New Year's 2011... singing in Grover Norquist's bathtub

Singing in the bathtub
Happy once again
Watching all my troubles
Go swinging down the drain

Singing through the soap suds
Life is full of hope
You can sing with feeling
While feeling for the soap.
"Singing in the Bathtub"

David Seaton's News Links

It's New Year's; this is when we are supposed to look over the past and think about the future. With the USA the situation is pretty simple: a large percentage of Americans are batshit crazy and the state itself is in tatters.

Simple concept, but how it might play out could get complicated

Many observers in America, and around the world, are asking themselves "Why are so many Americans so crazy?" and "Why is nothing done about it?". The answer to the first question is that living in a cloud of misinformation, they are being driven insane.

Over half of surveyed Republicans said they believe that the president is a socialist Muslim who wants to take away gun rights and turn over U.S. sovereignty to the U.N. What’s deeper, though, is the vitriol of those beliefs, with a substantial number of Republicans believing that Obama resents America's heritage (47 percent), is the "domestic enemy that the U.S. Constitution speaks of" (45 percent), wants to use an economic or terrorist event as an excuse to take dictatorial powers (41 percent), is doing some of the same stuff that Hitler did (38 percent), and may, in fact, be the Anti-Christ (24 percent). Daily Beast    

There is always the temptation to see certain people as reasonable when they aren't. "Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. Isaiah 1:18", was the favorite bible passage of Lyndon Baines Johnson and it describes the basic attitude of all successful negotiators. The lesson learned from the epic battle to pass a more than tame and mediocre health bill is that it is impossible to negotiate with whipped up insanity.

Before going further it is essential to understand that a racism as ingrained as America's is about much more than the color of a person's skin. It is a traditional element of social control and is much more about controlling the white people than about controlling the black people.

All of this insanity, from tea party to Antichrist is about using racism to distract people from seeing clearly what is right in front of their faces: the American Dream has run out of road. The ideal of upward social mobility for anyone willing to work hard is only a memory.

The idea is very simple, classic really. The system is in crisis, social inequality is widening and hardening, so stimulating paranoia and racism is a simple and effective way of keeping people from thinking about things like taxing the rich in order to get good public schools, affordable health care and other such Bolshevik twaddle.

Essentially what we have is Rupert Murdoch in the role of Joseph Goebbels,  with Beck and company playing post-modern George Wallace, nightly on Fox.

To understand this craziness we have to turn it inside out. The first thing about it that catches my attention in the Harris and similar polls is that a significant portion of the American population is totally paranoid and extremely suggestible. If we discount genetics and/or some hallucinogen that has been added to the water, we would have to look at objective factors to account for this vulnerability.

To begin with America's cult of competition, of dividing people from childhood into "winners" and "losers", has created an entire nation within the nation of losers: an enormous mass of people who feel terrible about themselves.

The American Dream is based on social mobility, but a great many Americans have not "moved" up since they arrived, even many who arrived during colonial times. At this moment many are on an express elevator moving down.

Since colonial times the subjugation and humiliation of African-Americans has provided a valuable tool in defusing social tensions in the rest of the population.

It all goes back that far.

Probably the most valuable service to domestic peace that slaves provided even, or especially, for those who didn't own them, was the role of being someone even the most miserable white person could feel superior to.

The most grievous problem encased in American racism is not the racism in itself, the problem is a society or a culture that divides human beings into "winners" and "losers" and punishes the losers so mercilessly. These unfortunates simply cannot survive psychologically without their "whipping boy". Racism is a tool of social control. The classic "divide and rule".

That is the dirty little family secret of American capitalism: keeping the races at each others throats prevents the social democracy that exists in practically every other country of similar economic development.

God knows that America is full of desperately miserable white people. Not all of them are poor, not by long shot. The Tea Party is living proof of that.

For losing and feeling miserable in America is not just economic, a study of marketing messages will give you an idea of the infinite ways that an American can be a "loser".

The entire American consumer economy, which is 70% of the total, is based on making people feel bad about themselves, making them feel poor, ugly, sick, helpless, stupid, inadequate and then offering to sell them something to relieve the pain of rejection and failure. A person of color might blame all the frustrations of life on race prejudice and he or she would probably be right in most cases. The white loser, and they are legion, hasn't ever had even that safety valve.

Those whites who fear they might be "losers" themselves, and if we look at the economic and psychological facts of life in today's American, that might include most American whites, desperately need someone to look down upon as a psychological safety valve and of course, since time immemorial African-Americans, even the lightest skinned among them, have served that purpose. Their status as loser was even pleasing to the abolitionists that wanted to "uplift" them.

For literally hundreds of years, besides this role as the official ultimate-loser, no other role beyond entertaining or lifting heavy loads was permitted them.

In 1952 an African-American author, Ralph Ellison published a ground breaking novel, “The Invisible Man”, whose title many critics feel defined the experience of people of African descent in America: that of being invisible and voiceless. In the years that followed, the people of color in the United States raised their voices and became visible, to the great and continuing discomfort of many whites. The white people of the US south who once voted solidly Democratic have punished that party’s leadership of the civil rights movement by voting solidly Republican ever since… the key to the victories of Nixon, Reagan and Bush. The “Conservative Revolution”, that only favors the rich, is based on the resentment of poor whites and gives the wealthy the necessary numbers to win elections. It was discovered that the poor whites of the American south (and not just the south), in desperate need of good public schools and socialized medicine hated black people more than they loved their own children or themselves. Talk about tragic.

With Barack Obama much of this resentment is coming to head.

Up till now, American "identity" politics was always played with surrogates: WASP or "waspable" white men wearing masks.

Thus Bill Clinton was "America's first black president". The whatever WASP whose turn it was to woo Latinos, would eat tacos and say "juntos podemos" with an atrocious accent etc, etc. Candidates would attempt to show that they were "sensitive" to the feminist agenda and so on. Absolutely de rigueur for all white, male and protestant presidentiables was a photo at Yad Vashem sporting a yomulka. This all came with the turf like kissing babies. It was all a game.

The problems start when the Democrats decided to use "originals" instead of the traditional, "ballo in maschera". The whole charade begins to fall apart without the WASP surrogates.

All of this resentful white anger has been directed heretofore against surrogates: the Jimmy Carters, the Ted Kennedys, the Walter Mondales, the Dukakises, the Gores and the Kerrys; and all the racism was disguised in euphemisms like "state's rights" or "liberal" or "elitist" or "un-American".

Now for the first time the American white ultra-right have got the chance to actually organize and march against a real black man who incarnates all the euphemisms, instead of a surrogate.

Even a "JFK meets Sydney Poitier" figure like president Barack Obama, or especially like Obama, is an unbearable provocation -- a lifetime membership card in the "loser" club -- for millions of American white people.

Here is about the shortest and sweetest description possible of how tragic that is

The deeper point--the ones the tea partiers haven’t courage nor the brains to see--is that our technological age has laid bare a core fact of American life: that our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder. There is little “upward mobility.” Your children probably won’t live as well as you, much less better. Your 2nd and 3rd mortgages made them billions and then they bankrupted you. They stole your future itself. Leonce Gaiter

The ideas expressed by Leonce Gaiter here are not very complicated, they would be practically self-evident if so much time and media effort plus financial fiction had not been expended in clouding all these realities. Gaiter makes clear that many people are finally finding themselves to be much less "middle class" then their advertising created fantasies led them to believe. Their treasured self-image is well tarnished and they are discovering that, as Gaiter says, "our corporatist state uses white men and women just like it uses black, brown and yellow ones--as cannon fodder." So in this crisis any person who lives from his salary and whose only patrimony is/was the house he lives/lived in, is, in the words of Marx and Engels, "at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind".  Alas, few are equipped either by temperament or by training to face with "sober senses" either the "real conditions" of their lives or the "relations with their kind". This lack makes them easy prey for movements like the Tea Party that fill the paths to truth with the traditional red herrings of American racism disguised as libertarianism. This nauseating and supremely effective tactic is being trotted out once again. The day when Americans in similar economic straits cease to see skin color and see clearly and soberly what they all have in common, in the same way  that the wealthy and powerful minority always have: on that day will the battle for social justice in the United States be more than half won. Keeping them from doing so has always been a growth industry.

Perhaps the joker in the right's deck, the spanner in the works, is the growing Hispanic vote. This is a vote that is in many ways socially conservative: family values etc, but very offended by racism directed toward them. A party of angry "white" people has very little attraction for this otherwise quite heterogeneous (Dominicans are very different from Mexicans) group. I certainly think it would be nearly impossible for a Tea Partied Republican Party to take and hold this, America's fastest growing, demographic niche.

Supposing we ever got racism licked, then we get to the really hard part.

If somehow this intrumentalized racism were neutralized, if white, brown and black could see their common needs and pull together to get what they need... what would be the instrument to use?

The term, "Welfare State" might give you the idea that the "state" is place to start... and the directing force of the state is the "government".  The desire to "fare" or "go" well using the "state" as the instrument.

What, then, is the "state of the government" or "state of the state" at this moment?

"Reagan’s view of government as the problem is increasingly at odds with a nation whose system of health care relies on large for-profit entities designed to make money rather than improve health; whose economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America; and much of whose fuel comes from unstable and dangerous areas of the world. Under these conditions, government is the only entity that can look out for our interests." Robert Reich

The shortest and anything but the sweetest description of the philosophy of government that has dominated American thinking since the 80s, is the following famous quote:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."  - Grover Norquist

Norquist doesn't really need a bathtub anymore, a simple washbasin might get it... government was already sending up bubbles in the floods of Katrina. You might say that today's politicians are rubber ducks in Norquist's bathtub.

For me this is the most disquieting thought of all... that even if the American people desired a welfare state, as many well may do, there might no longer be an instrument capable of executing that desire.

Here is a small sample of some of the nuts and bolts of this Norquist-bathtub government:

More than 100 American cities could go bust next year as the debt crisis that has taken down banks and countries threatens next to spark a municipal meltdown, a leading analyst has warned.(...)  US states have spent nearly half a trillion dollars more than they have collected in taxes, and face a $1tn hole in their pension funds, said the CBS programme, apocalyptically titled The Day of Reckoning. Detroit is cutting police, lighting, road repairs and cleaning services affecting as much as 20% of the population. The city, which has been on the skids for almost two decades with the decline of the US auto industry, does not generate enough wealth to maintain services for its 900,000 inhabitants. The nearby state of Illinois has spent twice as much money as it has collected and is about six months behind on creditor payments. The University of Illinois alone is owed $400m, the CBS programme said. The state has a 21% chances of default, more than any other, according to CMA Datavision, a derivatives information provider. California has raised state university tuition fees by 32%. Arizona has sold its state capitol and supreme court buildings to investors, and leases them back. - Guardian

Our friend Norquist is cool with states going bathtub, er, bankrupt:

Some critics allege that a state bankruptcy code would be used as a tool to “smash unions.” On the contrary, government employee unions and their dogged defense of the status quo are, in fact, smashing budgets and credit ratings in California, Illinois, New York and other states where they are dominant and have outsized influence in the state capitol.  Though it is true that the bond market might not be happy with a state filing for bankruptcy, as Skeel noted, the market is already beginning to take the possibility of default in certain states into account. California, for example, put $10 billion in revenue anticipation notes on the market in November — yet was only able to sell $6 billion worth. Advocacy for permitting state bankruptcy should not be confused with a desire for states to go bankrupt. In fact, simply having bankruptcy as a tool at states’ disposal is likely to be a boon to lawmakers trying to rectify their unsustainable financial plight.  The mere “threat of bankruptcy,” as Michael Barone recently noted in National Review Online, “would put a powerful weapon in the hands of governors and legislatures: They can tell their unions that they have to accept cuts now or face a much more dire fate in bankruptcy court.” - Grover Norquist

This is getting to be painfully obvious:

Congressional Republicans appear to be quietly but methodically executing a plan that would a) avoid a federal bailout of spendthrift states and b) cripple public employee unions by pushing cash-strapped states such as California and Illinois to declare bankruptcy. This may be the biggest political battle in Washington, my Capitol Hill sources tell me, of 2011. That’s why the most intriguing aspect of President Barack Obama’s tax deal with Republicans is what the compromise fails to include — a provision to continue the Build America Bonds program.  BABs now account for more than 20 percent of new debt sold by states and local governments thanks to a federal rebate equal to 35 percent of interest costs on the bonds. The subsidy program ends on Dec. 31.  And my Reuters colleagues report that a GOP congressional aide said Republicans “have a very firm line on BABS — we are not going to allow them to be included.” James Pethokoukis - Reuters

There seems to be no arrow left in the systems quiver to stop this, certainly not in Barack Obama's quiver.

When Robert Reich speaks of health care saying that America's "economy is dependent on global capital and on global corporations and financial institutions with no particular loyalty to America", he is underlining one of the principal facts of our world today, i.e. non-state actors, like multinational corporations, effectively controlled by a few individuals, a small percentage of the share holders and/or a management elite, are often more powerful than elected governments. This means, as Reich points out, that empowering government, which we elect, is the only defense we have against these unelected, non-state actors, who are indifferent to our welfare, whose only motive is profit.

Lets compare for a moment  the competence and seriousness of Robert Reich's corporate America to Norquist's "bathtub ready" US government. Try to imagine for a moment the  secret formula for Coca Cola in the hands of someone like  Pfc Bradley Manning... Impossible, isn't it... The management at Coca Cola are serious  folks. But the US Army allows an enormous mass of extraordinarily sensitive cables that could adversely affect US foreign policy in unimaginable ways in such hands as those of 23 year old "Bradass".

After a bout of intense introspection and self-criticism, I think that my strong desire to see the Wikileaks data-dump as the work of a foreign espionage network is in great part a reaction of denial from another, simpler but much more disturbing conclusion. One that literally fills me with horror. Remember that when politicians and thinktankers talk about cutting expenses, they are always talking about things like teacher's salaries or pensions and other "entitlements", never about "defense" spending. America's armed forces have always had preference of place at the trough. We might therefore assume that they of all American institutions would be immune from the "heck of a job-ism" of the rest of the stone broke and sorry-assed res publica.
 

Well, no, it seems the Army is just as incompetent as the rest of the system. If the secrets entrusted to the US Army are as vulnerable as Enron's emails... then the last one out, please turn off the lights.

In my opinion, it is no exageration to say that there is less difference between libertarians of the left, such as Assange, and those of the right, such as Norquist, than between either of them and those like myself that believe in big, well-funded government that is able to provide its citizens with good infrastucture, good regulations, good education and good health services and that has the power and the legitimacy to collect the necessary taxes to pay for those things. Make no mistake, the Assanges and the Norquists are executing a pincer movement.

When people riff about the impact of Wikileaks, you typically hear how it’s forever changed diplomacy or intelligence-gathering. The more ambitious accounts will mention the implications for journalism, too. All of that’s true and vaguely relevant. But it also misses the deeper point. The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information. It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.(...) All of a sudden, the very same things that made it more efficient to work with your colleagues—the fact that everyone had a detailed understanding of the mission and methodology—become enormous liabilities. In a Wikileaks world, the greater the number of people who intimately understand your organization, the more candidates there are for revealing that information to millions of voyeurs. Wikileaks is, in effect, a huge tax on internal coordination. And, as any economist will tell you, the way to get less of something is to tax it. As a practical matter, that means the days of bureaucracies in the tens of thousands of employees are probably numbered. In a decade or two, we may not only see USAID spun off from the State Department. We may see dozens of mini-State Departments servicing separate regions of the world. Or hundreds of micro-State Departments—one for every country on the planet. Don’t like the stranglehold that a handful of megabanks have on the financial sector? Don’t worry! Twenty years from now there won’t be such a thing as megabanks, because the cost of employing 100,000 potential leakers will be prohibitive.(...) I’d guess that most organizations a generation from now will be pretty small by contemporary standards, with highly convoluted cell-like structures. Large numbers of people within the organization may not even know one another’s name, much less what colleagues spend their days doing, or the information they see on a regular basis. There will be redundant layers of security and activity, so that the loss of any one node can’t disable the whole network. Which is to say, thanks to Wikileaks, the organizations of the future will look a lot like …  Wikileaks. -  Noam Scheiber - The New Republic

I am almost sure that Mr. Assange and Mr. Norquist would be horrified to know that they are brothers in arms in the war to destroy the state, but in fact they are... at the very least their efforts are overlapping and complimentary: Assange  by facilitating such endless kibitzing, as to make the cooperation by a large number of state employees in any great project, even those beneficial to society, well nigh impossible and Norquist by depriving those state employees of the funds with which to act, supposing they could.

Both Assange and Norquist would surely justify their words and actions as a defense of freedom.

I think it might be in order then to examine the practical meaning of the word "freedom".

A very workmanlike definition might be FDR's "Four Freedoms", they are as follows:

1. Freedom of speech and expression
2. Freedom of worship
3. Freedom from want
4. Freedom from fear

I for one, am in complete agreement with the contents of this list, however I think that for them to be realistically applicable to all of humanity, without exception, their order should be reversed.

It seems to me that a person who is hungry or/and afraid and without access to adequate medical care for herself and her children, has little time or even need for the other freedoms and that a person without an opportunity for decent schooling will have trouble expressing his needs, no matter how much freedom to express them that he is given. It might also be useful to note that many regimes that skimp on freedoms one, three and four, often encourage their subjects to worship; as fear and want are often great stimulants to prayer.

It would seem to me that both Messrs Assange and Norquist, each in his way, are having success in dragging the state into the bathroom and drowning it in the name of point one, the freedom of speech and expression.

At this moment millions of Americans are losing their homes, millions of American don't get enough to eat, American life expectancy is going down, millions of American children go to substandard schools, millions of Americans don't have access to good health care, America's infant mortality rate is simply obscene and wealth distribution in America is even more unequal than in India. Freedom? Adding insult to injury more like it.

My affirmation is that without a strong state serving its people, freedoms three and four, will only be enjoyed by the wealthy and that to ensure that such a strong state exists and that it defends the welfare of its people, those who call themselves progressives should use freedom one vigorously and then with the aid of freedom two and a long-handled spoon, go and drain Mr. Norquists bathtub. DS

Wikileaks: comparing conspiracy theories

Image by Christian Ségal      

David Seaton's News Links

It isn't as if conspiracies don't exist, but generally stupidity or incompetence explain most disasters and even real conspiracies don't tend to be as elaborate as their legion of fans would like to believe. But if we define a "conspiracy" as when two or more people combine to do something that would normally carry punishment in such a way so as not to be punished, then there are quite a few of them around. Certainly the Wikileaks data-dump would qualify as one under that definition.

Until Wikileaks itself leaks, we are forced to speculate. Without entering the baroque, we have to proceed from the simple to the more complex.

The first question would be: is the simplest explanation the true one?

There are two basic simple explanations as far as I can see:

One: Pfc Manning is a brave and principled young man, who, shocked by his country's criminal behavior, decided to blow the whistle and sought out Julian Assange, another brave and principled young man, who decided to help him.

Or

Two: Pfc Manning, who had broken up with his boyfriend was depressed and, feeling a bit spiteful, decided to commit the biggest electronic security coup de main since British intelligence broke the German code, "Ultra" during WWII. Julian Assange, a megalomaniac and a lousy lay, saw his chance for super stardom and a lifetime supply of condom-free groupies and decided to aid and abet him.

There is probably some truth in both versions, but if you think anything this big is that simple, you probably would have no trouble believing that the Swedish prosecutor is chasing Assange around Europe solely because of a broken condom... As well he may be... like I say, for the moment we are flying blind.

I, for one, happen to think that a very competent foreign intelligence service has been involved in this and is using Assange thirst for the limelight to cover their tracks.

Right off the bat, before we go any farther, I'll tell you I don't think Israel is behind Wikileaks' data-dump.

I don't see them gaining very much from it, certainly not enough to justify the risk.

I would say that there are two major countries that have enough motives to take the risks involved: Russia and China.

Russia has the human assets in the west, the experience and the know how to pull it off easily.

China has much more motivation than the Russians, although both countries benefit from the data-dump, witness Putin "nominating" Assange for the Nobel Prize.

For me the prime suspect is still China.

Why would the Chinese do this?

In my scenario, the United States is accusing China of currency manipulation. America's government is very interested in China revaluing their currency in order to make US exports more competitive. The Chinese are not cooperating. To put on pressure, the US has been organizing a human rights, "transparency" and democracy blitz to embarrass the Chinese. This mixture of Internet, bloggers and  human rights NGOs are the formula used in all the "color" revolutions such as the "Orange Revolution" in the Ukraine or the Twitter led "Green Revolution. The Chinese naturally resent having these techniques employed on them.

My idea is that the Chinese have had two objectives. To embarrass the United States and to change the subject of conversation from Liu Xiaobo's Noble Peace Prize, for example, or Tibet, or "The Great Firewall" that blocks access to the Internet in China.

"The Americans demand transparency?" say the Chinese in my scenario, "We'll see how much they really like it."  "You like Glasnost, here two helpings, rice on the side".

So far, if they weren't behind the data-dump, they are certainly benefiting from it more than anyone else I can think of. People are talking of little else. Liu Xiaobo's Noble Peace Prize ceremony was overshadowed by the daily delivery of American diplomacy's dirty laundry. Brilliant! Turn the enemy's strength against him. Sun Tzu is grinning from ear to ear somewhere in the Taoist heaven.

Assange's biggest mistake was to take the bait and turn himself, or let himself be turned into, the poster boy for the data-dump. People who have in turn taken the bait and accepted him as a hero are going to be bitterly disillusioned. This is all political and Assange has just made himself the butt of a million jokes. He is the one who insisted that he be the poster boy of Wikileaks... so now this is about him and all his busted condoms.

"Outing" the State Department, using Army personnel, is the ultimate in hardball. If Assange had done it to the Russians he would have died of plutonium poisoning and if he had done it to the Israelis his body would probably never be found. And if he had done it to the Chinese... yum, yum. Assange is counting on the Americans not being as rough as the above mentioned... big mistake, we're just more hypocritical. DS

Holbrooke and Assange: the end of empire and the dying Roman

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

"You've got to stop this war in Afghanistan."
The last words of Richard Holbrooke

David Seaton's News Links

America's most famous über-diplomat went out like an old Roman: his last words, lucid and noble, are worthy of the best moments that American history has to offer. 

We all have to die, but it has been Richard Holbrooke's good fortune to die like an imperial hero out of a novel by Kipling, his last words will be printed in school books and perhaps future schoolchildren will have to memorize them.

If it is still possible for the servants of an empire to die nobly, the death of empires themselves tend to be rather messier. The evidence of the passing of America's empire is all around us, but a recording of its last words, as revealed by Wikileaks, reminds me more of  the dying words of the gangster, Dutch Schultz, than of Richard Holbrooke's classic Roman dignity. 

Read Schultz's soliloquy and see if you don't agree:

The Last Words of Dutch Schultz
Statements made by Arthur (Dutch Schultz) Flegenheimer were taken down by a Newark police stenographer, F. J. Lang. The notes covered a period from about 4 o'clock Thursday afternoon until Schultz died. During that period he was delirious most of the time, but lucid at intervals. A transcript of all he said follows:

Schultz at this time was irrational, suffering with a fever of 106 degrees and a bullet in his stomach. Sergeant Luke Conlon and other detectives from Newark police headquarters were at his bedside. One of the officers had a newspaper.

(Schultz noticed newspaper and spoke) - Has it been in any other papers? George, don't make no full moves. What have you done with him? Oh, mama, mama, mama. Oh stop it, stop it; eh, oh, oh. Sure, sure, mama. Now listen, Phil, fun is fun. Ah please, papa. What happened to the sixteen? Oh, oh, he done it, please. John, please, oh, did you buy the hotel? You promised a million sure. Get out. I wished I knew. Please make it quick, fast and furious. Please. Fast and furious. Please help me get out; I am getting my wind back, thank God. Please, please, oh please. You will have to please tell him, you got no case.  You get ahead with the dot dash system didn't I speak that time last night. Whose number is that in your pocket book, Phi1 13780. Who was it? Oh- please, please. Reserve decision. Police, police, Henry and Frankie. Oh, oh, dog biscuits and when he is happy he doesn't get happy please, please to do this. Then Henry, Henry, Frankie you didn't even meet me. The glove will fit what I say oh, Kayiyi, oh Kayiyi. Sure who cares when you are through? How do you know this? How do you know this? Well, then oh, Cocoa know thinks he is a grandpa again. He is jumping around. No Hobo and Poboe I think he means the same thing.

Q. (from Sergeant Conlon) - Who shot you?

A.- The boss himself.

Q.- He did?

A.- Yes, I don't know.

Q.- What did he shoot you for?

A.- I showed him boss; did you hear him meet me? An appointment. Appeal stuck. All right, mother.

Q.- Was it the boss shot you?

A.- Who shot me? No one.

Q.- We will help you.

A.- Will you help me up? O.K. I won't be such a big creep. Oh, mama. I can't go through with it, please. Oh, and then he clips me; come on. Cut that out, we don't owe a nickel; hold it; instead, hold it against him; I am a pretty good pretzler -Winifred- Department of Justice. I even got it from the department. Sir, please stop it. Say listen the last night!

(Statement by Sergeant Conlon) - Don't holler.

A.- I don't want to holler.

Q.- What did they shoot you for?

A.- I don't know, sir. Honestly I don't. I don't even know who was with me, honestly. I was in the toilet and when I reached the -the boy came at me.

Q.- The big fellow gave it to you?

A.- Yes, he gave it to me.

Q.- Do you know who this big fellow was?

A.- No. If he wanted to break the ring no, please I get a month. They did it. Come on. (A name, not clear) cut me off and says you are not to be the beneficiary of this will. Is that right? I will be checked and double-checked and please pull for me. Will you pull? How many good ones and how many bad ones? Please I had nothing with him he was a cowboy in one of the seven days a week fight. No business; no hangout; no friends; nothing; just what you pick up and what you need. I don't know who shot me. Don't put anyone near this check~ you might have -please do it for me. Let me get up. heh? In the olden days they waited and they waited. Please give me a shot. It is from the factory. Sure, that is a bad. Well, oh good ahead that happens for trying. I don't want harmony. I want harmony. Oh, mamma, mamma! Who give it to him? Who give it to him? Let me in the district -fire-factory that he was nowhere near. It smoldered No, no. There are only ten of us and there ten million fighting somewhere of you, so get your onions up and we will throw up the truce flag. Oh, please let me up. Please shift me. Police are here. Communistic...strike...baloney...honestly this is a habit I get; sometimes I give it and sometimes I don't. Oh, I am all in. That settles it. Are you sure? Please let me get in and eat. Let him harass himself to you and then bother you. Please don't ask me to go there. I don't want to. I still don't want him in the path. It is no use to stage a riot. The sidewalk was in trouble and the bears were in trouble and I broke it up. Please put me in that room. Please keep him in control. My gilt edged stuff and those dirty rats have tuned in. Please mother, don't tear, don't rip; that is something that shouldn't be spoken about. Please get me up, my friends. Please, look out. The shooting is a bit wild, and that kind of shooting saved a man's life. No payrolls. No wells. No coupons. That would be entirely out. Pardon me, I forgot I am plaintiff and not defendant. Look out. Look out for him. Please. He owed me money; he owes everyone money. Why can't he just pullout and give me control? Please, mother, you pick me up now. Please, you know me. No. Don't you scare me. My friends and I think I do a better job. Police are looking for you allover. Be instrumental in letting us know. They are English-men and they are a type I don't know who is best, they or us. Oh, sir, get the doll a roofing. You can play jacks and girls do that with a soft ball and do tricks with it. I take all events into consideration. No. No. And it is no. It is confused and its says no. A boy has never wept nor dashed a thousand kim. Did you hear me?

Q. (By Detective) - Who shot you?

A.- I don't know.

Q.- How many shots were fired?

A.- I don't know.

Q.- How many?

A.- Two thousand. Come one, get some money in that treasury. We need it. Come on, please get it. I can't tell you to. That is not what you have in the book. Oh, please warden. What am I going to do for money? Please put me up on my feet at once. You are a hard boiled man. Did you hear me? I would hear it, the Circuit Court would hear it, and the Supreme Court might hear it. If that ain't the pay-off. Please crack down on the Chinaman's friends and Hitler's commander. I am sore and I am going up and I am going to give you honey if I can. Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.

Q. (By Detective) - What did the big fellow shoot you for?

A.- Him? John? Over a million, five million dollars.

Q.- You want to get well, don't you?

A.- Yes.

Q.- Then lie quiet.

A.- Yes, I will lie quiet.

Q.- John shot and we will take care of John.

A.- That is what caused the trouble. Look out. Please let me up. If you do this, you can go on and jump right here in the lake. I know who they are. They are French people. All right. Look out, look out. Oh, my memory is gone. A work relief police. Who gets it? I don't know and I don't want to know, but look out. It can be traced. He changed for the worse. Please look out; my fortunes have changed and come back and went back since that. It was desperate. I am wobbly. You ain't got nothing on him but you got it on his helper.

Q. (By detective ) - Control yourself.

A.- But I am dying.

(Statement by detective) - No, you are not.

A.- Come on, mama. All right, dear, you have to get it.

At this point, Schultz's wife, Frances, was brought to his bedside. She spoke.

(Statement by Mrs. Schultz) - This is Frances.

Schultz began to talk again, saying:

Then pull me out. I am half crazy. They won't let me get up. They dyed my shoes. Open those shoes. Give me something. I am so sick. Give me some water, the only thing that I want. Open this up and break it so I can touch you. Danny, please get me in the car.

At this point Mrs. Schultz left the room.

(Sergeant Conlon questioned Schultz again) - Who shot you?

A.- I don't know. I didn't even get a look. I don't know who can have done it. Anybody. Kindly take my shoes off. (He was told that they were off.) No. There is a handcuff on them. The Baron says these things. I know what I am doing here with my collection of papers. It isn't worth a nickel to two guys like you or me but to a collector it is worth a fortune. It is priceless. I am going to turn it over to... Turn you back to me, please Henry. I am so sick now. The police are getting many complaints. Look out. I want that G-note. Look out for Jimmy Valentine for he is an old pal of mine. Come on, come on, Jim. Ok, ok, I am all through. Can't do another thing. Look out mamma, look out for her. You can't beat him. Police, mamma, Helen, mother, please take me out. I will settle the indictment. Come on, open the soap duckets. The chimney sweeps. Talk to the sword. Shut up, you got a big mouth! Please help me up, Henry. Max, come over here. French-Canadian bean soup. I want to pay. Let them leave me alone.

Schultz sank into unconsciousness then. It was 6:40 P.M. He died less than two hours later, without saying anything else.

I wonder if future historians (here I usually say, future Chinese historians) will be able to make any more sense of the contents of  the Wikileaks data-dump than students of gangteralia can make of Arthur Flegenheimer's last words? Some think them poetry, some think they hold the key to endless gangland mysteries or even the location of buried treasure... others think they are only the product of a disintegrating mind. 

Frankly, I think my little metaphor is nearly perfect. DS

Wikileaks (my latest theory)

David Seaton's News Links

After my waltzing around ever so long with trying to figure out who's behind Wikileaks, the penny finally dropped. It is so glaringly obvious to me now, that I'm surprised it never occurred to me before. The good news is that it isn't Israel.

(Hillary) Clinton likened online censorship by countries such as China, Vietnam and Iran to the rise of communist Europe, warning that a new "information curtain" threatened to descend on the world unless action to protect internet freedoms was taken. Her comments, which mark the Obama administration's first major foray into foreign policy online, come at a delicate time for relations between the US and China. Guardian, 01/21/2010

The May 18, 2009, cable, titled “Google China Paying Price for Resisting Censorship,” quoted a well-placed source as saying that Li Changchun, a member of China’s top ruling body, the Politburo Standing Committee, and the country’s senior propaganda official, was taken aback to discover that he could conduct Chinese-language searches on Google’s main international Web site. When Mr. Li typed his name into the search engine at google.com, he found “results critical of him.” That cable from American diplomats was one of many made public by WikiLeaks that portray China’s leadership as nearly obsessed with the threat posed by the Internet to their grip on power — and, the reverse, by the opportunities it offered them, through hacking, to obtain secrets stored in computers of its rivals, especially the United States. New York Times 12/04/2010

Kill with a borrowed knife (借刀殺人／借刀杀人, Jiè dāo shā rén) Attack using the strength of another (in a situation where using one's own strength is not favourable). Trick an ally into attacking him, bribe an official to turn traitor, or use the enemy's own strength against him.

Sacrifice the plum tree to preserve the peach tree (李代桃僵, Lǐ dài táo jiāng) There are circumstances in which you must sacrifice short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal. This is the scapegoat stratagem whereby someone else suffers the consequences so that the rest do not. 36 Strategems

Cutting to the chase: my theory is that Chinese intelligence is behind all of this... just to see how we like some of our own medicine... a "(fill in the color) Revolution" for the USA.

The US government and thinktankery in general have been treating Internet as if it was America's "secret" or not so secret weapon to weaken the Chinese leadership's power. Wikileaks proves that America's "regime" is as, or more, vulnerable than China's to the dissolvent of uncontrolled information.

Julian Assange is China's answer to the Dalai Lama and this year's Nobel Peace Prize to the Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Do I think that Julian Assange knows that he is being used by the Chinese?

Of course not. it would be essential for them to keep him totally in the dark. At some point or another American authorities are going to interrogate Assange and whoever is behind him wants the buck to stop right there.  Assange has been put into to play to carry the can. I'm sure that whoever is China's man in the operation has impeccable cover and morphology to avoid suspicion. 

Assange talks and acts like the leader of a religious sect similar to the one led by his mother's old guru, Anne Hamilton-Byrne. Manipulating someone like that into thinking that every idea in their head originated in their head is surprisingly easy. Certainly the Chinese are devious and patient enough (read Sun Tzu) to groom Wikileaks and Assange for years waiting to spring him. The fact that some of the cables are unflattering to China's leadership increase their appearance of innocence.

Up till now the Chinese have been playing defense, putting up their "Great Fire Wall" and stealing Google's source code, with Wikileaks they are now on the offense.

Certainly, if the Chinese are not behind all of this they can only be grateful for it. They are said to be compulsive gamblers, obsessed by luck. If they are innocent of Wikileaks they should at the very least burn a few joss sticks to Cai Shen, the Taoist god of fortune. DS

Wikileaks or the loneliness of Private Manning

For your eyes only

 David Seaton's News Links

The diplomatic corps of any sovereign country is an instrument of the state.  It does what the head of state and his/her government decide that it should do.

Even if there were a total regime change in the USA, one of any political color you like: a military junta, "socialist with American characteristics", an Islamic republic, you name it, the United States of America (or whatever it would be called) would still have over 300 million people and it presumably  would be bounded by Canada in the north and Mexico in the South, with a Pacific coast and and an Atlantic coast and would have much of the vital interests that it has today and it would have embassies around the world to defend those interests, and I would imagine most of the same people that represent it today would still represent it then.

Getting back to bare basics, as I said in a post awhile back:

Let us assume for a moment that the United States of America is a democracy and it's officials represent the American people and that its institutions genuinely represent, define and defend the interests of the American people.

That is the assumption, that we, as American citizens must question and no other. Is the government of the USA legitimately empowered to govern its citizens and to define and defend their interests? Then, that being so, I repeat, the diplomatic corp is merely an instrument for that. If that isn't so, we should fix it urgently, but not, I think by damaging America's diplomatic capabilities.

Assange has damaged that instrument. Not only America's but the instrument of all who wish or must deal with the USA. Thus Julian Assange has damaged something that belongs to the US government, which in its turn belongs to the citizens of the USA. Something must be done to deter him from doing this anymore and to punish him severely enough to deter others from imitating him.

I sincerely don't believe that anarchy is viable option for a country of 310,836,000 people.

I repeat, any conceivable political construction of the USA: junta, people's or Islamic republic, monarchy etc, would have to try to apprehend and punish Julian Assange, pour encourager les autres. That, or simply go out of the government business.

To avoid being punished, Mr. Assange affirms that he possesses a secret so secret that, if revealed, would cause unimaginable harm to the United States, and that this secret is in an encrypted file at the following address:  

http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5741985/INSURANCE.AES256_WIKILEAKS.SECRET.DOCUMENT.2010.08.06  

And it is said that if any harm should befall him, his followers will publish the encryption key to this file on the Internet, thus causing even more harm to the interests of the American people (always supposing, remember, that the government of the USA represents the citizens of the USA.)

In short, Julian Assange has the chutzpah to blackmail the United States of America.

This is beginning to sound like the plot of a Bruce Willis, "Die Hard" film, twitchy terrorist included.

Finally, this is coming down to the question: are the people of the United States of America and its institutions Julian Assange's bitch?

Here is a sample of Assange's arrogance, in an answer to a quite civil question from a former British diplomat, this is taken from a live, blog interview in The Guardian:

JAnthony

Julian.

I am a former British diplomat. In the course of my former duties I helped to coordinate multilateral action against a brutal regime in the Balkans, impose sanctions on a renegade state threatening ethnic cleansing, and negotiate a debt relief programme for an impoverished nation. None of this would have been possible without the security and secrecy of diplomatic correspondence, and the protection of that correspondence from publication under the laws of the UK and many other liberal and democratic states. An embassy which cannot securely offer advice or pass messages back to London is an embassy which cannot operate. Diplomacy cannot operate without discretion and the protection of sources. This applies to the UK and the UN as much as the US. In publishing this massive volume of correspondence, Wikileaks is not highlighting specific cases of wrongdoing but undermining the entire process of diplomacy. If you can publish US cables then you can publish UK telegrams and UN emails.

My question to you is: why should we not hold you personally responsible when next an international crisis goes unresolved because diplomats cannot function.

Julian Assange:

If you trim the vast editorial letter to the singular question actually asked, I would be happy to give it my attention.

The guy's on a roll, next thing you know he'll be trashing hotel rooms.

I was talking this morning to a fellow who does mergers and acquisitions for one of the big Spanish banks: they've done deals in the USA, in South America, in China, in the Middle East... in a sense the M&A people are like the bank's diplomats... They are in constant conversations with people who are not exactly adversaries, but of a different organization. The Bank people know what they are willing to pay, but it is important that the people across the table not have that information. All the bank's internal conversations are held in the utmost confidentiality, as are those with the people they are negotiating with... it is essential. 

My friend is totally mystified. What he couldn't understand is how the Americans let a hamburger like Private Manning  have access to such important information.  He wonders, as I do, if America is showing signs of dementia praecox. That is the real story here, because the basic lines of American policy, warts and all, we already knew and it has been going on for decades. As yet I have not seen anything that really surprises me, except the fact that I am able to read this confidential traffic on the Internet and what that means going forward.

What I am driving at, and what I think that the British diplomat and my banker friend were asserting, is that doing deals is a process, one where confidentiality is vital and where without confidentiality the deals cannot be done, and Assange is making that more difficult, perhaps impossible.  Since these are deals with enormous economic and geopolitical significance, the freezing up of communication between diplomats could have historic consequences... bad consequences... and then there is this too: who ever elected Julian Assange to dynamite the foreign policy of the United State of America? Who is he responsible to? To "God and history" as Franco said he was?

In closing this post, just to note that, in a parliamentary democracy, something as big as this might bring down the government, might lead to early elections. In our system that isn't an option, but I think it would be a good idea if Hillary Clinton tendered her resignation. 

This disaster probably isn't Hillary's fault, but it has happened in her department, on her watch, and the government can't just go on as if nothing had happened. Heads must roll and all those responsible must pay for their errors. Or is the only one that is left holding the bag for all this going to be poor Private Manning? He may spend the rest of his life in jail... alone? DS

Wikileaks: America's senior moment

So this is what the eclipsing of American power looks like, with the disgorging of so much of its sensitive diplomatic correspondence in one fell swoop. Arguably not since Berlin fell to the Red Army in 1945 has there been a compromise of state secrets as breathtaking as that brought about by WikiLeaks. Yet while the drift of much of the ensuing commentary has been that there is not much new in the 250,000 leaked cables, the truth is that the damage to American credibility and diplomacy is incalculable. Robert Baer - Financial Times

The US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what? Timothy Garton Ash - Guardian

David Seaton's News Links

"Gaga" is a French world that means senile.

In the opinion of many observers, the Wikileaks data-dump is America's "senior moment".

America's present day foreign policy shenanigans are beginning to look like one of those caper comedies, full of hilarious gags and prat falls, the kind where everything goes wrong.

Historians are not going to find much to surprise them in the documents themselves, nothing or very little that they won't already know; what they are going to be interested in is who is behind the massive leaks and what they hoped to achieve by destroying the credibility of the US State Department. 

This goes beyond mere "whistle blowing".

I'm not against whistle blowing in itself. It can perform many useful services: for example, in exposing corporate wrongdoing or dangerous pharmaceutical products. In politics it can also serve the public interest by revealing a specific error or crime. For instance I was in favor of showing the video of the helicopter murder of the Reuters reporters in Iraq.

But this "data-dump" of masses of mostly banal material, dotted with tasty information truffles of the kind Zbigniew Brzezinski calls "pointed",  in the video above, is wantonly destructive of diplomatic "back channels"  as former CIA operative  Robert Baer writes in the Financial Times. 

And as Dr. Brzezinski says, the leaks are probably being manipulated by a foreign intelligence service or services yet unknown. That has been my feeling since day one and I am glad to find myself in such illustrious company.

Certainly the wikileaked materials are already being used in furthering  some countries specific national interests. 

An article by a top Israeli journalist Aluf Benn in Haaretz entitled: "WikiLeaks cables tell the story of an empire in decline" we can read the following:

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first world leader to leverage the WikiLeaks revelations for his own purposes. At a press conference on Monday, Netanyahu used the leaked cables to trash Obama's position and advance the agenda of "Iran first." The cables prove, he said, that there's no truth in the narrative that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the greatest threat to the region and its future. Aluf Benn - Haaretz

Why is Netanyahu in such a hurry to use Assange's material?

Here is how Noam Chomsky compares the relevance of the Wikileaks on the true situation in the Middle East:

NOAM CHOMSKY: (...) Hillary Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. The results are rather striking. They show the Arab opinion holds that the major threat in the region is Israel—that’s 80%. The second major threat is the United States—that’s 77%. Iran is listed as a threat by 10%. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority—in fact, 57%—say that the region would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. 80%, 77%, say the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. 10% say Iran is the major threat.  (HT: readytoblowagasket)

You might imagine that as they hold opinions directly opposed to their subjects, the rulers of America's clients, the Arab security states, might think twice before ever speaking frankly to an American diplomat again. That might have serious consequences going forward. Especially if preparation for war gathers speed.

Many are shocked by what they read in these cables.  They seem to be suffering from a political version of "primal scene", you know, the trauma little children experience when they first discover what mommy and daddy do after they tuck the toddlers into bed.

I'm beginning to think that Bismark was right, politics are like sausages, they are easier to eat when people don't know how they are made.

Diplomacy is not, repeat not a a business and the relations between sovereign "armed and dangerous" states are not the same as the relations between a bank or a pharmaceutical company and their customers. Lehman Brothers crashing or a bank screwing its customers is not the same as bombing Iran.

So many of history's wars have begun through misunderstanding or miscalculations. Often the only thing standing between the guns of the opposing armed forces of dozens of countries are the world's diplomats. For hundreds of years they have only had their endless conversations to gauge the intentions of allies and potential or real enemies.

Taken as a whole their information and access to the minds of the governments and peoples where they are stationed is of immense value.

They all live in a boring, itinerant, community who spend most of their working careers outside their home countries, people who see each other over and over again in an endless, purgatorial round of cocktail parties and dinners and when they finally move on to a new post, they find themselves thrown again into the same company of diplomats from their own and other countries where they were posted before and again and again they renew old friendships... this goes on for years and years until they retire and is quite endogenous. They learn to read the meanings of each other's carefully chosen words and even more careful silences.

Taken as a whole the diplomatic community is very sensitive and valuable animal. Their understanding and their relationships can come in handy when there is an international crisis on and to freeze and clog it up could be really, really, dangerous at a time like now, when there is a imminent danger of a war breaking out.

So this mega data-dump is not the same as exposing some corporation that is selling infected chicken liver. This could end up in with thousands of people killed and the world economy off into the abyss. DS

Why isn't Julian Assange in Guantanamo? Where are the drones?

Peter King, a member of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said the latest release "manifests Mr Assange's purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan".  BBC News

David Seaton's News Links

Let us assume for a moment that the United State of America is a democracy and it's officials represent the American people and that its institutions genuinely represent, define and defend the interests of the American people.

Let us also assume, merely for argument's sake, that as Congressman and member of the Homeland Security Committee of the House of Representatives, Peter King, says, the  release of the latest batch from Wikileaks proves Julian Assange's, "purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan". 

Taking these two assumptions as true: that one, America's government has the democratic legitimacy to define and defend the interests of the American people, and two, Julian Assange is aiding the enemies of the United State in time of war, then the following question arises.

Why isn't Julian Assange either dead or imprisoned in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp?

If this question seems overly provocative,  a mere boutade, let me remind readers that at this very moment remote control, drone aircraft are probably flying the skies of Pakistan and Yemen, armed with rockets, looking to fire them at men, women and even children who the US government believes to have "purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan". And of course, Guantanamo Bay prison is chock full of people held without trial or habeas corpus, who the US government believes to have "purposeful intent to damage not only our national interests in fighting the war on terror, but also undermines the very safety of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan".

What makes Assange any different from all of them?

You might think it is because Julian Assange, although not a citizen of the United States, is an Australian and Australia is an American ally... But, there have been  quite a few Australians in Guantanamo and Brits and citizens of other allied countries and American drones over Pakistan have killed citizens of countries allied to the USA and even American citizens. 

What makes Assange any different from all of them? 

Frankly the only difference I can see is that Mr. Assange is not a Muslim.

It is hard not to come to the conclusion that the United States of America has finally gathered to itself, under one flag, all the venal, violent defects of a militaristic empire and combined them with all the potential feebleness of a democracy and the results of this mixture are being splashed all over the world's newspapers and the only reaction up till now is that Sweden is accusing Julian Assange of date-rape. DS

Wikileaks: has anybody given a thought about Iraq itself?

David Seaton's News Links

In all the comments on Wikileak's Iraq revelations I've read, I haven't seen much of anything about their effect on Iraq and the Iraqis. 

This seems strange to me, because from beginning to end the real victims of everything we've done are the Iraqis themselves and it isn't as if the revelations of death and torture are going to be news to them.

What all the documents that Julian Assange has released  are sure to do is lead to many more deaths and much more torture.

Why?

As I remember Iraqi society is clan and tribally based, where avenging the death of any member of the tribe is the business of all his relatives. So it appears to me that Wikileaks has just made available much more detailed information about exactly who killed who, where and how... lots of dates, lots of names and this will probably lead to endless new vendettas, besides complicating even more the Iraqis effort to finally form a government after some six months of trying.

Which leads me to my final question: will the curse of us and our concerns about us ever be lifted from the people of Iraq? Will we ever stop fucking these poor people over? DS

Julian Assange and Wikileaks, a warning: How to hide an elephant

The reports make it clear that the lethal contest between Iranian-backed militias and American forces continued after President Obama sought to open a diplomatic dialogue with Iran’s leaders  New York Times

It seems to me that the most significant revelations from the massive WikiLeaks document dump is the apparent extent of Iran’s nefarious role in Iraq. Toby Harnden - Telegraph

Famous riddle: "How do you hide an elephant in the middle of 5th avenue? Answer: In a parade of elephants."

David Seaton's News Links

Most of the present discussion about Wikileaks and its founder and leader, Julian Assange, centers around whether he is a hero or a villain. I would tentatively offer an alternative view based entirely on intuition, that Assange is a vain man, now world famous, who is being manipulated by a party or parties unknown, in order to help create public opinion favorable to the United States joining Israel in an attack on Iran, or the United States facilitating an Israeli attack on Iran.

What do I base this alternative view of mine on?

It goes like this:

Israel's oft stated maximum priority is to stop Iran from developing an atomic bomb and they have made it perfectly clear on innumerable occasions  that they will stop at nothing to prevent this happening. I believe them.

On the contrary, at this point in time, the American people are obsessed with the economy, with debt and especially unemployment. At the same time, the Obama administration is trying to extricate US armed forces from two wars that rival each other for the longest, most expensive and most inconclusive conflicts in the nation's history. The consequences of a third war, this time with Iran, would be hard to calculate, but the most predictable would be an enormous rise in the price of oil, which might send the economy off into the abyss. 

I don't think that it is exaggerating to say that there is a certain divergence in US and Israeli priorities at this moment.

Suddenly, like the "ghost of Christmas past", we are confronted with all the Bush horror again.

This particular Wikileak consists of an enormous "dump" of uncorrelated data, some 391,832 documents, much of which simply confirms atrocities and crimes that we already knew about. Things that we have been hearing and reading about for years. In the midst of this unmanageable flood of data incriminating American troops in war crimes, are new incidents incriminating Iran.

What better wrapping for an Iranian "smoking gun", than an endless flood of confirmable stories of Americans torturing and killing Iraqis? What better place to "hide an elephant". And what more willing and ingenuous tool for disseminating the package than the newly created, world superstar, Mr. Julian Assange. If he hasn't been manipulated yet, he is certainly ripe for it.

The most difficult question to answer would be if the right wing coalition that governs Israel is crazy enough use agents of the Mossad or rogue elements in the US intelligence community to deliberately blacken Israel's best friend's world reputation in order to create hostile opinion against Iran in the USA?

I don't know the answer, I only know that it is difficult for Americans, obsessed with the economy to realize how obsessed the Israelis are with Iran's atomic program and it is even more difficult for most Americans to understand how entirely and obsessively self-referential much of Israel's ultra right wing is.

Israel is torn right now between very sane people like Shlomo ben Ami and dangerous extremists like Avigdor Lieberman and there is no sign that the ben Amis of Israel are winning the argument.

All we can do is wait and see if this story stops being about Americans torturing and killing and turns into a story about Iran. DS