No comment necessary. Well done.
If you’re the U.S. military and you killed 22 people while intentionally bombing a Doctors Without Border hospital in Afghanistan, what do you do next?
First, you deny all requests for an independent investigation. Check.
Second, you go to the scene of the war crime and destroy evidence. Check mate.
From NBC News:
A U.S. tank “destroyed potential evidence” by forcing its way onto the ruined site of a hospital bombed by American forces in Afghanistan, the charity said.
Doctors Without Borders, which ran the facility in Kunduz, said the tank’s “unannounced and forced entry” through the gates had also frightened staff and damaged property.
Besides sharing my own personal insight into the goings on in this crazy world we live in, the other primary purpose of Liberty Blitzkrieg is to highlight certain stories that readers may have missed or overlooked while dealing with all the ins and outs of everyday life.
In a perfect world, every American would read the eight articles that comprise the Intercept’s drone investigation published earlier today. Unfortunately, this is simply never going to happen. As such, I went ahead and read them, and what follows are some particularly juicy excerpts that will hopefully inspire readers to investigate further.
The reason I think these articles are so important, is not because they are based on intel leaked by an additional whistleblower (i.e., not Snowden), but because you can’t read the information without concluding quite simply that the U.S. empire is completely and totally out of control. That the plethora of American military adventures overseas are not only not making us safer, but are in fact making us far more vulnerable.
This information will be presented by providing the title of each article with a link, as well as author attribution, followed by relatively brief excepts. I hope you find all of this as interesting and concerning as I did.
1. The Assassination Complex by Jeremy Scahill
Welcome to our brave new world.
From Reuters:
Israeli industrial designer Kobi Shikar has come up with the concept of a parcel delivery drone that will never get off the ground – and that’s just fine with him.
The Transwheel Delivery Drone is a sensor-packed motorized unicycle that Shikar says could be an earthbound alternative to Amazon’s futuristic plans to use drone multicopters to deliver packages to your front door.
Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, the younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. Talbot offers a portrait of a black-and-white Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy. Dulles—who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats—falls firmly in the latter camp.
But what I was really trying to do was a biography on the American power elite from World War II up to the 60s. That was the key period when the national security state was constructed in this country, and where it begins to overshadow American democracy. It’s almost like Game of Thrones to me, where you have the dynastic struggles between these power groups within the American system for control of the country and the world…
Absolutely. The surveillance state that Snowden and others have exposed is very much a legacy of the Dulles past. I think Dulles would have been delighted by how technology and other developments have allowed the American security state to go much further than he went. He had to build a team of cutthroats and assassins on the ground to go around eliminating the people he wanted to eliminate, who he felt were in the way of American interests. He called them communists. We call them terrorists today. And of course the most controversial part of my book, I’m sure, will be the end, where I say there was blowback from that. Because that killing machine in some way was brought back home.
– From the Mother Jones article: You Think the NSA Is Bad? Meet Former CIA Director Allen Dulles
Many of you will be intimately familiar with the name Allen Dulles. Younger readers, of my generation or below, will be far less so. It is precisely because the youth of this nation remain so ignorant of the nefarious characters in America’s past, that David Talbot’s recently published book, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government, is so incredibly important.
Mr. Talbot has been recently conducting invaluable interviews about the book with various media organizations. One of the best I’ve seen is with Mother Jones. Here’s some of what he had to say about America’s longest serving CIA director:
No one who knows him thinks he wants to weaken the regulatory agency he has been chosen to lead. But he has deeper ties to the pharmaceutical industry than any FDA commissioner in recent memory, and some public health advocates question whether his background could tilt him in the direction of an industry he would be in charge of supervising.
– From the All-Gov article: Obama’s Nominee for FDA Chief Scrutinized for Ties to Big Pharma
Nothing from the above quote should surprise anyone. One of the hallmarks of the Obama Administration, has been his penchant for consistently surrounding himself with some of the biggest cronies America has to offer. From choosing Tim Geithner as Secretary of the Treasury, to the coronation of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, the list is almost endless.
Of course, it’s not just his cabinet choices that have justifiably raised eyebrows, but also his nominees to head various agencies, seemingly for the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo and protecting “elite” criminals. No such choice was more blatant than Mary Jo White to head the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). As I noted before she even worked a single day on the job: Meet Mary Jo White: The Next SEC Chief and a Guaranteed Wall Street Patsy.
This prediction proved to be accurate in spades, as we learned in subsequent years. See:
If you’re like me, and a brief attempt to watch last night’s Democratic debate was thwarted in less than thirty minutes due to the relentless and unwatchable heaping pile of bullshit that it was, never fear. ReasonTV has complied the debate’s three best and worst moments.
An under-the-radar startup funded by billionaire Eric Schmidt has become a major technology vendor for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, underscoring the bonds between Silicon Valley and Democratic politics.
The Groundwork, according to Democratic campaign operatives and technologists, is part of efforts by Schmidt—the executive chairman of Google parent-company Alphabet—to ensure that Clinton has the engineering talent needed to win the election. And it is one of a series of quiet investments by Schmidt that recognize how modern political campaigns are run, with data analytics and digital outreach as vital ingredients that allow candidates to find, court, and turn out critical voter blocs.
There is also another gap in play: The shrinking distance between Google and the Democratic Party. Former Google executive Stephanie Hannon is the Clinton campaign’s chief technology officer, and a host of ex-Googlers are currently employed as high-ranking technical staff at the Obama White House. Schmidt, for his part, is one of the most powerful donors in the Democratic Party—and his influence does not stem only from his wealth, estimated by Forbes at more than $10 billion.
According to campaign finance disclosures, Clinton’s campaign is the Groundwork’s only political client. Its employees are mostly back-end software developers with experience at blue-chip tech firms like Netflix, Dreamhost, and Google.
– From the excellent Quartz article: The Stealthy, Eric Schmidt-backed Startup that’s Working to Put Hillary Clinton in the White House
The following article from Quartz is fascinating, important and extremely troubling. It zeros in on a company you’ve probably never heard of called “Groundwork,” a startup backed by Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt. The sole purpose of the company appears to be to get Hillary Clinton elected President. What is so concerning about the company is that it appears to be little more than a clever way to get around the already extraordinarily loose campaign finance rules.
For instance, we all know about the rise of Super PACs and how they essentially allow unlimited funding to political candidates. The one limitation on their power is they are not allowed to directly coordinate with the political campaigns themselves. Enter “Groundwork,” which has seemingly found an exploitable loophole to this meager restriction. As such, the Quartz writers insightfully ask: “Are startups the new Super PACs?” It appears so.
From Quartz:
This is interesting.
From the Guardian:
Survivors of CIA torture have sued the contractor psychologists who designed one of the most infamous programs of the post-9/11 era.
In an extraordinary step, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen now face a federal lawsuit for their role in convincing the CIA to subject terror suspects to mock drowning, painful bodily contortions, sleep and dietary deprivation and other methods long rejected by much of the world as torture.
For more on Mitchell and Jessen, I suggest reading: Revelations from the Torture Report – CIA Lies, Nazi Methods and the $81 Million No-Bid Torture Contract.
You know things are not well in the world when you hear claims that the Prime Minister of Great Britain had sex with a dead pig’s head and you barely flinch. That’s because sexual relations with farm animal carcasses simply pales in comparison to the man’s disastrous, authoritarian political positions.
In his latest act of verbal diarrhea, David Cameron has gone on the offensive…against Twitter. Little did he know it, but he’s actually quite late in his perceived “insight” into those who use the social media platform. For instance, it was over two years ago when Saudi authorities made their position quite clear. Here’s a excerpt from the post, Saudi Religious Police Chief Goes on the Attack…Against Twitter: