Leaked Rumsfeld memos: "Link Iraq to Iran" and "keep elevating the threat"

Hi NikitaB. You say,

I think this is an example of how one should NOT seed on NewsVine or anywhere else.

How would you suggest I should have seeded this article from the WaPo? What exactly was twisted? I thought seeding around here was by definition handpicking a "teaser" from an article to lead, and then linking to the original where one can immerse oneself in the full context. Constructive discussion ought to ensue. I could be wrong. I mean, my "teaser" was simply the first paragraph of the article. Easy.

You are running a story based off of selective quotations and gross mischaracterizations from a handful of memos...Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn wrote in an e-mail...

Hey, I wouldn't expect anything less from a loyal aide.

I like this story because they are Rumsfeld's own words. Not government-backed translations of second-hand information on a discussion forum; this is the government itself speaking as the primary source. Goodness gracious, Rumsfeld likes to speak.

I would give a lot more credence to the point about mischaracterization and out-of-context placements if this were a rare instance of PR-over-Truth from an otherwise above-board, transparent government. This is, however, very far from the case. Rumsfeld's snowflakes are not a revelation of something new - they are more confirmation of what we have already learned (updated for Iran) about official manipulation and lies. If you have not realized this yet, I don't know where your attention has been the last 10,000 years - especially these last 7...

NikitaB, I don't know why you jumped on the Muslim physical labor bigotry issue. I did not emphasize that, nor did I comment on it anywhere (and neither did anyone else, for that matter). The seed title readeth: "Link Iraq to Iran" and "keep elevating the threat" and I went on to focus on deception re: spurious "links" and deception as official policy - as Iraq, so Iran.

But thanks for bringing up the Muslim physical labor bigotry issue too. Shiki's comments are spot on. The fuller context of that snowflake exposes Rummy's (and the establishment he serves) bigoted hypocrisy even more so. Yes, he is a bigot through and through, though that was not really the point of this seed, which is that we are being lied into another illegal, immoral attack. But you really can't see the bigotry or hypocrisy in his statements? No? How about their deeds...

How about the gorgeous irony of the slave-labor that was called in to build the new American Disneyland Embassy for Terminators in Baghdad?!

I don't see how these snowflakes show Rumsfeld and his buddies as short-sighted, actually. Deception requires an element of planning. So, I agree with you that (t)he(y) is/are not short-sighted (but probably for different reasons) as most liberal critics think. My studied take is that these guys are into long-term economic planning. I am not a member of the "incompetence" theory club, or a purveyor of the liberal "failure in Iraq" meme. The chaos and disaster and ethnic cleansing has served them well and has been a stunning success...up until recently. Now, much is threatening their plans as Iraqi factions are starting to unite politically against the occupation and the precious US-written oil law is on the skids. Long-term planning and does not equal wisdom or guarantee success, but I wouldn't say they are short-sighted.

Thanks.

For the record, I don't indulge in the Bush=Hitler cartoon. Though I do have to wonder what you would accept as acceptable discourse.

It is odd that you find my position to be fundamentally unacceptable, detached from reality, and offensive rather than the positions of Rumsfeld and this administration.

"Link Iraq to Iran" is not good for anyone, just as "sweep it all up" and "link Iraq to al qaeda and WMD" has not been good for any of us, anywhere.

Pamela, I don't think there was ever a time (let's say since 1945) that elements of the overt US government were not well-partnered with covert criminal elements, which makes those public officials who choose to collaborate criminal too. I think the history of the US imperialism post-WW2 bears this out. By way of a recent example, Sibel Edmond's limited disclosures thus far indicate that the criminality of the government is a) bi-partisan; b) transnational (treasonous, if you will); and d) spans administrations. Iran-Contra is another case in point. The execution of the Vietnam war is another. Pinochet. Drug-running. MKULTRA. COINTELPRO. Operation Mockingbird. Plan Colombia. The list goes on and on.

I think the crimminal element of power has been steadily undermining our government for years. The groundwork was laid and the conditions were ripe for the neocons (the militant wing of the neoliberals) to take the stage. I see, for example, the neoliberal war on Yugoslavia as a test run, a precursor to the neocon destruction of Afghanistan and Iraq.

In the case of these last 7 years, I think what we are seeing is not a "seizing" but rather a "granting" by the greater American establishment of temporary wilding rights to a known quantity (neocons, chickenhawks, W & Cheney etc) in order to get the dirty business done more quickly (oil, insane profits, geo-strategic leverage, privatization of the commons, de jure and de facto dismantling of the constitution, increased surveillance, funneling of wealth upwards). They are a known quantity because they worked on the inside during the 70's and 80's, and then advertised themselves & their services loudly throughout the 90's. The greater establishment needed a bunch of berserkers to shamelessly implement the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism; they needed a gang that would also gladly take the fall and absorb the public backlash - if there should be an effective backlash.

That said, we cannot assume "the establishment" is a harmonized, monolithic entity. Like all secretive, cynical ruling classes, they have factions and they fight and they kill. Sacrifices sometimes have to be made to serve longer-term interests. Differing means to similar ends.

Unfortunately, crime is politics by other means and is enjoying a hey day.

Pamela, S & B is a good example of one reference point we can use to discern (some of) the patterns of covert elite power. They are bad dudes, and that is a powerful, rotten little outfit - but I would not say they are the only reference, or that the patterns of corruption are necessarily clear. Well, the patterns of corruption are clear, but how they are arranged and play out I find to be rather complicated, actually.

I don't really totalize S&B or see these these rich white boys as some kind of all-powerful puppet-master occult fraternity. There are so many other groups and overlapping interests besides S & B, and they all kind of merge at the macro, surface level as the corporate capitalist system, or corporate financial globalization.

I agree that these secret (occult or otherwise) power networks are an under-acknowledged force in politics and international "relations" (affecting our daily lives on every level) which need to be taken a heck of a lot more seriously. Italians, for example, are way ahead of Americans (African-Americans not included) in this regard. Maybe it is because Italy was repeatedly terrorized (with the help of the CIA) by a covert, fascist, parallel state apparatus throughout the 20th century in order to stifle increasing socialist organization and communist sympathies. That was after their overt fascists were removed from overt power in WW2. Search terms: P2, Lucio Gelli, Gladio, Daniel Ganser. Maybe it is because they also house the Vatican. Maybe because they understand how mafias work. They saw how elements in the holy Vatican, for example, conspired with a fascist finance circuit in the P2 / Calvi / Vatican / Banco Ambrosiano scandal. Today we see the Vatican honor fascist collaborators in Spain. Overt and covert together again. Italians don't ridicule or cringe from such talk - because they know it is real; it is a respected part of political discourse (unless you are a fascist Italian!) Journalists and some brave public servants in the Italian parliament and legal system did their job in Italy. More to be done. Turkey has also officially acknowledged their own deep state, though nothing has been done about it.

I like Peter Dale Scott's take on the relation of overt and covert forces in deep politics, which would acknowledge the role of S & B in power politics and would incorporate secret societies into the analysis, but would avoid unified theories of hidden power or crowning any one group as the capstone:

Many more people, convinced that overt politics is not the true arena of power, postulate a kind of satanic reflection of it. Thus they talk reactively of some unified "shadow government," "invisible government," or secret team."

Unified 'shadow' models are, in my experience, usually based less on research than on reactions to the resistance and denial which have been observed with regard to sensitive topics, such as political assassinations in this country, or the CIA, or elite institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, or the drug traffic. The moment one begins to gather extensive data on any one aspect of deep politics...it is only too easy to pass from one extreme reception of it, the systematic underacknowledgement of its power, to its opposite, and to conclude that one has found the key to all political mysteries. Actually, shadow-government theories, by their very totalizing, do not seriously challenge the most sensitive feature of the conventional power paradigm. This is the belief that overt politics and deep politics have little to do with each other, a belief in which the establishment media, hyperstructuralist marxists, and even shadow-government conspiratorialists, all paradoxically concur.

The deep-politics paradigm, in contrast, attempts to go beyond all such restricted, unified explanations. It is essentially an extension of conventional political investigative methods to consideration of a much larger field of evidence, including, but not restricted to, the unacknowledged processes and events which conventional decorum excludes from our current 'political science' textbooks. By thus examining overt events in this larger field of deep political arrangements, it breaks down the distinction between overt and covert power, and thereby hopefully avoids the frequently asked question: Which forces are in control, the public or the shadow powers?

Winsomecowboy is right in saying "starve the beast" by

make[ing] the painful and difficult transition back to being citizens rather than consumers..

But where does that leave us once the beast is starved and the machine jammed? The answer may depend on the means we employ. We got to be presenting our alternative future in how we actually go about the starvation. But first...

What has failed here, in my view, is not human rationality itself, but that imperfect ideological crystallization of it which we call the Enlightenment. Both Marx and Weber, following Hegel, hypostatized rationality and neglected competing factors in history. Others, acting in the opposite direction, have hypostatized the irrational, or (in the case of the later Freud) the return of the repressed.

The defect here has not been that of rationality, but only of the historic ideologies put forward in reason's name...I propose that in the same spirit of Dante or the Tao Te Ching, we should move instead toward a deeper Enmindment that respects the truths of darkness, as well as those of light.

Deep political analysis is one specific attempt as enmindment in the political arena. It grounds the processes for political change in a larger context less amenable to control, not to reject the inspiring vision of change, but to render it more possible...

-- Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the death of JFK

These rare little gifts from the mainstream press (mere crumbs from the internecine battle between ruling class factions) can aid our political and historical enmindment while we keep the WaPo and others in their proper context as servants of the corporate establishment, both covert and overt.

Yes. I think the timing and the scapegoating aspects of all of the leaking going on merits serious consideration. I think a lot of the leaking is the blood being let as the various competing factions of the ruling class turn on each other.

Turns out, it is our job to keep former office-holders linked to history - and to past, present and future office-holders - since the WaPo and other mainstream press can not or will not do it. Thanks Newsvine and MSNBC!!