What's Really The Turkey Story?

Drugs, guns, cash, genocide, helicopters, state secrets, al Qaeda and 9/11 connections, corruption at the highest levels. Speakers of the House, different ones from different parties, sit on a resolution pronouncing the 1915 slaughter of 1.5 million Armenians a genocide right before it's to be presented to Congress for almost certain passage.

Is Turkey where the thread starts, the one that can be pulled to unravel the whole diabolical plot? Or is it just a fantasy? More likely something in between, revelations that could expose mendacity, greed and incompetence some very important people would pay anything to just go away.

Booman speculates Dennis Hastert's imminent resignation from Congress may have something to do with it, and he cites the usually incoherent Sibel Edmonds as the connection point -- Sibel considers herself the most gagged US citizen in history. Like the man who knew too much about our seemingly sinister dealings with Pakistan, Edmonds was at the right place and the right time, knowing how to speak the right language to learn things some very powerful people don't want exposed to the light of day.

It may be even bigger than that.

Although she meanders about what she learned as a translator of wiretaps on various, nefarious Turkish characters, her revelations -- allegations against some of the most powerful people in our midst -- especially the non-action taken by our government to follow up on her evidence while taking great pains to stifle her is extremely suspicious. Too much for mere coincidence. There's something there, something the secretive Bush administration doesn't want us to learn.

She reported her story directly to investigators that Hastert, who was going forward on a genocide resolution in 2000 just like the current vote, was tabled at the last minute. The wiretaps she translated concerned the price the Turks thought necessary to get Hastert to kill the resolution was $500,000 -- but the F.B.I. classified the results of the investigation and Edmonds was further shut down by the little used state-secrets privilege invoked by the Bush administration.

What exactly are her allegations? Frankly, her rambling discourse makes is hard to nail down, but Shayana Kadidal, one of the lead attorneys on the Center for Constitutional Rights' challenge to the NSA domestic surveillance program does an admirable job:

What was it she was trying to tell her supervisors that got her fired? Among other things: that a translator sent to Guantánamo to translate Farsi detainee interviews didn't speak that language, and that foreign diplomats suspected of spying in the U.S. were having their wiretaps translated by their own relatives who worked for the FBI. Rather than let those serious national security breaches see the light of day (and perhaps become subjects of an embarrassing outside investigation), the FBI fired her, and then successfully managed to deprive her of her vindication in court, courtesy of the state secrets privilege.

Kadidal documents the evolution of the state-secrets doctrine, something so foreign to the spirit of American jurisprudence it is no surprise it was derived from foreign law, not Congressional statutes. "What has experience taught us about the privilege in practice? Sadly, five decades of living with it has shown that the privilege is frequently invoked to cover up executive mistakes." You want to talk about "activist judges?" Talk about the one's carrying water for Bush/Cheney and their efforts to keep us all mushrooms -- kept in the dark and fed bullshit. They've enabled a return to tyranny unseen since Henry IIIV.

The state-secrets doctrine is bad law. Always has been. And as the conservative jurist Edmond Burke said, "Bad Laws are the worst sort of tyranny."

A Distinction Without a Difference

by shep

Reading Daily Kos this morning, a came across this peculiar claim by DHinMI in a long essay about Blackwater and the GOP:

“But the main reason why it’s wrong to refer to Bush authoritarianism as fascist is, simply, that it’s not fascist. Fascism exalted the state as the most powerful force, more powerful than any other institutions, including business.”

My reply is: you’re making a distinction where there is no difference, in both fascism and the Republican model of government.

The most perfect illustration of that is the current purchase of immunity for cooperating in illegal domestic spying for telecom companies by former political officials (in both parties) now employed by the telecoms and lobbying by current government officials, such as intelligence director Mike McConnell, who were formerly (directly) employed by the telecoms.



I’ll let Glenn Greenwald describe another dimension to the lack of distinction between “the state” and business:

”The top telecom officials are devoting substantial amounts of their energy to working on highly classified telecom projects with the Bush administration, including projects to develop whole new joint networks and ensure unfettered governmental access to those networks. Before joining the administration as its Director of National Intelligence, Mike McConnell spearheaded the efforts on behalf of telecoms to massively increase the cooperation between the Federal Government and the telecom industry.

The private/public distinction here has eroded almost completely. There is no governmental oversight or regulation of these companies. Quite the contrary, they work in secret and in tandem -- as one consortium -- with no oversight at all.”

Strangely, DHinMI’s thesis is based in large measure on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine which contains no such denial of Republican fascism:

“A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize a society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture.”

From Wikipedia on “corporatism”:

“Political scientists may also use the term corporatism to describe a practice whereby an authoritarian state, through the process of licensing and regulating officially-incorporated social, religious, economic, or popular organizations, effectively co-opts their leadership or circumscribes their ability to challenge state authority by establishing the state as the source of their legitimacy, as well as sometimes running them, either directly or indirectly through shill corporations.”

From Wikipedia on fascism:

”Fascism also operated from a Social Darwinist view of human relations. Their aim was to promote "superior" individuals and weed out the weak. In terms of economic practice, this meant promoting the interests of successful businessmen while destroying trade unions and other organizations of the working class. Lawrence Britt suggests that protection of corporate power is an essential part of fascism. Historian Gaetano Salvemini argued in 1936 that fascism makes taxpayers responsible to private enterprise, because "the State pays for the blunders of private enterprise... Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social."

And from the self-proclaimed “founder” of fascism himself:

”The Fascist State lays claim to rule in the economic field no less than in others; it makes its action felt throughout the length and breadth of the country by means of its corporate, social, and educational institutions, and all the political, economic, and spiritual forces of the nation, organised in their respective associations, circulate within the State.” (p. 41).
—Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.

Any way you slice it, fascism is about the alignment of all institutions of state power, especially corporate power, against the interests of democratic representation, populist policy and individual liberty, i.e., liberalism. It seeks not to enhance the state relative to business but to remove the barrier between corporate interests and the interests of state entirely. Meanwhile, fascism seeks to suppress or coerce any remaining conflicts with those interests as determined by its elites in both business and government, because they are the same people and the same interests.

From the corruption of the democratic process in the Supreme Court sanctioned Republican coup of 2000 and political prosecutions and voter suppression by Republican government officials, to restructuring the tax system to favor wealth rather than work, to outsourcing the writing of US law to corporations, to privatizing entire government functions like protecting US government officials overseas, to the militarization of society through fear mongering, to colluding between government and corporations to violate the law to spy on the lawful activities American citizens, this Republican government cannot be distinguished from US corporate interests and their combined interest in monopolizing the country’s wealth and power and undermining the liberty and self rule of average citizens. That is fascism by every meaning of the word.


[Cross-posted at E Pluribus Unum]

Say Cheese

Sometimes I sit in awe of the breathtaking turns our theoretical republic has taken under the Bush regime. I recognize that conditioned responses may contribute to the perception that a sinister oligarchy is promoting a fascist ideology through Stalinistic tactics aimed at domination of the world for a commercial imperium secured through the U.S. military in coordination with the Republican Party Apparachik. They've screwed with us from the day FloriDUH went from red to blue and consistently ever since. It is indeed possible that we look for the evidence that confirms our preconceived notions.

Nyahhh. I'm not paranoid. This is the most outrageous U.S. Presidency of all time.

It's almost too much. I'm just a guy writing into the ether. One person can't make all that much of a difference, can he? The power at the disposal of the Federal Government cannot be thwarted simply by standing up to it, can it?

Sounding paranoid may simply be the result of being too well read. (Scanning CorrenteWire will do that.) But I'm not the only one afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.

I've learned these past few years that just because some people are paranoid doesn't mean the Bush administration isn't capable of almost anything.
-- A. Sullivan

Of course, my paranoia is only heightened when there are no calls to throw the editors of the Wall Fox Street Journal under a tank for "treasonously" revealing the fact that our surveillance satellite fleet is being retasked by Homeland Security to spy on what my neighbor is growing behind his garage instead of watching Russian Strategic Bombers flying off to their fail-safe positions.

Sorry, a bunch of nutballs in the Iraqi desert or the Himalayan foothills don't scare me, no matter how many plane tickets they buy. Backfire bombers filled with nukes? Now that can really hurt us, permanently -- not just piss us off enough to overreact and expose our foolishness and vulnerabilities. So I just don't understand why renewal of the Dr. Strangelove Kabuki dance gets more media attention in the financial and foreign press than the coverage in the US political press of John Edwards' hair-cut or Hillary's blouses being too low-cut.

As the planet's lone superpower, spending more on war-making power than the rest of the world combined, the "existential struggle" is not with people who don't even have an air force or navy to speak of, but really -- it's with ourselves.

Realistically, I always figured that they had stuff up there way beyond Google Maps, toys that could read your underwear label through the roof of your Prius. So are they really, "laying the bricks one at a time for a police state," or just watching "24" and taking notes? Seriously folks, wasn't a joke they were using U2 spy planes to monitor us when they had all that awesome hardware in low earth orbit?

I'm sure there is a benign explanation that will be forthcoming once Karl Rove finishes his "If I Did It" tour and issues talking points which will satisfy inquiring minds. These are the questions right now:

• Will the public have an opportunity to comment on the development of appropriate guidelines for domestic use of spy satellites?
• What assessments of the legality of the new surveillance program have been performed?
• How does the Department plan to ensure that Americans' privacy and civil rights are protected once this new surveillance program becomes operational?

Honestly? Am I really troubled because increased domestic monitoring is yet one more indication of a security state that scoffs at your puny right to bear arms since their ability control your movement is near absolute anyway, your information cleansed, your communications monitored, finances tracked, and associations noted by the government almost as efficiently as your credit card company does? Or is it because the guy in charge of all this lacks common decency?

Maybe I would cut the Administration some slack if Bush and his enablers didn't suck so damn much. I would hope so. Even with a decent human being as president -- one who respected the fundamental nature of democratic principles enshrined in our Constitution, I would hope I would still feel as strongly about civil liberties, police state actions, freedom of expression and the privilege of turning right on red WITHOUT coming to a full and complete stop at 2 am when there's nobody coming.

But every day, day after day something comes down the wire reinforcing my conviction that we have allowed the most arrogant prick to hold the precious reigns of power so many real patriots have sacrificed for -- and in exchange for this sacred trust he treats us like crap.

"I am the commander, see?" I do not need to explain why I say things. — That's the interesting thing about being the President. — Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation." (Bush at War, 11/02)

F. You. Too. Mr. President.

That guy in Toledo, driving the gray minivan flipping the bird at your satellite cameras -- that's me. That's my message to you and yours. Maybe someone could explain to you why I think that's the very least you deserve.