Tag: ek Politics

Every death should be on the front page (2.70)

Let the people see what war is like. This isn’t an Xbox game. There are real repercussions to Bush’s folly.

That said, I feel nothing over the death of merceneries. They aren’t in Iraq because of orders, or because they are there trying to help the people make Iraq a better place. They are there to wage war for profit. Screw them.

by kos on Thu Apr 01, 2004 at 12:08:56 PM PST

That was our very own Markos in response to the deaths of 4 BlackwaterUSA mercenaries in Fallujah.  They were killed and their bodies desecrated by being dragged around behind cars, chopped up, and hung from a bridge.

They probably cut off their gonads too.

Now first of all, I don’t imagine unless you’re an ancient Egyptian or a Native American (some tribes) who believe in a physical afterlife where wounds inflicted on the dead are carried over into the spiritual realm you much care about what happens to your body after you die.

You’re dead Jim, dead Jim, DEAD!

Ready for more?

Mercenaries flock into Iraq

by kos

Fri Apr 02, 2004 at 03:17 AM PST

Given the manpower shortage, it’s no surprise that private for-hire armies are filling the vacuum.

The US has so far spent $20bn on reconstruction in Iraq. The companies which have won these contracts currently expect to spend about 10% of their budgets on providing personal security planning and protection for their workers.

Industry insiders say the war has proven a godsend for British security firms – which have picked up much of the work. Their revenues are estimated to have risen fivefold, from around $350m before the invasion to nearly $2bn.

And why is this a problem?

The field of private security is unregulated, and alongside the more reputable companies, gun-slinging, cowboy contractors – whether foreign or Iraqi – are reported to be setting up shop Iraq.

Established companies dislike competition from smaller entrepreneurs, but also worry that their reputations may be damaged by the gung-ho approach of some of the newer firms.

The lack of regulation means mercenaries can often act with impunity.

Stories abound of heavy handed and trigger-happy behaviour. There are reports that some private security companies claim powers to detain people, erect checkpoints without authorisation and confiscate identity cards.

Impunity.

The four merceneries killed yesterday worked for Blackwater Security Consulting. They claim they were in the area “protecting food conviys”, but “declined to provide further deails.

Even Tacitus, my good friend on the Right, doesn’t buy the cover story:

The question is: what were they doing in Fallujah? The Blackwater press release states that they were part of an operation to guard food deliveries in the area. This strikes me as likely false: Iraqis aren’t starving, guerrillas have not targeted food supplies in any case, and thievery is much more likely to strike transports of manufactured goods. Furthermore, even if food shipments did need armed guards, what’s the chance that the CPA has hired highly-trained (and quite expensive) ex-SEAL-types to do it? About zero. Cheaper, and probably as effective, to have Iraqis on the job […]

This, though, does not explain what four of these personnel were doing sans convoy, traveling through the town proper. Lost? Reckless? On their way to a meetup with a client? En route to a hit? One may justly wonder.

As Tacitus notes, there should be no room for merceneries in war, especially since the rules of war forbid it. If we don’t have the forces to take care of our own convoys and maintain local security, that just one more indictment of this administration’s pathetic post-war planning.

Update: More on Blackwater:

Blackwater has about 400 employees in Iraq, said one government official briefed by the company. Its armed commandos earn an average of just under $1,000 a day.

Although most of their work is to act as bodyguards for corporate, humanitarian or government employees, they sometimes perform more precarious jobs that are inherently riskier — escorting VIPs, doing reconnaissance for visits by government officials to particular locations.

The mercenaries weren’t delivering humanitarian supplies. They were supposedly delivering supplies to a private company, Regency Hotel and Hospitality.

No one pays $1,000 a day per mercenary to deliver humanitarian supplies.

Secondly, I agree with kos.  Screw them.

Erik Prince’s habits and morals have not improved-

After Blackwater faced mounting legal problems in the United States, Prince was hired by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi and moved to Abu Dhabi in 2010. His task was to assemble an 800-member troupe of foreign troops for the U.A.E., which was planned months before the Arab Spring revolts. He helped the UAE found a new company Reflex Responses, or R2, with 51 percent local ownership, carefully avoiding his name on corporate documents. He worked to oversee the effort and recruit troops, among others from Executive Outcomes, a former South African mercenary firm hired by several African governments during the 1990s to put down rebellions and protect oil and diamond reserves. The battalion was to engage in intelligence gathering, urban combat, special operations “to destroy enemy personnel and equipment, crowd-control operations, response to terrorist attacks, to put down uprisings inside labor camps, and to secure nuclear and radioactive materials in planned nuclear power plants. The force, made up largely of former Colombian soldiers, failed.

In January 2011, the Associated Press reported that Prince was training a force of 2000 Somalis for antipiracy operations in the Gulf of Aden. The program was reportedly funded by several Arab countries, including the United Arab Emirates and backed by the United States. Prince’s spokesman, Mark Corallo, said that Prince has “no financial role” in the project and declined to answer any questions about Prince’s involvement. The Somali force will also reportedly pursue an Islamist supporting warlord.

The Associated Press quotes John Burnett of Maritime Underwater Security Consultants as saying, “There are 34 nations with naval assets trying to stop piracy and it can only be stopped on land. With Prince’s background and rather illustrious reputation, I think it’s quite possible that it might work.” The company was accused (of conspiring) to violate a U.N. arms embargo.

So he’s not just a bloodthirsty mass murderer and a traitorous sell out, but a dumb, bumbling, incompetent one too.

Transcript

Vindication for Snowden? Obama Panel Backs Major Curbs on NSA Surveillance, Phone Record Data Mining

Democracy Now

Thursday, December 19, 2013

A White House-appointed task force has proposed a series of curbs on key National Security Agency surveillance operations exposed by Edward Snowden. On Thursday, the panel recommended the NSA halt its bulk collection of billions of U.S. phone call records, citing “potential risks to public trust, personal privacy, and civil liberty.” The panel says telecommunications providers or a private third party should store the records instead. The panel also calls for banning the NSA from “undermining encryption” and criticizes its use of computer programming flaws to mount cyber-attacks. And it backs the creation of an independent review board to monitor government programs for potential violations of civil liberties.

But, but, but why didn’t Snowden go through ‘normal’ whistleblower channels?

Because this is what happens to whistleblowers,

Transcript

NSA Whistleblower Kirk Wiebe Details Gov’t Retaliation After Helping Expose “Gross Mismanagement”

Democracy Now

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Veteran National Security Agency official Kirk Wiebe helped develop the data processing system ThinThread, which he believed could have potentially prevented the 9/11 attacks. But the NSA sidelined ThinThread instead of the problem-plagued experimental program Trailblazer, which cost taxpayers billions of dollars. Wiebe was among the NSA officials to face retaliation for blowing the whistle on Trailblazer.

Officials’ defenses of NSA phone program may be unraveling

By Greg Miller and Ellen Nakashima, Wasington Post

Published: December 19

From the moment the government’s massive database of citizens’ call records was exposed this year, U.S. officials have clung to two main lines of defense: The secret surveillance program was constitutional and critical to keeping the nation safe.

But six months into the controversy triggered by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the viability of those claims is no longer clear.

In a three-day span, those rationales were upended by a federal judge who declared that the program was probably unconstitutional and the release of a report by a White House panel utterly unconvinced that stockpiling such data had played any meaningful role in preventing terrorist attacks.

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

Barack Obama is scheduled to hold a press conference at 2 pm. ET today prior to a two week vacation in Hawaii.

Some of you may have had the chance to interact with David Swanson on that other site where he is frequently disrespected because of his tendency to say inconvenient things about this Administration and the Democratic Party.

Well, he’s the real deal.

David Swanson’s books include: War Is A Lie (2010), When the World Outlawed War (2011), and The Military Industrial Complex at 50 (2012).  He is the host of Talk Nation Radio. He has been a journalist, activist, organizer, educator, and agitator.  Swanson helped plan the nonviolent occupation of Freedom Plaza in Washington DC in 2011.  Swanson holds a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Virginia.  He has worked as a newspaper reporter and as a communications director, with jobs including press secretary for Dennis Kucinich’s 2004 presidential campaign, media coordinator for the International Labor Communications Association, and three years as communications coordinator for ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.  He blogs at http://davidswanson.org and http://warisacrime.org and works as Campaign Coordinator for the online activist organization http://rootsaction.org.  Swanson also works on the communications committee of Veterans For Peace, of which he is an associate (non-veteran) member.  Swanson is Secretary of Peace in the Green Shadow Cabinet.

Transcript

Transcript

Transcript

NSA-Approved Propaganda: ’60 Minutes’ & the Revolving Door Journalism of John Miller

By: Kevin Gosztola, Firedog Lake

Monday December 16, 2013 10:12 am

More than six months after stories on documents from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden began to appear, the NSA finally determined all the statements denying what had revealed or intended to clarify what the agency believed to be true and not true had not had the effect desired. Journalists continue to publish stories on the NSA, its capabilities, what information from Americans is being collected and how unchecked the agency’s powers happen to be. What has been revealed has had an impact on the public that has changed the way many Americans view the NSA. The agency may, as a result, have some of its surveillance powers curtailed.

It was time to call up John Miller of CBS’s “60 Minutes” program. As was stated in the two-part segment on the NSA, “Gen. Alexander agreed to talk to us because he believes the NSA has not told its story well.” So, the agency called up Miller to help “set the record straight” i.e. assist the NSA with its public relations issues.

Nobody quite represents the “revolving door” between journalism and government like Miller. “Full disclosure, I once worked in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence [ODNI] where I saw firsthand how secretly the NSA operates,” he said before the segment began.

More disclosure: Miller served as spokesperson for the New York Police Department in 1994. The “journalism bug bit him again,” according to Men’s Journal, so he left the NYPD and worked a network job for ABC News. He interviewed Osama bin Laden for ABC News in 1998 before going to work for the Los Angeles Police Department in 2003. He helped “establish the department’s counter-terrorism and criminal-intelligence bureau.” He also worked on the development of a “threat assessment system” called “Archangel” to protect “critical assets” in Los Angeles from terrorism.

He moved on to work as a public affairs officer for the FBI in 2005. Then, he worked for ODNI. When he grew tired of the bureaucracy at ODNI, he was hired by CBS as a senior correspondent in 2011.

Miller has engaged in some of the same kind of work as Alexander. He is unlikely to challenge those he interviews because they are the exact people he may want to work with after he gets tired of journalism again. This makes him someone with a huge glaring conflict of interest, but, for CBS News, that conflict of interest is a plus, and, when he produces segments for news programs like “60 Minutes,” the show does not see what he produces as propaganda because they value access more than investigating reporting that might actually hold officials accountable.

The Four Questions ’60 Minutes’ Forgot To Ask The NSA

By Lauren C. Williams, Think Progress

December 16, 2013 at 1:34 pm

1. Why did Alexander and National Intelligence Director James Clapper tell Congress that NSA wasn’t collecting U.S. citizens’ personal data when it really was?
2. Why were employees using NSA tactics to spy on their love interests?
3. What can the NSA get from spying on Google and Yahoo that it can’t get directly?
4. Does the NSA ever track people’s cell phone call locations and to what extent?

NSA goes on 60 Minutes: the definitive facts behind CBS’s flawed report

Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian

Monday 16 December 2013 13.56 EST

Our take on five things the spy agency would like the public to believe about its vast surveillance powers

1. Surveillance is just about what you say and what you write
2. Snowden and the NSA’s hiring boom
3. The Chinese financial sector kill-switch
4. NSA isn’t collecting data transiting between Google and Yahoo data centers, except when it is
5. The NSA wasn’t trying to break the law that got broken

NSA ruling fallout hits White House

By JOSH GERSTEIN, Politico

12/16/13 11:45 PM EST

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Leon’s ruling that the NSA’s metadata program appears to violate the Fourth Amendment was issued just three days after a review group established by Obama delivered its report proposing more than 40 changes to the federal government’s surveillance programs.

…

The delay gives Leon’s decision time to resonate and gives surveillance skeptics more time to pressure Obama to endorse significant reforms after Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance practices.

The ruling also underscores the awkwardness of a president who won office in part by railing against the national security state established by President George W. Bush trying to defend much of that establishment while also maintaining his vow to restore civil liberties and bring an end to what seemed like a permanent war on terror.

…

Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, a backer of the call-tracking program, also said the new court ruling could shift the balance in favor of more limits on the NSA’s work.

“The arguments of those interested in preserving the validity and legitimacy of arguments about how [Obama] ran could get a little stronger inside government,” Hayden said. “They may administratively change the program.”

…

While Monday’s ruling may shift the internal administration debate in favor of more reforms, there’s no expectation Obama will completely halt the bulk collection of calling data from U.S. carriers. But he might endorse stricter limits on how long the data can be kept or propose other ways of storing the data than having the NSA hold it.

Among the surveillance doubters who might now have more impact: former Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, who’s set to begin work next month as a counselor to Obama. Podesta has been a longtime privacy advocate and has expressed sympathy with Leon’s conclusion that a 34-year-old Supreme Court precedent allowing police to trace a suspected criminals phone calls without a warrant does not authorize bulk collection of data on virtually every phone call made to, from or within the U.S.

“Our smartphones with built-in GPS technology track our locations and our phone companies and Internet providers collect metadata on every call we make and every person we email…..Court decisions from the pre-Internet days suggest that the information we give away voluntarily to these companies can be obtained fairly easily by the government,” Podesta told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in July. “That legal rule may have made sense in an age before Facebook and iPhones, but we need a serious examination of whether it still makes sense today.”

Podesta has also taken on the intelligence community before, singlehandedly waging a successful battle to defeat anti-leak legislation passed near the end of President Bill Clinton’s term in office. At Podesta’s urging, Clinton vetoed the intelligence bill containing the measure and it was later stripped out.

…

At a minimum, the decision undercuts one of the pro-surveillance camp’s best talking points: that every judge who has considered the NSA metadata program has upheld it.

“This is great,” Richardson said of Leon’s ruling. “One of the biggest things they’ve had going for them is to say the FISA Court has always signed off on this program…..It just can’t be overstated how important it is to have outside judges actually looking at these programs.”

All In with Chis Hayes

Our elites are inbred, gibbering, idiots.

Why Inequality Matters

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: December 15, 2013

The best argument for putting inequality on the back burner is the depressed state of the economy. Isn’t it more important to restore economic growth than to worry about how the gains from growth are distributed?

Well, no. First of all, even if you look only at the direct impact of rising inequality on middle-class Americans, it is indeed a very big deal. Beyond that, inequality probably played an important role in creating our economic mess, and has played a crucial role in our failure to clean it up.

…

It’s now widely accepted that rising household debt helped set the stage for our economic crisis; this debt surge coincided with rising inequality, and the two are probably related (although the case isn’t ironclad). After the crisis struck, the continuing shift of income away from the middle class toward a small elite was a drag on consumer demand, so that inequality is linked to both the economic crisis and the weakness of the recovery that followed.

In my view, however, the really crucial role of inequality in economic calamity has been political.

In the years before the crisis, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of financial deregulation – a consensus justified by neither theory nor history. When crisis struck, there was a rush to rescue the banks. But as soon as that was done, a new consensus emerged, one that involved turning away from job creation and focusing on the alleged threat from budget deficits.

What do the pre- and postcrisis consensuses have in common? Both were economically destructive: Deregulation helped make the crisis possible, and the premature turn to fiscal austerity has done more than anything else to hobble recovery. Both consensuses, however, corresponded to the interests and prejudices of an economic elite whose political influence had surged along with its wealth.

…

Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they – unlike the general public – consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse.

Which brings me to my final point. Underlying some of the backlash against inequality talk, I believe, is the desire of some pundits to depoliticize our economic discourse, to make it technocratic and nonpartisan. But that’s a pipe dream. Even on what may look like purely technocratic issues, class and inequality end up shaping – and distorting – the debate.

(Reposted with permission. ek)

by lambert at corrente

Sun, 12/15/2013 – 5:35pm

On The Greenwald Question:

It is true that the “left” (for some definition of left that would include Greenwald’s civil liberties work, even if under the aegis of strange bedfellows) has struggled with a funding model. If Corrente were 10 times its size (with concomitant increase in size for similar blogs) that would make, I’m convinced on no evidence at all, a big difference in the discourse.

Hitherto, a reader support model — though reasonably free from conflict of interest, i.e. buying into the bullshit — has enabled survival but not growth. I don’t know why.

Another model is to become Kos or TPM or ThinkProgress, and to be funded by the Democratic nomenklatura. So here we have conflicts of interest. (“Who kidnapped Josh Marshall”?)

Another model is advertising, selling eyeballs (which, to be fair, Naked Capitalism does, in addition to reader support). At scale, and IMNSHO NC is not at scale, we have potential for a different sort of conflict.

And another model is finding a patron, which is what Hamsher did, CJR does (Soros, IIRC), and now Greenwald has done. A different sort of conflict. (Marx, we might remember, was funded by Engels, a Manchester factory owner.)

So what model do you use if you want to get a story out?

I find it hard to fault Greenwald on ethical grounds, especially if he got some up front “Fuck you” money from Omidyar. (I haven’t been following the ins and outs, and it may be that Greenwald has disqualified himself on other grounds in his various defense of himself.) If Greenwald doesn’t ruin his personal brand, he’s free to walk away. For some definition of “free.”

However, I’m not sure the funding model is the story. Let me now put on my tinfoil hat:

Call me foily, but if I were a really astute right wing billionaire who thought long term, and who wanted a lot more leverage over the government than I already had, I’d:

1. Get a technically astute and ideologically aligned mole into the NSA;
2. Have them steal a lot of extremely incriminating data;
3. Dole just enough out to the press to show what I had;
4. Keep the great bulk of it as a “fleet in being,” as it were.

I’ve also considered the idea that Snowden was the tool of an NSA faction that didn’t like the rampant illegality; that could combine with #1.

GG comes in at #3, and as an archivist/researcher in #4. He doesn’t even have to know.

I know this reads rather like a real-life late William Gibson novel, with Omidyar in the role of Hubertus Bigend, and “the data” as the McGuffin, but real life these days resembles a Gibson novel, except more convoluted, darker, and with even nastier villains.

I had always had this way of thinking in the back of my mind, but this story really brought it to the forefront for me:

   Officials Say U.S. May Never Know Extent of Snowden’s Leaks

That story reads very much like normalizing the situation to me.

So, Omidyar becomes a sort of data-driven sovereign, with informational nukes. Of course, that would imply that the tippy top global ruling class runs on blackmail, but then you knew that.

Readers?

I mean the Faux Noise one of course-

Original

Cenk Uygur

“To be clear, I’m a scholar of religion with 4 degrees including 1 in the New Testament and fluency in Biblical Greek.”

So you’re totally out of your league you vacuous news reader.

Reza Aslan: A Jesus scholar who’s often a moving target

By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Washington Post

Published: August 8

“As the crowd of vendors, worshippers, priests, and curious onlookers scramble over the scattered detritus, as a stampede of frightened animals, chased by their panicked owners, rushes headlong out of the Temple gates and into the choked streets of Jerusalem, as a corps of Roman guards and heavily armed Temple police blitz through the courtyard looking to arrest whoever is responsible for the mayhem, there stands Jesus, according to the gospels, aloof, seemingly unperturbed, crying out over the din: ‘It is written: My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of thieves.’?”

Aslan portrays Jesus as an illiterate peasant who was crucified by the Romans because his “messianic aspirations” threatened their occupation of Palestine and because his “zealotry” threatened the authorities at the Temple in Jerusalem. Though zealotry and zealot tend to have negative connotations now, Aslan writes that in the time of Jesus, the term referred to people who strictly observed the Torah and refused to serve a foreign master.

…

Aslan’s publisher is pitching the book as a work that “sheds new light on one of history’s most influential and enigmatic characters” and “challenges long-held assumptions.” But Aslan is not quite so hyperbolic in an interview. He says he sees his book as a way to “re-package” the story of Jesus “in an accessible way for a popular audience to read and enjoy. If you’re a Bible scholar, there’s nothing new.”

Indeed, many of Aslan’s assertions have become received wisdom for a large number of scholars. But few could deny that Aslan stitches the narrative artfully.

So are you, you Villager Idiot.

Jon is surprisingly good.

Part 1

Part 2

Transcript

Blackstone Unit Wins in No-Lose Codere Trade: Corporate Finance

By Stephanie Ruhle, Mary Childs, and Julie Miecamp, Bloomberg News

2013-10-22 15:02:47

GSO, the New York-based credit investing unit of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity firm, bought Codere’s bonds and credit-default swaps in the first half of this year, hoping to profit from differences in pricing of the instruments in what’s known as a basis trade, according to a person familiar with the transactions.

…

The company’s willingness to pay the coupon late helped ease restructuring negotiations as many bondholders also held credit-default swaps and would benefit from a missed payment, the person said. Codere made the August payment two days after a 30-day grace period, and the International Swaps & Derivatives Association ruled that there was a failure-to-pay credit event, resulting in a $197 million payment to holders of the swaps.

…

“As a lender, the idea is to help somebody make payments on their debt,” said Bonnie Baha, the head of global developed credit at Los Angeles-based DoubleLine Capital LP, which manages about $53 billion. “It’s generally not to pay them not to make payments on their debt so that you can benefit via a derivative instrument.”

Blackstone Made Money on Credit-Default Swaps With This One Weird Trick

By Matt Levine, Bloomberg News

2013-12-05 22:47:32Z

The Blackstone Codere trade — in which Blackstone Group LP bought credit-default swaps on troubled Spanish gaming company Codere SA, then agreed to roll a $100 million revolver for Codere on favorable terms in exchange for Codere agreeing to make an interest payment on some bonds two days late, thus creating a technical default and triggering the CDS, pocketing some gains for Blackstone at the expense of the CDS writers, without costing Codere anything — is such a glorious pinnacle of financial achievement that of course someone had to make a television show about it. I would have preferred a prime-time miniseries, but what we got is a “Daily Show” segment, and that will have to do.

…

Really, the only reason to cover this story is its majestic beauty. Which is a great reason to cover it, don’t get me wrong; it’s just that aesthetic appreciation of clever derivatives trades is sort of a specialized niche. Certainly “The Daily Show” didn’t muster much admiration and instead spent seven minutes criticizing everyone else for not covering the story. This is wrong. This trade is so lovely that the proper reaction is to love it and cherish it and hold it close to your heart, not to complain that nobody else does.

…

The credit-default swaps market is a way to express in terms of money the market’s estimate of a company’s chance of default — real default, not missing a payment by two days — in the future. Blackstone found a way to turn that expression in terms of money into money. One day it had a CDS contract with a mark-to-market value of 11 million euros or whatever; the next day it had 11 million euros. One day the banks were taking risk on Codere’s credit that had gone against them to the tune of 11 million euros; the next day they had no risk and 11 million fewer euros. The risk that they got rid of was still worth about 11 million euros.