Month: December 2014

“Clearing Peter from my brain…”

by digby

Sadly, no can do:

He’s always been a dancer:

h/t to Max Sawicky

.

Randroid Ideal

by digby

David Ferguson at Raw Story with the literary event of the century:

For the first time in more than 50 years, publishers are rolling out a new novel by the godmother of libertarianism, the previously unpublished Ideal. The book tells the story of a movie actress who is accused of murder.

Rand wrote the novel in her late 20s, but never published it, although at one point, she did write a stage adaptation, which will be included in the new edition along with the short novel.
[…]

Richard Ralston, publishing manager at the Ayn Rand Institute, stumbled across the unpublished manuscript in 2012 and said that he is very excited to be adding to Rand’s small published canon of works.

“I’ve heard wishful comments over many years from readers wondering if there were other novels in Ayn Rand’s papers,” Ralston told the Wall Street Journal.

Yes, we’re all on pins and needles.

But that’s not really the literary event of the century. Ferguson’s commentary is:

The “objectivist” author’s works — particularly the novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged — have been held up by pro-business, anti-government zealots as exemplars of political fiction. Her acolytes praise her as one of the greatest minds of the 20th century and have made her, essentially, the patron saint of people who don’t tip.

Literary critics, however, find that the often uneasy mix of political proselytizing and fiction writing produced particularly dismal results in Rand’s typewriter. Her characters have been slammed as one-dimensional and wooden, her plots as flowing like mud, and when her characters aren’t declaiming for seven straight pages about the evils of socialism, the dialogue they speak is about as natural as a bright pink aluminum Christmas tree.

I can hardly wait for his review of “Ideal.”

This could be very interesting if it’s based on what I think it might be. Rand famously admired a serial killer as the ultimate expression of objectivist manhood and based her male characters on some of his attributes. She was known to have wiritten an unfinished novel about him. I don’t know if this is it, but it might be:

Back in the late 1920s, as Ayn Rand was working out her philosophy, she became enthralled by a real-life American serial killer, William Edward Hickman, whose gruesome, sadistic dismemberment of 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker in 1927 shocked the nation. Rand filled her early notebooks with worshipful praise of Hickman. According to biographer Jennifer Burns, author of Goddess of the Market, Rand was so smitten with Hickman that she modeled her first literary creation — Danny Renahan, the protagonist of her unfinished first novel, The Little Street — on him.

What did Rand admire so much about Hickman? His sociopathic qualities: “Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should,” she wrote, gushing that Hickman had “no regard whatsoever for all that society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. He has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize and feel ‘other people.'”

This echoes almost word for word Rand’s later description of her character Howard Roark, the hero of her novel The Fountainhead: “He was born without the ability to consider others.” (The Fountainhead is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ favorite book — he even requires his clerks to read it.)

This is the guy she considered “ideal:”

He was the OJ Simpson of his day; his crime, trial and case were nonstop headline grabbers for months.

Hickman, who was only 19 when he was arrested for murder, was the son of a paranoid-schizophrenic mother and grandmother. His schoolmates said that as a kid Hickman liked to strangle cats and snap the necks of chickens for fun — most of the kids thought he was a budding manic, though the adults gave him good marks for behavior, a typical sign of sociopathic cunning. He enrolled in college but quickly dropped out, and turned to violent crime largely driven by the thrill and arrogance typical of sociopaths: in a brief and wild crime spree that grew increasingly violent, Hickman knocked over dozens of gas stations and drug stores across the Midwest and west to California. Along the way it’s believed he strangled a girl in Milwaukee and killed his crime partner’s grandfather in Pasadena, tossing his body over a bridge after taking his money. Hickman’s partner later told police that Hickman told him how much he’d like to kill and dismember a victim someday — and that day did come for Hickman.

One afternoon, Hickman drove up to Mount Vernon Junior High school in Los Angeles, telling administrators he’d come to pick up “the Parker girl” — her father, Perry Parker, was a prominent banker. Hickman didn’t know the girl’s first name, so when he was asked which of the two Parker twins, he answered, “the younger daughter.” Then he corrected himself: “The smaller one.”

No one suspected his motives. The school administrator fetched young Marion, and brought her out to Hickman. Marion obediently followed Hickman to his car as she was told, where he promptly kidnapped her. He wrote a ransom note to Marion’s father, demanding $1,500 for her return, promising the girl would be left unharmed. Marion was terrified into passivity — she even waited in the car for Hickman when he went to mail his letter to her father. Hickman’s extreme narcissism comes through in his ransom letters, as he refers to himself as a “master mind [sic]” and “not a common crook.” Hickman signed his letters “The Fox” because he admired his own cunning: “Fox is my name, very sly you know.” And then he threatened: “Get this straight. Your daughter’s life hangs by a thread.”

Hickman and the girl’s father exchanged letters over the next few days as they arranged the terms of the ransom, while Marion obediently followed her captor’s demands. She never tried to escape the hotel where he kept her; Hickman even took her to a movie, and she never screamed for help. She remained quiet and still as told when Hickman tied her to the chair — he didn’t even bother gagging her because there was no need to, right up to the gruesome end.

Hickman’s last ransom note to Marion’s father is where this story reaches its disturbing end. Hickman fills the letter with hurt anger over her father’s suggestion that Hickman might deceive him, and “ask you for your $1500 for a lifeless mass of flesh I am base and low but won’t stoop to that depth.” What Hickman didn’t say was that as he wrote the letter, Marion had already been chopped up into several lifeless masses of flesh. Why taunt the father? Why feign outrage? This sort of bizarre taunting was all part of the serial killer’s thrill, maximizing his sadistic pleasure. But this was nothing compared to the thrill Hickman got from murdering the helpless 12-year-old Marion Parker. Here is an old newspaper description of the murder, taken from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette on December 27, 1927:

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”
Another newspaper account explained what Hickman did next:

Then he took a pocket knife and cut a hole in her throat. Then he cut off each arm to the elbow. Then he cut her legs off at the knees. He put the limbs in a cabinet. He cut up the body in his room at the Bellevue Arms Apartments. Then he removed the clothing and cut the body through at the waist. He put it on a shelf in the dressing room. He placed a towel in the body to drain the blood. He wrapped up the exposed ends of the arms and waist with paper. He combed back her hair, powdered her face and then with a needle fixed her eyelids. He did this because he realized that he would lose the reward if he did not have the body to produce to her father.

Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam’s [sic] head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive–he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she’d appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam’s father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter–and screamed.

This is the “amazing picture” Ayn Rand — guru to the Republican/Tea Party right-wing — admired when she wrote in her notebook that Hickman represented “the amazing picture of a man with no regard whatsoever for all that a society holds sacred, and with a consciousness all his own. A man who really stands alone, in action and in soul. Other people do not exist for him, and he does not see why they should.”

Read the whole article by Mark Ames to see how Hickman had picked up the same shallow, half-baked Nietzschian philosophy as Rand to justify his actions.

It’s hard to believe even Randroids would go for a novel celebrating a serial killer as the ideal man, but you never know. After all, their hero John Galt was based on one.

.

Good cop, bad cop

by digby

Teacher Ken over at Daily Kos had a conversation with a white cop:

About Ferguson. He noted that Darren Wilson fired 12 shots, and that there is evidence of only 6 hitting Michael Brown. He wanted to know where the other 6 rounds went, and to what kind of risk did that expose bystanders.
[…]
About Staten Island. He has seen the video. His immediate reaction is that the officer applying the choke hold will probably face federal indictments, and he should, for excessive force.

But my friend went further. He noted there was a sergeant on the scene who did not stop it, and questioned whether the sergeant should be brought up on charges. He also noted that the EMTs who arrived apparently made no attempt to revive Eric Garner. He pointed out that Garner’s crime, which was a misdemeanor, did not even require an arrest – an officer could simply give him a criminal citation. He described what the police were doing, including how they pressed Garner to the ground while handcuffing him, as appalling and unnecessary.

About Cleveland – he wondered why an officer is getting out of his car with a drawn gun perform ascertaining the nature of the possible threat. He described how the cop fired so quickly as demonstrating why it is dangerous to draw one’s gun, because then one is inclined to use it. By the way, he has drawn his gun – see what I said about Staten Island, but even then had the good sense not to fire it. He remarked that to draw one’s gun is often to escalate tensions in a situation that can be addressed just with words.

Read on …

He said he wasn’t the only one who thought this way. In fact, I’d guess there are many thousands of police who think the same way.

This goes back to that conversation on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show I wrote about the other night:

If you would just imagine if Officer Wilson in Ferguson had just taken a step back after the confrontation with the vehicle and after Michael Brown ran away. Just after he called for back-up that was 90 seconds away. Where was Michael Brown going to go? He’s going to the hospital, he’s been shot. He’s not going the Katmandu, on an airplane. You’re going to catch him. Just take a step back. In Mr Garner’s case, as well. When he put’s his hands like this it’s like “ok ok”, when they get on his back, take a step back. In the Cleveland case with the child, if you drive your car in like that if you have an escaped felon with a gun your dead, he’s going to shoot you as soon as you drive up. What kind of tactic is that?

So take a step back and be smart and we can police better than we’re doing.

The Cleveland shooting of Tamir Rice reminds me of killing of Kajieme Powell in St Louis last summer. They pulled up tires squealing, jumped out of the car and 30 seconds later Powell was dead.

There are better ways. So much of this problem is about bad policing feeding into underlying racism. There are plenty of good cops.  If there weren’t we’d be swimming in blood on the streets because they are confronting people all day long. And they all have guns.

Update: Here’s an example of some lucky cops. It happened just last night in LA:

When they arrived on scene, officers found a man armed with a knife, said LAPD Detective Meghan Aguilar.

“When he saw the officers, he approached them and an office- involved shooting occurred,” Aguilar said.

The man was transported in critical condition to a local hospital where he later died.

The deadly confrontation occurred in the middle of a busy intersection in the heart of Hollywood and was witnessed by dozens of stunned bystanders.

“I heard like five shots go off and then all of a sudden I saw police run across and they’re pointing a gun at this guy that’s lying on the ground,” said local resident Neil Barnett.

A number of tourists staying at a nearby hostel were stunned by what they saw.

“We heard a couple of gun shots … and we ran to the window and we just saw the cops standing there aiming their guns [at] the guy,” said tourist Hanna Forspend.

The reason these cops were lucky is because that intersection is teeming with people on a Friday night. A stray bullet could have easily hit one of them.

I have no idea if they were really in danger from this knife. But once again, if tasers aren’t for situation like this, then the only thing they’re good for is cops enforcing instant compliance on unarmed citizens. You have to get very close to hit with a knife. Certainly closer than you need to be to hit someone with a taser.

Update II: Another one

.

.

Deep

by digby

He has a black friend:

Such insight. We really suffer now from lacking frequent exposure to the wisdom of this man pic.twitter.com/d8Ne8V5ycW
— Elias Isquith (@eliasisquith) December 6, 2014

This man once had a 90% approval rating.

Cryin’ and Spyin’

by digby

This is why these people should have been fired:

“There is a feeling in the hallways that Brennan is not pursuing their best interest,” said a former intelligence official who talks to friends at headquarters. “That, in fact, he’s pursuing the White House’s best interest. And they’re getting thrown under the bus. It goes back to the one basic thing: Whether they did right or they did wrong, they were told to do something, they did it, and they feel like they had the rug pulled out from underneath them. They feel sold down the river, and Brennan is part of the sale process.”

Oh boo hoo hoo. What a bunch of sniveling cowards. They are not robots. If they had balked at doing it, they would not have been fired. After all, it was torture. Would the administration have risked them going public with that mess? No. They could have found other ways. They wanted to do it and so they did. And clearly, they’re not sorry. Why should they be? There are no repercussions. If you like torturing people, which they apparently do, then it’s all good.

And once more, let’s all be aware of the fact that torture has been “normalized” by this episode. It’s now a matter for “debate” as to whether we should do it and you can bet that we will do it if they feel the need:

Those disgruntled analysts and spies will find more vocal defenders in a group of former officials who’ve read the findings, and who pledged not to discuss them until they were made public. These officials have penned an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, which will be published soon after the report is publicly released. In it, according to a source familiar with the contents, the formers will lay out their fierce rebuttal of the committee’s findings—nearly all of which have already been leaked—and blast what they see as a biased, five-year process that culminated in a flawed history of the rendition, detention, and interrogation efforts.

Right. After all we won the War on Terror, pacified Iraq and ushered in a new era of peace and tranquility in the Middle East. It’s been a big success. Why would we change a thing?

This is just sickening. The Republican Party is overtly pro-torture and they’re proud of it. Democrats can barely raise their voices against it.

And people wonder why cops on the streets of American think they can chokehold people to death on the sidewalk? Why? This is who we are.

.

They’re not always crazy
by Tom Sullivan

Out here in the Laboratories of Democracy, ALEC is testing market-based solutions to problems other market-based policies created. But unless one of these solutions barrels right into you (ask Mike Stark), you might not know about it ahead of time.

You know when you hear a speech (or read a quote) by a not-as-crazy conservative and a phrase strikes your ear a little odd? After you baroo, the speech continues and you shrug it off as random weirdness. Something I learned during the George W. Bush administration was to pay attention to those odd phrases. They are usually either racial dog whistles or else a reference to some issue conservatives know about and the left needs to (unless you like getting blindsided). That happened again here recently.

In an article on the Cesspool of Sin’s $4.8 million effort to reduce its carbon footprint, a critic from a local business-owners’ organization argued that the money would have been better spent on transportation improvements, even though half the investment has already paid back in energy savings [emphasis mine]:

Regardless, Swicegood said, the money and energy would be better spent on projects such as rerouting and widening the tangle of interstates around Asheville. Efficient roads will be crucial to bringing new businesses and jobs to the area, he said.

Baroo!? But funding interstates is a state and federal matter, you say? And how much interstate would $4.8 million in local money buy anyway? What’s this guy smoking?

Funny you should ask. As it happens, in 2013 Republicans here passed the Strategic Transportation Investments (STI) bill. (Primary sponsor? One of Swicegood’s friends.) Having cut taxes and facing Kansas-like revenue shortfalls, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory and friends want to fund future highway projects around the state using public-private partnerships and tolls rather than gas or other taxes. The state Department of Transportation’s formula for prioritizing highway projects provides two ways local planners can boost their project’s STI score [emphasis mine]:

A project’s benefit/cost can be improved if funding is provided during the project submission phase through local entity contributions or tolling approved by the local planning organization. In addition, a bonus allocation of up to 50% will be returned to the contributing area for a subsequent project scored through STI.

The 50% bonus? “A little sweetener slipped into the bill” to make up for “the bitter pill of a half century of tolls.”

As it also happens, a needed project to widen and improve I-26 through our area has long been in the works. We have suspected that, as with Thom’s Tholl Road on I-77, tolling might be in this project’s future. Unless, of course, locals would like to avoid that and hasten the project along by enacting a local sales tax to raise the score.

As Admiral Ackbar said, “It’s a trap!”

Should Democratic officials pass local sales taxes to help fund highway construction, what do you think the attack ads will look like in coming elections? Or if they sign on to plans to bring tolls to local highways for the next 50 years? Like most states, in North Carolina the largest blocks of blue votes are in the cities where Democrats tend to control. So cities are next on the target list in the GOP’s effort to defund the left. One side benefit of cutting taxes for the rich at the state and federal level is to push the cost of government and infrastructure down to the cities where Democrats can take the blame for cutting services and/or raising taxes.

Not so crazy after all.

[h/t Barry Summers]

Even-the-liberal New Republic

by digby

Far be it from a scruffy blogger like me to venture an opinion on the storied New Republic (which so masterfully put my kind in its place long ago.) I will just say that I tend to agree with those who think that the period under Martin Peretz, which lasted quite a long time, was pretty egregiously racist and sexist across the board. African Americans and feminists were routinely degraded and I don’t think I have to mention just how disgusting Peretz’s writing about Muslims and arabs was. This person thinks that’s all petty but the best you can say for its legacy is that it’s mixed.

We like to talk about teachable moments and one came to my mind yesterday as I saw the emotion flowing through my twitter stream on this subject. Here we have a venerable Village institution that goes back a hundred years. In some ways it was the company that employed the liberal intelligentsia for decades, nurturing them from generation to generation. And as has happened in villages, towns and cities all over the nation for the past several decades, new owners have come in and they’ve decided to change what the company does and move it to another place, leaving the long time employees and the village which depended upon it behind. It happens every day in this country to people who have far fewer resources and fewer chances of recovering from the blow.

Here’s one I chose at random:

For 40 years workers in Bryan [Ohio] made Etch A Sketch, a children’s drawing toy that has outlasted almost all others, and to a significant extent Etch A Sketch made Bryan.

This town of about 8,000, tucked into the northwestern corner of Ohio, has a tool and die factory, a tire company and a candy maker. But Etch A Sketch, the signature product of the Ohio Art Company, was Bryan’s mascot. It marched in Bryan’s parades. It was the mayor’s calling card and the town’s alter ego.

”You tell people you’re from Bryan and they look at you blankly,” said Carolyn Miller, a longtime assembly line worker at Ohio Art. ”You tell them it’s the home of Etch A Sketch, and they smile.”

That was true, at least, until a winter day three years ago, a week before Christmas, when Ohio Art executives called representatives of the Paper, Allied-Industrial, Chemical & Energy Workers Union into head offices and delivered the news. The Etch A Sketch line was moving to Shenzhen, China. About 100 union employees would lose their jobs.

The decision did not catch employees unaware. The mostly female work force had been training Chinese counterparts on the job. Cost pressures had been dragging down profits for years. Production of other Ohio Art toys, including Betty Spaghetty dolls, had already moved to China. But coming as the American economy entered a sharp downturn, the layoffs hit workers, and Bryan, hard. Three years later only a few Etch A Sketch assembly line workers have found other jobs. Most of those who did were lifetime employees of Ohio Art who were rehired in other departments, including a few who got jobs unpacking crates full of Etch A Sketches from China.

”Everyone knows the reason these jobs move to China,” said Ms. Miller, 64, who now lives on her Social Security and her husband’s income. ”But when it happens to you, I can tell you, it hurts.”

In a small town like Bryan, the pain was shared. Bryan’s tax base is eroding from the loss of manufacturing and a population drain. The Bryan Times is full of notices of home foreclosures and auctions.

The town’s central square is in repose. The drugstores, real estate offices and bars look more like relics than marketplaces.

The William County Courthouse, a 110-year old Romanesque Revival structure, hints at the loss. Its turrets and towers give it the aura of a fantasy castle. Toy soldiers guard the doors. But the oversize Etch A Sketch that once decorated the courthouse lawn through the Christmas season is gone.

Toy making can be overromanticized, of course. Many workers developed muscle stress injuries from repeating the same wrist- and shoulder-twisting motions thousands of times a day on the assembly line.

Still, workers said the biggest hole in their lives after Etch A Sketch moved was the death of a community that had bonded over many years. They sat shoulder to shoulder and shared two coffee breaks, the lunch hour and gossip.

”I could look at someone’s face in the morning and see that something was wrong,” said Nancy Bible, an Etch A Sketch lifer. ”Before the day was out, we all knew what it was.”

Nancy Viers, another assembly line worker, followed her grandmother and father to Ohio Art. She said she and many colleagues never expected to have another job. ”The company was our family,” she said.

Sentiments like that may explain why William C. Killgallon, the company’s chief executive, still looks hangdog when he talks about the decision to transfer the toy line to China. He cites ineluctable laws of economics. But his eyes water.

”It tore our hearts out,” he said in an interview in his office. ”We ate with these people. We went to church with them. For some of them, this was the only job they ever had.”

Elite liberals have sounded a lot like those people from Bryan, Ohio over the past couple of days. Just like those small town folk, they identify with the company, they live the traditions, it’s part of who they are. And it’s understandable and human to feel that way. But I couldn’t help but think back to an editorial from 2011 about Occupy Wall Street. The y stipulated that Wall Street has been very bad and should be rebuked. But they felt that OWS was terribly ill-mannered and failed to understand what liberalism, and perhaps more importantly, capitalism, was all about:

Liberals believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated—that seeks to level an unfair economic playing field so that all citizens have the freedom to make what they want of their lives. But these are not the principles we are hearing from the protesters. Instead, we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely. American capitalism may be flawed, but it is not, as Slavoj Zizek implied in a speech to the protesters, the equivalent of Chinese suppression. “[In] 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel,” Zizek declared. “This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here, we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.” This is not a statement of liberal values; moreover, it is a statement that should be deeply offensive to liberals, who do not in any way seek the end of capitalism.

Matthew Yglesias responded by pointing out that TNR’s editors seemed not to have noticed that average Americans were in deep economic distress:

[I]t’s worth reflecting on the idea that the instinct toward ideological police actions represented by TNR’s editorial has had a malign influence on American politics for years. Liberalism, in its triumphant years, represented the “vital center” of American politics. The silence of further-left voices over the past decade has merely served to marginalize liberalism, creating an atmosphere in which center-left technocrat Barack Obama can be tarred as a radical socialist.

The fact of the matter is that the American economy isn’t working for average Americans, and hasn’t been for some time. Meanwhile, the corporate executive class has gotten quite adept at standing in solidarity against effective regulation of the financial system, against solutions to our environmental problems, and against progressive taxes.

This week those editors got a taste of what their vaunted modern capitalist America is all about. A baby billionaire product of Wall Street’s inexplicable value system bought the place for his own amusement. And then decided, as his CEO has been quoted saying recently, to “break some shit.” And so he did.

Fortunately for the people who are no longer employed at TNR, they will all likely end up working somewhere else doing what they do and being successful at it. After all, Washington DC is one of the richest, most thriving cities in the world right now. But a lot of Americans who have suffered this experience are not so lucky — the death of their company spelled the death of their town and the end of their middle class lifestyles as well. But one can at least hope that some of those editors who were so disdainful of the impulse that led people to take to the streets and protest this ongoing, painful economic dislocation might have a little more empathy now.

After all, it can happen to anyone. Even The Liberal New Republic.

John Kerry’s sad legacy



by digby

Of course this is happening. If they can just hold out until a Republican Senate is sworn in then everyone’s “hands are tied.” Froomkin:

After seven months of promising to release a report exposing CIA torture of terror suspects, the Obama administration Friday reportedly sent Secretary of State John Kerry to ask Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein to consider holding off “because a lot is going on in the world.”

The White House has been negotiating with Feinstein since April over extensive CIA-requested redactions before making public a 450-page summary of the committee’s exhaustive investigation into CIA detention and interrogation during the Bush/Cheney years.

But the intelligence community never wanted its dirty secrets revealed. I suggested as early as six weeks ago that administration officials, doing the CIA’s bidding, were stalling negotiations until Republicans took over the chamber and killed the report themselves.

Then in the past few days, reports emerged that Feinstein conceded enough ground that an agreement had been reached. The report’s release was set for early next week.

The window of opportunity to quash release appeared to be closing — until the national security argument suddenly emerged in force.

Adhering to the time-honored Washington tradition of releasing news with unpleasant PR repercussions on a Friday afternoon, “an administration official” leaked word of the call to Josh Rogin of Bloomberg View. He reported:

[Kerry’s] call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

“What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

The Associated Press published a more restrained account, also sourced to an anonymous official, reporting that Kerry had simply asked Feinstein to “consider” the timing.

Yeah, well the timing is never going to be good for pretending that we are morally above reproach in this area or that our allies who eagerly helped us do it are either. So what? It happened.

He has more at the link. I’m disgusted. Kerry is the guy who once had the guts to go before the congress and expose the atrocities US troops were committing in Vietnam.

..I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of 1,000 which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony….

I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command….


They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.


We call this investigation the “Winter Soldier Investigation.” The term “Winter Soldier” is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough.

Now he’s covering up torture. What a sad legacy.

BTW: Froomkin predicted that the White House saw this as a big silver lining if the Republicans took over.

QOTD: “tora, tora, tora” edition

by digby

Secretary of Defense nominee Ashton Carter:

In his remarks at Harvard, Carter said another “obvious” national security challenge facing the United States is cybersecurity. But he said the defense establishment has often focused too much on external threats and not on insider ones.

“We had a cyber Pearl Harbor. His name was Edward Snowden,” Carter said, referring to the former intelligence contractor who exposed inner workings of U.S. espionage and surveillance networks.

He said that U.S. security officials who were supposed to safeguard against a mole “screwed up spectacularly in the case of Snowden. And this knucklehead had access to destructive power that was much more than any individual person should have access to.”

Indeed. The Snowden revelations were exactly like the Japanese declaring war. A day which will live in infamy, for sure. I’m glad the new Secretary of Defense understand the threats against us so well. I feel safer already.

And the good news is that he wisely counsels that the government needs to become even more secretive. Because being transparent is like Hitler. (I’m guessing on that last part, but it’s as logical as anything else he said.)