More Sunday bits and pieces: Helvetica: the movie! THQ & the CIA, another Sibel Edmonds bit

My ol buddy Tom from Macalester bails out of professional poker, he says on his blog. He's one of the low-key, calculating types of poker players, not a high-roller. And he made an impressive amount of cash in the process. I just don't know how anyone could put in that many hours. But hey, if it pays its easier than work, right? Best of luck all around. Tom wants to work on thebrewingnetwork project apparently. Best Luck, Aces high etc.

Brother Ali's album drops at midnight on Monday night. You can go to Fifth Element and pick it up along with bonus goodies. Oddly, today's Strib reported that Aaron Sorkin, the (pot enthusiast) guru who created and wrote most of the West Wing is working on a stage version of the Flaming Lips' album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Something about a rambling Martin Sheen and giant robots come to mind. Nice.

I just got a couple books from the writers behind CounterPunch in the mail: The new End Times: The Death of the Fourth Estate and Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press are both excellent. They were only about $30 together, not bad! Speaking of the CIA and the media, one major element of both books is the crass manipulation of domestic press for the purposes of intelligence agencies. Wikipedia's entry on Operation Mockingbird is just a starting point.

The Panopticon cracks in London! It turns out that filling up your whole society with cameras won't actually work that well at catching criminals: it just swamps law enforcement with too much information. This means that the system doesn't cover its intended purpose, unless the real purpose is to spread fear and paranoia! 4.2 million British cameras aren't doing much, apparently. See also Social Fear and the Commodification of Terrorism, and London: The PhoboCity.

Minnesota U.S. Attorney case gets ugly and weird: The Paulose USA here in MN looks pretty shady, and the Star Tribune (and columnist Nick Coleman) are getting into the mix. TalkingPointsMemo is interested (earlier) as is Senate Judiciary in DC. Corporate squares proclaim: move along, nothing to see here...



Helvetica: The Movie! Yes there is a documentary coming out about the venerable Swiss font! via the pretty sweet blog 3quarksdaily.

Minnesota House Republican leader Marty Seifert emits the memorable:

...the war in Iraq was the dominant issue [in the election] and the President’s approval rating was so low that it rivaled that of gonorrhea...

CIA/Pentagon team up with video game distributor THQ: Pentagon and CIA enlist video games: Simulations developed for training and recruitment: photo of THQ army game at right:

“Full Spectrum Warrior” was created through the Institute for Creative Technologies in Marina Del Ray, Calif., a $45 million endeavor formed by the Army five years ago to connect academics with local entertainment and video game industries. The institute subcontracted game development work to Los Angeles-based Pandemic Studios.

The institute’s other training program, “Full Spectrum Command,” was released for military use in February...... The game the Institute for Creative Technologies has been working on with the CIA for about a year — at a cost of several million dollars — will let agency analysts assume the role of terror cell leaders, cell members and operatives.

“Our analysts would be accustomed to looking at the world from the perspective of the terrorists we are chasing, and learn to expect the unexpected,” CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said.

RECRUITMENT TOOL: Training aside, video games are increasingly viewed by top brass as a way to get teenagers interested in enlisting.

Yikes.

Antiwar bits: Raimondo hits back against Wall Street Journal squares who try to frame the upcoming AIPAC trial as an antisemitic exercise. Former CIA dude Philip Giraldi sez Democrats Earn Their Stripes in the War Party. Also The Waste of War and Kudos to Pelosi for Visiting Syria. The Ravings of James Woolsey. James Petras: Bush AIPAC and Palestine: The Political Economy of a Disaster. Uri Avnery: Condi in the Middle East.

More bits: Ridiculous White House spin about Pelosi in Syria. You Make Peace With Your Enemies, The Sadness of American Foreign Policy.

The Council For National Policy: the Council on Foreign Relations for fundamentalist lunatics! Check it out on DailyKos, Wikipedia, and a really lengthy two-part and rather oddly conspiratorial view of what the hell they are up to. The Deep Politics of God: The CNP, Dominionism, and the Ted Haggard Scandal, part 1 and two. While there is a ton of conspiracy fluff here, I found interesting the parts about a kind of eschaton-immanentizing neo-Gnosticism that underpins Christian Dominionism's claims to initiate the Kingdom of Christ on earth through political action on the Temporal Plane is really anti-Christian and crazy.

At the Manchester United/Roma game, Police escalation sparks soccer riots, not rival fans! Is corn safe these days, or adulterated?

Protesters try to arrest Karl Rove at American University! Bravo. Wapo on it.

Internal Crisis strikes Israel / Some of those leftists say the Palestinians lost a lot of land. What are they talking about? Bet you never saw this map before...



Naah... Continuing the last post, A bit more about Oded Yinon's schemes to break up the Arab states into mini-statelets. Is the US implementing this? A bit last year on it in Counterpunch. Neocon David Frum rambles on about how awesome Jewish espionage is.

The Israeli ambassador to El Salvador was recently found bound and gagged wearing sex toys down in Central America! In other random news, Russian-Israeli mobster-billionaire Arcadi Gaydamak was indicted by the French for selling nearly $800 million in arms to Angola's president during the civil war there. However Gaydamak is also starting an Israeli political party, the Tzedek Hevrati (Social justice) party. A poll indicated the Gaydamak-led party would receive 14 Knesset seats, drawing the vote of Haredim after Gaydamak has spend a good bit of cash there. This would skim off Shas' Knesset share to 10 seats, according to the poll, and Kadima would only get 11, Labor 14, and worst of all, Likud 27. The extreme right in NRP gets 10, and Yisrael Beitenu 7. Looks horrible!

With many recent indictments and resignations around the top of the government (including a Presidential sex scandal and the Chief of Staff's foolish Lebanon misconduct), this article by Dror Wahrman asks if Israel is falling apart internally:

Do these events really presage the collapse of the Israeli system of governance and democracy? There certainly has never been such a deep crisis of leadership in the country that touts itself as the only democracy in the Middle East. The leader of the ruling parliamentary coalition, Avigdor Yitzhaki, said so publicly a few days ago. And the Minister of Education has suggested that all schools devote special classes to the “government crisis”, so that children can speak out about what might well seem to them like a total collapse of all systems that control their lives. Suddenly the Palestinians and the Hizbullah, and even Iranian nukes, have taken a back seat: Israel does indeed seem in danger of imploding from within, at least as a viable democracy.

......The infinite variety of devices through which Israel has condoned and often actively encouraged the breaking of the rules in its drive to expropriate Palestinian occupied land against both Israeli and international law has been documented not only by journalists, scholars and observers on the left: it was also the subject of a thick government judicial document, known as the “Sasson Report,” which created something of a furore when it was handed to prime minister Ariel Sharon in March 2005. Within months, however, the Sasson Report joined the mounting pile of legal and normative documents that have been effortlessly side-stepped by the settlers and their supporters in multiple branches of the government. It was only a matter of time, inevitably, before the lawlessness of the occupied territories – and their support networks throughout the Israeli state apparatus – began infecting Israel proper.

.......So if Sharon’s reign was the epitome of success for the activism of both 1948 and 1967, the reign of his successors has been the time of collapse and of reckoning. With Sharon’s departure Israel has been left with a weak cadre of second-rate politicians, who seem even more puny in the shadow of Sharon’s towering figure and tragic exit. The corrupt practices are all there, but no higher motives can be claimed for them, and no protection from public outrage can be afforded to their perpetrators. They are simply as petty and ugly as they look. Even when Dan Chaluz, the Army Chief of Staff, resigned for reasons ostensibly linked to the failed war in Lebanon, the one act of his that will be remembered with particular public disgust is that even as he ordered the bombing of Southern Lebanon on the 12th of July 2006, he paused to instruct his stock broker to sell his portfolio; a callous, greedy mistake Sharon would never have committed.

This article also places the shady Gaydamak's public image in context. Also: Benny Morris: From Israeli ‘New Historian’ to Hardline Rightist on the leftist Tikkun Olam blog. Many of these links come from the xymphora blog, which has a lot of stuff I don't agree with (including some generalizations I find offensive), but is still interesting with some good leads.

Bolvian resistance pays off, spreading discord and native unity in South America: Check out Oil, Water and Resistance in Bolivia: The Price of Fire!

Iraq Slog: The Under-reported story of millions of Iraqi refugees. How much can Syria and Jordan handle? More on McCain shadiness. From the Guardian: In Iraq, public anger is at last translating into unity:

The success of the occupation's divide-and-rule tactics and their insistence on basing the new political and military structures on sects, religions, and ethnicities is threatening the communal cohesion that was once the country's hallmark. This is a factor in the absence of a united movement, capable of leading the struggle to end the occupation. The occupation has sown divisions where there were none and transformed existing differences into open warfare.

And is it any wonder that the long-suffering Iraqi people find themselves at an impasse. Try catching your breath after decades of brutal dictatorship, 13 years of economic sanctions and four years of an obscene war.

But even in the absence of a unified anti-occupation front, the resistance of the Iraqi people has managed to thwart the world's greatest military empire. And there are signs of a mass rejection of these sectarian forces, and the possibility that public anger will translate into the very unity that is so desperately needed. Rage against corruption and the collapse of public services is sweeping the country, including Kurdistan. Similarly, the proposed corporate occupation of Iraq, disguised as a legal document to tie the country to the oil companies for decades to come, has reminded the population of one of the main reasons for the US-led invasion. It has also reminded them what a self-respecting, sovereign Iraq looked like in 1961, when the government nationalised Iraq's lands for future oil production.

Agent Provocateur accusations against U.S. in sparking sectarian conflict: There were a couple weird stories about random Iraqis getting set up as "suicide bombers" by the U.S. It's an odd tale but interesting from the odd and kind of inscrutable site Roads to Iraq. (I would be more impressed if they got rid of the Wordpress default theme!) Also: Robert Fisk in Egypt: The US and the West want to divide you, invade you and control your oil! How about that! Here is more accusing the U.S. of agent provocateur bombings in Iraq to incite sectarian conflict. Also "The Provocateur State: Is the CIA Behind the Iraqi "Insurgents"--and Global Terrorism?" by Frank Morales and this collection of articles.

Central/South America bits: Check out NarcoNews including stuff on Oaxaca, Low-intensity war in Chiapas, the Return of La Otra ("the other"). Fidel Castro rambles on about Ethanol.

Sibel Edmonds bit on FISA: NarcoSphere had info about the Sibel Edmonds case recently published and ignored by the media - check the comments:

Edmonds’ complaint included allegations of illegal activities by Turkish organizations and their agents in the United States, and the involvement of certain elected and appointed U.S. officials in the Department of State, Pentagon, and the U.S. Congress in these activities. In its September 2005 issue, Vanity Fair ran a comprehensive piece on Edmonds’ case by reporter David Rose, in which several former and current congressional and Justice Department officials identified former House Speaker Dennis Hastert as being involved in illegal activities with the Turkish organizations and personnel targeted in FBI investigations. In addition, Rose reported: “…much of what Edmonds reportedly heard seemed to concern not state espionage but criminal activity. There was talk, she told investigators, of laundering the profits of large-scale drug deals and of selling classified military technologies to the highest bidder.” In January 2005, DOJ-OIG released an unclassified summary of its investigation into Edmonds' termination. The report concluded that Edmonds was fired for reporting serious security breaches and misconduct in the agency's translation program, and that many of her allegations were supported by convincing evidence.

Another Former Veteran FBI Counterintelligence and Espionage Specialist at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC also filed similar reports with DOJ-OIG and several congressional offices regarding violations of FISA implementation and the covering up of several espionage cases involving FBI Language Specialists and public corruption cases by the Bureau. The cases reported by this whistleblower corroborate those reported by SA Graham and Sibel Edmonds. In an interview with NSWBC investigators the former FBI Specialist, who wished to remain anonymous, stated: “…you are looking at covering up massive public corruption and espionage cases; to top that off you have major violations of FISA by the FBI Washington Field Office and HQ targeting these cases. Everyone involved has motive to cover up these reports and prevent investigation and public disclosure. No wonder they invoked the state secrets privilege in Edmonds’ case.”

William Weaver, NSWBC Senior Advisor noted that: ”These abuses of power are precisely why we must pay attention to whistleblowers. Preservation of the balance of powers between the branches of government increasingly relies on information provided by whistleblowers, especially in the face of aggressive and expanding executive power. Through illegal surveillance members of Congress and other officials may be controlled by the executive branch, thereby dissolving the matrix of our democracy. The abuse of two powers of secrecy, FISA and the state secrets privilege, are working hand in hand to subvert the Constitution. In an abominably perverse arrangement, the abuse of FISA is being covered up by abuse of the state secrets privilege. Only whistleblowers and the congressional and judicial oversight their revelations spawn can bring our system back into balance.”

See also the ACLU on the case - but its old.