1. ‘We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.’ — William Casey, CIA Director, 1981-1987.
‘The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.’ — William Colby, CIA Director, 1973-1976.
2. “US Has Lost Moral High Ground on Treatment of Prisoners
The US military has, understandably and correctly, condemned the coerced video of a US soldier taken hostage by Taliban in Afghanistan.
But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney.
After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say substantial skepticism.
In fact, as I was reminded by a former ambassador, the Bush-Cheney-Yoo-Armitage gutting of US conformance with the Geneva Conventions really makes it difficult for Washington credibly to complain about the treatment of any of our captured soldiers. The Taliban could hold the soldier hostage forever if they follow the principle put forward by Sen. Lindsey Graham. They could (God forbid) put him in stress positions naked and threaten to release the pictures to his family, and they would have done nothing that Rumsfeld’s Pentagon had not done routinely and on a vast scale.
The US refusal to so much as investigate American officials implicated in torture and breaking international law also does not help us gain credibility on seeing to it that those who mistreat our troops are tried on those charges. We even have Dick Cheney defending waterboarding, for which Japanese generals were tried and executed after WW II. It is disgusting.
And huffing and puffing that the Taliban are not a government won’t get us very far either. They control 10 percent of the country.
You obey the Geneva Conventions and the rest of international law on the treatment of captives because it gives you the moral high ground with regard to the treatment of our troops. Not doing so endangers every single one of our men and women in uniform. The chickenhawks who called such international agreements ‘quaint’ and outmoded should be drafted and sent to the front.”
3. How ludicrous:
“US Bombs Poppy Seeds in Afghanistan ‘Show of Force’”
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/07/21/us-bombs-poppy-seeds-in-afghanistan-show-of-force/
4. “Commission Investigating Financial Crisis Will Be a Whitewash
While many people hoped that the Congressional committee on the financial crisis would launch a hard-hitting investigation like the Pecora Commission, it looks like the Commission will instead be a whitewash.
Don’t get me wrong: there are some good people on the so-called “Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission”, like Brooksley Born, who argued for regulation of derivatives (but was shouted down by Summers, Greenspan and Rubin).
But the Commission won’t investigate the role of Congress or the White House in the financial crisis. Commission chair Phil “Angelides firmly insists that his purview does not extend to the legislative or executive branch“.
That is eerily similar to the 9/11 Commission, which time and again said its investigation “didn’t seek to assign blame” to anyone in government. So the Commission treated the government with kid gloves, even though the 9/11 Commissioners themselves later said that the government lied and obstructed justice.
And the commission won’t issue any subpoenas unless there is bipartisan support to do so.
The 9/11 Commission, of course, failed to question Bush, Cheney, Rice or any other relevant people under oath, and failed to issue subpoenas to obtain relevant documents.
And the 9/11 Commission used the idea of “unanimity” and “bipartisanship” to delete all of the hard-hitting sections from the Commission’s report (if either republicans or democrats objected to any draft wording in the Commission’s report, it was modified until acceptable to everyone).
The 9/11 Commission was a whitewash. The Financial Commission will be the same thing.
To those who will say “give it a chance, it’s unfair to criticize the Commission before it has even been convened” I’d like to point out that they said the same thing when many including me warned that Obama’s appointment of Summers and Geithner would mean that Obama would just do the same old thing with regard to the economy and banks.
If a sports league has instituted grossly unfair rules, you don’t have to wait and watch the first game to know that it will be a train wreck. “
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/07/commission-investigating-financial.html
5. “If low-level CIA interrogators — and only them — end up as the targets of investigations because they used m0re water than John Yoo allowed, or turned the thermostat lower than the hypothermic levels which the DOJ permitted, or waterboarded with more frequency than Jay Bybee approved, I wouldn’t blame the CIA for being furious. It was the regime itself, implemented at the highest levels of our government, that was criminal. Prosecuting only low-level interrogators who followed the torturing spirit of those policies but transgressed some bureaucratic guidelines would be a travesty on par with what happened with the Abu Ghraib “investigations.” Though there is the potential benefit that a prosecutor could follow the trail to high-level officials notwithstanding Holder’s attempts to limit the investigation (a result I think is quite unlikely), there is a strong argument to make — as I made here — that prosecuting only low-level “rogue” interrogators would be worse than no prosecutions at all, as that would only serve to further bolster our two-tiered system of justice.
Despite how limited the investigation is to be — despite the full-scale immunity from the law which our highest political officials will continue to enjoy — the media consensus is still that any criminal investigations of Bush’s torture regime would be a horrible and distracting act of unfairness, even if the intention is to prosecute acts of homicide by interrogation.
…
There are few instances where the establishment media reveals more transparently what they are and what they do than when they demand that high-level Bush officials be endowed with immunity from the consequences of their crimes.
…
It’s one thing for a prosecutor to decide, as a matter of standard prosecutorial discretion, that those memos would make it too difficult to obtain a conviction, but to declare ahead of time that they constitute immunity as a matter of DOJ policy is another thing entirely. An investigation grounded in this premise would be to institutionalize the incomparably dangerous notion that anything the President does is legal provided he finds some low-level DOJ functionary to write a memo saying it is. The torture tactics Bush ordered are criminal no matter how many memos John Yoo wrote saying they weren’t.”
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/
6. “The Great Tax Con Job
Republicans are using the T-word – taxes – to attack the Obama healthcare program. It’s a strategy based in a lie.
A very small niche of America’s uber-wealthy have pulled off what may well be the biggest con job in the history of our republic, and they did it in a startlingly brief 30 or so years. True, they spent over three billion dollars to make it happen, but the reward to them was in the hundreds of billions – and will continue to be.
As my friend and colleague Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks pointed out in a Daily Kosblog recently, billionaire Rupert Murdoch loses $50 million a year on the NY Post, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife loses $2 to $3 million a year on the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, billionaire Philip Anschutz loses around $5 million a year on The Weekly Standard, and billionaire Sun Myung Moon has lost $2 to $3 billion on The Washington Times.
Why are these guys willing to lose so much money funding “conservative” media? Why do they bulk-buy every right-wing book that comes out to throw it to the top of the NY Times Bestseller list and then give away the copies to “subscribers” to their websites and publications? Why do they fund to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year money-hole “think tanks” like Heritage and Cato?
The answer is pretty straightforward. They do it because it buys them respectability, and gets their con job out there. Even though William Kristol’s publication is a money-losing joke (with only 85,000 subscribers!), his association with the Standard was enough to get him on TV talk shows whenever he wants, and a column with The New York Times. The Washington Times catapulted Tony Blankley to stardom.
“Fellowships” and other forms of indirect sponsorship of right-wing talk show hosts have made otherwise-marginal shows and their hosts ubiquitous, and such sponsorships of groups like Norquist’s anti-tax “Americans for Tax Reform” regularly get people like him front-and-center in any debate on taxation in the United States.”
http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23113.htm
7. “CHINA VOWS TO DESTROY THE MOON
CHINA last night vowed to destroy the moon after a solar eclipse reduced its industrial productivity by almost one percent.
…
China will deploy its 200 million quarry workers to dismantle the moon over the next nine months and use the material to build a series of enormous, terrifying skyscrapers and a 3000-mile bridge from Shanghai to Australia.”
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/international/china-vows-to-destroy-the-moon-200907221922/
Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes? 
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