Stop The Spirit of Zossen 2.0

Of course the Obama Administration punted today and delayed yet again the oft promised public release of CIA’s [sic] own internal investigation into torture and abuse of detainees. Why should this play out any different than say, don’t ask, don’t tell (DADT), defense of marriage, state secrets or a host of other broken commitments?

Imagine the scene. A 47 year old self-professed ‘change agent’ and Commander-in-Chief meets at the White House a decorated war veteran facing career termination because he happens to be gay. He looks the war hero in the face. And says without blinking or apparent irony while shaking his hand that he, the Commander-in-Chief, is helpless to sign an executive order placing DADT on hold pending congressional review. He’s helpless doncha know before some ‘generational prejudices’ in his own armed forces. (Something, oddly, his Secretary for Homeland Security can surmount and has no qualms doing, btw).

Now imagine what this towering oak, this schwerpunkt of progressive achievement is gonna say when he is stampeded by a herd of terrified GS-15s et al. braying at him for releasing yet more ’secrets’? All while a bureaucratically weak Panetta tries to ride his internal stampede by calling Rahm on the backside?

When we labelled Obama ‘Boy King’ last Fall we worried about ineptitude, inexperience and general Peanut Farmerisms. All while secretly nursing -dare we say it? — hope that he would be a principled, focused and consistently progressive president. As stabilizing antidote to the Warlord’s perhaps fatal corrosiveness. He is far and away a much more canny politician than we credited him. And far and away just as much a disappointment.

First, on the report issue one should note there are not many meta-level secrets left in it anyway. The most damning is, of course, that CIA had no legitimate purpose for using *any* enhanced interrogation techniques at any time. Why? Because it was and remained completely blind about the enemy. It had no assets. There simply was no way to evaluate whether anything said to them was true or false. Torture or abuse can not be rationalized in this situation even in McCain’s Jack Bauer wet dreams. This is CIA’s real shame. A complete and utter failure as an institution. Among many others. So on first principles of intelligence, the practice was unfounded. And another reason why Tenet helped lead CIA to its tragically deserved destruction.

Second, the entire torture matter is — as we have noted before — merely a symptom of the alarming amebiasis between the Movement’s impulses and the Permanent National Security State’s darkest Id. A state of affairs that largely remains intact to this day, circumscribed really only at the margins. We see zero sign that the Duma or Obama has the will or intention to correct matters. Until that larger and still existent threat is addressed, chasing ‘torture’ remains in many ways shadow boxing.

Third, we obviously realize as someone not unfamiliar standing in a federal court room and making closing arguments to juries that details and facts are critical for both law and justice (not always the same thing, beyond the technical equity/legal dichotomy). The ACLU and others pressing this matter are serving not only as posterity’s conscience but the only apparent goad capable of even nudging the rhetorically intoxicated Obama.

The main reasons to hide the report are institutional pride and personal liability. The first should be a non-issue; CIA is dead. Why cater to a ghost’s pride? People going to work in the Old and New Buildings and elsewhere may call themselves CIA. They believe it. The building and letterhead may proclaim it. Lord knows the ads on Facebook, Craigslist, Burger King napkins and Comedy Central blare it. But that living institution, that culture, that ethos — all of it was dying by 2001 and utterly died conclusively by 2006/7. Kappes and a handful are in a way living apparitions, concrete ectoplasmic phenomena walking along corridors serenely amid a multitude of shuffling specters.

We say again that Obama and those individuals now serving would be better off in a greenfield situation. Shut the doors. Give a deserved memorial service for all that was (for good and ill). And start over. Fresh. Let the new Huge Unwieldly Bureaucracy That Is Supposed To Protect Consumers From Financial Manipulation But Will Get Captured And Controlled By Industry Anyway use the buildings. (And to our old acquaintance, Liz Warren, we say your heart is in the right place as always but your memory of what America was is blinding you to what America has become). It’s not like the Community isn’t constructing new buildings anyway today. Panetta still will be a captive of careerists in any event, regardless of address.

Without ‘CIA’ as Banquo’s ghost both those serving and the Nation will be better off. And we can begin the process of accountability amid the deceased’s wreckage. We wrote at the time we agreed with Obama’s initial declaration of pardon for those who relied on (the patently incompetent) OLC memoranda *while* acting within their four corners. Should someone - regardless of badge color - have gone off even that immoral and illegal reservation, woe be to them. If Obama has a spine.

We suspect what many assert. That the manifestly irrational number of torture applications was indeed Stalinist — i.e., what the OGPU and later NKVD did to prisoners for the purpose of eliciting broken, false testimony for either show trials or implicating predetermined others. We say this being more than a bit familiar with the Sovs, their operational techniques and history.

In our case, it wasn’t ‘darkness at noon’, but ‘malice in the green room’ — bureaucratic torture engineered to force out any shred, any tissue of lies, to link Bin Laden to Saddam and WMD. The regime knew what Wolfowitz conceded: WMD was the weakest excuse and lowest common denominator they could find to support a war of aggression. There are no Lynndie Englands this time. But does anyone really expect Obama to do other than he has done this far on every other issue?

We wonder when Daily Kos and the others will wake up to all this. What exactly will it take before that gang looks to Obama for accountability rather than blame more convenient others? We can understand — in Kos’ own words, empathize — with the Lieberman mau mau over there. Although we have to say to that community laying down markers in the sand to the likes of hapless Harry Reid today is not a stretch. So he has 60 votes. Was he competent before with 59? (Editorial addition: Kos makes the point the next day we mistakenly thought was not front in center at DailyKos re Reid. Kudos. We need to read that community more thoroughly).

What we do hope openly is that Daily Kos and others in the netroots retain their edge, passion and organizational momentum. Obama may turn out to be a mere transitional figure. There’s no reason that the netroots still can’t take the future beyond him.

Dr Leo Strauss Constitutional Issues, Intelligence

It was the summer of 1984. Morning in America and all that. Driving across America in a convertible with no real agenda for once. Just a vacation. With me a now ultra famous ‘Republican pollster’ frequently discussed even in our modest comments section here.

We were somewhere near Iowa or perhaps Missouri. The stars were so bright we didn’t need headlights. Cool night time wind flowing and the radio blaring. And ‘Beat It’ and ‘Thriller’ were on heavy rotation. We were so happy that America could embrace Michael Jackson as simply an astounding superstar, transcending race. He was on another plane of superstardom uniting people. If you were around then, this was also the time the Right Wing Nuts thought ‘Born In The USA’ was effin’ A jingoism. But what mattered was white FM radio and MTV were finally playing (initially grudingly) a Black American genius.

That achievement alone would be a lifetime’s work. But then he and America in the late 1980s and 1990s made the journey together into the soup of disconnected memes and dada-ist commercialized narratives. Voyage to the Bottom of the Jello Bowl. Still, through all the ensuing hype and then 24 hour televised scandal, we always remembered that summer. When Michael Jackson showed that even in Reagan’s America, racial progress could be a reality.

Now we watch tonight and wonder how a rudderless society drunk on promiscuous meme generation and over consumption will deal with this ‘event’. In one sense, one could ask was he alive? Commoditized as a youngster ruthlessly, he lived his life as a brand, was manipulated by coporations as a brand, and pioneered a form of loneliness and emotional distortion just as he trail blazed his moon walk.

Tonight MSNBC has some vapid young woman on their payroll for her ‘entertainment expertise’ admonishing demos that the masses should never forget Michael Jackson’s contribution to ‘culture.’ If one could bottle the irony, it would fuel Jon Stewart’s writers’ room for a year. And if he was the first astronaut into the endless void of commercialized American meta-narratives, it’s also true then that he is not truly dead.

We are also saddened by the passing of Farah Fawcett. The Poster aside, Farah reminds us of the 1970s. True, there was Saigon, Nixon, the Khmer Rouge, the Peanut Farmer and Pet Rocks. But we prefer in many ways the values of the nation during that period aside from lack of racial justice. America had not yet begun its disintegration into mindless goo, consumers at the thrall of business models not even understood by their corporate progenitors.

Dr Leo Strauss General Aktion

We don’t have alot to add. By all accounts, a man, his family and another woman are entangled in an affair of the heart. The children are always the most vulnerable. We generally encourage such sad episodes to remain private and avoid joining the political circuses. But following Ensign, it’s hard to deny that ‘family values’ joins ’small government’, ‘fiscal responsibility’ and ‘civil liberties’ on the Wing Nut Wall Of Hypocrisy.

Sanford ensured his affair is public theater with a truly bizarre, performance art-like news conference. Following an equally astonishing 5 day vanishing act. Naturally, Tweety saw the whole thing as a statement of Sanford’s manliness (he didn’t allow some ‘damn staffer’ (Tweety’s self loathing once again) to prepare his remarks). Tweety remains one of our most reliable contrary indicators today.

Obama’s ongoing timidity despite an avalanche of Rightist ‘Family Values’ posing crumbling on national TV remains a puzzle. It makes one wonder what would ever galvanize him to action. Exactly what form of political seppuku must the Republican Party give him before he dares a mere twitch beyond rhetorical flourishes.

Dr Leo Strauss Acolytes In Aktion, Culture, Pop Culture

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Dr Leo Strauss Acolytes In Media, Foreign Policy

“We’re the United States of America. You’re just passing through.”

A quote from “Good Shepherd” that we find useful when thinking about the engorged Permanent National Security State. Our old fable about the craven people who created and eventually surrendered to a monster in illusory pursuit of security is timely as ever.

One objectively can understand the apparat’s disdain for Obama-as-political-force, Dems and that noisome rabble called the American people. Yawn. The apparat is swollen beyond recognition by hundreds of billions recklessly squandered by a cowardly Duma. Cheney/OVP’s raging paranoia nurtured the permanent apparatchiks’ darkest, basest instincts. And not a burp from the usual merry go round of ‘public intellectual’ worthies except on single issues like torture. Let alone the Duma et al.

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Dr Leo Strauss General Aktion, Intelligence

Developments are moving faster than bloviators. Mercifully. Even the usual Neocon self serving hypocrisy stumbles over itself in daily revisionism. (How does Dan Senor even show his face in public?)

We think Obama has it about right. The office of the presidency is largely ceremonial and not in the chain of command. There is little in his record to suggest Moussavi would be any less intractable re nukes, Israel or regional imperialism.

We know less about Iranian affairs than the Neocons. So if a reader has a different and more informed pov by all means please share.

Who knew Pete Hoekstra himself would become a meme?

Dr Leo Strauss Foreign Policy

Paul Krugman succinctly sums up the relationship among Fox News, Rightist Talk Radio, political extremism and now murders. He says in passing, “And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.”

Here at STSOZ we’ve discussed and diagnosed the differences between the Movement, its various strands and ‘Republicans” since 2004. The Movement is the controlling parasite astride its enfeebled Republican host. The Movement’s reaction to Obama’s victory only underscores the point.

Seemingly bright ‘mainstream media’ still do not understand the dichotomy. Or its implications. They still treat ‘Republicans’ and Democrats as equivalent political actors playing the same game by the same rules for the same prizes. As long as relative neophytes view politics in this prism, the Movement wins.

What we here at STSOZ call the Movement within the conservative base always plays a different game for a different prize. The Movement may speak in normal political talking points from ‘Republican’ institutions. Yet is is not committed to Dahl-esque pluralistic politics. It has has never sought compromise or ‘moderation’. That’s because for the Movement, politics is existential warfare. Compromise is defeat.

Because Krugman et al. fail to grasp the fundamental difference between the Movement, the former Republican Party and the Democratic Party, talking heads refer to the Movement as the ‘Republican base’. As if somehow the Movement and its Manichean zero-sum nihilism is the same as the Democratic base. Say the the Sierra Club or unions. How one can be a professional political analyst and assume a base is a base is a base. Well, we live in truly decadent (technically defined) times.

It wasn’t always like this, of course. The Republican Party as an independent actor and entity was able to keep the Movement within bounds. But after Reagan, and especially the Bush debacle in ‘92, the Movement learned to seize power on its own within and without the Republican Party. As a sign of their increased power, the Movement’s rage, paranoia, and conspiracy fever in 1993 seemed novel. By 1994 and certainly 2000 the Movement had completed its subversion of the Republican Party.

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Dr Leo Strauss Constitutional Issues, Culture

Still stunned by it and the past weekend’s long conversations with Fox News and Bush Administration personnel on their views of responsibility for public rhetoric. In the interim, as a placeholder, what Michelle Kraus says. And God’s peace and love be with you, Officer Johns.

Dr Leo Strauss General Aktion

When we heard the DGI yet again suborned some State types while we bit into a steak fajita at Chipotle Mexican Grill, liberated from Gringo McDonald’s imperialism since 2006, we mused what functionary had fallen for one of Cuba’s greatest natural resources. Maybe she was even a natural blonde.

First up, in a world with human beings, we are going to get penetrated. Sure as the Sun rises. We can manage the risk. Minimize the risk. But it’s going to happen — especially lately given the reaction to the Warlord’s Authoritarianism. On this we are serious: seeds planted in appalled reaction to Bush-Cheney may yield bitter fruit for us regarding agents in place for the coming decades. WFO has its work cut out for it.

Second, the DGI simply are first rate. For their own internal doctrine, training and culture. But also because they understand how to push in this case American buttons. They also understand that American techno-fetishism remains undimmed, especially the so-called box. As you know, having watched both “Chuck” on NBC and possibly a Bond flick, the ‘box’ is really nothing more than a series of galvanic skin response measurements along with other biologic stress recorders. What calls itself CIA today and others still swear by the whole thing. To our ultimate loss.

In the old days, ever wander into a facility and noticed piles of change around soda machines or on the floor? Alot easier to do and be able to say ‘no’ to stealing at the office and not worry about a sweaty guilty flashback to that Mountain Dew you scrounged coming back to bite you in the ass because you get a crappy read on what should have been a pass. Not entirely apocryphal. Now you’re at FSI studying Urdu while it gets ‘cleared up.’ Better today, but the whole process still largely governs by fear and is art, not science, at its best.

Unfortunately for the High Priests some individuals and even whole ethnic elements have different response patterns. Advocates deny it, but the facts are that some Latin personalities for a variety of reasons seem able to defeat the box. The DGI has kicked CIA’s ass time and time again by sending people whom CIA tested, passed, trusted and of course we got burned big time. We are not talking about small little ops. Over decades this has been going on. It’s a Warners Brothers cartoon, folks. Some slavic personalities are also able to manage their stress reactions and continue to give false positives. And then there are mediocrities like Ames. . . But the Cult of Box makes Apple enthusiasts look like Walmart zomboids.

Kendall went to State ostensibly to avoid the box. We knew him tangentially back in the 1980s. For personal reasons unrelated to this blog already aware of his purely academic limitations, we largely stayed clear. Apparently, he had some private epiphany in the 1978 time frame. Let me emphasize that to distinguish what the major papers are reporting as specific dates: *timeframe*.

Learning he betrayed the country for some contrived love for Fidel remains unconvincing at this remove although it was 1978 with ‘Hey, Hey, LBJ’ still echoing in the air and Khmer Rouge Chic affectation still rampant. Nonetheless, Fidel has, um, vast quantities of Cuban ‘natural resources’. For whatever reason, even if not the brightest bulb around, Kendall had to know the DGI of all the Soviet Bloc related services ranked near the top at false flag operations. Perhaps other shoes may drop. We will close with one thought about that. If we’re wrong, and it was all truly a simple awakening to the joys of building socialism, ell that boy just ain’t right, as they say. Perhaps, if Plato takes his case and the usual deal fall through, he may offer creative extenuating circumstances.

PLATO: Your Honor, Defendant respectfully asks that Exhibit 1959(c) be entered into evidence.

JUDGE: What is it, Counsel?

PLATO: This is the K-Tel Top 10 List For 1978. THIS on the radio. Day after day, week after week, haunting my client and his wife, Your Honor. As they started promising careers to defend this Nation against her enemies. May I?

JUDGE: Proceed.

PLATO: The Bee Gees, “Stayin Alive”. Then, Debbie Boone, “You Light Up My Life”, followed again by The Bee Gees, “How Deep Is Your Love” . . . (turn to US Prosecutor). Even a man of iron will would break and weep like a child. I could go on . . . and all in heavy rotation.

US Prosecutor: Oh God, I had no idea. How could we have known?

JUDGE: Counsel, is the Court being offered ‘The Bee Gees Defense”?

Levity in an otherwise bleak situation. Now there is one item I will add from personal background so must do so very carefully. My opacity here is not based on games but a desire to inform while being respectful and careful. Myers very, very, very early on had an issue which caused certain people to propose denying him a security clearance. This would be in the 1977/78 time frame. This is not speculation. It was unrelated to ‘Cuba’. And he eventually did get his clearance.

The matter was not box related (his handlers more than he, we suspect, determined he would be wise to stay clear of the off kilter (because of JJA and Church/ Pike Committees) but still formidable Agency. Besides, the DGI finds mid-level assets useful. CIA then and what calls itself CIA now were and are heavily compartmentalized. State, by comparison, is a Doris Day pillow party.

Like a legal matter, fact patterns are essential, especially dates and time. And my memory is not what it was once was. But his issue was in the 1977/78 period. I can’t say for certain which even plausibly could be construed as even a potential chicken or egg. If there is any causal relationship at all.

But am sipping coffee Sunday morning, wondering. And shuddering at Plato’s revelations . . . someone call Turley and get the Spanish judge.

Dr Leo Strauss Foreign Policy, Intelligence