Month: January 2014

Teachers with Tommy guns

by digby

The GOP candidate running against Lindsay Graham in South Carolina explains why you cannot stop teachers from carrying guns in school:

COLMES: So [teachers] shouldn’t have machine guns?

BRIGHT: I would think a teacher protecting a school grounds should be able to carry whatever she can carry legally.

COLMES: So should machine guns be legal to carry?

BRIGHT: The Second Amendment is pretty clear. It says the right to carry arms should not be infringed. […]

COLMES: So you should be able to have any gun you want?

BRIGHT: Well, I don’t see how the government can regulate it.

Since public schools are government institutions it’s quite clear that teachers — anyone, really — can walk around armed to the teeth regardless of the safety hazard it presents to the staff and the students. It’s in the Bill of Rights in that passage about militias and infringing. Nothing you can do about it.

Next on tap: allow teachers to teach whatever they want to the kids. What? Not ok? I wonder why that would be? Freedom of speech is in the Bill of Rights too. Right at the beginning. And it’s really simple.

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They’re not addicts.  They’re narcissists.

by digby

David references the story of the “wealth addicts” that’s getting so much play in his post below.  I second his advice that everyone should read it.  It’s a fascinating look into the inside of the money industry.

But I don’t believe that it’s an “addiction” problem, with all the connotations of good people caught up in the maw of a disease which changes their brain chemistry and saps them of their free will.  Being fascinated by the fact that these people truly didn’t care that they were killing the golden goose for short term profit, I wrote a lot about this during the first couple of years of the financial crisis.  The whining of the wealthy, the paranoia, the constant need for reassurance that they were respected and loved struck me as bizarre for people with such wealth and power. And I signed on to a different theory:

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Corporate Narcissism


by digby


Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution notices something important:

The Washington Post published an op-ed today by Martin Feldstein. Feldstein explains how Obama’s proposed limitation on the deductibility of charitable contributions by upper-income taxpayers is a horrible idea. He’s identified as “an economics professor at Harvard University [and] president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research.”

One affiliation the Post left out is that Martin Feldstein is a longtime member of AIG’s Board of Directors. He’s also a member of the board’s Finance Committee.

I mentioned narcissism in passing yesterday and got an interesting email from journalist and author Tim Hall, who wrote an extremely interesting article for the NY Press on the subject during the Enron scandal. He explains what Narcissistic Personality Disorder is and interviews a well known expert on the subject:

I’m very interested in the concept of corporate narcissism. Many companies are successful without also engaging in criminal behavior. In your opinion, how much of the recent wave of business scandals in the U.S. is attributable to a corporate “culture of narcissism,” and how much to a number of very misguided—and possibly narcissistic—individuals?

The “few rotten apples” theory ignores the fact that affairs like Enron and WorldCom were not isolated incidents—nor were they conducted conspiratorially and surreptitiously. What is now conveniently labeled “misconduct” was an open secret. Information—albeit often relegated to footnotes—was available. The charismatic malignant narcissists who headed these corporations were cheered on by investors—small and institutional alike. Their grandiose fantasies were construed as visionary. Their sense of entitlement—never commensurate with their actual achievements—was tolerated forgivingly. Their blatant exploitation of co-workers and stakeholders was part of the ethos of the virile Anglo-Saxon, natural selection, can-do, dare-do version of capitalism. Everyone colluded in this mass psychosis. There are no victims here—only scapegoats.

In the late 1990s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat on lower Broadway without hitting a dozen Internet “visionaries,” touting companies that then went bankrupt. These individuals seemed to literally come out of nowhere—suddenly everybody was a Genius with a Big Idea. Do you have any thoughts on whether certain business cycles (like the Internet boom) actually create narcissists? Or do they simply attract preexisting narcissists looking for quick and easy wealth? 

The latter. Pathological (or malignant) narcissism is the outcome of a confluence of an appropriate genetic predisposition and early childhood abuse by role models, caretakers or peers. It is ubiquitous, because every human being—regardless of the nature of his society and culture—develops healthy narcissism early in life. Healthy narcissism is rendered pathological by abuse—and abuse, alas, is a universal human behavior. By “abuse” I mean any refusal to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of the individual. Thus, smothering, doting and excessive expectations are as abusive as beating and incest. 

Pathological narcissism, though, can be latent and induced to emerge by what I call “collective narcissism.” The way pathological narcissism manifests and is experienced is dependent on the particulars of societies and cultures. In some cultures, it is encouraged. In others suppressed. In collectivist societies, it may be projected onto the collective; in individualistic societies, it is an individual’s trait. 

Families, businesses, industries, organizations, ethnic groups, churches and even whole nations can be safely described as “narcissistic” or “pathologically self-absorbed.” 

The longer the association or affiliation of the members, the more cohesive and conformist the inner dynamics of the group, the more shared are its grandiose fantasies (“the vision thing”), the more persecutory or numerous its enemies, the more misunderstood and exclusionary it feels, the more intensive the physical and emotional experiences of its members—the stronger the bonding myth. The more rigorous the common pathology. 

Such an all-pervasive and extensive malaise manifests itself in the behavior of each and every member. It is a defining—though often implicit or underlying—mental structure. It has explanatory and predictive powers. It is recurrent and invariable—a pattern of conduct melded with distorted cognition and stunted emotions. And it is often vehemently denied. 

What steps might a corporation take to protect itself from being ruined by this kind of narcissistic contagion? 

The first—and most obvious—step is screening. Mental health management is often considered a low organizational priority—frequently with calamitous outcomes. Employees on all levels—especially the upper echelons—should be tested periodically and regularly by professional diagnosticians for personality disorders. Those who test positive should be sacked.
There is no way of containing narcissism. It is contagious—weaker people tend to emulate narcissists, stronger ones tend to adopt narcissistic behaviors in order to fend off the narcissist’s unwelcome attentions and overweening demands.

I would have to say that this particular virus is contagious among the ruling class in general.


Here’s how MSNBC covered it just now:

Carlos: Is the angry mob trying to destroy any chance of recovery? JP Morgan Chase says making the financial industry the enemy hurts the chances at a rebound.

Contessa: Across the country, there are angry Americans who I know probably scoff at that but an executive vice president at AIG was so furious at the way he was being treated both by the company and the government that he resigned and had the NY Timesactually publish his resignation letter today. Jake DeSantis says (she reads the letter) 

Let’s talk to Melissa Francis from CNBC. You wrote about it and we talked about it yesterday. A lot of concern from people in the financial industry that “you keep doing this and you’re going to destroy the very people who can help the nation make a comeback..” 

Melissa:Yeah. This is really the case in point of the danger of mob rule. This is somebody who had already agreed to work for a dollar a year. He was in there unwinding a business this Jake DeSantis that he had built for more than a decade. He had nothing to do with the credit default business that had caused so many problems at AIG and he felt like basically he’s spending ten, twelve, fourteen hours a day away from his family and for what? You know, to be abused, to be abused in the media, to be abused by congress. And now he’s saying, you know,m the ultimate sticking it to everyone, he’s not going to give the money back, he’s going to give it to charity. 

Carlos: Melissa can I play the skeptic here? I read the story by executive vice president Jake DeSantis and he writes that he’s an executive vice president, MIT grad, the son of a modest upbringing, and he said, “although I was a vice president I didn’t know what was going on.” I find that hard to believe. This guy was an executive vice president and he was in the company for eleven years, they’re doing literally billions of dollars worth of risky and crazy trades and he’s saying that he doesn’t know what’s going on? 

Melissa; His division was completely separate from what was going on. And I’m glad you raised that question because, … 

Carlos: When you say that his division was separate, I know and you know that when you’re an executive in a large company you sit in those senior management meetings you hear what’s going on in other parts of the business. I find it hard to believe that and I look at the comments on NY Times.com, over 600 comments, and most of the people were a lot like me, saying “come on, you didn’t know what was going on?” 

Melissa: Yeah. I think that you can hold the CEO and the board of directors to that kind of standard. This is somebody who was in charge of hundreds of people and he knew what his hundreds of people were doing. I don’t think he was in charge of this other group. This is a company, you have to understand, that sprawls nations, I mean across oceans. I mean, it’s an enormous company. You can hold the CEO to that standard and the board of directors, but I think this person was in charge of a lot of people and, you know, the credit default swap unit wasn’t part of that group. 

Contessa: And regardless of whether there’s credit to be made from that argument, we do know that letting mob mentality leaves no room for logic.

Kudos to Carlos for at least putting up a fight.


I’m afraid that Melissa is ill-informed. Our boy Jake wasn’t selling life insurance in Mayberry. He was an EVP for the commodities division AIGFP which was where the crimes took place:

Joseph Cassano and Thomas R. Savage helped start the group in 1987. AIGFP businesses specialize in aircraft and equipment leasing, capital markets, consumer finance and insurance premium finance.

AIGFP focused principally on OTC derivatives markets and acted as principal in nearly all of its transactions involving capital markets offerings and corporate finance, investment and financial risk management products. AIGFP played key roles in the acquisition of London City Airport and, in one of the largest private equity transactions announced in 2006, the management-led buyout of Kinder Morgan Inc.

AIGFP’s commodity derivatives and commodity indices helped stimulate the development of this new asset class. AIGFP’s sponsored a major study on the historical performance of commodity futures by professors Gary Gorton and K. Geert Rouwenhorst.[1] AIGFP created a specialized credit business. AIGFP focused its business on structured products like CDO’s. In 2003, it absorbed subsidiary, AIG Trading Group (AIG-TG) which dealt primarily in over the counter derivatives and created the Dow Jones-AIG Commodity Index (DJ-AIGCI) from their offices in Greenwich, CT. The DJ-AIGCI is a leading commodity benchmark composed of 19 futures contracts on physical commodities. As of the end of June 2007, there was an estimated $38 billion invested in financial products that track the DJ-AIGCI on a global basis.[2]

From 1987 to 2004, AIGFP contributed over $5 billion to AIG’s pre-tax income. During that period, AIG’s market capitalization increased from $11 billion to $181 billion, and its stock price increased from $4.50 per share to $62.34 per share.

AIGFP’s trading in credit derivatives led to enormous losses. These losses at AIGFP division essentially bankrupted the entire AIG operation, and forced the United States government to bail out the insured.

It’s very hard to believe that this person knew nothing of the CDO business since it was the focus of the division in which he worked. I’m sure it’s very embarrassing for him to be associated with the criminal side of AIG, but he is, whether he likes it or not. It’s just a good thing he made many millions of dollars over the past decade so that he might be comforted through this time of terrible unfairness and injustice.


The smart move for all of them is to shut up rather than whine publicly at a time like this. But corporate narcissists can’t help themselves. All you have to do is think of names like Kenny Boy Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernard Ebbers, Bernie Madoff,  Joseph Cassanno and the list goes on, to know that this personality type is rampant among our Masters of the Universe. Rather than being the rational heroes of their Randian dreams (who would be smart enough to STFU at this moment) they are actually seriously screwed up human beings who found the perfect outlet for their disorder in our millennial gilded age.


Risk and growth are absolutely necessary for a dynamic capitalist economy. But this isn’t that. This is an organizational and cultural disease and it’s landed the economy on life support. These people either need to submit to the cure or be quarantined in their gated communities.

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A Wall Streeter comes clean

by David Atkins

This op-ed by a former Wall Street whiz kid is going viral, but it would almost be blogger malpractice not to repost part of it here in fragments just in case folks missed it somehow:

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted…

After graduation, I got a job at Bank of America, by the grace of a managing director willing to take a chance on a kid who had called him every day for three weeks. With a year of sobriety under my belt, I was sharp, cleareyed and hard-working. At the end of my first year I was thrilled to receive a $40,000 bonus. For the first time in my life, I didn’t have to check my balance before I withdrew money. But a week later, a trader who was only four years my senior got hired away by C.S.F.B. for $900,000. After my initial envious shock — his haul was 22 times the size of my bonus — I grew excited at how much money was available.

Over the next few years I worked like a maniac and began to move up the Wall Street ladder. I became a bond and credit default swap trader, one of the more lucrative roles in the business. Just four years after I started at Bank of America, Citibank offered me a “1.75 by 2” which means $1.75 million per year for two years, and I used it to get a promotion. I started dating a pretty blonde and rented a loft apartment on Bond Street for $6,000 a month.

I felt so important. At 25, I could go to any restaurant in Manhattan — Per Se, Le Bernardin — just by picking up the phone and calling one of my brokers, who ingratiate themselves to traders by entertaining with unlimited expense accounts. I could be second row at the Knicks-Lakers game just by hinting to a broker I might be interested in going. The satisfaction wasn’t just about the money. It was about the power. Because of how smart and successful I was, it was someone else’s job to make me happy.

Still, I was nagged by envy. On a trading desk everyone sits together, from interns to managing directors. When the guy next to you makes $10 million, $1 million or $2 million doesn’t look so sweet. Nonetheless, I was thrilled with my progress.

My counselor didn’t share my elation. She said I might be using money the same way I’d used drugs and alcohol — to make myself feel powerful — and that maybe it would benefit me to stop focusing on accumulating more and instead focus on healing my inner wound. “Inner wound”? I thought that was going a little far and went to work for a hedge fund.

Now, working elbow to elbow with billionaires, I was a giant fireball of greed. I’d think about how my colleagues could buy Micronesia if they wanted to, or become mayor of New York City. They didn’t just have money; they had power — power beyond getting a table at Le Bernardin. Senators came to their offices. They were royalty.

I wanted a billion dollars. It’s staggering to think that in the course of five years, I’d gone from being thrilled at my first bonus — $40,000 — to being disappointed when, my second year at the hedge fund, I was paid “only” $1.5 million.

And here it gets really good:

But in the end, it was actually my absurdly wealthy bosses who helped me see the limitations of unlimited wealth. I was in a meeting with one of them, and a few other traders, and they were talking about the new hedge-fund regulations. Most everyone on Wall Street thought they were a bad idea. “But isn’t it better for the system as a whole?” I asked. The room went quiet, and my boss shot me a withering look. I remember his saying, “I don’t have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

I felt as if I’d been punched in the gut. He was afraid of losing money, despite all that he had.

From that moment on, I started to see Wall Street with new eyes. I noticed the vitriol that traders directed at the government for limiting bonuses after the crash. I heard the fury in their voices at the mention of higher taxes. These traders despised anything or anyone that threatened their bonuses. Ever see what a drug addict is like when he’s used up his junk? He’ll do anything — walk 20 miles in the snow, rob a grandma — to get a fix. Wall Street was like that. In the months before bonuses were handed out, the trading floor started to feel like a neighborhood in “The Wire” when the heroin runs out…

I’d always looked enviously at the people who earned more than I did; now, for the first time, I was embarrassed for them, and for me. I made in a single year more than my mom made her whole life. I knew that wasn’t fair; that wasn’t right. Yes, I was sharp, good with numbers. I had marketable talents. But in the end I didn’t really do anything. I was a derivatives trader, and it occurred to me the world would hardly change at all if credit derivatives ceased to exist. Not so nurse practitioners. What had seemed normal now seemed deeply distorted.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them. During the market crash in 2008, I’d made a ton of money by shorting the derivatives of risky companies. As the world crumbled, I profited. I’d seen the crash coming, but instead of trying to help the people it would hurt the most — people who didn’t have a million dollars in the bank — I’d made money off it. I don’t like who you’ve become, my girlfriend had said years earlier. She was right then, and she was still right. Only now, I didn’t like who I’d become either.

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

Wealth addiction was described by the late sociologist and playwright Philip Slater in a 1980 book, but addiction researchers have paid the concept little attention. Like alcoholics driving drunk, wealth addiction imperils everyone. Wealth addicts are, more than anybody, specifically responsible for the ever widening rift that is tearing apart our once great country. Wealth addicts are responsible for the vast and toxic disparity between the rich and the poor and the annihilation of the middle class. Only a wealth addict would feel justified in receiving $14 million in compensation — including an $8.5 million bonus — as the McDonald’s C.E.O., Don Thompson, did in 2012, while his company then published a brochure for its work force on how to survive on their low wages. Only a wealth addict would earn hundreds of millions as a hedge-fund manager, and then lobby to maintain a tax loophole that gave him a lower tax rate than his secretary.

There’s much more to read there as well, including his point that his “job” as a derivatives trader added no discernable value to society, certainly not enough to justify his exorbitant pay. Read the whole thing. You’ll be glad you did.

Wall Streeters often whine that people hate them without good reason. But of course that’s not true. People hate them for very good reason. There are the inevitable degenerate moral cretins who watch a film like The Wolf of Wall Street (or Michael Douglas’ Wall Street for that matter) and want to be that guy. But those with a moral compass read accounts like this, or ones by Michael Lewis, or films about Wall Street, and understand that while the boring business of loans, liquidity and investment has value, the destructive, wealth-addicted, deeply immoral and Objectivist culture of modern Wall Street cannot be salvaged.

It must be cleansed with the purifying fire of punitive taxation and regulation.

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QOTD: Amy Davidson

by digby

From her piece on the NSA speech in the New Yorker:

There is one more argument for Obama, and the rest of us, to avoid: the idea that running the N.S.A. differently, with real and not just mechanical respect for civil liberties and privacy, would just be too much trouble—that neither the agency nor the public could handle it. That argument was made in a letter from Judge John Bates, formerly of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, to the Senate and House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. He urged them not to listen to the President’s review panel, which suggested dozens of changes, such as a more adversarial process and more transparency. “Releasing freestanding summaries of court opinions is likely to promote confusion and misunderstanding,” Bates wrote. Confusion tends to lead to questions, which one would think would be useful—especially when what is confusing are claims about safety and privacy in a democracy. Effectiveness in fighting terrorism and blind gliding are not the same thing. Bates also worried that “some of the proposed changes would profoundly increase the Courts’ workload.” Would that mean a large volume of cases? That’s work that we can do, and have to do.

Yes. If it’s a matter of straightening out confusion and misunderstanding and devoting necessary resources, I think we can find the time and money. There’s a gigantic black budget I’m quite sure has some extra dollars we can tap into.

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Happy birthday to The Greatest

by digby

He’s not only one of the greatest athletes ever, he’s a true patriot:

He’s 72 years old today.

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Making sure their noxious ideology lives long after they’re gone

by digby

 It’s football time again — and I’m not talking Super Bowl:

In 2009, Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) wrote a letter to President Obama recommending that he nominate Jennifer May-Parker, a federal prosecutor from his state, to a judicial vacancy on a federal trial court. You can read his letter to President Obama here. Last June, the president agreed with Burr’s recommendation, and nominated Ms. May-Parker to be a federal district judge.

And now Burr is blocking May-Parker’s nomination, invoking an arcane Senate tradition that allows senators to unilaterally veto judicial nominees from their own state. In an interview with the Huffington Post’s Jennifer Bendery, Burr refused to explain why the woman he once said has “the requisite qualifications to serve with distinction” as a federal district judge is suddenly unfit to be a federal district judge.

Lawyers, Guns and Money suggests that it’s time to lose this little bit archaic tradition right along with the filibuster for judicial nominees. There’s a reason why the right wingers are so frantic about who gets on the courts. Everyone else should be just as frantic or the legacy of this era of conservative lunacy will last a whole lot longer than it has any right to.

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Testing, testing

by digby

Emptywheel and Barton Gellman show why the devil is in the details:

Bart Gellman noted something I had also noticed (in addition to noting that Obama embraced Big Data in his speech — his whole story is worth reading).

In another significant footnote, Obama said the limits he ordered “shall not apply to signals intelligence activities undertaken to test or develop signals intelligence capabilities.” Signals intelligence development, or “sigdev” in NSA parlance, is the discovery of untapped communication flows and the invention of new surveillance methods to exploit them.
For example, NSA Director Keith Alexander revealed last summer that his agency had collected location data from mobile phones in the United States.

Here’s the language in question.

Consistent with this historical practice, this d irective articulates principles to guide why, whether, when, and how the United States conducts signals intelligence activities for authorized foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. 3

3 Unless otherwise specified, this directive shall apply to signals intelligence activities conducted in order to collect communications or information about communications, except that it shall not apply to signals intelligence activities undertaken to test or develop signals intelligence capabilities.

This is something we’re seeing throughout the NSA programs (and we’re not seeing any real auditing or checks on this activity) as I have been noting with respect to the data integrity analysts who have access to the phone dragnet. The NSA uses real data to develop its new toys. And while there are some limits on the finished intelligence products that can be produced from such development, there doesn’t seem to be any protection for the data that gets used.

See, they’re just testing. And if something happens to turn up during the test you can’t expect them to ignore it.

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When does “oversight” become McCarthyism?

by digby

This is exactly the sort of rhetoric and behavior that makes me mistrust the secret surveillance state:

Mike Rogers, a Republican representative from Michigan, interviewed by NBC’s Meet the Press, said Snowden was “a thief whom we believe had some help”, and added that there was an “ongoing” investigation into whether Russia had aided Snowden.

“I believe there’s questions to be answered there,” Rogers said. “I don’t think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the [Russian intelligence service] FSB.”

Rogers added: “Let me just say this. I believe there’s a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB agent in Moscow. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.

“We have questions that we have to answer but as someone who used to do investigations some of [the] things we are finding we would call clues that certainly would indicate to me that he had some help and he stole things that had nothing to do with privacy,” said Rogers.

The Democratic chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Dianne Feinstein, a staunch defender of the NSA’s programmes, also spoke to Meet the Press. She said Snowden had joined the NSA “with the intent to take as much material down as he possibly could”.

Asked if he was aided by the Russians, Feinstein said: “He may well have. We don’t know at this stage. But I think to glorify this act is to set a new level of dishonour.”

Rogers’ comments were backed by Michael McCaul, chairman of the House committee on homeland security. Speaking from Moscow, the Texas Republican told ABC’s This Week: “I believe he [Snowden] was cultivated by a foreign power to do what he did.”

McCaul said he could not “definitively” say it was Russia that helped Snowden. “Hey, listen, I don’t think … Mr Snowden woke up one day and had the wherewithal to do this all by himself. I think he was helped by others. Again, I can’t give a definitive statement on that … but I’ve been given all the evidence, I know Mike Rogers has access to, you know, that I’ve seen that I don’t think he was acting alone.”

These allegedly responsible overseers made wild accusations on television, without producing any evidence (as Feinstein even admits) that Snowden was working on behalf of Russia. Now, the last I heard we weren’t at war with Russia anymore, but I guess you just can’t ever trust those Ruskies.

How can we possibly trust people who would behave in this way?

We’ve had some experience with this sort of thing in the past you might recall:

McCarthyism is the practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence. It also means “the practice of making unfair allegations or using unfair investigative techniques, especially in order to restrict dissent or political criticism.”

Some things never change. Which is why relying on “trust” and “confidence”  is such a dangerous practice.

Greenwald doesn’t hold out a lot of hope that congress will do much to “reform” these practices, although he is glad to see some of the proposed changes even if they don’t go far enough. Ryan Lizza and Chris Hayes are more optimistic. I lean more toward Greenwald on this because I think that even the post-Watergate reform minded congress approved changes that were pretty weak tea, with a rubber stamp “court” and hamstrung oversight committees, so it’s hard to see how this gridlocked, dysfunctional institution can accomplish what needs to be accomplished.  Still, I think it’s important to raise these issues and have them out in the public domain so that everyone who is impacted, from the public to the big global tech businesses, to our allies and our own government can start off from the same premises.  I don’t know what will come of it, but I’d guess that those who actually care about the constitution and civil liberties will be more alert going forward. That’s a big deal even if it doesn’t fully solve the problem.

Update: Also too, this:

U.S. security officials have told Reuters as recently as last week that the United States has no evidence at all that Snowden had any confederates who assisted him or guided him about what NSA materials to hack or how to do so.

Iraq redux

by digby

What could go wrong?

The US military is planning to train Iraqi troops in a third country to help counter a resurgence of Al-Qaeda-linked militants, a defense official told AFP on Friday.

Pending an agreement with Jordan or another nation to host the effort, the training was “likely” to go ahead as both Baghdad and Washington supported the idea, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

However, Pentagon officials are not contemplating sending an American team of military instructors into Iraq, partly because it would require negotiating a legal agreement with Baghdad that proved elusive in the past.

Such a move also could spark political rancor in Washington that would revive old wounds over the controversial US-led war in Iraq.

I wonder.

Recall that this “training mission” supposedly was already done — with 50,000 troops:

In late February 2009, newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama announced an 18-month withdrawal window for combat forces, with approximately 50,000 troops remaining in the country “to advise and train Iraqi security forces and to provide intelligence and surveillance”…

Beginning 1 September 2010, the American operational name for its involvement in Iraq changed from “Operation Iraqi Freedom” to “Operation New Dawn”. The remaining 50,000 U.S. troops were designated as “advise and assist brigades” assigned to non-combat operations while retaining the ability to revert to combat operations as necessary. Two combat aviation brigades also remain in Iraq. In September 2010, the Associated Press issued an internal memo reminding its reporters that “combat in Iraq is not over”, and “U.S. troops remain involved in combat operations alongside Iraqi forces, although U.S. officials say the American combat mission has formally ended”.

On 21 October 2011, President Obama announced that all U.S. troops and trainers would leave Iraq by the end of the year, bringing the U.S. mission in Iraq to an end. On 15 December 2011, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta officially declared the Iraq War over, at a flag lowering ceremony in Baghdad. The last U.S. troops left Iraqi territory on 18 December 2011 at 4:27 UTC.

If that didn’t work, will sending advisers to Jordan to “train” more Iraqis really make a difference? I doubt it.

I don’t know the answer to this problem but I do know that the main reason this problem exists at this point in time is because Junior and the Retreads recklessly decided to use the excuse of 9/11 to topple Saddam Hussein. And I suppose if they’re lucky, those same people (and their heirs) will now be able to use the excuse of extremists in Iraq to justify even more carnage.

That worked out well for both the terrorists and the neocons didn’t it? Funny think that.

Paranoid vs reckless

by digby

The President of the United States:

“Obama’s limousine, a Cadillac said to weigh as much as fifteen thousand pounds, is known as the Beast. It is armored with ceramic, titanium, aluminum, and steel to withstand bomb blasts, and it is sealed in case of biochemical attack. The doors are as heavy as those on a Boeing 757. The tires are gigantic “run-flats,” reinforced with Kevlar. A supply of blood matching the President’s type is kept in the trunk.”

The President of France:

I don’t know that either example of presidential security is particularly rational. But it’s an interesting contrast.

h/t to AG