Rhinocrisy

This is the video of the year. Spread it:

Via Matt Taibbi.

About a week ago, the man convicted of blowing up Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988 was released by the Scottish government and sent back home to Libya on account of his terminal prostate cancer, declared a free, but not an innocent, man.

Readers of this blog^* are expected by yours truly to be savvier than most, so I trust that you’re all at least marginally aware of the argument that Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was not the bomber, and that Libya was in fact in no way involved, but that, because they were a more convenient scape than the likely perpetrators hiding in Syria or Iran, and because most Westerners tend to squint when looking at Muslims enough that a Libyan is just as good as a Persian to them, and because America was about to go to war with Iraq and needed to keep certain relations (especially with Syria) relatively friendly, al-Megrahi was made to be that which he was not.

If you’re not, you might want to read this piece by Hugh Miles in the Independent on the subject. Unfortunately, he’ll probably have no further opportunity to clear his name, but it helps to know.

^* If ye still remain after my especially protracted silence - I promise to get back on it in the near future!

The new Obama administration White House website is very snazzy, and apparently done by the same folks who designed his campaign website. I can’t help but feel a little disappointed, though. One of the things I loved most about the Bush website was the easy availability of press briefings. Transcripts were available almost as soon as the briefing was finished. By contrast, the Obama website has nothing, yet. Maybe that will change.

Anyway, to business: Gibbs’ response regarding drone attacks on Waziristan/Pakistan:

Q Exactly. There is skepticism among Republicans whether or not this could happen. What kind of reassurances is he giving? Then, on Pakistan, was he consulted before the strike, or did he consult with Pakistan on that?

MR. GIBBS: Well, let me take your Pakistan question first. As you know, I’m not going to comment on those matters.

What the fuck? If this is “transparent”, I’m going to go replace my windshield glass with corrugated cardboard.^*

^* I just realized I don’t have a windshield glass!^†
† No, it wasn’t stolen. I don’t have a car.^‡
‡ No, my car wasn’t stolen. I never bought one.

I highly recommend this article by Michael Klare on the subject of America’s oil dependence and its effect on our superpower status. The best summary of it is in this calculation:
19 Mbbl/day * $120/bbl * 365 days/year * 0.65 = $540 billion per year spent on oil imports. That’s about on par with the Pentagon’s budget and about 4% of US GDP.

(Via ATR)

So, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. But by whom?

To an American the answer is obvious: al-Qaeda did it. This is the assumption of Anthony Zinni, former CENTCOM:

Zinni rattled off reasons for al-Qaeda’s wanting Bhutto dead, including her commitment to democracy, her secular views, the blowback it will create for Musharraf, and her gender. Beyond that, Zinni says al-Qaeda — making marginal progress in Afghanistan, backsliding in Iraq, and rebuffed in Somalia — is looking for a new battlefield.

They’ve also allegedly claimed responsibility.

To an Indian this is just as obviously the ISI (i.e., Musharraf). That name describes a bogeyman commensurate with the Mossad or the KGB in that part of the world, with a long list of terrible deeds tallied up beneath it. And certainly Musharraf is a very credible suspect; we’ve seen in recent days that he is quite determined to hold onto power, and Bhutto was certainly a threat to that.

And - are these really alternatives? The ISI was instrumental in bringing al-Qaeda to the point where it is. It nursed on one teat the mujahideen movement in Afghanistan, serving as the main conduit for US money into the region.^* On the other teat clung the mewling babe that grew into the Taliban movement, brought up in madrassas all throughout Pakistan. They didn’t acquire the weapons and funding necessary to wrest misrule of Afghanistan from its savage and well-armed warlords by magic; tanks don’t grow on trees. (Much of this, ironically, went on during the reign of Benazir Bhutto.) And only after September 11 were there moves to divest the ISI of any trace of sympathy for either of these parties.

Was this effort sincere? Is Musharraf genuinely interested in reigning in these militants, or merely in playing a shell game that convinces the US he is doing what they want? I’ve always suspected the latter. His moves are too half-hearted, his purges temporary, his discipline mere gestures. And I’m not alone in being incredulous of the idea that the ISI was well and truly cleansed. And in this instance their interests are well-aligned.

Bhutto herself complained of specific individuals within the ISI who she thought were closely involved in her previous assassination attempts. At the very least the government is guilty of being lax, of looking the other way while interested parties tried to kill her. That much is fact.

Does it amount to conspiracy? Did Musharraf want Benazir Bhutto dead? Certainly we’re not going to get any useful information out of official investigations. We’ve known for decades that those do nothing to settle the question of who assassinated whom. I propose the following metric: If Musharraf postpones elections, then he is not guilty.

Commence twiddling thumbs.

Strange. I was reading about the Venezuelan terrorist just freed on bail when I saw this Google Ad at the bottom of the screen that said something like “Coffins for everyone!” I had to click. It was for these mass-casualty coffins, easily folded and stacked and then assembled and stacked again. Clever! Too bad they are 100% tropical hardwood. Boo hiss. What’s wrong with a pine box?

But on the topic of the terrorist, it’s sad to see liberals agitating against Posada’s bail. I agree he should face murder and terror charges at least, if not extradition to Cuba or Venezuela. But bail is ok. I don’t support the hypocrisy of letting a CIA asset right-wing nutjob off the hook for terrorism. But I do support bail for all, even those facing terror charges. Prisons suck.

There is no shortage of clever ideas for solving climate change once and for all. I’m not talking about amateur-hour stuff like electric cars or planting lots of eucalyptus trees. I mean serious proposals with at least a little scientific backing that might screw everything up for everyone but would solve some aspect of climate change. They might prevent some of the tipping scary feedback loops from accelerating out of control. And the good news is they are guaranteed against any unforeseen effects. After all, everyone knows that reengineering the world’s climate is a simple, linear process that has no possibility of failure.

Here’s one that was presented at a scientific conference in December with the I-wish-I-were-joking title, “Are Salps A Silver Bullet Against Global Warming And Ocean Acidification?” No, the term “silver bullet” isn’t being used sarcastically. It’s a concept by this fellow to pump nutrients out of the deep ocean to increase the population of salps, strange jelly-like creatures, which then shit out lots of carbon-rich excreta which drop to the bottom of the sea, sea-questering it for “ever.” The nice inventors appear to be positioning themselves to make money with this kind of scheme when carbon credits go above $26 a ton, as companies will pay them big bucks to sequester carbon so they can keep pumping out more CO2 into the atmosphere.

Another idea is to spray sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere to reflect light and “counterbalance most of the warming associated with the greenhouse gas forcing. Surface temperatures return to within a few tenths of a degree(K) of present day levels. Sea ice and precipitation distributions are also much closer to their present day values. The polar region surface temperatures remain 1-3 degrees warm in the winter hemisphere than present day values.” They note that they didn’t study “the important ethical, legal, and moral issues that are associated with deliberate geo-engineering efforts.”

The ongoing discussion in comments about whether the U.S. could have or would have stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur if it weren’t for those darn Chinese reminds me of a tendency I’ve seen again and again in foreign policy. That is the “who wants to play the heavy this time” game. Because few country’s governments really want to, say, sign the Rio Declaration (the proto-Kyoto), or outlaw bribery, or enact any number of other measures that sound good to the public but are deeply opposed by the people who Matter. So what they do is they figure out, subtly, who in the group will pay the fewest consequences by blocking action, and then they all go home and shrug and say, “We tried but XXXX wouldn’t let the measure move forward” and then go sip fine scotch with the people who Matter. Sometimes the public take these statements literally and they pass laws that put their own country into good moral standing, other countries be damned. So Europe tries to live up to Kyoto, with or without the U.S., for a while at least.

In the case of global warming, of course, the U.S. has played spoiler. For nuclear issues, France has been handy. Japan won’t let anyone really save the whales. Chile spoils other marine endangered species protections. Nobody who Matters wants that treaty to restrict small-arms sales, not even Sweden, home of Phil

bang.^*

Late update: N. Korea appears to have flunked its test. Maybe less Song of Experience, more the last lines of The Hollow Men. Or, as the news networks delighted in reminding us today, like this.

^*I remember when George Bush was elected and I thought, `well, if we can just drift through the next four years without any major crises, how much harm can he do?’

I’m only three years late discovering this - maybe I heard it before and it slipped my memory. Yes, yes, that will do nicely.

Anyway, it was a bit about Iran offering a fairly comprehensive negotiation with the U.S., including ending support for armed groups, recognizing the state of Israel, and accepting much tighter IAEA controls, in exchange for access to “peaceful nuclear technology”, normalization of the relationship between the U.S. and Iran, and a two-state solution for Palestine. Some more detail is here, including the incredible U.S. response:

But in 2003, Bush refused to allow any response to the Iranian offer to negotiate an agreement that would have accepted the existence of Israel. Flynt Leverett, then the senior specialist on the Middle East on the National Security Council staff, recalled in an interview with IPS that it was “literally a few days” between the receipt of the Iranian proposal and the dispatch of a message to the Swiss ambassador expressing displeasure that he had forwarded it to Washington.

Astounding. I think my blood is actually boiling - steam is coming out of my ears.