzling, but it is also a bit alarming. If this is the view of a high-profile “Liberal” regarding America’s ongoing assault on key Muslim countries and its proxy wars around the globe, the future of the “Left” looks pretty bleak.

Really, hasn’t that been the story of the Obama years thus far?

Like the Cold War before it, the Neo-Con’s War on Terror has been transformed by Obama into a normalized fact of American politics that both sides must heed, lest they forgo their status as “patriotic Americans.”

And Bill is nothing if not patriotic. The way we know he’s true-blue? He’s got the one thing necessary to be a real, post-9/11 “patriot” actor—a blind spot.

To accept the drone war and the black hole of Gitmo and a policy of extrajudicial assassinations and all those convenient tropes about Muslim “radicalization,” one must remain blind to the implicit and, more shockingly, to the explicit causes of Muslim furor against—and let’s be honest here—the highly militarized American empire dominating their lives.

That blind spot keeps the culpability out and the easy assumptions in. How else can one square their beloved American “values” with actual American actions that kill so many innocents—men, women and children—in far-off lands?

When Greenwald countered Maher’s arguments with obvious comparables of religious extremism—Lt. Gen. Boykin’s “Our god is bigger” rationale for destroying Iraq and radical Judaism’s role in extending a religiously-based homeland in the Occupied Territories—Bill’s bizarre response was to attack Greenwald’s “silly liberal view that all religions are alike because it makes you feel good.”

Really, Bill? Are you the same crusader for rationality who made “Religulous?”

Did you forget about George the Younger’s claim that his decisions, particularly about going to war, were answerable to a “higher father?”

Or the imposition of Evangelical teachings at the Air Force Academy?

Or the way “God” and “faith” are now litmus tests all politicians must pass if they have any chance of being elected?

How about the odd alliance between Christian Zionists and Israeli advocates of a greater Israel, both of which rely on “holy books”—the New and Old Testaments, respectively—to establish their God’s role as a metaphysical real estate agent?

In Maher’s case, the blind spot is almost comical. An avowed, proud and exceedingly loud atheist, it is amazing that he is unwilling or unable to see the role religion played and still does play in America’s imperial ideology. Like many of the right-wingers he likes to razz, he’s blotting out Christianity’s role in the genocide of the American Indians, the missionary impulse toward “Little Brown Brothers” in Asia or the way propaganda about “Godless Communism” was the centerpiece of Cold War jingoism for the better part of the “American Century.”

But the most glaring example of Bill’s blind spot was the segment that immediately followed his tense exchange with Greenwald. It was a recurring gag titled “The Search for America’s Craziest Congressman,” this time featuring Rep. Paul “Evolution is a lie from the pit of Hell” Broun (R-GA) and Rep. Michelle “The Muslim Brotherhood controls our foreign policy” Bachmann (R-MN). Two incredibly religiously fundamentalist Christians harboring an array of strange views, Maher even termed them as a “danger to democracy.”

Next he brought out Zachary Quinto, an openly gay actor currently making a name for himself as the rebooted Mr. Spock. Defying all logic, Maher started the discussion on newly-out-of-the-closet NBA center Jason Collins, referencing the critique of Collins’ gayness by ESPN commentator Chris Broussard. Maher lampooned Broussard for opening his commentary with “As a Christian,” which Bill pointed out means he’s a moron, and then he admonished those who “…use the Bible as a cudgel against the Gay.”

But the irony didn’t end there.

Maher moved the discussion to the NRA and gun rights, picking up his consistent theme about Americans loving guns and being violent. He predictably attacked the “fantasy” held by many “right-wing” gun owners that they may need them to rise up against tyranny here in America.

Huh. Crazy ideologues just looking for a reason to revolt. Go figure.

Then came the coup de grâce.

In his “New Rules” segment, Bill got some good laughs about the Christian heavy metal singer who tried to have his wife killed by a hired assassin. The joke turned on the fact that the Bible does, in fact, offer a variety of valid reasons to kill one’s wife and nearly two dozen verses that expressly support it.

Had Bill looked in the mirror after delivering that punchline, he’d have seen that the joke was suddenly and irreversibly on him.

Big Oil’s War on the Sun

Posted on | May 13, 2013 | 2 Comments

Remember “Peak Oil?”

Neither does anyone else.

That’s because the operational theory of why, at the turn of the century, Big Oil tightened its grip on the political system and used it to acquire as much of the “dwindling” resource as possible, often through proxy imperialism, has suddenly become irrelevant.

It’s not as if the fear of an impending, precipitous decline in oil production wasn’t an effective tool to massage markets, influence decision-makers and pique oil-thirsty populations into supporting petroleum-based wars, even if only subconsciously.

It was effective.

Rather, the planet is suddenly awash in oil. New discoveries in Africa, the long-awaited Caspian Sea oil and gas pipeline, expanding reserves in the US and the possibilities of the South China Sea have turned the earth’s ecosystem into a fountain of youthful exuberance for Big Oil.

Add to that the ever-more refined technologies now employed to extract shale oil, to cook up Canada’s toxic tar-sand goop and to build massive new infrastructure projects to move it around the continent and the globe, and you’ve got an oil supply that isn’t going to “peak” anytime in the foreseeable future.

In fact, with oil-fueled climate change opening the last great unspoiled frontier—the Arctic Ocean—the folks at Big Oil could be getting even more bang out of your gas bucks. The big melt from burning lotsa hydrocarbons is a big “two-fer” for Big Oil.

It’s good to be the king, and right now it looks like Big Oil is the king of the world!

But there is a problem.

Every day, Big Oil’s executives, geologists, engineers, lobbyists and political cronies wake up to an existential threat. It cannot be destroyed by a proxy army. It cannot be bribed. And all the lobbying the world will never, ever keep it from rising each and every day, looming over them and challenging their every move.

Big Oil cannot hide from the Sun.

It turns out that Old Sol not only provides the essential energy that powers all life on earth, but—thanks to the ingenuity of some particularly troublesome human beings—its reliable light can be “transformed” into “usable electricity” through a “miracle device” called a “photovoltaic cell!”

Just imagine—what if people could stop burning oil and gas and even coal, and just use these miracle devices to transform Old Sol’s sunny disposition into the power needed to run just about everything?

Well, if you are one of the masters of the oil universe, you’ve probably lost a lot of sleep worrying about that very question. But worrying is not enough. Big Oil is taking action to stop the Sun’s onslaught on their energy monopoly. Big Oil is working hard to counter market-driven innovations that are not only making solar power more and more affordable, but also making solar power a progressively more attractive investment to Big Oil’s heretofore reliable benefactors on Wall Street.

In fact, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) recently issued a report touting the future of renewable energy as an investment. Suddenly, this is not about tree-hugging ethics. Now this is about the bottom line.

According to BNEF, annual investment in new renewable power capacity is going to rise significantly between now and 2030. The report states: “The likeliest scenario implies a jump of 230%, to $630bn per year by 2030, driven by further improvements in the cost-competitiveness of wind and solar technologies relative to fossil fuel alternatives….”

But wait, there’s more: “Improvements in cost-competitiveness means that renewables will account for between 69% and 74% of new power capacity added by 2030 worldwide.”

And it gets even better. Not only are renewables crossing the line from hippie dream to golden goose, the manufacturing sector is moving so fast that there is a “glut” of solar panels. That’s right. Solar panels are no longer “too expensive” or an “unrealistic” alternative to Big Oil’s monopoly hold on energy production. Instead, there is a production glut in solar manufacturing.

Yes, you read that correctly. A glut!

That glut may be the real reason Solyndra, along with other notable solar manufacturers, collapsed over the past few years. They were simply overtaken by rapid advances in manufacturing and cheap Chinese labor. That combination made their original production model quickly and irrevocably obsolete. That’s not an example of pie-in-the-sky green technology cronyism run amok. Rather, it is an indication that market forces are moving at a breakneck speed to give us all the miracle of photovoltaic power at exactly the moment the planet needs it most.

Now, for the first time ever, Big Oil is facing a clear and present danger—one that actually promises to deliver energy without a panoply of oil-related problems:

• without all that climate-altering CO2
• without all the cancers and asthma and birth defects from exhaust
• without ecosystem-destroying spills and explosions and pipeline bursts
• without all those wars and political bribery and support of repressive Petrostates
• and without all those moral, ethical and environmental compromises that are taking the whole damn planet with us in a death spiral of destructive consumption

But don’t start selling off your shares of Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell or Halliburton just yet. The oil industry has spent billions of dollars on the care and welfare of their collective hold on the energy market and, in effect, the lifeblood of the modern world.

The primary strategy in Big Oil’s preemptive war against the revolutionary, liberating power of Old Sol is to “out-glut” the “renewables glut.”

In fact, US oil inventories reached an 82-year high on May Day, with stockpiles jumping to 395.3 million barrels at the end of the previous week. Take that in for a minute. An 82-year high! The price per barrel has settled above $90—down from a high of $118 in February of 2013, but still a far cry from the $11-$25 per barrel seen during the salad days of the Clinton years.

Not surprisingly, the price at the pump did not dip to 82-year lows. But it has dropped, and CNNMoney touted this as a boon to consumers and the flagging economic recovery with a grabby homepage headline: “Falling Gas Prices to the Rescue.”

But who is being rescued?

Consumers? Small businesses? Obama’s economic team?

Or is Big Oil rescuing itself?

Already fattened up on Bush Era spikes in oil and gas prices, it makes sense that they’d “sacrifice” a few quarters or even years of “flat profits” to flood the market with hydrocarbons and outflank the advances being made by renewables and, specifically, solar energy.

In March of 2013—just weeks before that 82-year spike in oil inventories—the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) reported that photovoltaic power plants generated 100 percent of newly added electric power capacity for the entire United States. That was a first in US history, by the way.

This may be the reason why Saudi Arabia is embracing the US shale boom currently transforming America into an energy exporter. In a pure free market sense, this doesn’t make much sense for the petroleum-reliant Saudis. But Khalid Al-Falih, CEO of Saudi Aramco, gushed to the Financial Times about the positive impact of American oil and its crucial role in “reassuring” consumers about the “reliability of oil supplies.”

More to the point, Al-Falih told FT that more US oil production “…just cements in the public and global consensus what we’ve already known. Oil is going to be the fuel of choice…for an extended period of time, and we need to manage it, we need to invest in it.”

And invest in it they are—in deeper and deeper drilling, in political lobbying, in new fleets of tankers and, pulling an ace outta one of the many holes they’ve drilled, in hydraulic fracturing.

The fracking frenzy is the main front Big Oil’s preemptive war against the growing glut in renewable capacity. Armed with a swelling supply of so-called “clean” burning “natural” gas, the plan to “out-glut” the solar glut is playing out in the heartland of America.

A massive spike in natural gas production is not only poisoning water supplies and causing earthquakes, it is undercutting the transition to renewables—solar, in particular—and forcing cash-strapped governments to forgo the future in favor of a cheap and easy present.

Natural gas is, in effect, a “force-multiplier” for Big Oil, preserving the hydrocarbon infrastructure for decades to come and undercutting both rapid advancements in renewable technologies and the American public’s stated desire for more emphasis on solar and wind. They are comfortable with more “natural gas,” too—probably because of the snazzy branding of hydrocarbon gas as “clean” and “natural.”

But nothing trumps the bottom line. And Big Oil knows it. All the bad news about climate and extinctions and pipeline spills in the world will not overcome simple economics, particularly in hard economic times. Perhaps that’s why so many are so convinced that approval of the Keystone XL pipeline is, in fact, “game over” for the planet.

If approved, that new surge of oil into the market—coupled with the fracking boom and a massive, newly identified source of methane “trapped” in ocean seabeds called “fire ice”—will amplify Khalid Al-Falih’s “reassuring reliability” and truly “cement” Big Oil’s monopoly on the future.

And that is a dark future, indeed.

CNN Hasn’t ‘Jumped the Shark.’ It is ‘the Shark.’

Posted on | May 2, 2013 | 11 Comments

Cable news networks thrive on tragedy.

That’s nothing new.

What is new is the incredible, monomaniacal programming mantra that has taken over CNN—the ever-more inane and dementia-addled granddaddy of the 24-hour news business.

Their unwillingness to let go, cut away or—perish the thought—actually cover a wide array of “news” stories, first manifested itself during the infamous coverage of the Carnival Cruise “Poop Ship.”

Roundly criticized as the ignominious beginning of the ill-fated Jeff Zucker Era, CNN’s wall-to-wall coverage of a stinky ship being towed to port looked a lot like it had finally “jumped the shark.” In other words, it had totally run out of ideas and was simply bereft enough to willingly engage in a sort of stunt-based stupidity that actually signals the coming of the end. That’s what happened when “Happy Days” decided to have The Fonz literally jump a shark in a bizarre storyline that, as the lore goes, signaled the effective end of the Happy Days premise.

But that’s not what happened with CNN.

Jeff Zucker and Co. are not jumping sharks. They are sharks.

It has been over two weeks since the Boston Marathon was bombed. It has been just under two weeks since the manhunt, shoot-out and capture. And well-over a week has passed since David Ortiz dropped an F-bomb at Fenway Park and the memorial services were held. But CNN still has “anchors” hosting “news shows” live from the scene of the crime.

The crime happened on Tax Day. Now May Day has passed. And there is Brooke Baldwin—still standing in front of the flowers and signs and accoutrements of mourning—hosting the “news” from the site of a story that literally ended weeks ago.

There is Brooke Baldwin finally segueing from hours of incessant blathering about the “latest in the Boston Bombings” to give viewers the latest developments in the arrest of—wait for it—Reese Witherspoon.

And there is CNN, like a hungry shark patrolling the feeding-rich waters of a blood-soaked tragedy, its teeth locked down on the sparse remains of a decomposing body…squeezing it and cajoling it for every last drop of coverage.

It is neither helpful nor informative. It has been so bad that CNN’s error-filled coverage of the events as they happened actually became a running joke…one that ran all the way up to the President and his hilarious riffs on its mistakes at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Now that the events have passed, staying at the scene of its own crimes against the practice of journalism is crass, manipulative and shameful.

Sounds harsh?

FOX News doesn’t have its hosts there. They moved back into the studio quickly after the memorials and even spend some airtime on other stories. In a bizarre twist, they’ve exercised the most restraint in light of the temptation to go 24-7 and continually scroll pictures of the Tsarnaev brothers against an ominous red and black “Boston Bombing” graphic.

MSNBC doesn’t have its hosts there. In a reasonable compromise, they did leave reporter Michael Isikoff in Boston to log periodic reports. But, by and large, they are back to their usual array of opinionistas, counter-FOX shock troops and hosts who seem to always be yelling at us. Do you ever get the feeling that Al Sharpton thinks viewers are partially deaf and mentally slow?

Unlike CNN, Tweedledum and Tweedledee don’t have their big personalities standing in front of a memorial, waiting for minor developments and incremental bits of information to chum the water. Only CNN remains there, hopelessly failing to justify itself and its bizarre transformation into infotainment.

It is time to face facts—CNN is not a news channel. It isn’t even reality television. It has finally devolved into “reality-themed” programming. And it’s bad “reality-themed” programming, to boot. They’ve even re-hashed Anthony Bourdain’s tired, self-satisfied “watch me eat food” show.

Anthony Bourdain? On CNN? Then again, Piers Morgan.

Still, Zucker was brought in to pump up the ratings, and he can claim that he is just giving the people what they want. When he hitched his anchors to the Poop Ship, the media “elite” responded with predictable despondency about the sad state of the American public.

Here’s a news-flash: A “blame the viewer” orthodoxy reigns supreme in newsrooms around the country.

The decision-makers and number crunchers blame the public for the low quality of news programming. To them, the ratings are the Alpha and the Omega. Long gone are the days of news as a public service that secures an FCC license. No, now it’s about pulling numbers in key demographics. And profits.

So, when the numbers came in on twelve hours of non-stop Poop Ship coverage and showed a 50% increase in viewership, you could almost hear the collective “I told you so” come from plush executive suites in New York and D.C.

But the numbers are not as good as it sounds. Here they are, from Brian Stelter’s industry-read Media Decoder column in the New York Times:

At noon on Thursday, CNN started covering the ship to the exclusion of most other stories. For the whole day CNN had an average of 632,000 viewers watching at any given time, up about 50 percent versus typical Thursdays this year. MSNBC had 535,000, down slightly. Fox News remained on top with 1.38 million, up slightly.

CNN’s “huge,” 50% Poop Ship spike increased their viewership to 632,000 viewers. That’s it? In a nation of 312 million people? You could run a show on The History Channel titled “Hitler’s Lower Intestine” and you’d pull more viewers than CNN did with their bizarre coverage of the cruise ship. And that “spike” also means CNN normally pulls 316,000 viewers on a Thursday.

316,000.

Really, look at all of those cable numbers and match those against the total population of the United States. It is not troubling how many people are watching FOX or MSNBC or wasting valuable nap time on CNN—it is staggering to see how few people are watching cable news.

But still we get the same tripe, warmed over and served again and again by executives who say they are “just giving the people what they want.”

It’s a claim that ignores the amazing, long-term success of 60 Minutes. It ignores the public’s historically low opinion and trust numbers. And it totally discounts the responsibility of so-called journalists and news directors and news organizations to exert news judgment and journalistic ethics as they engage in the endeavor of reporting news.

And it shows an inability to see the biggest news of all—that people are fleeing the cable and broadcast media and its carnival barking personalities to find news and information in a series of tubes and wires called “the internet.”

Perhaps that’s best news of all—that people are turning away from CNN in droves.

But, like the shark, it will keep on swimming and swimming in the chum-filled waters of tragedy, playing up the drama…until there’s nothing left to eat and it finally stops. And we all know what happens to a shark that stops swimming.

Drone Fallout: Decoding the Arrest of General Musharraf

Posted on | April 24, 2013 | 2 Comments

The drone war may have just taken out a high value target—former President of Pakistan and Bush Administration partner in the War on Terror, Pervez Musharraf.

No, he didn’t get blown to bits by a Hellfire missile, or die in a “Double-Tap” strike when he rushed to the aid of an unfortunate wedding party supposedly teeming with “suspected militants.”

Rather, simply by shooting of his big mouth, the retired general collaterally damaged the tumultuous pact between his former colleagues in both Islamabad and Washington. In fact, he blew another hole in the crumbling wall of obfuscation around Washington’s kill list.

What did Pervez say?

Eager to position himself as an instant frontrunner in Pakistan’s forthcoming elections, Pervez agreed to a bombshell interview with CNN in which he admitted to a “secret deal” between his government and the U.S. to allow drone strikes within his troubled, often drone-attacked country.

This directly contradicts the official position of the Pakistani government and instantly confirms the charges made by critics within Pakistan. It also confirms and highlights revelations now emerging from sharp reporting by Mark Mazzetti in both the New York Times and his new book about the drone war, The Way of the Knife.

Although it got quickly lost in the wall-to-wall coverage of the Boston Bombings, General Musharraf’s candor was a stunning development with geopolitical implications.

And it probably got Musharraf arrested. That’s right. Within a week of the interview, a judge issued an order for his arrest.

General Musharraf, who’d come back to Pakistan with the stated intention to run for the Presidency, quickly stated his intention to run for his life! But there was no escape. Musharraf was arrested on charges related to the summary firing of judges back in 2007 and was ordered held for two weeks. Now those charges have escalated to possible treason and perhaps even the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. He’s also been named as a target for assassination, and someone tried to bomb his home.

The timeline tells the story:

03.24.13: A less-than-triumphant return

04.12.12: Gives the CNN interview

04.16.13: Officially barred from seeking election

04.18.13: Arrest order issued

04.18.13: Flees the Court

04.19.13: Arrested

04.24.13: Bail denied, may be charged with Bhutto assassination

It is quite a turn of events for America’s one-time partner and the Pakistani Army’s most reliable strongman. The timing of the arrest and charges certainly highlight the fluid nature of Pakistani politics, along with the growing problem of the drone war and the fallout it is generating—not only in Pakistan, but around the world.

In this case, timing is everything.

Musharraf’s gambit—perhaps to position himself with the growing popular reaction against the ad hoc bombing of his country—came on the heels of a number of revelations about the conduct and cover-up of the drone war by the Obama Administration.

Not only has Team Obama mischaracterized targets and wildly under-reported civilian casualties, it also inherited a “quid pro quo” policy established in 2004 that traded access to airspace in Pakistan for the assassination of Pakistan’s political opponents.

The policy could best be summed up as: “We’ll kill yours, if you let us kill ours.”

This deal basically turned the CIA into contract killers and Musharraf, whether intentionally or inadvertently, verified this shocking alteration to a long-standing prohibition against assassinations by the CIA. More directly, it confirms the data which, as hard as it is to gather and collate, consistently illustrates that the drone campaign as now conducted by Team Obama is not really killing many “high-value” Al Qaeda targets. Instead, it is mostly killing a wide variety of so-called militants, military-aged males, civilians, first-responders and children.

When this growing body of evidence is considered within the context of Musharraf’s interview and Mazzetti’s reporting, disturbing questions about the drone war become ever-more acute and troubling.

Is the drone campaign really a war against “terrorists?”

Or, is the drone campaign a political tool being used to extend the reach and influence of Washington’s overseas ambitions?

Are drones the newest, easiest way to prop up allies, support regimes and eliminate the internal enemies of America’s functionaries and political cronies?

And what does this mean for the war in Yemen? Is Washington simply using drones to intercede in a civil war?

How about in Somalia? Or Mali?  And, of course, there is Afghanistan.

It is in Afghanistan that both NATO and the drone war are causing immediate problems. While the American media focused on the Boston Marathon bombings, the rest of the Muslim world and Afghanistan’s President Karzai focused on the murder of eleven children in a NATO airstrike.

Karzai has become increasingly critical of the CIA and the drone campaign, likely because he has to cope with the fallout and blowback right there in his own backyard. The Taliban is simply a fact on the ground in Afghanistan and, therefore, has to be reckoned with politically. Drones cannot kill ’em all, so Karzai is understandably perturbed by the consistent toll exacted on civilians, which only serves as ready-made propaganda for the Taliban’s insurgency.

Back in the USA, where the CIA used to overthrow regimes and support dictatorships the “old-fashioned way” with front groups, “freedom fighters” and drugs for weapons deals, the drone campaign offers them an assassination tool that flies under the cover of terrorism.

Since there is no actual scrutiny of what a terrorist is, anyone can be labeled a “terrorist” or “militant” and summarily eliminated, either at the secret behest of an allied regime or according to the long-term political and “national interest” imperatives established by faceless planners within the national security apparatus.

Whatever the reason is for a given drone strike, “terrorism” is easily applied ex post facto to any killing. Who can prove otherwise?

In fact, vociferous critics could be simply identified as enemies of the regime where the strike took place or as potential terrorists likely to target America in some dark, distant future. Anyone decrying the death of a proclaimed terrorist is a de facto “Double Tap” target.

Ultimately, what we are now talking about is the use of drones as a political tool, not a tool of “war” against “enemies” (whether real or imagined) intent on killing Americans simply because they hate our freedom.

Now we see the thin edge of the imperial wedge opening up a whole new realm of possibilities for political assassination—possibilities previously foreclosed in light of revelations from the Church Committee and Rockefeller Commission in the 1970s.

And now that the presumption of guilt is tied to a “Sci-Fi/pre-crime” standard of potentiality and the drive to execute both far and wide is predicated on securing airspace, is it not safe to assume that the deal cut with Pakistan in 2004 serves as a viable and, perhaps, likely precedent going forward?

Remember that law is not just about words written down in bills and constitutions and inspirational preambles—law is about precedent.

And the drone war as executed by Obama has cemented heavy bricks of precedent in the growing wall between previously-held ideas about the rule of law and a new paradigm of preemptive, secretive kill lists.

Unfortunately for Pervez Musharraf, he pulled a brick out of the wall and tossed it at the wrong people. But the hole he left behind does offer a staggering insight into the murky world on the dark side of the “War on Terror.”

Chechnya, Russia and the Conspiracy Impulse

Posted on | April 19, 2013 | No Comments