Kiriakou and Novak: The Connection

No, not Kim Novak. Robert Novak. Remember him? The frothing mad dog right wing "commentator" with a regular TV perch on the McLaughlin Group* (for a long time a GE-sponsored show- GE was the SOLE sponsor, the same corporation that brought us Ronald Reagan) and a permanent newspaper column which he used to commit a blatant criminal act- to wit, a violation of the Agent Identities Protection Act. He's the guy who named for all the world to hear the identity of an undercover CIA operations officer by the name of Valerie Plame.

Well, you know what happened to Novak! Openly flouting a Federal criminal law like that!

Nothing. That's what happened.

John Kiriakou, former CIA officer, gave a reporter a lead on someone to talk to in an email. He named a CIA officer in that email, that was seen by nobody but the reporter, and the name was never published.

So Kiriakou had to cut a plea deal and is off to the Federal slammer for the next 30 months. He leaves behind a wife, 5 young children, and close to a million bucks in legal debts. (Pointless since there's no defense these days in Federal courts in "national security" cases- see the interview with Kiriakou for details at democracynow.org for January 30, 2013.)

My point? Well, it's not one I haven't made before. Just another example of the political nature of the U.S. legal (aka "Justice"-sic!) system. How tiresome I've become.

There seems to be a pattern. Right wingers have impunity or near-impunity. James O'Keefe, the video slanderer, caught red-handed in a U.S. Senator's office trying to wiretap the phones- not even a charge! Bill O'Reilly, inciting the assassination of Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller- not even scolded by anyone in the bourgeois media! (Contrsat with jihadist propagandists subject to U.S. assassination. And that fellow in Boston who completely on his own translated Al-Qaeda tracts sentenced to 17 years for that and nothing more.) Anti-abortion terrorists can get away with anything short of outright murder. The FBI doesn't consider them terrorists- anti-war activists and Occupy movement people are "terrorists" to the FBI. And so on and on and on. (Did I mention that pretenses to the contrary, the U.S. is a right-wing country and has been one for almost the entirety of its history? Contrary to the delusory ravings of reactionaries about  the "Liberal Establishment." If only there were such a thing! Maybe they mean the Philharmonic and art museums. They seem to resent high culture.)

Novak blew Plame's cover to carry out the Bush regime's revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson, who had the efffontery to point out the falsity of the regime's claims about yellowcake uranium from Niger going to Iraq under Saddam Hussein, a key fabrication used to drum up the hysterical war fever necessary for the U.S. aggression to be carried out. (Remember Bush-Powell-Rice saying things like "we can't wait for the proof in the form of a mushroom cloud"? They meant over a U.S. city. Those terrorists just blew up the Twin Towers! And Saddam Hussein is connected to Al-Qaeda! [Not really.] Ultimately one of VP Cheney's henchmen, I. Lewis "scooter" Libby, was convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Federal agents. (This is why you should NEVER, EVER talk to Federal agents. That's how they got Martha Stewart and Tonya Harding too- lying to Federal agents. They can lie to you, of course. But you're facing 5 years in prison per lie if you lie to them.Why would you agree to compete on such an uneven playing field? Plus the Government is the referee!)

Libby, like Kiriakou, was sentenced to 30 months, but unlike Kiriakou didn't have to do a day in jail since Bush immediately commuted the prison term. Kind of like how his father pardoned all the Iran-contra criminals to immunize them. Guess protecting right-wing conspirators runs in the family.

The Agent Identities Protection Act was passed as an attack on the righteous publications Counterspy and Covert Action Information Bulletin, which exposed CIA crimes against humanity and tried to enable victims of the CIA in other countries to protect themselves by being able to identify CIA officers pretending to be diplomats in foreign countries. (Adversary "intelligence services" of course know exactly who the CIA officers are.) The law criminalized publishing their names. Apparently private emails constitute "publishing" these days.

*The McLaughlin group had as its ringmaster a reactionary from National Review, one John McLaughlin, a former Jesuit, and a crew of 3 other Beltway reactionaries and one sane person, the world-weary Jack Germond who made rational comments, and consisted of a lot of yelling, yelling which illuminated the mentality of the Empire's political elite, for those interested in studying such things. These days Patrick Buchanan and the billionaire Zionist fanatic Mortimer Zuckerman are on the panel, and Eleanor Clift has to hold up the "liberal" (i.e. non-deranged) side of the arguments. Before he died, Novak was a regular, along with the loathsome and smug reactionary Morton Kondracke. McLaughlin is still the "host."

The U.S. Courts Giveth, The U.S. Courts Taketh Away

Or, Three Strikes And Their Bullshit About “Guaranteed Rights” Is Out.

Of course, by this point in history, there are countless thousands, if not millions, of such strikes. But here are three contemporary cases, the latter two occurring just within the last few weeks:

Strike One: U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Guantanamo Bay permanent prisoners have habeas corpus rights. In practice, every such appeal brought by the prisoners' lawyers under this putative dispensation is quashed by the D.C. circuit Appeals Court and the Supreme Court refuses further review.

Strike Two: A Federal District Court judge issued a permanent injunction against Obama's Law, the one that he claimed to be against, which gives the President the power to brand American citizens “arrested” (seized by the state without charges) anywhere on earth, including inside the U.S., as “terrorists,” and throw them into the U.S.' military gulag without recourse, for as long as “hostilities” last- i.e. until they decide to declare “victory” in the eternal “war on terror.” (Recall that Bush the Younger wanted to call it the War On Evil, but the political branding experts must have figured that would make it too obvious that this state of “emergency” repression was intended to be permanent.)

Well, Obama, who claimed to oppose the law he signed, and promised not to use it (a totally hollow promise, and also hardly binding on him, let alone on his successors, and besides the point in any event, which is about outrageous state power to oppress us) appealed this decision, and the Federal judiciary obligingly threw out the injunction on the appellate level.

Strike Three: Federal judge Shira Scheindlin issued an injunction against the outrageous practice of the New York City Police Department (NYPD) of arresting guests and residents of apartment buildings for no reason at all. (Black ones, of course. What did you think?) Then she canceled it so as not to unduly burden the NYPD by making them stop it (such a complex and expensive process!) and in anticipation that the appeals court would throw it out in an event.

One thing I should note: the courts are constantly cruelly teasing lawyers and plaintiffs who try to fight state repression through the state's own legal system by giving temporary or minor “victories” to them and then pulling the rug out from under them, not enforcing their own rulings, or ignoring the reality on the ground which makes the tiny concessions of no real import and that do not change the power relationship between the government and the populace it rules.

See? I Was Right About Obama Trying To Bluff Karzai

Obama's pathetically transparent attempt at bluffing Afghan "President" Hamid Karzai has been effectively confirmed by the Wall Street Journal. ["Military Hasn't Pursued Afghan 'Zero Option'" 1/18/13, p. A11.]
The article states that the Obama regime never asked the U.S. military for a scenario of a zero U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan after 2014. It did ask for plans for options with various troop levels after 2014 staying on. So obviously Obama never had any intention of actually withdrawing all troops.

He did get Karzai to sort of kind of agree to immunize U.S. troops for their crimes under Afghan law, somewhat. It's all rather vague. (Isn't it always when dealing with con men hustlers in their bazaar stalls?)

Master Negotiator Obama Tries To Bluff Karzai

Ace poker player Barack Obama (the man who gets fleeced almost every time he has to negotiate with American politicians) made a ploy to bluff Hamid Karzai, the wily Con-Man-In-Chief of Afghanistan. Obama had one or more of his minions plant in the press the notion that Obama may leave no U.S. troops in Afghanistan at all after 2014 (the "withdrawal" date for U.S. forces) if Karzai doesn't soften his negotiating position.

Naturally, Karzai wasn't fazed. This is a man who's spent much of his life in the cutthroat environs of Afghan society. Obama is a man with a record of caving in and making hollow veto threats. The idea that Karzai would be snookered for one second by Obama's bluff is laughable, and pathetic. Obama is like a tourist in the casbah, haggling with a bazaar merchant over some trinket. He thinks he's getting a good price but the merchant has played him for a sap.

Obama's well out of his depth dealing with the likes of Karzai. Karzai has gotten away with running a gigantic scam on the U.S. for over a decade, and calling it a "government." The truth is, the U.S. doesn't dare let its Afghan client-crooks fall. The Democrats don't want to face GOP screams of "WHO LOST AFGHANISTAN?" (That crap started with "who lost China?" in 1949. Most recently we had a mini-example of it in "Who lost Ambassador Stephens?" in Libya.) The Wall Street Journal is already doing it on today's editorial page!

 At issue is immunity for U.S. troops to commit war crimes. That was the sticking point in Iraq, which prompted Obama to pull out the U.S. troops there. Obviously it's intolerable that U.S. troops not have license to commit crimes where they're stationed, since it is their habitual behavior to commit them. (See Okinawa, for example.) And in Iraq, the U.S. military blessed those crimes, even the most notorious ones, like the Ramadi massacre by U.S. Marines storming homes at night and slaughtering the residents because they'd hit a mine.  (That's a tactic the Nazis used in World War II, slaughtering civilians in retaliation for attacks by underground guerrillas.) The Marine Corps exonerated the murderers in that one. Or the helicopter slaughter by chuckling U.S. flying butchers in Baghdad, who killed Reuters journalists and snickered cynically over the children they shot in a van that stopped to offer aid to the victims. (A double war crime.) The upshot of that is Bradley Manning is being prosecuted and will be sentenced to life in prison for leaking the video evidence of the war crime to WikiLeaks. This "aids the enemy." That's true. When the world gets informed of U.S. atrocities, it does provide grist for enemies' propaganda mills. Hence the war against truth by the U.S. government. (Note to Idiots who support Obama: this vileness is what you back, and what you rabidly demand that progressives vote for like sheep. Not me.)

The U.S. is also miffed that their Afghan "partners" apparently intend to free the various Afghan prisoners the U.S. is hoarding at the Bagram Air Force base prison. Maybe they should stuff them into Gitmo, if they're so valuable. Since Gitmo is down to 166 prisoners (86 "cleared for release"- yet the U.S. still won't release them!) from 750 or so, there must be plenty of spare cages there. Since they're never going to close it anyway. Not until "the war on terror" ends. And if "the war on drugs" is any guide, that means not for decades, or maybe until people wise up and overthrow this evil system.

Not that I'm a fan of Islamofascism. But an oppressive Imperialist power that has effectively rescinded 500 years of progress in human rights and thrown us back into pre-Magna Carta days is actually the more dangerous enemy. Al-Qaeda didn't strip 300 million Americans of rights, the U.S. government did. Al-Qaeda isn't "rendering" innocent people all over the world and torturing them, the U.S. and its lackey nations are. Al-Qaeda isn't spending trillions of dollars on an exorbitantly expensive military and secret police apparatus while sharpening the knives to slash spending for human needs, the U.S. is. So I submit to you that the U.S. government is much the greater enemy of the American people, even counting 2,800 deaths over a decade ago in an attention-getting act. (One facilitated by the FBI and CIA watching carefully and letting it proceed.)