Iran’s nuclear bomb

At Truthout, Retired Republican House and Senate staffer Mike Lofgren indicates that he is seeing so much toxic warmongering aimed at Iran these days that it makes George W. Bush look like a pacifist:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran. . . . Whether it is sources in Tel Aviv, sources in Washington, or both, that are feeding Iran stories to the US news media is unclear. Whoever they may be, they are playing much of the press - The Washington Post and CBS News are standout examples - like a Stradivarius. In Pentagon-speak, this is known as "prepping the psychological battlefield."

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Indiscriminate drone attacks by the U.S. termed “war crimes”

Glenn Greenwald takes a look at the disturbing reports concerning Afghanistan drone attacks by the United States, suggesting a pattern to many of the attacks:

the U.S. first kills people with drones, then fires on the rescuers and others who arrive at the scene where the new corpses and injured victims lie.
Experts quoted by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism conclude "targeting rescuers and funeral attendees is patently illegal and almost certainly constitutes war crimes."

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News media is uncritically beating the drums for war against Iran

Haven't they learned anything? America's warmongering politicians know that they need only rehash lies from the past to convince America's gullible and lazy mass media to beat the drums for more war. Glenn Greenwald has the headlines. [Epilogue Feb 4, 2012: Now the media is rapidly spreading the highly misleading story that Iran is doubling its military budget, painting it as a threat to the United States.]

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ACLU sues Obama for assassination secrecy

Glenn Greenwald reports:

The ACLU yesterday filed a lawsuit against various agencies of the Obama administration — the Justice and Defense Departments and the CIA — over their refusal to disclose any information about the assassination of American citizens. In October, the ACLU filed a FOIA request demanding disclosure of the most basic information about the CIA’s killing of 3 American citizens in Yemen: Anwar Awlaki and Samir Khan, killed by missiles fired by a U.S. drone in September, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, killed by another drone attack two weeks later. The ACLU’s FOIA request sought merely to learn the legal and factual basis for these killings — meaning: tell us what legal theories you’ve adopted to secretly target U.S. citizens for execution, and what factual basis did you have to launch these specific strikes? The DOJ and CIA responded not only by refusing to provide any of this information, but refused even to confirm if any of the requested documents exist; in other words, as the ACLU put it yesterday, “these agencies are saying the targeted killing program is so secret that they can’t even acknowledge that it exists.” That refusal is what prompted yesterday’s lawsuit (in December, the New York Times also sued the Obama administration after it failed to produce DOJ legal memoranda “justifying” the assassination program in response to a FOIA request from reporters Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, but the ACLU’s lawsuit seeks disclosure of both the legal and factual bases for these executions).

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Free market war

Given that those of us who oppose America's wars can't stop these wars no matter who we vote for, it's time to privatize these wars. It's time to use the good old free market approach touted by so many American warmongerers. I propose that we pass a law requiring that all American wars must be completely paid for--no more wars on the American credit card. Here's a second new proposed rule: Only those citizens who are in favor of starting any new war (or continuing any existing war) will be forced to pay for it/them. Let's see how this new system would work in the case of the War in Afghanistan, which is costing the U.S. $2B/week (= $100B/year). Let's assume that there are 250,000,000 adults in the U.S and that 1/3 of those American adults (about 83 million) want to continue with this absurd military action in Afghanistan. Since I can't stop that war regardless of how I vote, I should at least not be made to pay for it. Those seeking to continue that war would be forced to pay all expenses related to that war. $100 billion divided by83 million = $1,204 per year for each hawkish American adult. That's $100 per month for each of you warmongers, and you will be made to pay in advance in this fantasy approach to funding America's wars. [More . . .]

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