CIA Director convicted of torture charges!

No, it can't happen here, but it does happen in countries that actually have an independent judiciary:

Italy's ex-intelligence chief given 10-year sentence for role in CIA kidnapping

Glenn Greenwald

"This entire case reveals vital facts about the culture of impunity for high-level officials that prevails in the US even when they commit the most egregious crimes:

"First, it is completely inconceivable that anything like what just happened in Italy could happen in the US. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the highest-level US officials had systematically committed felonies under the War on Terror rubric, both political parties, bolstered by a virtual consensus of the DC press, united to block all forms of accountability. A sacred rule in US political culture is that high-level state officials are to be shielded from all accountability, let alone criminal punishment, for how they abuse power.

"In sum, US officials are not subject to the rule of law but reside above it. Neither party's establishment nor their Adversarial Press Corps would ever tolerate the CIA Director being prosecuted for his crimes the way Italy's just was."

[Read entire article]

SNL Skewers America's more-Zionist-than-thou Politics (Updated)

In dress rehearsal. They decided not to air it. I'd love to have heard that discussion.

Update (2/13/2013): Here's a take from "SNL Nixes Skit Mocking GOP's Israel Stances During Hagel Hearing" at Crooks and Liars 

It is not hard to imagine the pearl clutching and cries of outrage (Outrage, I tell you!) had this skit gone out on the airwaves, depicting the blatant pandering and ridiculousness of the dialogue in Washington surrounding the hearing on the nomination of Chuck Hagel to the position of Secretary of Defense. I'm sure that Lindsey Graham and his BFF Grampy McCain would be issuing a proclamation of censure and a threat to deport Lorne Michaels back to Canada. How dare SNL mock the "When did you stop beating your wife?" line of questioning that the Republicans proffered to prove how much more they love the state of Israel? I'm still wondering if anyone in the Beltway media will ever wonder why blind obeisance to Israel is considered a requirement for holding an American political office.

And, not to be outpandered, the Democrats claim that donkey for themselves (h/t Buzzfeed):

Jewish Democrats Blast Marco Rubio For Not Mentioning Israel

“Jewish Democrats are proud to stand with President Obama and his second term priorities that put support for Israel.” posted on February 12, 2013 at 11:22pm EST
Image by J. Scott Applewhite / AP

WASHINGTON — The National Jewish Democratic Council issued a statement criticizing Sen. Marco Rubio for leaving Israel out of their responses to President Barack Obama's State of the Union address....

[Update (10/15/2014): Fixed video embed.]

As Syria Devolves, Israel Rampages

And America approves.

The Israeli attack on Syria last week confirms the observations I made in my post on Syria in August, namely that: 1) the US has assured Israel in advance that, whatever transpires from the US-backed rebellion, Israel will get the net benefit of a weakened Syrian state, open to at-will Israeli incursion; that, 2) for both Israel and the US, the object of this game is to utterly destroy the Syrian state, to make it disappear as a military and political force in the region; and 3) that “chemical weapons” were introduced into the narrative as a flimsy excuse for military attacks by the US or Israel whose actual objective will be to destroy, tout court, the Syrian state’s military capability, and its ability to provide any significant resistance to future Israeli attacks or any significant material support to other targets of Israeli aggression – like Iran, Hezbollah, or any other Palestinian resistance groups.

I also noted Israeli Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon’s reported gleeful prediction of “Syria’s fragmentation into provinces, adding that Lebanon will suffer the same fate in the future,” and his understanding that “the Arab world is passing through a phase that will restore it back to the way it was before World War I ….[ruling] out the possibility of the emergence of an Arab alliance that would stand in opposition to Israel in the next 10 to 15 years.”

The Rifle on the Wall: A Left Argument for Gun Rights

An essay in seven sections.

From Progressive Economics

The Fundamental Political Principle

  

"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- George Orwell¹

Let’s start with this: The citizen’s right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right. The political principle at stake is quite simple: to deny the state the monopoly of armed force.  This should perhaps be stated in the obverse: to empower the citizenry, to distribute the power of armed force among the citizenry as a whole. The history of arguments and struggles over this principle, throughout the world, is long and clear. Instituted in the context of a revolutionary struggle based on the most democratic concepts of its day, the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution is perhaps the clearest legal/constitutional expression of this principle, and as such, I think, is one of the most radical statutes in the world.

The question of gun rights is a political question, in the broad sense that it touches on the distribution of power in a polity.  Thus, although it incorporates all these perfectly legitimate “sub-political” activities, it is not fundamentally about hunting, or collecting, or target practice; it is about empowering the citizen relative to the state. Denying the importance of, or even refusing to understand, this fundamental point of the Second Amendment right, and sneering at people who do, symptomizes a politics of paternalist statism – not (actually the opposite of) a politics of revolutionary liberation. 

I’ll pause right here.  For me, and for most supporters of gun rights, however inartfully they may put it, this is the core issue.  To have an honest discussion of what’s at stake when we talk about “gun rights,” “gun control,” etc., everyone has to know, and acknowledge, his/her position on this fundamental political principle.  Do you hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right?

If you do, then you are ascribing it a strong positive value, you will be predisposed to favor its extension to all citizens, you will consider whatever “regulations” you think are necessary (because some might be) with the greatest circumspection (because those “regulations” are limitations on a right, and rights, though never as absolute as we may like, are to be cherished), you will never seek, overtly or surreptitiously, to eliminate that right entirely – and your discourse will reflect all of that. If you understand gun ownership as a political right, then, for you, if there weren’t a second amendment, there should be.

If, on the other hand, you do not hold that the right to possess firearms is a fundamental political right, if you think it is some kind of luxury or peculiarity or special prerogative, then, of course, you really won’t give a damn about how restricted that non-right is, or whether it is ignored or eliminated altogether.  If you reject, or don’t understand, gun ownership as a political right, then you probably think the Second Amendment should never have been.

God Is On Their Side: No Regrets for America's Jihad Wars

It’s a daisy chain of horrific violence, all of which can be traced directly back to a decision made by a Democratic president and his National Security Advisor to arm, train, and send out into the world a new army of radical jihadis, in order to entice the godless communists into an historic trap in Afghanistan. The actors from that drama were hired again last year by another Democratic president in Libya, and are being remobilized today in Syria – even as the blowback from their comrades in Mali becomes virtually instantaneous.

No force in the world has done more than the government of the United States to create a radical global jihad army.

It’s a blowback world.  

Some excerpts:

Today:

“Algeria’s interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, said that the seizure of the gas field had been overseen by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian who fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s and has reportedly established his own group in the Sahara after falling out with other local Qaeda leaders.”¹ (New York Times)

Yesterday

“But this intervention is itself the consequence of another. The Libyan war is frequently touted as a success story for liberal interventionism. Yet the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorship had consequences that Western intelligence services probably never even bothered to imagine. Tuaregs – who traditionally hailed from northern Mali – made up a large portion of his army. When Gaddafi was ejected from power, they returned to their homeland: sometimes forcibly so as black Africans came under attack in post-Gaddafi Libya, an uncomfortable fact largely ignored by the Western media.

“But the Libyan war was seen as a success, too; and here we are now engaging with its catastrophic blowback. … The price of Western interventions may often be ignored by our media, but it is still paid nonetheless.

“It is the responsibility of all of us to scrutinise what our governments do in our name; if we cannot learn that from Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, then it is hopeless.”² (The Independent)

The Day Before Yesterday

“Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi, the Libyan rebel leader, has said jihadists who fought against allied troops in Iraq are on the front lines of the battle against Muammar Gaddafi's regime. Mr al-Hasidi admitted he had earlier fought against ‘the foreign invasion’ in Afghanistan …