Monday Reads

Good Morning!!

I’m heading back to the Boston area this morning, so this will be brief. I’ll be on the road for two days, but I’ll try to check in when I stop for the night. So let’s see what’s happening out there.

Here’s a hysterically funny story: Former Bush/Cheney mouthpiece Judy Miller says Julian Assange is a “bad journalist.”

A former New York Times reporter assailed for her incorrect reports about Iraq’s purported weapons of mass destruction is criticizing Julian Assange for being a “bad journalist.”

Judith Miller took on the WikiLeaks founder during an appearance on Fox News Watch Saturday, arguing that Assange was a bad journalist “because he didn’t care at all about attempting to verify the information that he was putting out, or determine whether or not it hurt anyone.”

For many critics of the war in Iraq, that claim is likely to set off irony alarms. Miller has become famous for being the author of a 2002 New York Times article — now debunked — suggesting that Saddam Hussein had an active nuclear weapons program.

Miller now writes for Newsmax.

The Air Force has a new surveillance toy, according to the Washington Post.

This winter, the Air Force is set to deploy to Afghanistan what it says is a revolutionary airborne surveillance system called Gorgon Stare, which will be able to transmit live video images of physical movement across an entire town.

The system, made up of nine video cameras mounted on a remotely piloted aircraft, can transmit live images to soldiers on the ground or to analysts tracking enemy movements. It can send up to 65 different images to different users; by contrast, Air Force drones today shoot video from a single camera over a “soda straw” area the size of a building or two.

With the new tool, analysts will no longer have to guess where to point the camera, said Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. “Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.”

Isn’t it interesting how the government can find the money for exotic military toys, but they need to cut back on the safety net for old and disabled people?

At Antiwar.com, Scott Horton interviewed Bryan Bender of the Boston Globe on

the very high percentage of retired high-ranking US military officers going to work for defense contractors; the Pentagon’s limited oversight on conflicts of interest that seems based on the assumption retired generals have an unshakable code of ethics; how private equity firms – specializing in defense industry investments – give compensation to rent-a-general firms for privileged information about Pentagon contracts; why Eisenhower should have gone with the military-industrial-Congressional complex version of his famous farewell address; and how retired Army Gen. Jack Keane – on behalf of AM General – helped overturn the Army’s decision to repair instead of replace Humvees.

Give it a listen.

Also at Antiwar.com, there’s an article by Kevin Carson on why Bradley Manning is a hero.

Manning, like many young soldiers, joined up in the naive belief that he was defending the freedom of his fellow Americans. When he got to Iraq, he found himself working under orders “to round up and hand over Iraqi civilians to America’s new Iraqi allies, who he could see were then torturing them with electrical drills and other implements.” The people he arrested, and handed over for torture, were guilty of such “crimes” as writing “scholarly critiques” of the U.S. occupation forces and its puppet government. When he expressed his moral reservations to his supervisor, Manning “was told to shut up and get back to herding up Iraqis.”

The people Manning saw tortured, by the way, were frequently the very same people who had been tortured by Saddam: Trade unionists, members of the Iraqi Freedom Congress, and other freedom-loving people who had no more use for Halliburton and Blackwater than they had for the Baath Party.

For exposing his government’s crimes against humanity, Manning has spent seven months in solitary confinement – a torture deliberately calculated to break the human mind.

[….]

He’s impaired the U.S. government’s ability to lie us into wars where thousands of Americans and tens of thousands of foreigners are murdered.

He’s impaired its ability to use such wars – under the guise of promoting “democracy” — to install puppet governments like the Coalition Provisional Authority, that will rubber stamp neoliberal “free trade” agreements (including harsh “intellectual property” provisions written by the proprietary content industries) and cut special deals with American crony capitalists.

[….]

Let’s get something straight. Bradley Manning may be a criminal by the standards of the American state. But by all human standards of morality, the government and its functionaries that Manning exposed to the light of day are criminals. And Manning is a hero of freedom for doing it.

At Corrente, there’s a great post by Letsgetitdone: Fairy Tales of the Coming State of the Union: The Government Is Running Out Of Money

In “All Together Now: There Is No Deficit/Debt Problem,” I warned against the message calling for deficit reduction that the President will probably deliver in his State of the Union Address next month. I argued that there was no deficit/debt problem and that it is essential to reject the President’s framing of the issue and move on cope with the real problems of the economy and American Society. That piece stands alone. But I also think it would be useful to examine each of the specific fairy tales the President is likely to tell in making his case justifying austerity measures which are certain to be counter-productive. This post focuses on one these fairy tales; the narrative that the Government is running out of money.

Check it out.

Finally, Crooks & Liars has the video of Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press threatening to shut down the government until he gets cuts in Social Security.

As Mike Malloy used to say, “have I told you lately how much I hate these people?”

So, what are you reading this morning?