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Gary Edwards

Daniel Pearl and the Normalization of Evil - or, Carter's an Idiot! - WSJ.com - 0 views

online.wsj.com/...SB123362422088941893.html

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shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Feb 09 - Cached
  • Bill Moyers was quick to lend Hamas legitimacy as a "resistance" movement, together with honorary membership in PBS's imaginary "cycle of violence." In his Jan. 9 TV show, Mr. Moyers explained to his viewers that "each [side] greases the cycle of violence, as one man's terrorism becomes another's resistance to oppression." He then stated -- without blushing -- that for readers of the Hebrew Bible "God-soaked violence became genetically coded." The "cycle of violence" platitude allows analysts to empower terror with the guise of reciprocity, and, amazingly, indict terror's victims for violence as immutable as DNA.
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Feb 09
     
    But the clearest endorsement of terror as a legitimate instrument of political bargaining came from former President Jimmy Carter. In his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," Mr. Carter appeals to the sponsors of suicide bombing. "It is imperative that the general Arab community and all significant Palestinian groups make it clear that they will end the suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism when international laws and the ultimate goals of the Road-map for Peace are accepted by Israel." Acts of terror, according to Mr. Carter, are no longer taboo, but effective tools for terrorists to address perceived injustices. Mr. Carter's logic has become the dominant paradigm in rationalizing terror. When asked what Israel should do to stop Hamas's rockets aimed at innocent civilians, the Syrian first lady, Asma Al-Assad, did not hesitate for a moment in her response: "They should end the occupation." In other words, terror must earn a dividend before it is stopped.
Paul Merrell

Torture Report Revives Rogue Image the CIA Has Sought to Erase - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...e-cia-has-sought-to-erase.html

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shared by Paul Merrell on 12 Dec 14 - No Cached
  • This week’s Senate report on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation methods is neither the first nor the worst time the agency has run afoul of its congressional overseers. Four decades ago, a series of hearings on Capitol Hill helped reveal that the CIA-run Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, working in concert with the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, had “neutralized” -- killed, detained or recruited -- as many as 80,000 people suspected of being members of the Communist Vietcong and used gang rape, beatings and electric shock as well as waterboarding to interrogate prisoners. Then in 1975 and 1976, a Senate panel took a broader look into the dark side of the Central Intelligence Agency and found that the nation’s spies seemed to have few limits, with covert activities that included plotting to assassinate foreign leaders, domestic spying and LSD experiments on unwitting subjects.
  • The Church committee, the investigative panel named for Democratic chairman Frank Church of Idaho, published 14 reports on CIA activities, including efforts to kill leaders in Cuba, Chile, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Dominican Republic and Vietnam; a secret program to open Americans’ mail; and a mind-control program called MKULTRA
  • It led to creation of the current congressional intelligence committees to guard against CIA abuses and resulted in an executive order by Republican President Gerald Ford banning assassinations of foreign leaders.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Nevertheless, the new findings are a blow to the agency Brennan leads. “The Senate intel report is right up there with the Church committee in the scathing criticism of the agency,” said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University in Washington.
  • Obama has defended CIA Director John Brennan, who this week said that the agency’s methods produced “intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives.” Brennan said the report was wrong to suggest the CIA “systematically and intentionally misled” Congress and the White House.
  • This image of the CIA supposedly having run amok and having done all this torture stuff on its own will stick with a large part of the American public,” said Paul Pillar, a former senior CIA analyst who had a 28-year career in the intelligence community. “The idea that the CIA has been lying to the president, lying to the Justice Department, lying to the Congress, and even lying to itself about how effective these programs were -- that’s the real show-stopper in the Senate intel report,” Blanton said. “That’s really the most remarkable piece of it.” The Church committee, despite the breadth of its review, “did not produce this kind of damning indictment using the CIA’s own words and own evidence,” Blanton said.
  • Pillar said the reaction to the CIA’s interrogation methods reflects a public mood change from the “fears and emotions” immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. Similarly, Americans at first accepted the internment of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a policy since considered a black mark in American history, he said. “The CIA is where the people who are on the bottom end of the political process happen to work, but this was a much bigger process where the bigger story was how the American mood, as expressed by the public and our political leaders, has changed significantly since the first year or two after 9/11, when there was much more willingness to compromise long-held values in the name of American security,” Pillar said.
  • In 1984, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Barry Goldwater, an Arizona Republican, wrote an angry “Dear Bill” letter to CIA Director William Casey amid reports that the CIA was covertly involved in mining Nicaraguan harbors. “I’m pissed off,” Goldwater wrote, complaining that Casey had misled the committee on an action that amounted to an act of war. The panel’s Democratic vice chairman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, quit the committee as the “most emphatic way to protest” the Reagan administration’s failure to inform lawmakers.
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